Posts by Giles C

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Re: The Rules

Also don’t start work on the car when your other car is parked in front of the one you are working on, you need another part and can’t get the other car out because it is blocked in….

Had that happen to me, main link went down and it turned out the backup was already down.

We tried to improve that and used a laser link on another site. Main fibre went down and the laser failed as there was thick freezing fog so the light was refracted off course.

Oops….

Carry spares

Whenever I go to do a job in the comms room or similar, I usually end up carrying a box of various cables so that I can replace anything that looks dodgy or is about to be stretched to the point it can play music on it. Sometimes I don’t use anything but on rare occasions have had to go back to the supply cupboard. Fine when the site has supplies but when working remotely you almost take the entire stock room with you.

Especially tricky are when the old kit uses c13 but the new uses c15 I.e. high temp power leads… c15 power leads are some of the elusive kit that exists, mostly because someone uses them where a c13 should be so you can’t find any spares….

NASA switches off Voyager 2 plasma instrument to stretch out juice

Re: The Biggest Impediment to Interstellar Travel

True, but when you find something interesting you need to be able to slow down to make observations or it will be gone in a few minutes / hours / seconds

Victims lose $70K to one single wallet-draining app on Google's Play Store

Re: "Victims lose $70k"

The article states 150 victims were indentified, so that makes about $466 each on average, ok not huge by some counts but enough that you don’t want to lose it

91% of polled Amazon staff unhappy with return-to-office, 3-in-4 want to jump ship

When searching for a job I would be told about these great opportunities in London paying about £15k more that you get in Peterborough where I live.

The London based agencies seems shocked when I wasn’t interested as the cost of a train season ticket was £9k and it added 4 hours travel a day.

After tax I was paid less and then had a 6th of my day spend stuck on trains.

No thanks I will take the lower headline pay and have a 20 minute commute so more time for me.

Ok that has gone a bit out of the window as I now work from home 3 days a week (roughly) and have an hour each way journey to and from the office when I do go in.

Look! About chest high! Is it a pallet? Is it a drone? No, it's a Palletrone

Star wars

Certainly someone has been trying to do the Star Wars style of transportation. Although we haven’t got carbonite freezing sorted yet.

I can see this having a lot of uses in the future once the load capacity is up to something more practical. I mean it needs a nice woven fabric cover and then you have a flying carpet.

Microsoft on a roll for terrible rebranding with Windows App

Tried to search for it

I quick check across a few search engines (google, bing, duck duck go) and the phrase windows app bring up the news stories and then a valid link is about the 3rd or 4th one down.

As for “windows app not workingl a fairly common phrase it doesn’t appear on the first page of the results.

This will make looking for help with it to be interesting…..

Ming you Cisco has some strange renames

Stealthwatch became “sna” or “secures network analytics” I still call it by the old name.

DNA is now Catalyst Centre even though the software hasn’t changed internally - yet

The coloured pencil department has a lot to answer for….

Europe to force Apple to help rivals connect to iOS, iPadOS

Re: iOS "interoperability"?

The “files” app for iOS was out in 2017 so 7 years ago, and I am sure that it could open pdf files back then, not sure why you would have had a problem?

Open a webpage download the PDF, go to files and click to open the document.

RISE with SAP sinking year on year

Re: Who is this Gartner that keeps on being quoted?

We are looking at monitoring systems at the moment, now we starting looking based on the functionality, ease of use etc. Once the procurement department got involved they wanted to know where the products were on the Gartner “magic quadrant” and we should only look at products that were rated highly by them.

We are looking at the systems that can do the best job for monitoring not whoever gartner think if flavour of the week.

Apple AirPods Pro 2 can be sold as hearing aids, says FDA

Depends my brother is in charge of one of the companies that provides hearing services to the NHS, and some of the new kit is very good quality (not that he can persuade our mum to get her hearing checked)

Thank you, Reg Readers: On Call has turned 500!

Both on call and who me are some of my favourite columns

Without a fresh on call story Mondays can be quite dull,

Then on Friday you get the who me and if there happens to be a new BOFH as well then that is perfect end to the working week

And yes I have submitted a story once…. But I no longer do call out work anymore.

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: I remember seeing some OLD datacenters

There is a story of mine about the cables shorting under a comms room florr, but we had a couple of load problems,

The first was someone drove a 4tonne cherry picker in through the loading doors to replace a pane in glass in a 4 storey atrium. The atrium didn’t have big enough doors to let he machine through, the loading bay did. However the loading bay had a raised floor as it was just part of the office. I was on the 3rd floor when it drove in (the building was still being fitted out, it managed about 2 m before the inevitable happened, one the red floor I think it moved about 10cm from the shockwave.

The second was the new storage unit for the iseries in the comms room started buckling the floor, the solution was to stack reams of A4 paper to support the floor, I think we used about 15 to preserve the floor.

Re: Sizing

I’ve worked in several building where you load up the lift with equipment and then take the stairs, as the lifts were that dodgy nobody wanted to ride in them. If the equipment got stuck or damaged that could be replaced, the workers not so much.

The problem used to be if someone was waiting for the lift because the buildings were a few floors and occasionally you get stopped by someone on the way up or down the stairs.

BOFH: The Boss is right, the applications of AI are truly staggering

Re: the 'sheep' entrance...

For those wondering about the reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2PyeXRwhCE

Cyber crooks shut down UK, US schools, thousands of kids affected

Re: Prevent kindergarteners

Well knowing people’s desire for automation, you could find that HVAC doesn’t work, nor does the lighting, or possibly the door access system is down.

But then people want all these systems to be able to be monitored from anywhere without proper controls… rather than keep them isolated from each other.

In some ways we have gone slightly too far…

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: Those Facility Guys!

For those working unusual hours which I used to, make sure the facilities and security staff are on your side, makes things work a lot smoother and they will help you out if needed.

I side to be in and out of the offices so often I knew them all by name, even the remote sites

AI-pushing Adobe says AI-shy office workers will love AI if it saves them time

Really?

I have spent most of this week writing low level design documents, which require lots of checking, and cross referencing to ensure the spare is there for the new equipment, the cabling exists, and all the weird configuration of the existing devices which needs to be replicated (some of it I am still puzzled how it actually works at all). The documents themselves are only 15-20 pages long for each system but still take at least 1/2 (one took 2 days) to write.

Sorry I don’t think any sort of ai can same me much time, by the time you have figured out how to tell a system to do it and then double checked to ensure it is accurate it is easier to do it manually.

The five enabled copilot of Office apps and now everytime I select more than 3 characters it appear to ‘help’ do a copy and replace….

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

Self inflicted

I have probably recounted this tale before but it is a good one and relevant.

Back in the early 2000s compaq made docking stations for laptops these things where huge (standard desktop size for the era) and could take 2 5-1/4” inch drives.

Now occasionally the ejection method for removing the laptop jammed and under the back cover on the dock was a level to manually release the catches.

To get to this lever you also exposed all the connections for the PSU - the thing used a standard desktop power supply - some of you may guess what is coming next.

A director rings up to say his laptop is stuck so we talk him through taking the back cover off (leaving power connected so the manual eject still has the power to operate. We talk him through the process to use the lever to manually eject, at which point there is a band that can be heard across our office. Followed by a rather sheepish I think that was the wrong lever.

Yes you guessed it instead of moving the white lever, he moved the one on the back of the PSU from 240 to 110v input.

Oops

UK government can't kick consultancy habit despite promises

Oops that should have been years not tears.

And I forgot to add if you are senior medical grade in the NHS you are.paid well, if you are not medical then you aren’t important., no matter what you do.

I think this comes down to the capex/opex argument

Consultant = capex I.e. pay tech corp £xxxx to do job, civil service stays small

Internal = opex you pay less but the head count is increased, civil service gets larger, more complaints about bloated public sector payroll, and if the electorate found how much these experts were being paid……

The problem is the same all over a few tears ago the NHS in Peterborough wanted Cisco network admins, and were offering 10-12k less than I got doing the same role working less that 1/2 mile from the site.

BOFH: Videoconferencing for special dummies

Re: HAMMER Time!

Or to quote rainman rays repairs on YouTube “everything is a hammer”

Cabling

You think that is bad in meeting rooms, try the cabling in retail stores, I used to work for Thomas Cook and the number of times a branch stopped working and when we sent an engineer out the wan link would b in the console port or similar. We never found out who was telling them to move cables (we made sure it wasn’t the service desk) and used to blame it on cable fairies who crept around the stores at night.

I think we had at least one or two stores a week suffering the same sort of problems.

Devs at Asia's top messaging app drowned in Slack, tamed it with ChatGPT

Confusing

So you are working on and building an IM app

But internally you use one of your rivals products to keep track of QA tasks.

If it just me or does this seem odd?

Mind you at work, we use slack, teams, email, zoom, webex, calls, semaphore, morse code …..

I log in and open up at least 4 messaging platforms so I can keep track of everything….

Microsoft rolls out one Teams app to rule them all

Re: Separating work / home

Very sensible, if stuff needs to be shared between home and work that is what email is for. I go further and have separate mobile phones for home and work.

If a cheesy '80s flick is a good metaphor for how you run projects, something is wrong

Re: What's in a (code) name

At one company we found a random project name generator.

So the project to swap out a lot of network switches became “spent proton” we liked it even if the rest of the company didn’t.

Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet

No idea, do they have a brain fitted…..

On the other hand I just book a book called strange ways to die in history. Which is a very good read.

One of the entries is for an Eleazar Avaran who on a battlefield went after an elephant, got underneath it and then stuck a sword up into its heart, this killed the elephant and it promptly collapsed onto him…

So stupidity is nothing new.

Re: Hellkom

So they haven’t changed much in the last ten years then….

I used to manage a set of acls which was for pci compliance, it was running on three sites with a mixture of IOS and NXOS switches. To do a change (which needed to be appplied simultaneously) it would take about an hour and the risk of the site stopping working put it all to be done out of hours (post 10PM).

After some near misses and overloading the tcam tables on the switches, I eventually persuaded management that this wasn’t working and could we use firewalls instead,

This brought the risk down a lot and also meant that by careful configuration we could use the same policy on all the firewalls

I also brought the change time down to about 4 minutes.

One of the most impacting changes I have ever done… especially when installing the firewall on one site and my laptop rebooted whilst I was completing the routing. This resulted in the network locking us out as were on one of the segments controlled by the firewall.

The only work around (as I had also lost the connection to the door system, and the comms room) was to sit on the steps of the one section of the site not under the firewalls control, connect to the WiFi, finish programming the network and then get back in.

At which point the security guard said the local police did a sweep of the industrial estate and two people sitting on the steps of a deserted building using laptops around midnight looked a bit suspect, fortunately they didn’t come round while we were working.

Re: Hellkom

Hmm I used to deal with Telkom they where interesting people.

We had a link from the uk to Cape Town and if it went wrong (which it did) we had to relay all the calls through someone in the local office, as the support team were not allowed to dial international numbers, yet they managed all the international links….

This was about 10 years ago though, so maybe things have changed now…

Report slams Boeing and NASA over shoddy quality that's delayed SLS blastoff

Tanks

The thing that is strange is that oxygen tanks weren’t welded properly.

Now these are fairly common items (I accept that space rated might need to be better quality) but surely they are numerous companies out there that have fabricated oxygen tanks they are used in all sorts of industries. This is either we don’t care or Bob down the road will do it for a cheaper price and we won’t bother getting the work checked. I mean welders use them all the time.

Adobe exec likened hidden cloud subscription exit fees to 'heroin', says FTC

Re: Affinity

I am also a user of affinity mostly publisher but the other apps do get used.

Now the first affinity photo app came out in 2015 and for a one off purchase you got all the upgrades free until the v2 app came out in 2022.

Any you are complaining about paying for the new version you had up to 8 years of free fixes.

The one downside is the lack of a cataloguing function but I can live without that until the intend to make one or not.

The full price photo app is £34 whereas photoshop in the same period would have meant you spent about £800.

I don’t think affinity is a bad deal….

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

My worse ones….

I put a projector on the road and then backed out the pool car, straight over it. That one took a bit of explaining as it was on the office car park.

I had a colleague put a MacBook in his backpack jumped on a motorbike and forgot to fasten the top of the backback. It escaped was was run over by a lorry, what was recovered was, an interesting shape….it did still try and boot though….

Mind you being a network engineer I have lost several laptops to comms rooms incidents. Usually involving a usb lead that snagged rather than coming out and ripping the usb ports out of the case. Of falling off the top of a cabinet whilst trying to run diagnostics on something or other,

And finally I remember the dodgy machine that came in for investigation, took the lid off fired it up and there was a 1” flame coming out of a component on the motherboard, we killed it and put a warranty claim in for that one.

Patch management still seemingly abysmal because no one wants the job

First job when i started at the company

After coming back to my employer (previously was a contractor) I had to sort out the Cisco estate patching, which in some cases had 7 year old code or worse.

It took 6 months but there is now a process in place to ensure all the sites are upgraded once every three months (if required) and everything runs on gold or gold-1 images.

It was a lot of work but worth it in the end.

Fortunately windows Linux etc are out of my scope.

Kia Niro electric vehicle defies physics with record-breaking 114 million miles on the clock

Is this now returning as a regular column??

School gets an F for using facial recognition on kids in canteen

Supplier problem

Surely when being approached by a school for this sort of solution, shouldn’t the supplier be aware of the data protection risks and advise them accordingly.

If these companies are knowingly selling this solution into schools then they should take some of the blame, and probably get blacklisted or prosecuted accordingly for failure.

Time Lords decree: No leap second needed in 2024

Re: It could be worse

Well just before I left there was a remote office that ran 24x7 but the machine were left on the call centre policy so every night at 22:45 all the computers rebooted. They hadn’t decided to inform the people that this took all the machines out for 15 - 30 minutes.

It could be worse

A company I used to work for had a system where everything was logged in local time (uk), this meant that when the clocks changed they would pause the machine for an hour to avoid any logging issues - as this was pre internet working and the offices were closed it didn’t cause much of an issue.

Then some clever person suggested running the machine in UTC and applying al time offset to the users workstations….

Mind you this is the group of people that for years insisted they couldn’t use dns because it slowed the machine down to much.

Said machine in both cases was at the time one of the largest IBM as400 / system I / I series in the country.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Dead short

I might have told this one before. But years ago I was doing some work which required moving a lot of digital phone cables out the way so we could install some new fibres. Now for safety we were running the fibres under the telephone cables as they were due to be ripped out a few months later.

So one Saturday night myself and.a colleague where sat side by side (shoulders almost touching) whilst lifting the floor tiles and the cabling to run in the new stuff.

Sitting on top of the telephone cables was a brand new 32A commando socket needed for the new kit.

So I pick up the new commando to move it out the way, there was a bang and the building went dark. The Electrican hasn’t tightened the screw holding the earth cable this fell out of the terminal and dead shorted the building power as it went through and tripped the main breaker for the building.

Now the Monday after this I had a day off, at this point the rumour mill went into overdrive as I had

Had an electric shock

Been hospitalised

Died

Despite my colleague saying I was ok and if it had been that dangerous he would have been in the same state.

Ps the electrical contractor company was fired and banned from the site.

Paessler pulls subscription licensing switcheroo on PRTG Network Monitor

Re: We'll see how it goes

We have just started on a project to look at monitoring and PRTG was already being looked at to be replaced (we need more functionality than it offers) so there is even more of an incentive… although the cost is very small compared to some of the other monitoring systems currently in use.

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

Re: Large site offline due to copy and paste

If I am using putty then that is the first thing I disable, I hate that ‘feature’

Keyboard shortcut copy and paste only here.

Oracle Java license teams set to begin targeting Oracle users who don't think they use Oracle

Re: I haven't had Java [New Extortionware]

Somehow I don’t see that being a joke in a few months…

Feds sue Adobe and execs for stinging subscribers with 'hidden' cancellation fees

I think those terms were hidden until you had signed up.

I cancelled an adobe suubscription by terminating tube direct debit instruction, and when they kept calling to get to reinstate just told them no.

It wasn’t that hard but I think I was beyond the initial contract period so they couldn’t stop me,

If a contract is offered on a month by month basis then you should be able to cancel with 1 months notice.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Screwdrivers can be used for anything

I would have thought it was easier to pull the blade out and go in from the other side?

But even I don’t know the exact circumstances so this might not have been feasible.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

Which screws - we need to know?

Indonesia's president orders government to stop developing new applications

An ISO of not so quality apps?

Sorry..

Best Buy and Geek Squad were most impersonated orgs by scammers in 2023

Re: Simple rule for phone calls

This is uk specific but my mum has a phone with call guardian built in.

If the number has a cli of unknown / withheld or is not in the contact list on the phone you need to press 1 to be put through and state the name. Typically 20 calls a week get blocked by it.

The recipient can choose to accept the call or not.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Technical Terminology

Ah difference noted….

So the Birmingham version is better for piercing objects where a Manchester is more useful for stuck lids on paint cans….