* Posts by GlenP

933 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2012

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Is there anyone

I've recounted this before, back in the days when MS-DOS <> IBM Compatible Apricot used A: for the HD then B: for the floppy. Switching between different machines you'd go to format the floppy, type in FORMAT A:, Y to Are you sure, then oh sh*t (or other expletive). This was followed by frantic hitting of Ctrl-C and then reaching for the Norton UNDELETE utility which, fortunately, worked at that stage of the format. You had to know the first characters of the deleted filenames but the systems were a fairly standard setup.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

GlenP Silver badge

Nothing New

Back in the mid-eighties I was working at the local college (now university); PCs were starting to come in but the mainstay hardware was a Vax 11/785.

The secretarial* classroom was equipped with Facit Twist terminals which did the same as the Radius Pivot, but of course only in character mode. I don't recall what software was being used but it did take some fettling to get it to resize to the portrait mode.

*Senior Secs for Tom Sharpe fans, mostly "Daddy's got a BMW" types who's families had the money to support them through two years of college whilst ordinary people got jobs!

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

GlenP Silver badge

From one review it seems it's a power down / standby button with the power down being a customisable script which seems a good thing in general.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

GlenP Silver badge

Re: A cave, rather than a mine, and a laboratory, rather than a computer

Interesting - I went down Blue John Cavern last week. They didn't mention that story!

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Dirt

keyboards and mice are consumables

Nowadays I agree, and chiclet keys on laptops have minimised the problems there, but I go back to when a keyboard was £100+ (IIRC DEC keyboards were around £130 in 1985) so we often had to go to great lengths to clean them, including dismantling and literally scrubbing under a tap (I thing that was the one that had Tizer spilt on it).

GlenP Silver badge

Dirt

I did have an issue at one employer, computers stood on the floor in a factory office with work boots frequently in close vicinity. I encouraged them to put the computers on desks but to no avail, "there's not enough room if we do that!" Computers were much larger then of course! We ended up with purchasing floor stands which helped a bit but any time you needed to work on those a vacuum cleaner was required.

Like many people, the biggest issue, back when smoking in offices was common practice, and occasionally since with wfh, is tobacco. I've had laptops returned that I would only handle with rubber gloves (and I'm not squeamish about such things) and that were impossible to clean and reissue. Some keyboards were positively disgusting, with ash, food scraps, etc. as well.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Should this be so easy?

You can't plug a printer lead into a kettle

We had a kettle at work that *didn't* have the extra notch in the power lead, and yes, someone replaced the original with a computer lead.

I don't know how long it lasted but eventually the lead decided it had had enough and started emitting smoke and flames. Fortunately I was in the kitchen at the time and knew the standard procedure in such cases* - turn the thing off at the wall! No drama in the end, it fizzled out and a new, hot condition, lead was easily procured.

*I did hear the tale of a generator fire, after several extinguishers had been tried and the fire was still going someone had the bright idea to stop the generator!

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

GlenP Silver badge

I had exactly the same when the company I worked for moved over to Cat-5 cabling instead of thin-net. I wasn't directly IT by then as I'd moved onto a project but they couldn't get a segment to communicate. They'd checked and rechecked the wiring, still nothing, so I offered to have a look.

Quick glance at the hubs (yes, hubs not switches, it was a long time ago), no lights on the connecting ports of the central hub and the segment hub. Pull the connecting cable, get out my trusty cable tester, and yes, it's a straight through cable not the necessary, in those days, crossover. It turned out the network provider had shipped a box full of identical cables with no indication of which were straight through and which weren't. I found the right bit of string, duly marked each end with an X and plugged it in.

I knew the writing was on the wall at that company as I was then criticised by senior management for getting involved!

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Plausible...

32MB - that was a large hard disk for a PC, never mind memory or file size!

My first home PC (80286, 1MB memory) came with a 20MB drive but I "acquired" an RLL* controller which pushed it up to around 32MB.

*Run Length Limited - the bit density on the track was by length rather than angle as in MFM drives. ACT had achieved similar with 5 1/4" floppies by varying the rotation speed as the head moved in and out, hence their musical disk drives.

Sure, give the new kid and his MCSE power over the AS/400. What could possibly go wrong?

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Umm. Mainframe?

Midrange according to IBM (minis according to everyone else) so no, not mainframes.

I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Outlook...

You just had to be careful that the local folder the active PST files were in wasn't being replicated to the server - that could really cause a network slow-down.

I still do this today with 365 though.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Outlook...

I'd be surprised if anyone who administered SVS2K3 hasn't encountered exactly this problem!

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Outlook...

Way back when I was a civil servant any papers you threw out had to be torn through before binning otherwise you'd find them back on your desk the next day. Apparently it was a measure to stop claims of, "It must have been thrown away accidentally!"

Out of habit I still do this.

BOFH: What a beautiful tinfoil hat, Boss!

GlenP Silver badge

That reminds me of the covers you could get for mobiles, "To protect you from the harmful effects of radiation!" Of course all that happened was the phone would turn the power up to get a connection.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has a left wing bias – at times

GlenP Silver badge

Re: a politically neutral 'truth'

The so-called Indiana Pi Bill was a lot more complex and doesn't actually mention Pi at all, although it does imply a value of 3.2 (it related to a method of Squaring the Circle which had already been proven to be impossible).

Norway to hit Meta with fines over Facebook user privacy from next week

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Tell the ISPs to block access to Facebook

That would never happen in a democracy - too many votes would be lost if you stop the electorate viewing cat pictures!

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

GlenP Silver badge

professional wedding photographer

We were at a hotel last year (the Dunblane Hydro) where a wedding was taking place. They had three wedding photographers plus a videographer wandering around - I can't comment on the quality of the results but that seemed overkill to me! And yes, long lenses seemed to be much in evidence in an environment more suited to something sensible. perhaps it's what they're taught in Wedding Photography 101?

GlenP Silver badge

I took a conscious step back a couple of years ago with digital photography. Like most people* I got into the habit of shooting lots of pics in the hope I'd get a good one rather than thinking about, and setting up, the shot carefully as I used to do when shooting expensive slide film. I've stayed with digital but tried to apply a film mindset if that makes sense.

The one thing I would go back to film photography for is B&W - for some reason digital monochrome, whether produced in-camera or post processed, just never has the same look.

*I met someone at the North Norfolk railway who shot absolutely everything on 4K video then spent days searching through for the few stills shots he wanted!

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Similar language problem on Windows 1 0

Although UK based I'm often remoted on to systems on other continents, Australasia isn't too much of a problem as at least web sites come up in a form of English but my Asian language knowledge is sadly lacking which is a pain when searching for a driver or similar and the website insists on being in the local language.

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

GlenP Silver badge

Bandwidth...

It's not that many years ago that, as an experiment, they tried downloading a film (movie for non-Brits) from a server in London to a computer in Nottingham (130 miles or so by road), at the same time they sent a USB drive strapped to a pigeon's leg. The USB drive arrived before the download completed.

We had an incident 10-12 years ago with TomTom updates over our 2 meg leased line. The downloading PC sent the request to the Akamai server hosting the updates which duly sent the update, then when the server hadn't received an acknowledgement within a relatively short time frame it sent it again, and again, and again... I believe at one point there were 7 copies of the update being downloaded simultaneously, and not a lot else being done. Shutting down the PC concerned and terminating the connections cured the immediate problem, as did telling the user to not try that again. I then gradually blocked every Akamai address on the firewall to prevent a recurrence.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Real Sanitizers

Several jobs ago the big boss decided getting a telephone sanitizer company in might be a good idea so arranged a demo (he obviously didn't watch Hitchhikers).

The sales droid duly arrived complete with swabs, fancy meter and cleaning kit. He proceeded to swab one of the phones all over, very thoroughly, loaded the swab into the meter and pointed out the very high reading for "contamination".

He then cleaned the phone with their "special" processes and formulas, gave it a cursory wipe with a swab and, <sarcastic mode>wow</sarcastic mode>, the contamination reading was very low.

For some reason he seemed very reluctant to repeat the test with comparable levels of swabbing before and after, and with us just giving the phone a quick swipe with a duster (as our regular cleaners would do).

The result, of course, was one sales droid ejected from the building and the big boss gave up the whole idea.

Microsoft's Surface Pro 9 requires a tedious balancing act

GlenP Silver badge

We're largely moving away from the Surface tablets unless an eligible user really wants one. For several years they've been issued to users who are frequent fliers or C-Suite level but the policy has changed for a few reasons.

Unless you are going to use it as a tablet regularly a laptop is more convenient for most purposes.

The overall cost of a surface for any given spec is significantly higher than the equivalent laptop.

A good 13" laptop isn't much bigger, or heavier, than a Surface tablet plus keyboard.

Laptop connectivity is generally better - you don't need to carry around a video/network/USB adapter.

We're constantly struggling to source Surface's reliably - MS themselves cancelled an order without even bothering to tell us, another previously reliable supplier sent the wrong keyboard and took 3 months to refund the cost, etc.

Laptop keyboards are far better.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

GlenP Silver badge

PC Engineers...

I've probably recounted the tale previously of a 486 based HP SCO Unix box I managed for a while. I was on holiday but had taken the company "mobile" (a car phone attached to a blooming great battery pack) just in case. Half way through I got a call, the backup tape wasn't ejecting, what should they do?

I balanced the risks and decided the best thing was to wait until my return a few days later and I'd sort it.

That apparently wasn't good enough, they summoned an engineer, against my instructions and without telling me, from the parent company's PC support people. He travelled the 150 miles or so from the South Coast, turned the box off without any thought of a controlled shutdown, manually ejected the tape then turned the box back on. When it wouldn't boot again he ran away after saying, "Oh shit!" or words to that effect.

It took a few days to completely wipe the file system, reinstall and reconfigure Unix then restore the last good backup tape which by then was over a week old. Had it been my own fault I'd have pulled an overnighter and got it back within 24 hours but as it was down to senior management I wasn't going to rush (you can always find an excuse to go home* such as running a disk check that will take several hours).

*A DEC engineer once used a thunderstorm as his reason for not continuing to fix a fault, I didn't argue as I wanted to go home too.

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Lightning strikes

DEC VTs were usually fairly robust.

I'd left a VT220 in the computer room when I went on holiday as I'd been doing some tasks that were better on a VDU than the console. Unfortunately the computer room burnt down while I was away (no connection of course - electrical fault in the workshop next door).

The two VAXen, an 11/750 and 11/780, were a total loss of course.

The terminal was pretty much melted but for a laugh we tried plugging it in from a safe distance - yes, it came up VT220 OK, albeit somewhat faintly.

GlenP Silver badge

Re: At least you fixed the problem.

I'd concur on both TNMOC and MK Museum. Last time I visited the latter it was with someone who'd actually operated the manual exchanges displayed during/shortly after WW2.

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

GlenP Silver badge

Way back in the 6th form common room at School the "committee" got permission to hire in a pool table, on the strict condition that the school would not be liable in anyway.

All good for a month or two until the people who'd made the arrangements, and had the keys, did some mods for perpetual free plays - that (and the pool table) lasted until the next time the supplier came to empty the coin box and found it empty. I don't know how much the pupils concerned had to pay up to settle the matter but it was a significant sum.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

GlenP Silver badge

Paris...

Many years ago I went to Paris on a day trip, largely to deliver a "second-hand" laptop - quite why I don't know, laptops weren't cheap back then but was it truly better I flew over there than use a courier or purchase one in France? I suspect corporate budgets were involved!

Before I went I had a call* from one of my colleagues, "Can you bring me a wateefee?" After a bit of toing and froing I established that what he actually wanted was a copy of What HiFi magazine!

So I fly to Paris with the laptop and wateefee, link up with a colleague and get to the office then hand things over. First comment, "Oh, it's the wrong keyboard!" What did they expect on a UK sourced machine?

It ended up being a rather wasted day, albeit with a decent lunch in the middle, compounded by flight delays at CDG. A plane had gone U/S so they combined two flights but wouldn't let anyone leave the grotty concrete Eurohub as they wanted to get everyone boarded as soon as possible. Friends were, "Oh Paris, how glamorous!" Business travel is always a PITA.

*In the days before ubiquitous email people did actually phone each other!

Forget these apps and AI, where's my flying car? Ah, here's one with an FAA license

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Speed and Weight

For the moment, the real question is : can it actually take off ?

Given that there's no actual photos or video I think the real question is, "Does it actually exist?"

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

GlenP Silver badge

Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...

Proper documentation came in ring binders so that pages could be inserted or replaced!

I used to have two bookcases full of the things (one for the VAX systems, one for a PDP 11/45 that wasn't used but had to be retained) to update every month.

Astroscale wants to be the world's friendly neighborhood space garbage collector

GlenP Silver badge

Re: is this correct?

People seem to be able to drop litter with impunity in the UK

Not round here! Over £500 for dropping a cigarette butt, plus your name in the local paper. It's probably a drop in the ocean of course.

https://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/crime/names-of-30-people-in-court-for-dropping-cigarettes-outside-grosvenor-centre-ann-summers-kfc-sports-direct-poundland-and-burger-king-and-vodafone-in-northampton-town-centre-4184129

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Memtest

I remember Gateway 2000 - the company that was once recommended for people with low blood pressure!

Support calls would regularly take up to 4 hours to be answered, and there was no alternative way of contacting them, the internet then being in it's relative infancy.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

GlenP Silver badge

Opto-isolators were common enough back when I started. In my first role, in the mid-eighties on a large government site, we had a switch room full of them. They had, at least, by then got all the buildings wired up although comms speeds at the outer edges of the place could be iffy, a short while before I arrived the distant offices were still connecting via 300/300 modems (and some users still had hand card punches on their desks!)

GlenP Silver badge

Think I've mentioned before the friend's microwave internet link that went down twice a day for periods, but not at exactly the same time and nor every day.

She was on the South Coast and the link crossed a bay, every time it was a particularly high tide it would fail for a short while. realigning the link slightly cured the problem.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

GlenP Silver badge

Not Weighed but...

I was on an internal flight to Rhode Island, it was relatively empty but they'd filled the seats from the front.

Shortly before departure there was a request from the flight deck, "Can some passengers please move to the rear of the plane?"

If they're weighing solely for a study of average weights it can be truly anonymous, if they're weighing to check the individual plane loading it needs to use seat number and therefore data is identifiable.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

GlenP Silver badge

Re: PSUs

A bit of both - the current in build is definitely chuff-chuff, a narrow gauge Quarry Hunslet, the one Ive put on hold for a while is 1960s coal depot so a mixture of diesel and steam.

GlenP Silver badge

PSUs

Any PSU with 5v and/or 12v is never thrown out - they come in useful for all sorts of things!

The 5v/12v ones for powering external drives are especially useful for model railways controlled by RasPi's (yes, I'm that sad)!

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

GlenP Silver badge
Happy

Re: Serial...

Can you now try saying that with a straight face?

GlenP Silver badge

Serial...

Many years ago I tried connecting a Nokia (?5130) via serial cable to an ancient laptop, at the time it was the only option available for some remote working, dialling in to work then running an AS/400 5250 terminal emulator. In theory it should have worked fine, in practice it was unreliable until I realised it only worked when the phone was on charge, or at least fully charged.

A dredge through my limited electronics knowledge suggested the likely scenario, the laptop was using TTL 5v logic, the phone was 3.3v CMOS! Once known I just had to make sure I'd got the phone charger as well.

The next iteration of the same connection, with later hardware, was using IrDA instead of the serial cable, it worked fine until I was sat outside my tent on a Sunday, beer in hand, running some month end processes and the sun came out!

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

GlenP Silver badge

Depreciation

I once worked for a company where the FD had capitalised everything with 15% reducing balance depreciation, in effect it would never be written off and she refused to allow anything with a book value to be disposed of.

She got really upset when she needed a valuation on the sale of the company, equipment she'd got valued at a few £1,000s was only worth, in real terms, £90 and that was if we delivered it to the recycling company. Apparently that was my fault!

Support chap put PC into 'drying mode' and users believed it was real

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Buying time

It's not quite as daft as it sounds.

The original PS/2 Model 50 would often blow the PSU if shut down and then restarted immediately. A minute or so was sufficient to avoid the problem but of course you always tell impatient users to wait longer than necessary, on the assumption that they will always try earlier than told.

Boffins think they've decoded mysterious 819-day Mayan calendar

GlenP Silver badge

My immediate thought when I started reading was that they've just looked for LCMs.

The flaw is that synodic cycles are rarely (never?) an integer number of days, so they'd have been inserting and removing days and making adjustments constantly.

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Giving out the password to a privileged account

VMS had some peculiarities such as equating file and device names, so I can see that it could be possible, although it may have been someone else setting it up deliberately.

When I worked at the local college (now a university) we had an independent management centre on site which used our VAX. We had a printer in there called, naturally, XXMC (name changed to protect the guilty!) One day we had a puzzled student arrive at the computing reception, she was doing a project relating to the Management Centre, had spent all morning typing it up and now couldn't find it. We asked her the file name and the penny dropped, she'd naturally named her file XXMC. A quick dash over there to retrieve the many pages of print out, then we had to deal with a student now in floods of tears thinking she'd lost her work. Fortunately in those days staffing levels were such that one of the department secretaries offered to type it back in for her, crisis averted.

Child-devouring pothole will never hurt a BMW driver again

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Acceptance

Northamptonshire did some pot hole filling in my street, having carefully marked the ones to be filled, of course.

Shame the workmen then parked their wagon over the worst offender at the bottom of the road, just where anyone turning in wouldn't see it, and failed to repair it.

Student requested access to research data. And waited. And waited. And then hacked to get root

GlenP Silver badge

Not Caught...

Our OpSys project at Uni was carried out on a Unix box. With several student groups all vying to use it, plus lectures, etc. time on the system was precious. It didn't help that the operations people had blocked logins daily from 12:00-14:00, "In case we need to carry out updates or maintenance!"

Fortunately one of the PhD students was sympathetic having been in the same position the previous year, and conveniently had the su password which he let slip. That would bypass the block and then allow us to sudo login on our own user. This happened most lunchtimes for at least a month, the ops staff never did notice so their maintenance window was hardly essential.

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

GlenP Silver badge

Keepers of...

I've known a few "keepers of" in my time. The clue is in the title, they keep things and almost never give them out.

30+ years ago stationery was invariably jealously guarded, even getting a new pen meant taking the old, empty, one back and proving it would no longer write. Notepads had to be filled, on both sides of every single page, before they'd issue a new one, so the chances of prising a battery out of them were slim in the extreme. Solar calculators (yes, it was that long ago) meant that at least one battery-hungry device was removed from the equipment list.

They'd also jealously guard the purchasing budgets. I once placed a requisition for ordering 10 RJ-45 plugs, only to be asked, "Do you really need 10, won't 5 be sufficient?" I did point out the pack size and MOQ were both 10!

The worst I knew insisted on reusing paper in the fax machine and on making sure all labels on a sheet were used. The first lasted until someone tippexed out some text on the front of a page so she could put it back in the machine - I did manage to clean the Tippex off the drum for that one. One of the reused label sheets ended up with a few labels nicely wrapped around the printer drum which ultimately had to be binned and a new one installed with the result that a small saving was completely wiped out.

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

GlenP Silver badge

Re: A strange feature of fault-tolerant systems...

Operators used to like demonstrating these features.

DEC did vertical tape drives with self closing doors that had a trip if the door was obstructed. I was visiting a government department computer room (long story) where they demonstrated this with a packet of cigarettes. Apparently they'd previously often put their hand in the way but on one occasion, fortunately, had used cigarettes and the door trip failed. The operator concerned had some very quick smokes, as the packet was chopped in half, but at least he still had his fingers.

Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Sshhhhh!!!!!

In the UK the latest review has ruled out bringing the rise from 67 to 68 forwards as life expectancy seems to have plateaued. Not that the suggested change would have mattered to me as I'll (hopefully) be retired before then.

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

GlenP Silver badge

Been There...

We upgraded an EFM connection to fibre on the clear understanding that although the EFM connection contract still had a while to run this was an upgrade and therefore the contract would be terminated at no cost to us,

A couple of months later we get a bill for the EFM connection, but the provider assured us it was just taking time to process. 3 months later another bill, and every quarter afterwards. After about a year they finally managed to process terminating the connection and about another 9 months later we finally received the credit for all the charges.

Overall we'd got the best of the deal on the fibre installation anyway - their surveyor had decided the cable would go through the existing duct and therefore they'd cover the installation charge so the contract was signed. 3 months later they'd installed the new duct right back to the exchange and probably lost more money on the deal than the value of the contract!

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

GlenP Silver badge

Re: Take aways

Yep - it was reported a while back that at one establishment in London people were waiting up to an hour for service while the delivery couriers were waltzing in and out in a couple of minutes.

Unfortunately my usual chippy for a Friday if I've been in the office has now started doing Deliveroo and Uber Eats - not too bad last time I was in but I'll be monitoring it. Trouble is all the other local decent chip shops have gone downhill.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

GlenP Silver badge

ISDN...

Back in the day we had a demand from senior management to connect a Dutch office to our UK AS/400 (via 5250 terminal emulation on a PC). We did warn them about the costs but it "must be done"!

The only viable option at the time was ISDN, there was no way they'd provide the funding for leased lines at each end. Despite being told otherwise they'd naively assumed the connection would only be up whilst the user was actually typing.

3 Months later the Dutch were restricted to only connecting for a couple of hours a day due to the high bills, which didn't last long, they found an alternative workaround.