Posts by pirxhh

Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down

Re: "The Register wishes you a wonderfully scary day"

Tinnitus. Because beeps.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

I have a grill in my garden, made by the apprentice workshop of a chemical plant. This thing will survive not only myself, but generations to come - massively built out of pharmaceutics-grade stainless steel pipes and 4mm thick sheets, lovingly welded. It's over 30 years old and has never been protected from the elements in any way, nor needed such protection.

I generally move the output live wire (L1) to the second connector on the input live side (L) of a switch if I want it to stay on no matter what (usually because the light fixture is "smart" or motion activated). I label it accordingly, of course, but it's safe against people who don't read.

Clean, easy to revert, and relatively foolproof (until the universe invents a better fool, so 5 ms maybe?)

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

Senior [whatever] are surely senior citizens now, unless they're late.

I'm seeing myself out now.

Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings

Re: Fairly Minor but...

It's all kinds and sizes of businesses, unfortunately. We just received payment for a fairly substantial bill from a world-leading, highly profitable, billion-dollar company that was seven months overdue. Took us ages to hunt them down.

I honestly don't know why we still do business with them.

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

Re: I don't get it

Stuff like this usually happens when you can't (or don't want to) accept the downtime at the time, so you leave it in until you have a maintenance window. Which does not happen until you've forgotten about the box.

Well, driving alone by car to a datacenter that is by definition well ventilated, working with only one other employee in a room otherwise devoid of humans (aka potential infection vectors) - this would qualify as fairly low risk, from an infection preventon point of view.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

Micromanagement is so last century.

Moore's law applied to management, we should at least be at nanomanagement, if not picomanagement.

I'll see myself out now.

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

Not exactly breaking, but close: I was tasked with investigating if a particularly hard to install aircraft component could be simplified, while still doing the job.

This was meant to teach me good engineering parctices, not to actually solve the problem, mind.

So I went, designed somethinh creatively ab^H^Hreusing an existing component, and handed it in. Wrote a report about what I learned, and that was that. Internship finished, back to uni.

Months later, my grandboss let me know my design had passed all reviews, saved some 7 hours and 1.2 kg per aircraft, and would be used. Everyone, especially me, was completely surprised by this outcome; as the particular aircraft turned out rather popular with (so far) no crashes attributable to my part, I'll call that a successful (if unexpected) result of my internship.

After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'

Re: Rights problem

Had a very hard time once to get rid of forest-level admin rights on a customer's system.

The project was finished, hand-over done, real end users on the system... and I still had access for months. No amount of begging made them at least deactivate my account.

IIRC we had to involve legal, who wrote a polite but firm letter that we couldn't be held responsible.

I also went to a somewhat convoluted process to ensure nobody knew the password any more (recruited three coworkers, initiated password change, each typed a word, a special character, and a number without the others knowing what it was; afterwards we all signed a statement what we did).

Key KDE developer Jonathan Riddell quits

No, the concept is that if you are effectively an employee (you have to do the task personally, the employer telling you what to do, when, and how), you should be treated as such.

In Germany, that means the employer has to deduct taxes and healthcare and social security deductions from your salary, and the employer has to pay 50% of those contributions. And you get job protection, six weeks of paid sick leave, 24 days of paid vacation per year, etc.

A self-employed person has to pay all of their taxes, helathcare, and social security contributions.

Therefore, there is a test if you qualify as sself-employed contractor. One key indicator is if you are wholly (or almost wholly) dependent on a single client; others are if you have employees, an office, do yur own sales, and others.

The linked Blue Systems ... is another one

The link to Tönnies' company is https://blue-systems.com/ - the link in the article is to a French, much larger, IT services company.

Slack threatened to delete nonprofit coding club’s data if it didn’t pay $50k in a week

Re: Slack should ..

Sure, they'll have people who can do it.

Should they? Not necessarily. Operating a service for that kind of user community is an almost 24/7 commitment, and volunteers are a limited resource. Their talents may be better spant at moderating discussions, creating challenges, giving hints, ... teacher-y stuff rather than fixing misbehaving updates at 3am.

I operate servers jsut for my family and a teen org of a much smaller scale, and it requires more intermittent effort than I woudl have imagined - usually when I'm on a business trip sevral timezones away.

So, in theory, outsourcing operation of something like Slack has its appeal, but it comes at a (possibly unaffordable) price.

Lesson learned: Have solid contracts in place, with reasonable pre-warning of contract cahnges built-in, and ensure data portability. A solution that is self-hostable may be best, even if you buy it as a cloud service - this way you can go on-premise if needed.

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

For the time-honored "divide and conquer" (aka binary search) method, I had built myself a female BNC terminator so I could split the bus and test both halves at the same time. Reduced the wear and tear to my pants' knees a lot.

I had one customer who insisted on administering their own MAC addresses (!) on Token Ring and this then carried over to Ethernet. The wanted all theri MACs to be FE:01:a.b.c.d for TR, with a.b.c.d the octets from the IPv4 address, and FE.02:... for Ethernet. Never heard of ARP? "But that's so much easier!" - No, it isn't.

Re: Who to blame?

I have been on both sides of the equation (me career went from vendor to customer to consultant to a non-IT role, soon to go to "from July, you're on your on, boys" aka retirement).

I freely admit to overlooking the (in hindsight) obvious blunder we'd made, but also saved the bacon by thinking outside the box and/or around the odd corner or two - like triggering a bug in the core switches' OS, causing a complete network shutdown on a maritime asset (fortunately still in the shipyard, so the suppliers could do a full investigation and proper fix rather applying a band-aid and hoping for the best).

But I did my est to remain reasonably calm, polite, and professional - the one time I had to raise my voice at a telecoms provider, I profusely apologized in advance to the poor key account manager on the other end of the phone line.

Re: Passing the buck is typical human behavior

Well, it's usually manglement that's stuck in these meetings, not valuable technical resources.

Arguably, that's their best natural habitat, with the least opportunity to cause harm.

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Re: Ah, security

Indeed.

I make part of my money by telling clients how to beat their security, often within seconds after the first glance.

You have to have a bit of an subversive attitude and an inclination to look at things from an uncommon angle, but it's not that hard.

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

Re: Kill Switch

Closely followed by the Maintenance Supervisor and the Camp Boss (despite the lofty title, the latter is quite low on the totem pole, but he manages all things accommodation, including the food, so there.)

Re: Wrong PC

Happens to all of us.

The most (potentially) desatrous I know of was a techie doing remote software updates, and subsequent restarts, on the control pods of a drilling rig's subsea BOP (blowout preventer, arguably the most critical safety system - think Deepwater Horizon).

He wanted to do that on a rig between wells, with the BOP safely stored on deck, but mistyped the address and basically disabled this last line of defense for an hour or so. Several people were decidedly unhappy. A pysical lock-out, with two independent locks, was subsequently installed, preventing any further unauthorized remote access.

Teen interns brute-forced a disk install, with predictable results

Re: Zapping an expensive disk

Had a similar case; a Priam 100MB full-height 5.24" ST412 jobbie.

Did some work with the disk not screwed in properly. Bang! and magic smoke came out.

Fortunately, a good friend owned an identcal disk and let me borrow the logic board so I could rescue the data.

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

Re: "leave operations to us techies and focus on management"

One of the best managers I ever had was decidedly non-technical (he was from marketing).

He would not lose face by telling his peers that he'd check with his guys (usually, me) and come back, rather than being browbeaten into committimg to... unwise.. ideas.

A truly excellent manager knows when they are out of their depth; in IT, knowledge ages very fast (and badly) - won't I know it!

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Re: no fault

That's brilliant!

Sir, let me steal that idea, and have a -->

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

That happens a lot with my mum.

So I built her a gizmo with a few colour LEDs, one each for WiFi, "the Internet" (can ping Google), our email server (port 25 responds), and her solar system's web page.

It's basically an ESP with a few LEDs from an addressable RGB light strip, all built into an IKEA picture frame that has enough space behind the actual picture plane to hide the electronics.

Now when "the WLAN does not work", I can ask "which lights are red and which are green" and save eveyone involved a lot of frustration.

I've been in the situation of that user, due to my own carelessness... sort of.

On a business trip to board a ship in Anchorage, Alaska, I had made the mistake to pack my laptop's power brick in my checked luggage. When said luggage inevitably did not make it to the US, I was in the unenviable situation of arriving at midnight on a Sunday morning and having to board by Sunday 1pm. The only remotely electronics-adjacent shop open on Sunday morning was W**t, and I was delighted that they could supply me with evrything I needed to complete the trip - clothing, toothbrush, and a 65W USB type C power supply.

I subsequently told the airline to ship the luggage right back to my home, as bringing it to the next port of calll would be pretty useless.

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

Re: And the lesson we learn today is:

We had quite a number to dispose of. A coworker's wife had a pottery kiln and we just wanted to heat everything over the Curie temperature.

Went a bit overboard and melted them down into puddles while having a barbecue at their house. Enough witnesses signed a statement that the media had, indeed, been rendered unrecoverable.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Been there, luckily nothing damaged

When we last moved (same building, different floor) we got boxes so we could pack stuff we wanted in a particular place. We also got bins for any crud we wanted to part with.

IT got moved by the professionals, same as anything not packed by us.

No better time than a move to organise several years of assorted stuff, with a preference for the circular file (pretty much all the important stuff had been digitised before or in the early phases of the pandemic-induced lock-downs).

Re: In denial

Also called progressives.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: on the topic of dogs

Just a few weeks ago, I heard on the telly that Labs are bred to be very easily motivated by food. They lack the "I'm full" feeling, so they are always hungry, the poor sods.

This explains some of our labs antics...

What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack

Re: ?

https://discworld.com/management/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/DW-MOUSE-Death-of-Rats-2-800px.png

I still have the first edition, obtained at the Discworld Convention in Manchester IIRC.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: Never heard of Romex cables?

Here in Germany, domestic 3 phase is common. Electric stoves are generally connected to all phases (but can run on one), larger water heaters (18 or 21 kW) almost universally are. My house gets 63 amps per phase, the most common main fuse (you have to be a licensed electrician to hange those).

It's handy when you want to install a high-powered wall box for an EV, for example.

Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running

Re: Serious OOPS!

Laptops use less power and come with built-in UPS... until the battery inevitably dies, that is.

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Not so much over a dispatch system, but....

Ours has a lock on the inside, like a bathroom stall. Seems to be a pretty common arrangement.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

When I had a project at an insurance company, I had one (1) 3.5" floppy disk, with a laser-engraved serial number, duly signed for (by me) when I received it. Even then it was mostly but not quite outdated technology in that some PCs still had drives.

Sending data within the building was often faster by in-house physical mail than by email - the mail service was very good (30 minutes, usually) while my Notes account had some issues and got delivered only during scheduled garbage collection runs on the mainframe, every 3 hours or so.

Signal will withdraw from Sweden if encryption-busting laws take effect

Re: Workarounds?

Nothing, really - and that's kind of the point.

Signal (the charity) can avoid complying with the regulation by not making Signal (the app) available for download in Sweden. If anyone sideloads the app, so be it.

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

Re: Many a decade ago ....

Just yesterday, I spent hours to re-count all the ballots at my polling station... twice. We had totaled one more vote than ballots, so we needed to find the mistake before closing up shop. Tedious work but someone has to do it... democracy doesn't come free.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

Re: DIMMs

Our high school's Apple //e computers had notoriously noisy 5.25" floppy drives.

Some bright (and I use the rem very loosely) fellow student decided they needed lubrication, so he put bicycle oil on a floppy and inserted it into the drive.

Took me the better part of two hours with a Phillips screwdriver, isopropyl alcohol, and new silicon grease to make the thing work again. No lasting damage as these things were built to last.

It takes a beancounter to catch a ... spy?

Enough years ago the statute of limitations has run out by now, I was a lowly student intern at an aerospace company. The copiers ran on plug-in counters so the copies could be billed to the departmental budgets.

A beancounter noticed that one department made an unexplainably large number of copies and decided to investigate. Turned out some engineer had a side hustle of selling aircraft design documents to a foreign power.

It made quite some waves internally when the entrepreneur was led off the facility in handcuffs to help the police with their enquiries.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Re: Multiple voltages.

You might be surprised.

I surely was when I lived in the US for half a year in 2019. I went to buy a monitor for my laptop, and most of the cheaper 22-24" jobbies at Best Buy were 115V only. Bought a HP that was both on sale and wide-range, so I could still use it after my return back to Europe. My nephew still uses it.

Re: "built to survive minor accidents"

Quite a number of German-engineered, decidedly not cheap, HomeMatic wireless actors (for blinds, lights, dimers etc.) have under-specced capacitors. It's a known bug and I became quite good at replacing these electrolytics with better ones (higher voltage and temperature rating); they're 17 cents each retail. The actuators cost around 40 Euros.

It's not just a single model but multiple, and the problem is known for years. I'm not sure if the successors (Homematic IP) have the same issue as for new additions to my home control I prefer Zigbee components (better radio range due to the mesh routing).

Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?

Re: No, I was Wrong

I have to test my real multi-gas meter quite frequently with a span ga (whenever I go offshore or on-site). It keeps me alive. No testing of an identical "test system" would do the job.

That's true whenever there's hardware involved, not just software or data.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Forklift driver Klaus

Probably this guy: https://youtu.be/TJYOkZz6Dck

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

Nope, MSC is Italian/Swiss with ship management centres in Sorrento and Limassol (Cyprus).

Ship IT can be very varied; where it gets scary is OT (the control systems)...

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Here are the copies

I have made photocopies of (albeit 3.5") floppies myself, to much hilarity.

(I needed to document the license numbers printed on said floppies before sending them off to various offices across Europe, so I had a reason for it...)

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

Here on the old continent, car liability insurance is mandatory, to protect the public from you operating a potential deadly piece of machinery.

Comprehensive or theft insurance is not, as the public cares very little if you have to take the bus after causing an accident with said piece of sh^Hteel. You may decide to take the risk of losing your car, and the lower it gets in value, the less attractive comprehensive insurance becomes. But if you should injure a cyclist, the insurance company will pay (and, should you have been intoxicated, may recover their losses from you). The victim should not have to suffer from your bankruptcy.

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

A bank branch had work done to rewire one of the offices with 10base-T. The contractors used a nice diamond core driller to get down to the "IT room" in the basement.

Gravity happened: The core fell down into the basement. The contractors called it a day (hey, it's pub o'clock and now the IT guys can put in their wiring over the weekend.)

What they had not seen (maybe on purpose): The falling core had damaged a sewer line that promptly flooded the terminal concentrator underneath. The IT guys were understandably p***ed by the condition, dunnikindivers were called, and the whole branch was closed for a week for decontamination and repairs.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Ways to encourage payment

We had a client who was rumoured to be in financial dire straits.

We offered our services on a prepayment basis but also gave them a small discount (10% or so) for that, so everybody could save face. That was over ten years ago, and they are still a loyal customer.

Compression? What's that? And why is the network congested and the PCs frozen?

I once worked on a project for an insurance company.

You could tell it was "old economy" (when "new economy" was A Thing) by that the in-house physical mail distribution was often faster than email (the former was darn efficient while the latter suffered from some error in the bowels of Lotus Notes on mainframe, IIRC).

So when things were moderately urgent, I wrote the data on one of the individually numbered, signed-for 3.5 inch floppy disks, turned on the "I have mail to pick up" light, and within minutes the mailman collected said disk and brought it from my 20th floor office to IT on 3rd floor. When they were really urgent, I took the service elevator myself.

Re: "Shared Cloudy Thing"

Never underestimate the capacity of a truckload of tape cartridges (or HDDs)

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Re: Windows Update still resetting things

Clippy got resurrected/zombified as Copilot...