Posts by Giles C

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: Has your tech team pranked colleagues?

There are a lot of those around

Sparks for the grinder

Left handed spanners

Tartan paint - as an aside watch on Netflix Kiko and the wonderbeasts the lumbercats wear check shirts where the check stays the same pattern as they move - took me a minute to work out what was wrong…

Sky hooks )they always float away when you need one)

Long weights - and short ones

But a friend works for Caterpillar and if you try to send a trainee for any of those you would be seen by HR for abuse (or similar)

Cisco suggests a stubby chassis, shrunken servers and router, to tame the edge

When i worked supporting a number of retail outfits…

Well ok 800 Thomas Cook shops…

We used to find that the cable fairies had visited overnight, how else did the wan router port suddenly move into the AUX or console port of the switch.

The helpdesk swore they never told people to move cables and all we could do was to send a field engineer to basically plug cables back in.

Retail store staff are generally not techies

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: Deliberate act or not ?

Surprise and ????

Get ready to squint! World's smallest pixel is just 300 nm

Picture this

In a few years it won’t be were are my glasses, it will be where is my monitor.

Mind you if they could get the processing small enough it might work for partially sighted people by being able to position an image where the retina is still working to allow them to see better.

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

Re: Vulcan

I remember seeing it done the other way, came in at a good altitude nose down engines to idle and then nose up on full power, that was a sight to remember.

They also had one at little gransden air show which came in low and caused the farm next door’s chickens to die of heart attacks - took about 400 out one year…

Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case

Re: So how are the Apple customers going to get the money ?

To be honest here I personally wouldn’t bother claiming,

In the last 10 years I have probably spent maybe £200 on apps, assuming a 10% refund that is £20, the lawyers will want their cut, so maybe I would get a tenner back. If it takes me more than 30 minutes (assuming minimum wage earner which I am not) to file a claim I have lost money by doing it.

Other people may have spent a lot more but you can be sure of one thing - expect a load of adverts from claim management companies as we got until recently for car finance refunds.

If you have spend thousands on the App Store then go ahead and make a claim but in my position it isn’t worth the hassle.

Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide

I have never needed to replace a PC - at most I've had to replace a motherboard.

That is like saying a have never replaced a car but I fitted a new engine, gearbox, final drive, fuel tank etc

You have replaced a core component which is the computer unless you have always replaced the motherboard and kept the cpu the same this is a Triggers broom situation

Well

My employer offers, windows, Mac or Linux machines.

The engineers go mostly with Linux or Mac and windows seems to be used more in IT and support roles.

However in my department when I started 2.5 years ago only one other person had a max (I was the second) now about 70% have them. We notice that in a meeting the first thing the windows users do is plug in to charge the battery, where the Mac users don’t need to bother. I regularly can get a full day on a single charge unless I am on video calls all day at which point I still get about 7 hours useage.

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: I don't get it

The most common occurrences are in physical IPS or IDS units where there is mechanical shunt on the interfaces where if the box loses power or crashes it is hardware bypassed.

This is where dropping the circuit would cause a huge impact. However what should happen is that you then fix the problem.

Nor excusing Steve’s actions but a box of thsi type should by physically labelled with a warning message

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Nope never on a friday

The only time we do changes on a Friday are for planned work that is occurring on the Saturday, even then it will be backups or other prep work.

A normal change on Friday can result in a catastrophic (for the people concerned) chain of events - which when we don’t get paid overtime is even worse….

Hmm we have some kit that is still sitting sealed in boxes and it has gone end of support so has been there at least 10 years and as for stuff in comms rooms that should have been removed…..

AI: The ultimate slacker's dream come true

Re: The worrying part...

Well if they were setting up an ssl connection to the chatbot?

It mostly when you get a pem you go to the machine which created the car and upload the cert to it.

What did they thing the chatbot was going to do with it, you would hope nothing it could extract the root cert key but that should just be the public one.

Code commit

I came across a note on a colleagues code commit today, the description given was (not exact as I am not powering up the work laptop this late)

Program emissions routine updated

Er ok, can this program cause a Cisco switch to fart?

After some puzzling and trying to remember what they had been asked to do - it turned out they had changed the code which generated a syslog message when an update was successful.

I am not a programmer it even so what was that comment meant to mean.

Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

When I started at budget insurance back in 1997 the sales floor (where I didn’t work) was a maze of cubicles where nobody could see more than a 2 or 3 desks around, the desks were about 6 foot tall so you couldn’t even see people by standing up.

They also had desks sized based on role, one person got promoted and was entitled to another 4 inches of desk, they had to move 100 desks to give them the room.

Fortunately by the time I left 20 years later the desks were open plan better spaces and standard between grades so no more silly furniture moves (what has happened in the last 8 years I only know from old aqaintances who I happen to live near.

My current employer everyone except for head of department level gets the same desks, the head of department usually have an office.

Logitech's MX Master 4 mouse buzzes with haptic feedback but lacks lefty love

If you have the desk space and are doing a lot of graphics work they are good, but for general input tasks a small trackpad or a mouse I find better.

I am a southpaw, sinsister, lefty whatever takes your fancy.

But I have never used a mouse with my left hand, I think it is starting out as a cad draughtsman using graphics tablet (big 15” square one) with a decidedly right hand only pick - this is back in 1989. Since then I have always used my right hand and mostly use touchpads these days rather than mice again with my right hand.

As as for those you swap the buttons around - why.

I do use scrolling in natural mode so that confuses people who try to use my machines though….

Intern had no idea what not to do, so nearly mangled a mainframe

Re: Expensive Lessons

This one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJYOkZz6Dck

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Re: To quote The Great Propet Douglas Adams..

I had recourse to that yesterday, working with my manager on a knowledge transfer document to present to the rest of the team, he said it needs to be idiot proof - I said that wasn’t possible and putting that in the presentation would be seen as a challenge by some people…

But considering there is a 15 page document on how to configure a wlc, and so many far people have missed out pages such as licensing the controller, or set the option 43 address to point at a wlc half the world away (yes APs in Manchester instead of the local controller lets point it at one in India instead). I sometimes just look and go not again…

Word to the wise: Don't tell your IT manager they're not in Excel

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

Agreed

Word is 'designed' to word process - i.e. allow a writer to churn out large multiple page documents, the main thing it (I) need to do is format the text on the page with standard styles - so it can key the section headings and produce a document with an index and tables for reading on screen or printing.

If I want to design a newsletter, catalogue etc then I will shift applications in my case to Affinity Publisher but others will use Abode InDesign, Quark etc.

Trying to do graphics layouts in Word is a short cut to going insane...

Re: "Surely an IT manager should know the difference between Word and Excel?"

I don't think I have seen training courses for Office products for years, companies expect you to know it - and for the school leavers they should have been taught at school. This does leave a massive skills gap.

One of the people you used to work for my brother - made a spreadsheet, had a column of numbers - added them up in a calculator and then input the result manually. It used to annoy my brother as he would change a number and then wonder why the totals didn't update.

I mean I will admit to writing multi chapter technical documents (a wifi requirements document came in a 130 pages - which included various easter eggs to prove people had read it) but I use Word for the text, and include a lot of tables however those tables are probably 4 rows and 3 columns. Diagrams are done using a proper application and inserted as images etc.

if you are wondering about easter eggs then in an explanation of wifi mobility the reason for moving from one building to another was quoted as "better snacks" which somebody found - there are still some others that haven't yet been located.

BOFH: HR discovers the limits of vertical mobility

The last line....

A relatively normal BOFH - until you get right to the end. Fortunately there wasn't a drink anywhere near my computer.

Careless engineer stored recovery codes in plaintext, got whole org pwned

Hmmm

How do you lock the box with the key inside, and if the key is inside then how do you unlock it,

Yes I know you are talking about the password / software key and not the physical lock to the box….

It reading it quickly I read it as the physical key kept in the box you locked with said key….

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Re: Can't afford to offer it for free...

It was the military tattoo. Reminded me of the prison in Andor more than anywhere I would want to live.

For a night or two it might be okay, but not for any longer.

It's time mobile devs started to think seriously about foldable smartphones

There was a line in the apple presentation about needing the right material for bend resistance

BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit

Re: MAYBE THERE NEVER WERE ANY BISCUITS!!!

You can still buy sunblest bread in the uk, allied bakeries still sell it and Tesco appear to stock it - not that I have bought any in years…

100% agree I forgot that key word in my post above.

I recently bought a packet of dark chocolate digestives but found when eating them that they were milk chocolate in the wrong packet, not good at all but as I had started on the packet and didn’t have a receipt there was no choice but to eat them. You can’t throw away good biscuits.

No not lion taming, or being a lumberjack either….

Good job this was chocolate biscuits and not Jaffa Cakes or the VAT implications would be horrendous....

Plain biscuit - essential (Zero vat)

cake - essential (Zero vat)

Choc biscuit - luxury (pay vat)

Jaffa Cake "cake" with chocolate - essential (Zero vat)

I am so glad I didn't go into accountancy for a career.....

But the "tastes of disappointment" line is any chock digestive that is not McVities. (let the biscuit wars restart...)

Dashboard anxiety plagues IT pros' nights, weekends, vacations

The other option is email alerts - one system sends me almost 1000 emails a day, trying to get that to feed into a Seim so the software can reduce the noise somewhat….

I know people like tha

One manager logged in 3 days into their holiday to send an email, I only realised when asked to approve a change found it had already been done!

Others have answer calls when on leave (I admit I didn’t know that) and one that I remember was I rang an account manager who answered a call from a beach somewhere (why they didn’t have a voicemail message saying call an alternative contact I don’t know)

Others I have similar behaviour from, me I am on holiday for two weeks and the laptop is put away in its bag and won’t be coming out until possibly a week on Sunday when I will do a quick check to see if I have to change the plans for that week or not (have a few people I need to see but the schedule wasn’t confirmed yet).

No checking the register does not count as work this week.

Unfortunately this sort of behaviour will only lead to more stress and probably time off work. I had the same when on call on “best endeavour” (there were only 2 of us and usually I was the one rung first as more likely to answer) and then formally 1 in 3 weeks on call.

I don’t do call out anymore when it was introduced I was asked if I wanted to and said no thanks…

Flu jab email mishap exposes hundreds of students' personal data

Bromcom pr department

Must be thrilled they have appeared in two separate stories on the El Reg on the same day.

Well they will until they read the articles….

Apple's 'Awe Droppings' fall close to the tree

Re: Yes!

They also announced a MagSafe battery which sticks to the back of the iphone air to give more power costs $99 but gives another 13 hours of life potentially.

UK schools give system supplier Bromcom an F for Azure uptime

"Many suppliers," the department's document notes, "will not guarantee that their systems will function and be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

So reading that statement, they (suppliers) don’t expect the software to work properly or be available?

Surely this is the first thing you would be looking at when purchasing such a system….but then reading what it does

Who is on site - any door access system can tell you if it can’t then it isn’t fit for purpose.

How to contact parents - an access database, spreadsheet or card index file would do the job

Attendance registers - paper works quite well for this.

You would have hoped that the education department would have produced some guidelines and have a list of suppliers that have been verified, oh sorry this is the same idiots behind the online safety act and the “markets will find a solution” mantra..

Atlassian's move to cloud-only means customers face integration issues and more

Re: But what exactly are the alternatives?

I’ll agree with you on confluence after all it is just a large wiki site but the layout is reasonably good and it doesn’t take long to pick up how to use it.

Jira well who knows we use it for task tracking and in my opinion it is useless, unless it is the way it is configured no option for multiple people working on the same project (without each given their own task), and absolutely useless for tracking big chunks of work that run for a couple of months.

Programmers it might be useful for but not me as a network engineer. I think we would spend longer adding tasks that doing work if we were to use it properly (one person would like to run tasks down to 15 minute intervals if they could….)

Use it or lose it: AI may cause you to forget some skills

Re: Use it or lose it

Happens all the time, if I don’t do a particular task for a few months then I need to go back and refer to the documentation that I wrote to tell me how to do it properly, I mean if you look at my cv I am certified in all sorts of technologies but if I don’t use them on a regular basis the knowledge gets fuzzy and starts fading. Could I write a program in Cobol, no but 20 years ago I held several certificates and had a reasonable understanding of it, along with lisp, c and a few other programming languages.

The only thing that AI will change is that the duration of retention will become lower, which will bite you when the internet is down and you need to fix it but can’t remember how…

After nearly half a century in deep space, every ping from Voyager 1 is a bonus

Re: We couldn't do it again

Not just Britain

There are equivalents in a lot of countries where there is a height difference or a curved platform which happens a lot on the underground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_the_gap

Techie ended vendor/client blame game by treating managers like toddlers

Re: Ping

Upvote for the Hunt for Red October reference, I haven’t seen the film or read the book in about 20 years but knew the reference.

Re: Who to blame?

I always stay on the good side of the support people when having a call logged with them.

Surprisingly I have found that if you don’t rant at the supplier then you actually get better service. Admittedly I know our service manager, and she usually just says “ok if you have logged the call it must be a big problem” as anything simple I can normally fix. Occasionally I have asked for a ticket to be transferred if I feel I am not getting anywhere but for that I go to the service manager and has her to reallocate and explain the reasoning.

At the end of the day the people on the other end are trying to do a job to the best of their ability so treat them as you would be expected to be treated yourself.

And relax!

Re: Who to blame?

I had a similar problem about 10 years ago. Working for a large insurance broker they wanted to use this system to provide enrichment data for quotes (in simple terms how much could they adjust the price before you went elsewhere - there was more to it than just that but). In test the system worked great but before we went live we wanted to ramp up to production levels at this time it was about 10-30 quotes per second which had to reply within 6 seconds to be useful). It couldn’t cope and yes the developers were finger pointing, I looked at a wireshark trace and lots of ssl connections were terminating at 15 seconds duration and all with the same payload size.

Hmm reading on the ssl specification and this told me that is the timeout when the handshake fails - left it with some rather red faced engineers to go and talk to their bosses about more capacity was needed on the 3rd party side.

My company thought this was a very good outcome.

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Synthetic time detected

Not an error on Novell servers you ever wanted to see, all it took was a bad record in the database and until time caught up you would have that message every few minutes…

CIO made a dangerous mistake and ordered his security team to implement it

Re: Has your boss ever ordered you to break things?

Happened to me twice, once, there was a vulnerability found on Cisco ASA vpns, and one of the security people found a fix that had been out on a blog.

They wanted me to run it on the production firewall, I put my foot down and said I wasn’t installing an unauthorised fix on a production firewall hosting 40 vpns.

The department director sent me an email saying he authorised the change, I applied said change and my vpn went down 20 seconds later….

When I got to the office the firewall was stuck in a boot loop, it took an entire weekend to get it working again.

second time someone doing a software deployment forgot to request a firewall change and wanted me to do an urgent change. I stuck out for an authorisation from their director (who I knew well) before making the change. He was glad I did and I thing the testers got a telling off for not testing before going to production- this didn’t break anything but proves you must CYA…

BOFH: HR plays checkers, IT plays 5D chess

Re: PVC drain pipe bursting... actually it came apart at an elbow joint.

At a previous job, there was a comms rack installed under the toilet block on the floor above - yes there was a leak….

Basic projector repair job turns into armed encounter at secret bunker

I would have thought the officer could have escorted Andy back to his car and then gone back for his cap. Unless walking around without a cap would have been a worse reprimand….

Should UK.gov save money by looking for open source alternatives to Microsoft? You decide

Re: Extra option?

Round or square hole…

People in bowler hats need to know

And if you are too young for the reference look up Bernard Cribbons songs…

Alexa hits snooze on basic functions as alarms and timers KO'd in UK outage

Re: My alarm clock...

I have a gps alarm clock, a little more sophisticated but still cheap reliable and gets through a couple of aa batteries a year. Only problem is the angle it sits on the bedside table makes it hard to read the display at night so you have to reach out and angle it (you have already reached for the light switch so it isn’t much harder). But I don’t really need it as I am up at 5:45every morning.

Pay attention, class: Today you’ll learn the wrong way to turn things off

Re: Been A While - Due For A Retelling

Sometimes you have to listen to those on site…. A lot of the time they might be talking rubbish but sometimes, and when provided with the schematics well…..

Day 4 of a new job.

I was asked to move some equipment below the items was the ups for the comms room with an emergency power down switch just 1 or 2 mm proud of the case, not recessed or with guards.

My knee caught the switch and dropped the power to the comms room.

Fortunately there were other people in the room at the time, and it must have been forgiven as I was still working there 20 years later.

Snotty astronauts should skip spacewalks, suggests study

We foresee potential in procedural strategies such as radiofrequency turbinate reduction to decrease expansile tissue volume," the study suggested.

What m earth does that phrase mean?

Blowing up one’s nose to take down the swelling?

Truly wonderful turn of phrase

Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Re: Netware

Netware 1 and 2 both came on a very limited number of disks

3. Was about 3 or 4 disks

4 up I think came on cds

It is 20 years since I worked on novell software