Posts by ricardian

14-hour+ global blackout at Ingram Micro halts customer orders

Christian Trinity?

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: VAX field service engineers

Each of our early PDP machines required a 240v 30A supply.

On a long, residential course with a dozen other folk umpteen years ago our new instructor appeared without a tie and manglement quickly instructed him to find and wear a tie. However, it appeared that the local rules only said "a tie" and did not specify what sort of tie. There, for the rest of the course we all scoured local charity shops for the ugliest possible tie and our instructor happily wore them.

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

And it gets worse https://danwatch.dk/en/serious-security-breach-russian-nuclear-facilities-exposed

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Whoops

And in Orkney we don't have turnips, we have neeps as in "haggis & neeps"

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

CYTA (Cyprus Telecom Authority) in the mid 1960s insisted on using their own non-NATO alphabet. The only letter that I can recall is Y = Yokahama.

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Re: Bombs too

At a seaside resort in North Yorkshire in the 1980s BT were advertising their remote fire monitoring package - a fire would trigger an alert and all would be well. Such a shame that a few weeks later a fire broke out in the local exchange during the wee small hours and by the time anyone noticed the place had burned to the ground

GCHQ intern took top secret spy tool home, now faces prison

Re: Official Secrets Act?

It was HM Queen Elizabeth II who signed the Act. Mere mortals sign a bit of paper attesting that they understand the penalties for offences committed under the Act!

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

I was in the RAF 1959-73 and for my final 3 years I was an instructor. There was an intensive 3 week course "Instructional Techniques" at RAF Upwood which gave all of us great confidence in our ability to teach our particular subjects. I believe that in later years the course gained national recognition

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

For 'O' level History 1955-59 our teacher was straight out of teacher training after National Service. His flawed technique was to spend the first year dictating all the notes for the subsequent 3 years. Of course most of us lost the notes before the start of year 2.

Top Trump officials text secret Yemen airstrike plans to journo in Signal SNAFU

Re: 'glitch'

or Penistone

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

At work in the early 1980s we had a couple of Commodore Pets. We ran 6502 assembler programs which could do some impressive stuff, especially as the GPIB/IEEE488 routines were all encoded in ROM and just had to be called in order to control printers, etc. Of couse we were heavily reliant on Raeto West's comprehensive manual. We moved on to C using the Aztec compiler (remember .MAK files?), recommended to us because it was used by the CEGB in their nuclear power sites!

Payday from hell as several British banks report major outages

My TSB branch was in Kirkwall, to reach it involved a 2 hour ferry crossing and a 10 minute taxi ride (and the same for the return journey). Now the Kirkwall branch has closed and my nearest branches are in Wick & Thurso which would involve a further 2 hour ferry crossing and 10 minute taxi ride from Kirkwall. And, because of the ferry timings, it would probably involve at least one overnight stay in Kirkwall.

Fortunately I can check my TSB accounts online and use my local Post Office to withdraw cash.

Relocation is a complete success – right up until the last minute

You got an audible alert

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Cobol...

Back in the 1980s the OU taught programming using HEKTOR, a simple computer that had a UHF modulator which you plugged into the aerial socket of a TV. The course began by using pure machine code then using a very, very simple assembler. Once you got the idea you were introduced to BASIC. That stood me in good stead at work when I encountered 6502 assembler (Commodore Pet and Raeto West)

Re: Close enough

I and many others have got something that Elon and his like will never, ever have - "enough"!

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: ability

Myself and quite a few other folk have something that Elon Musk and his ilk will never, ever have - enough!

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: One place I was at...

IBM Data Transceiver (this was 1961) receiving cards but not printing text. Reported to BM tech who drives 250 miles from base, walks into room, moves "print" switch from "off" to "on", leaves room & drives 250 miles back to base.

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

London airport:

https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3744849

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

Re: 8 floppy disks for Office 97?

Remember Multimate? It came on a large number of 5.25 inch floppies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiMate

Stop installing that software – you may have just died

Re: Back to Front

<Pedant mode on>

The only person who signs the Official Secrets Act is the reigning monarch. We mere mortals sign a piece of paper certifying that we understand the penalties for offending!

<Pedant mode off>

Blaster Bates (remember him?) had one failure - a company that produced the overhead power lines for British Rail had huge furnaces to melt copper and other additives. One day there was a total power failure - backup didn't work - and molten copper solidified in the furnaces. Blaster Bates was brought in but his explosives made little impression on the solidified, quite soft copper. In the end I think that they had to send in people to physically chisel out umpteen tons of copper.

Re: Strangest?

My old boss in the RAF had a lovely, solidly-built, old Rover 90. It was written off when being driven at high speed over Dartmoor at dark o'clock and collided with an unfortunate owl that entered through the starboard headlight and exited via the dashboard

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Re: Time for a slide show

I see your telegraph poles - how about https://www.nia.org

Re: Simple rule - Engaging Smug Mode

A large Government organisation commissioned a new, multi-storey building. It had several thousand ethernet sockets and umpteen telephone sockets. The contractor (not BT) for ethernet socket installation labelled every socket with a clear label (produced from a small hand-held printer). The contractor for the telephone sockets was BT who labelled all the sockets with hieroglyphics written with a stubby HB pencil...

Cybercriminals quickly exploit CrowdStrike chaos

Remember the 2010 incident when McAfee mistakenly identified the Windows system file, svchost.exe, as a virus. George Kurtz was the CTO of McAfee at the time.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

From CrowdStrike's website https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/statement-on-windows-sensor-update

"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. "

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

A friend bought an old cottage on the island and was trying to find the switch for the outside light. Eventually he discovered that there was no switch, you just removed the fuse.

Re: 48V

2 shorts & 2 longs is Ю in Russian morse code!

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

Re: Safety-Guard-Free

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz1YrpMbBg&ab_channel=slopemower

Your trainee just took down our business and has no idea how or why

Re: "Doublefuck!! Wrong [rebooted|powered-off] Computer!"

Me too! BT "support" asked what colour lights were showing on the router and got annoyed when I said I couldn't say for sure

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

Re: CompuPro S-100 boxes in cat litter plant

Mid 1980s and Commodore Pet was the machine of the day in my area. Armed with Raeto West's invaluable manual and a little 6502 assembler knowledge it was relatively easy to control external bits of kit using IEEE488 (aka GPIB) low level - TALK, UNTALK, LISTEN, UNLISTEN - commands. My tour de force was to link two Commodore Pets, each with its own IEE488 controller, using 6502 assembler

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

Re: The real lesson...

Back at work in the 1980s we got one of the first IBM PCs and a C compiler. The C compiler was "Aztec" and it was selected because (allegedly) the CEGB were using it in power station design! Memories of writing batch files to compile, link and create .exe files. And TSR (Terminate & Stay Resident) programs were not unknown.

Re: The real lesson...

About 20 years ago I converted a Pascal program to C by using MS Word then tweaking the final result. I'd never encountered Pascal before but found an ancient Pascal textbook in a charity shop.

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

Someone forgot to remove silica gel bags from the engine intake of Vulcan XH558 thus causing the destruction of two engines http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-18241082

Americans wake to widespread AT&T cellular outages

Here in the UK there's a cunning plan:

https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/retiring-the-copper-network

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

Re: As a Non Legal Opinion

In-house the PO and Fujitsu know or have access rights to know things about Horizon but in Scotland the Procurator Fiscal / staff / Prosecutors only know and only can know what the PO and or Horizon tell them. Unless the PF / Staff received documentary evidence that contradicts the instructions / witness statements they received how on earth are they to know that Horizon was riddled with errors and the PO / F staff have lied to cover up these problems?

I suspect that the person writing this about the process in Scotland knows v. little about how legal proceedings work.

I'm assuming that in Scotland (just like in England & Wales) the Prosecutor is under a duty to disclose to the defence documentary evidence that is adverse to the Prosecutor's case. Down south the PO of course had such material, but north of the border the PF will only have it if the PO had provided it. Knowing the PO as we now do, it probably didn't.

I doubt that the PF or its staff or Prosecutors were told about the Horizon defects.

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: Copier Replacement

In 1973 I started work in a government office that had a "copier" which used liquids (no idea what they were) and you had to use barrier cream before attempting to use the machine. It produced copies that were "not bad". Nowadays the unions would scream blue murder about H&S!

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

Re: Ahhh...the early days.

Reminiscent of Multimate on lots & lots of 5.25 inch floppies

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: I'm curious...

The PET had the IEEE488 routines (read, unread, etc) hard coded in ROM - very handy when using 6502 assembler (and the invaluable handbook by Raeto West)

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Who remembers PG Strangman RIP on a certain telecom-related newsgroup back in the 1990s

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Re: Plausible...

Back in the 1978 the Open University had two computer sites, one in Milton Keynes and one in NE England (Sunderland?). These two sites did not share all the data as I discovered when sending in an assignment consisting of a handwritten bit of code that relied upon data saved by the previous assignment. On several occasions my assignment failed because the data was stored at the other OU site.

Reason for handwritten bit of code? I was living in Brora, Sutherland and nearest site with access to the OU system was over an hour's drive away (and access, via a 75 baud T100 teleprinter and a telephone-based modem, was decidedly flakey at the best of times)

What was the course? My first ever OU course, PM978 "Computers and Computing"

Did I pass? Yes, grade 2

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

Re: Almost got locked in

Working at a secure government site the security guards would patrol twice a day to ensure that all was well. One area only worked Mon-Fri so when the security chap checked it on Sat morning and found a cupboard left open he reported the security guard who had performed the previous security check. Alas, he failed to realise that occasionally someone in the area would work on a Saturday. The outcome was that if that situation occurred again the security guard wouldn't simply report his mate for failing to do his job but check whether (a) someone was working in the area or (b) there had been a break in!

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

Re: Chemical Photography

And Orkney has Gunnie Moberg https://orkneylibrary.org.uk/orkney-archive/photographic-archive/gunnie-moberg

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Re: "you have to wonder how they get home each night

In 1964 I was in the RAF, unmarried, living at RAF Northolt and travelling to work at the Air Ministry via the Central Line (with a free travel pass every 3 months!). It was 24/7 shift work and after a busy night shift it was not unknown for folk like me to get on the tube at Charing Cross, doze off and wake up several hours later at somewhere like Ongar...

Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice

That put me in mind of a quote from Pratchett's "Colour of Magic":

“If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!”

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Halon in action https://youtu.be/Jx1s8u2Mpmo

Re: Testing to destruction

I've told this story before but it is relevant to the topic.

My friend worked for a high security Government department and had managed to create a small piece of security-related hardware that matched all the specs - works with wide range of voltages both AC & DC, not polarity sensitive, not bothered by moisture, heat, vibration or being dropped from several feet onto hard surface. However, he failed on the final item in the spec - had to be easily & quickly destroyed in case of an emergency

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

Re: Higgins

Many years ago a friend of mine produced a "hardened" piece of cryptographic kit for the military. It was tough (run over by tanks on Salisbury Plain, dropped out of aircraft) and dealt with a wide range of voltages ( AC & DC), reversed polarity, etc. He failed to meet the final requirement - it had to be simple to destroy in an emergency.

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

Re: This is poor planning

And if you're colour blind...