Posts by Giles C 1182 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2015
I have been in the situation where a recruitment agency has lied to me about a job role.
By lie, I mean telling me it did not require shift work, the salary was overstated etc.
But if you are advertising a salary band then the lower number should be the minimum that the company is prepared to pay if you are recruited, and this should be enforceable.
I mean that will just result in more companies advertising competitive salary which means nothing at all
When o started reading this my mid went back to the first pentium II cpus which came in a little enclosure.
We had had one delivered and the person concerned managed to shoot the cpu package out of the case and halfway down the office. It did still work after being replaced.
Unlike the machine giving a problem that when powered up with the case up had a nice little flame coming off the board.
As long as the colour can be distinguished by said colour blind person (me), colour blindness encompasses a range, for example green and orange are the same (yes grass is orange normally) traffic lights are orange, red, white etc,
There is a reason I only wear one colour of socks, or always wear a white shirt, or want labels of coloured items….
I’m much the same zero interest in management, I am a techie and reasonably at it.
I usually end up being a lead technical engineer on network projects (not a pm as that isn’t my forte).
But my approach to management is
If you don’t know who to do it you can ask me I will help
If you don’t know who to do it and you break it you are on your own, as occurred in this conversation from just before I left a company
Caller: we have a problem (we…… at this point I am 100 miles from the main office having just been working overnight)
Me: what has gone wrong
Caller: I turned spanning tree off on a port on the core switch and the site seems to have stopped working
Me:Why on earth did you do that?
Callee: Someone suggested it
Me:Well the network has gone into a loop so you need to do three things
1. Go and tell management
2. Shutdown that core if the console has locked then pull the power (this is a Cisco 7010 chassis running about 10 fex extenders
3. Wait 5 minutes check everything is running and then power the core back up it will take about 20 minutes to boot.
Caller: do I have to tell management?
Me: well if you don’t they will realise quickly and then come demanding to know what is going on, this way you may get away with just being told you are an idiot.r
I still don’t understand why turning spanning tree off on a production interface was ever a good idea and without any change documentation…..r
All these rovers need some common components
Wheels and drive mechanisms should be common (maybe different seals, tyres) but an electric motor is still common to both as are springs / shocks
Steering simple rack and pinion should suffice and most cars have had electric power steering for the last 15 years.
Chassis box girder is simple to use if you need it bigger add longer girders
There is your basic platform now the instrument pack will be different, but the driving computer should be an off the shelf unit.
To an outsider it looks like if it was done before then we need to redesign it.
Classic quote but true
Their is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix.
After spending the last week attempting to unravel how the routing works in the main campus, I have a diagram that to be readable would need to printed on A0 paper, and still can’t work out how some of the routes appear to work it has both BGP and OSPF but no redistribution between protocols and a good scattering of random static routes as well.
But it does function - now I have to work out how to move everything to one protocol without breaking anything.
I left Bgl group about 8 years ago, having worked there as a network admin for 20 years.
Since then (although these stopped about 5 years ago), I have been asked for….
The combination to the data tape safe (seriously)
Did I know where xxx was - this was 6 months after I left.
And the best one, where did the cable for the gps clock antenna run as they are doing some building work and it has stopped working….
I also found that a year after I had left I still had admin access to their Ripe account and could have changed any of the settings.
Years ago when we moved buildings there were a stack of printers heading for the skip, so I got one (old Lexmark 610) and ran it for the club I run for about 6 years before it broke. That was replaced by a HP4350 which has lasted about 7 years before something broke in the duplex unit last week.
At this point repairing a 21 year old printer didn’t seem worth it so I have just order a Kyocera as its replacement which I will be able to play with on Monday when it gets delivered.
Before anyone asks I need duplex for the magazine and colour is way too expensive for the club to afford….
Early nineties and I was the main autocad operator for a company straight out of school.
I ran a 486sx25 with maths coprocessor and a 1024x768 display. This cost about £5000 and had a 100Mb hard drive.
I had a few days off and came back to find I couldn’t do any work as someone had wiped the drive containing all the data files and they were in the middle of restoring the data. I think was either an ID10t or VDU fault.
After a while you don’t notice how much things cost, this afternoon I just moved about £50k of network switches between two buildings on a flat bed trolley, there is a stack in the build room, containing a 9410, two 9500x28c8, a couple of console servers, some more switches and various cables. Any of this bolted ins rack nope just resting on top of each other because that is full of £400k firewalls that need to be installed and a few test bits of kit.
If we stopped to think how much some of this is worth we would be scared of working on it.
That reminds me of a situation my brother found himself in.
One year gets the top grade and a pay rise for exceeding his previous score and the normal raise.
The next year he gets the top grade again and just gets the normal raise
Reason you haven’t improved your grade from last year…..
Yes because there is a tick box to allow us to do this on the application forms, and on the renewal forms the same applies if someone does not wish to receive messages then we accept that and they can unsubscribe from any of the messages that get sent out.
Fully GDPR compliant even though we only have 60 members.
Sometimes the best approach is to ask them to create a ticket, and then sit on it for a week before telling them it is done.
On the other hand there is the time when you confidently state it is working only to discover it didn’t so you need to rush a fast fix in to avoid looking an idiot…
When working on a token ring network, we had reports of a slow connection, I found the cable and started pulling it from the cabinet to find the other end (this is the type 1 stuff). Well we pulled it and pulled it and got back to the doorway to reception (about 50 metres) but at this point the cable was still connected at both ends in the cabinet. Why some idiot had got a 100m patch cable and plugged it between two ports about a metre apart I don’t know but the segment speeded up after that. (It had been running a dumb terminal and was swapped to a pc)
Hmm nice In theory, but I had last week off (as it is a bank holiday in the uk I am back tomorrow)
Friday morning spent isolating a problem with a line card in a chassis
Then debugging a dhcp problem, testing new wireless configuration and Friday afternoon spent writing a handover email which came to 2500 words due to the number of projects I am working on before getting hit with a load of questions about 4:30.
Didn’t help that I got hit with a norovirus of similar on Monday / Tuesday which screwed up my schedules somewhat….
Came in one morning and one segment of the network would not connect. This was about 15 years ago
Now the windows admins had set a profile which basically locked all machines if they couldn’t see a domain controller so this one was going to be hard.
It took a good while searching but eventually I found someone had attached a server running whatever the Citrix thin client manager was to the network and it was happily giving out ip addresses with itself as the default router whilst getting its own gateway as itself.
Due to the locked down machines it was difficult to track what the problem was in the first place.
Once I had found the machine and removed it everything went back to normal.
This is when we started moaning about locked down machines. Our windows admins had set the machines to first run through a group policy disabling all “admin” type functions, and then for people such as myself who needed to get to lower level commands to do our job, it would then apply another policy to remove all the restrictions it had just applied - this took about 10 minutes from turning a laptop on to being able to do anything……. They also foisted Microsoft direct access as a vpn client which could take up to 20 minutes to log you in great if you get called out on a urgent problem.
The problem with insecure protocols is that if you are a home user with just one computer then the risk is acceptable, however if you are running a company with a mixed platform (I.e. windows and mac) then malware can be used to scan for the insecure protocol hack in and install something nasty to exfiltrate your personal details.
It is a simple logic (coming from someone who is a network engineer) any insecure protocols should be turned off or if that is not possible sandboxed to a degree that is an acceptable risk.
I am also expecting os 27 to drop Rosetta support as I have had quite a few warnings about Intel coded apps not working in the future…..
2nd story….. we had just had the server room refitted and the electricians had installed a no CD e new distribution board with a 100 A breaker as the main release. We had been waiting for a while for this to be done and another person was installing new kit now we had the power available or so he thought.
He plugged it in and turned the power on only to plunge the comms room into darkness.
So we went in with torches and looked at the new board everything was good all the breakers were in the on position.
It took some head scratching it we found the problem round the back of the comms room was the power feed for it. This went through a 40A breaker so the extra load was enough to trip the breaker outside but not the panel inside…
First of two tails here this afternoon.
Early 2000s I get called out to the server room has gone down.
So I trudge over to the site (it was a weekend) and walk into the room to be greeted with silence, hmm the UPS is offline, no problem I will just reset the machine and everything will be back online.
Big mistake, it turns out it had gone off due to a battery failure and when I turned it back on the failed battery started venting sulphuric acid gas into the room.
Not something to be repeated.
If you left a machine unlocked then it was usually the undying love for a colleague email, copied to everyone in the department, or (better for the rest of us) I am buying cakes for everybody.
We did have some none-it people do snapshot desktop set as wallpaper and hide icons, even better was doing it and rotating the screenshot 180 degrees…
I used to work with a guy who liked very spicy food. He bought into the office a bottle of his home made extra strong sauce.
After warning the office that a tiny amount could numb your tongue one person decided he would have a heaped tablespoon. He was advised to not do it but did it anyway
About 10 minutes later you could have used him as a navigation beacon and he was sweating so much it was visible going down his face. We had no choice but to bundle him into a car and send someone to drive him home.
We next saw him 5 days later…..
I read it differently.
What I was looking at was some form of malware that could be uploaded to a monitor through the interface to infect another machine when it is connected to the screen. Considering that hdmi and usbc both support networking natively, it seems that that could be an overlooked vector. Go to a coworking space or similar and connect to a monitor, come home with a nice piece of malware.
Spent a couple of minutes explaining when I wanted to change part of the monitoring threshold on our system.
Got to the end and said any opinions and was greeted with silence. Had to ask if anyone was listening (a colleague in the same team was) as for the intended audience not a reaction….
This was to make it easier to work with and not generate so many alerts but……
