Posts by Giles C

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

He should have taken the Tom Lamb approach

https://youtu.be/9jkcdXwGbkM?si=Rkp5G-oEIoL81GBF&t=600

The 500A slow blow fuse,,,,,

Sop?

You went in there last week therefore it is your fault.

Standard line from a lot of people.

However if you think it was you own up people will treat you better we all make mistakes.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

This is always the problem we face in our line of work.

I need to do a change which will take 10 minutes, but to do it I will have spent 2 or 3 days going through all the configurations to make sure everything has been checked and double checked to ensure it goes to plan.

If I didn’t do that all hell would break loose and that is where the money disappears to.

It cost 3 man days to prep say £1200 a day if you are paying a contractor to do the change prep work, but if you didn’t spend the money planning you could be down for a day and lose millions.

I used to work for an animal advertised insurance site and left about 9 years ago, if we lost card payments for an hour that was at least 60k in cash not taken back then I don’t know how much they take these days…

So yes you will pay a lot but as others have said it is insurance, because nothing went wrong doesn’t mean we didn’t do the work…

IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world, but don't call it a failure

Re: Never underestimate the lazyness of system administrators.

Strange view.

I have worked in networking for over 15 years,when I started it was on a token rung system running ipx sna and a small smattering of IP.

Since then I have had to learn and implement

Firewall - Cisco Asa, checkpoint, Cisco ftd

Routing - bgp, ospf. Is-is (need that for a new project)

Switching - too much to mention

Identity management

Proxy servers

Wireless networking

All whilst keeping existing system up and running.

And others …

So not everyone is reluctant to change, in fact if you don’t keep up to date you will be left behind, and no I didn’t go to university but learnt on the job with occasional training courses when management deemed that that had to pay for it, or I paid for my myself.

Or where I work half the ranges don’t have a reverse zone defined, makes working out where machines are very hard….

Re: 32 bits were just right

Slightly moving away but I once had to build a vpn where the traffic was Natted 6 times to get to the destination, took over a week of troubleshooting before that one worked, I natted the traffic once leaving my router and then it disappeared into the blob that was Aviva (due to so many acquisitions and mergers their network was a mess).

Mind you I was trying to fix a network where the switches randomly are configured with mst or pvst depending on who build them so debugging the data path is interesting….

Welcome to Wendy's! Before your order can be taken, you must first reset this kiosk

They seem to be breeding around the Peterborough area in the uk, we have one in a horrible location (Maskew avenue) and another just on the A1.

Don’t go to them myself, but I know about them because I go by the one in Peterborough, and the A1 location features on Tom Lamb’s YouTube channel fairly often.

Tis the season when tech leaders rub their crystal balls

Really, well in the tech world maybe. But if I want a pair of walking shoes I will probably go for Merrill again or go into a shop (Cotswold outdoor is my preferred outlet) and try a few pairs on to see which fits best.

I am not interested in the AI all I want is a physical item which fits me and feels good, yes AI could create a perfect fit but it doesn’t mean it will be comfortable to wear…

'PromptQuest' is the worst game of 2025. You play it when trying to make chatbots work

The progress bar

All it needs is “you were eaten by a grue” to be added to the messages.

IT team forced to camp in the office for days after Y2K bug found in boss's side project

Re: POS

All I will say to that is there is nothing so permanent as a temporary fix.

So they are probably still running some form of that code, or it is sitting idling until it detects the “wrong” value.

Who knows?

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

Re: “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”

That is just windows 10, what about the myriad of other products that they have.

Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud

Hosting datacentre

Why it just buy your own equipment host it in a colo data centre, therefore all the environmental systems are managed for you and you are responsible for your own machines.

You can have two or more in different locations for backups.

The company i work for has at the time of writing, 2 hosted in the uk, 1 in the USA and others, all shortly to be connected via 100gb private links…

The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

Re: For all the cynicism

I agree with you for disabled or limited mobility this sort of equipment is invaluable and improves quality of life.

But…. If you are in that situation, you will most likely have wide open doorways, single level throughout and possibly wooden floors rather than carpets, which makes it a lot easier for the machine instead of having to deal with assorted camera bags, random stuff that hasn’t been put away and the general chaos of other households.

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

Re: The GP is a Thermal Unit!

The same effect can be accomplished at home by mr Kipling fruit tarts and heating them for about 2 minutes, nice and cool to touch the outside - the filling can blister the roof of your mouth..

Other brands can achieve the same but they are the ones I have tried…

BOFH: All through the house, not a creature was stirring except the homicidal vacuum cleaner

Re: I didn't see what this was heading

For the first half this read very benignly (for a BOFH) withe them helping out and doing stuff that improved efficiency but then it went back to the true form we expect…..

Re: A promotion is

Ah bu now she has been promoted will she spend time reading the register and then know what you post about her…

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/303/

To be honest I would have someone would have beaten me to this one….

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

There are some people I know of that would call the work Leo did a major security breach.

After all a quote I have heard is “knowledge shared is overtime lost” so by making things work faster there is lost opportunity for earning more money. Personally I would prefer not to have to do the work myslef but then I am salaried not paid by the hour….

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Medical systems are a nightmare

A properly configured password vault will not have this problem. For a start there should be permissions and restrictions on how the passwords can be accessed. If a password is just for yourself to use then don’t give anyone else permission to access it, however If the system allows other users to override that then it must be logged and justified.

If a password is for a group of users who need it because of their role then the role gains access.

Regardless of this there should be a full audit trail to determine who and when has accessed the passwords. Using a password vault I.e. hashicorp or similar that makes it a lot easier to manage the password and only those tasked with updating the password need to be able to view it. Bearing in mind tha a vault is not the same as a manager.

Re: Medical systems are a nightmare

We use a password vault all the time, mostly for things such as radius keys, snmp passwords, service account passwords. All those things you only need occasionally and it is better than writing them down.

Of course we share passwords for systems with over 2000 network devices just one person knowing the emergency password would be dangerous…

UK digital ID plan gets a price tag at last – £1.8B

Re: No it wouldn't

Nope when I last renewed my passport a couple of years back, the replacement was sent by courier and had to signed for by the addressee. If you weren’t in then it was taken back to the office.

Both the old and new came back in the same package.

When I sent the old one in then I used special delivery - why wouldn’t you?

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: "Oh yeah, I just push it back in when it falls out"

Never underestimate the ingenuity or determination to just get the cable to fit….

All of us have seen provably seen some abused connector and a user saying no nobody has touched it….

Bent pins, bent housings, completely broken connectors used to be a regular occurrence.

USB-b into Ethernet has been seen before…

Why do you think usbc is a orientation agnostic connector.

BOFH: Forward-facing AI brand experience meets forward-facing combustion risk management

I only get time to read the register on my lunch break so didn’t see it until after 12

Re: "... as invaluable as the 1-port network switch, a marzipan heatsink, or write-only memory!"

You mean those monitors with a 2 part hub, one uplink cable and then one spare - so why did I connect the cable to the monitor again….

Cryptology boffins’ association to re-run election after losing encryption key needed to count votes

This reminds me of an old joke

Clairvoyant meeting cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances

Honestly this could have been run on the 1st April…

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Seen it before.

Wow 10.3 code most of the stuff nowadays is running 17.9 or newer.

We have a rolling site plan where every 13 weeks we start again, with 30+ sites (I forget the exact number as we are opening and then closing office as we expand) it is the only way to keep up.

There is a judgement call on if we should patch on the same train or more to a new train but it depends on features required…

Seen it before.

Routers with hundreds of days of uptime, but these days there are so many patches and fixed for machines that most of the network rarely gets more than 6 months before a reboot.

As part of our Sox compliance we need to be on venders gold image or gold minus 1 with the intent of going to gold within three months of an image being released.

However if you have a dual supervisor switch this sort of uptime record is possible even with software patching as the chassis will stay up just the processor modules will swap over the control. Some people may argue this is downtime but if it stays up then I don’t.

SEC drops SolarWinds lawsuit that painted a target on CISOs everywhere

Lost faith in the company

I used to be a solarwinds admin and really liked the product - well maybe not the map drawing part but most of it.

However after the hack (at this point I wasn’t running a monitoring system) I don’t know why anyone would have bought the product.

About a year ago I was involved in selecting a new monitoring tool for the network, even though it is 4 years after the hack we wouldn’t even give it serious consideration, we did ask for a demo but it was for completeness so we could say it had been looked at and discounted.

Would I use it again yes. Would I recommend it for a new install - No, the taint is still there.

Networking students need an explanation of the internet that can fit in their heads

Re: Teaching networks

I agree when i started work it was thin ethernet, adding a new node was preparing a cable unplugging terminatators and reconnecting before the network dropped…

Then it was token ring

And finally back to high speed ethernet.

As for the propocols running….

Decnet (not that i did much with that)

SNA for AS400

ipx/spx when managing Novell servers

And then TCP/IP

So that is one thing people coming into a field have an advantage with - they only really have to learn the IP protocol stack, routing they still need to know the various types eigrp, ospf, bgp, is-is but protocol wise it is simpler these days.

If anyone is wondering is-is is used for Cisco’s sd-access solution.

Teaching networks

A few years ago I taught basic networking to a number of apprentices.

Started off with two computers how to they talk.

Then explained the concept of address (not protocol specific)

Expanded that into multiple networks

Then how do we talk to different networks (I.e routers)

And at that point once they have the concepts then we can go towards IP, subnets, routing protocols and the more fun stuff.

Mind you I have a monitoring system that reads the system name and dns suffix from a device configuration and found this gem yesterday (not the real name for obvious reasons)

Host name wan-switch.company.com

DNS domain name wan-switch

So the total system name was wan-switch.company.com.wan-switch

Need I say more….

Re: And include...

Best one for that is the Cisco TSHOOT exam.

Probably the most enjoyable exam I have done, a couple of basic questions and then loads of simulations all along the lines of a can’t talk to b why?

Great prep for real life.

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…