Posts by FishCounter

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

Re: Many years ago

True that about blood sacrifice; it's the only way things go right. I was working alone on a rack-mount server in a remote comm room and because it was about shoulder height, I had no ladder, so had to shutdown the server, extend from the rack, remove from the rails & place it on the floor to swap the internal cache battery. All was good until I stood up and turned, getting stabbed in the neck by one of the rails, wasn't deep, but made me very aware that I nearly became central to a "locked room" mystery. Would've been a dumb way to die; damn server, stupid human.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Karma does exist

I worked for a contractor after leaving uniformed service and that same non-DOD service hired a complete ass of a man to manage their data center on our base in NYC. No one in the contracting team wanted to work for this guy, so we rotated 2 members of our small team onto the DC support team to "do time" under this guy. Over the next 2 years of his reign, many of us nearly quit because the experience was so awful, but during my sentence, I was there when he alerted base security to remove an engineer from the DC because he spoke while repairing a server. Our unit commander was unaware of the "intruder" until security arrived at the DC and that was the last straw. He directed his warrant officer to reclaim the DC manager's keys, at which point the manager started yelling "I know what you're trying to do, you're trying to get rid of me" and that screaming fit sealed his own fate. He was put on administrative leave due to instability and we were all informed to keep an eye out should he somehow make it onto the base. I never saw him again, but loved telling the story of his departure and that karma does exist.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

Re: PC-Board Dust Blankets

Our client support team has often vacuumed out dusty desktops and when powering on the "clean" desktop, the power supply fails, requiring replacement. Turns out the insulating layer of dusty/crud was serving a purpose.

1 in 5 VMware customers plan to jump off its stack next year

Re: A convert

I echo your sentiment and may have to give Hyper-V a chance and since we've already purchased CIS licensing, maybe we just go all-in.

If you can't quickly pivot your on-prem virtual infrastructure off-prem, you're stuck with looking for alternatives. Management has no appetite for open source and I'm loathe to abandon the infrastructure I've acquired. We only have one app that will be containerized with the newest version, but we're pretty entrenched with VMware.

Everyone's doing it: PayPal sends 2,000 workers packing

Re: I'm not sure

My wife warned me when I entered private sector and worked in a public company that my ONLY job (regardless of my actual profession) was to increase shareholder value. I didn't believe it, but have seen too many decisions made to deliver double-digit returns to investors no matter what.

Man wins court case against employer that fired him for not liking boozy, forced 'fun' culture

Re: "Fun & pro, that's our motto!"

I used to joke about who would win in a fight between a Six Sigma black belt and an Institute of Professional Innovators (IPI) certified black belt. This is after working for the federal government and TQM/QAT had been all the rage. If you have to "force" process improvement or innovation, it doesn't work well at work.

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Only as good as the AI?

Am I the only one who caught "...instructing the model on what it to do" in paragraph 3? I'm not Oxford trained and I'm a colonist from across the pond, but that doesn't sound right.

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Re: PC

Before the vaunted Unisys BTOS/CTOS B28, B39 and B39, I started my IT career supporting the Coast Guard Standard Workstation (CGSW), their client-server computing platform based off the Convergent Technologies AWS & IWS/MWS workstations.

The typical CGSW had a 16-bit/8MHz 8086 CPU, 512KB RAM, 5.25" Floppy (630KB) and could have a Winchester drive with a whopping 5, 8.6 or 12.6MB capacity.

Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!

Oracle Printing Issue

Just had this issue last week; customers couldn't print from Oracle and printer looked fine, LPD service on print server was running (gets knocked offline by some jobs). Accessed the printer via web UI and will you look at that...no paper in the letter tray. Gave the help desk manager who called me about this only a little grief as he's the one who called me and was still on the phone when I "fixed" the issue.

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Teaching Moment

I was teaching a System Administrator class for the U.S. Coast Guard in the early '90s and while covering the use of the 5 1/4" floppy drive, a student called me over as the drive wasn't reading the disk. I thought I saw the problem right away, not seeing anything in the drive and told him he needed to insert the disk, then turn the lever to actuate the drive. He said he did and that's when I noticed the thin, rounded edge of the mylar disk poking out of the drive. I withdrew it and asked how he got that out of the case; he proudly admitted that while it was difficult to peel back the edge of the "sleeve" when I requested they remove the disk from the sleeve before inserting the disk, he was successful. I had no words of praise for him and just walked away.

A real head-scratcher: Tech support called in because emails 'aren't showing timestamps'

Re: Routing Slips

Workflow is one thing, but most people were actually "distributing" messages via e-mail (arguably its whole purpose) in the 90s, not printing the message, attaching a routing slip and walking the message from person to person for their signature acknowledging they'd read the message they'd already received via e-mail.

Huge Attachments

You can actually send 30GB attachments by e-mail, to everyone in the organization and with Single Instance Storage no longer available within Exchange it puts a nice chokehold on your e-mail system. I always expected a DoS attack to come from the outside...

Routing Slips

My wife used to work for a financial firm and her boss preferred e-mails be printed out, so they could attach routing slips and hand deliver the e-mails. The really frightening thing is that this was in the mid 90s.

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

Re: Outlets NOT For Computer Use

Lieutenant commander. Considered mid-rank officer and should know better...

Outlets NOT For Computer Use

Was working for the U.S. Coast Guard as a Sys Admin on a now closed facility near NYC; the building I operated from was a horse stable dating from the 1800s that had been converted to office space. We found out many of the outlets weren't wired correctly when a LCDR would move his office around, unplug his computer and plug it back in sending a power surge up the RS422 "daisy chain" to fry other computers.

We had our electricians label any outlets that had no ground, reverse polarity, etc. as "Not for computer use" since they couldn't easily remedy these in a landmark building. Unfortunately, that didn't stop the LCDR from doing this at least twice more.

DXC Security exec: Yes, I'd have thought we'd spend more on certs and laptop kit for staff, too

Just Another Cog

Before entering the private sector, my wife had repeatedly informed me that even though I worked in IT, my job at a public company was to increase value for the shareholders. I didn't always believe that, I wanted to make a difference, contribute to the success of my company, be valued as member of the team, etc. She was right; at the end of the day, all anyone really cared about was did my efforts increase that shareholder value. It sucked to come to that realization of my "worth" and that I was easily discarded or replaced.

Rookie almost wipes customer's entire inventory – unbeknownst to sysadmin

Re: New contractor

Sounded like an RGE to me; Resume Generating Event. You folks would term that a CVGE, I suppose.