Posts by pirxhh

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...

Quickest fix: Turning up the brightness that was turned all the way down by giving the monitor a light dusting.

The NorthStar terminals had brightness and contrast buttons the size and depth of a quarter (coin), and only part of the rim was sticking out. So one wipe --> totally dark screen.

I got "caught" by a user to diligently copy a stack of diskettes... by using a photocopier.

After she recovered from the ROTFL attack, I explained that it was the easiest way to document which serial numbers (aka licenses) went to which office location (this was in the 1990s, when fax machines were a Thing and digital cameras... weren't)

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Unless offshore, where not wearing gloves and walking on any kind of stairs without using the handrails are fireable offences.

Re: Carry spares

I do cyber security stuff for a living, often on offshore rigs. My kit is compact (as the space on the helicopter is limited) but pretty comprehensive. I know that I can get safety gear onboard if needed (don't get me started on each drilling company seems to require a different brand of impact gloves), but I don't rely on anything else being available as the next shop is... not exactly nearby.

Re: hmm , am I a hoarder

I do the same but have to pack a bit more diligently, as I do most in-city trips by bicycle (and longer trips by train if I can), so the kitchen sink rarely fits into my bags...

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Re: African customs

A few years back, I was on a (non-IT) mission to visit some ports in northern African countries. On immigration, the queues were long and slow moving. When it was our turn, the guy stared at my passport and the plethora of visas therein and told me to wait. And wait. And wait...

Then my phone rang. With an apologetic smile, I took the call. The voice at the other end asked me where I was, as they were waiting to pick us up. I explained the situation, they asked to please hand the phone to the immigration officer - whose demeanor very suddenly changed. Within seconds, we had our passports stamped and were ushered through where the secretary of state for transport had been (less and less) patiently waiting for us. The drive to the ministry escorted by police on motorcycles with flashing lights felt a bit surreal.

Disruptive weather....

Once, I got stuck on a Friday afternoon in Munich. A lot of snow almost shut down the airport; I was very lucky that I was able to catch a jump seat on probably the last plane to make it to my destination that day. I was working for the IT arm of an airline at the time, meaning I had the security clearance to fly on the spare seat in the cockpit. I learned a lot about airport procedures that day, plus quite some vocabulary that my fairly prim mum would had disapproved of.

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

Re: PFY's responsibilities

I had done this an *ahem* few years ago, as a terminate-and-stay-resident program for DOS.

Hooked the keyboard interrupt, and when keystrokes were close to each other (i.e., someone typing fast) introduced random key swaps.

When the victim^H^H^H^H^H^Huser took notice and typed slowly, all was normal. Speed up, and the fun began.

Hilarity ensued.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Re: The Reason So Many People Automatically Hate *All* Managers

Early in my career, I had a very good manager.

He had only a very limited knowledge of the subject matter (IT), but he was good at networking and managing his peers and the ones above him. Who also knew that he (marketing major) was not too technical, so he could always say "I'll check with my technical people and get back to you" without losing face.

His successor was way more technically adept (and a decent if not great manager), but he sometimes felt pressured to agree to something that would require a well-oiled time machine to achieve.

Twilio reminds users that Authy Desktop apps die in March – not in August

If you self-host with using the Vaultwarden back-end software, you're all set.

Re: Found a silver lining

When you self-host using Vaultwarden as your server software, you get a fully open source solution and have most of the premium feature you're likely to want, such as sharing vaults.

That's what I do for the family; I have access to my mum's utilities, insurers etc. should it become necessary but not her various fora, knitting club and the like.

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

Re: The real lesson...

It also has its place in crypto, where you want to make sure that different code paths take the same time. Compilers may optimize too well in that case; you don't want minimal time but constant time (to avoid leaking information about keys).

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

It may well be - remember "Xeroxgate" about ten years ago? Most large Xerox scan/print/copy machines habitually swapped characters, due to an over-eager data compression algorithm. So you could never be entirely sure that your scans were accurate or if the scanner had changed some sixes into perfectly aligned, clear eights.

Xerox first claimed that it only happened at some settings, as explained briefly on page 16odd of the manual. Still, it later was proven that it happened at any setting - and, as the issue was a few years old, many archives of scanned data (and hard photocopies, as those were effectively scanned and printed) could not be trusted any more.

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

A part I designed as a student intern made it (after full qualification, of course) into a family of commercial airliners. They'll still be putting those in when I'll retire in a few years. Gives me warm, fuzzy feelings whenever I travel on one of those birds.

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Re: It is mandatory to have a Oh No Oh Second experience

Stercus, stercus, stercus, moriturus sum!

GNU Pterry

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

Re: Plausible...

My first computer had 2 *Kilo*bytes.

Designed from schematics in a Zilog Z80 data book and hand-threaded and soldered. Surprisingly, it worked. Programmed in hand-assembled machine language (Z80 was easy, very orthogonal instruction set).

As a pupil in the late seventies, I wanted a computer but had more time than money. Learned a lot from building that thing.

Tools for end users

I had numerous calls/texts from my elderly mother that her bank / pharmacy / email / WiFi were broken.

Troubleshooting was always a bit tricky...

Early May, I had an epiphany and built her a "traffic light" type thingy - a few WS2812 adressable LEDs driven by an ESP chip, built into an Ikea picture frame.

Now, my first question is "which lights are green and which are red?"

No. 1 is WiFi access works, #2 is the router responds, #3 is Google (as a handy stand-in for "the internet"), #4 is our e-mail server, and #5 is the control box for the PV panels on her roof.

Best mother's day present (for me :-) ever!

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Re: Where are the backups?

TBH, any sort of financial liability would not help the clients much.

The provider is likely to be bankrupt from an incident like this (so the final payout will be negligible), and in any case, the legal system will take too long to save the clients' business should they rely on the data.

It's a bit like insurance against a meteorite strike: They may pay your heirs a princely sum, but you'd still be dead.

Re: "their own backups as a contingency"

Nowadays, there's quite a number of companies for which "on-site" is not a meaningful term at all. They don't own/rent any permanent premises, all employees are remote/traveling/working from home. In that case, cloud-first makes sense - but it requires assurances that the data will, in fact, be there when needed.

Some (too many?) believe in vendor assurances and contracts. Sure, you can sue the provider, but what good will it do? A massive hit like CloudNordic's will likely wipe out the provider, making any lawsuit not only too late to save your company but probably fruitless.

Re: Why is it the company's responsibility to make backups of the customer's data?

Yes.

My irreplaceable data lives on my PC, with an hourly backup (using restic, not a mounted file system) to a local TrueNAS. That in turn is backed up to my brother's server, about 400km away, again using restic over ssh.

All cloud stuff lives in Nextcloud on a rented VPS, with hourly backup to my server - so if the VPS is lost I will lose time and may lose a few hours of emails and such, but nothing essential.

My company, on the other side, has joined the cult of Azure. The best I can do is to manually back up anything I deem important from my laptop to a portable SSD, that I keep disconnected (and encrypted with Bitlocker to go).

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: Similar language problem on Windows 1 0

It helps to memorize the ASCII codes of the most-needed ones (like @=64, \=92, |=124, and so on) - then you can type ALT+(ASCII code on the numeric keypad). Works everywhere (sadly, not on Linux) regardless of keyboard layout.

Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?

Re: Clean keyboards

Great idea!

We use tiny keyboards with a touchpad, about the size of the venerable Nokia communicator, for our lab machines (mostly Intel NUC and Raspberry Pi). They are wireless (dongle stored inside). I'll remember taking one for every user support task (not my official job any more but still happens).

Re: Clean keyboards

Yes indeed.

My personal keyboard is an original IBM MF-II. The (outer) keycaps are easy to detach; they regularly go into a sock and then in the (30°C wash).

At work, we have a shared desk concept; we all got personal bluetooth keyboards and mice so it's only my own dirt I'm touching.