Posts by Petergwilson

Holy smokes! Ex-IT admin gets two years prison for trashing Army chaplains' servers

So they don't really practice what they preach. I thought they were supposed to 'turn the other cheek'.

Behold the perils of trying to turn the family and friends support line into a sideline

Re: Obligatory XKCD

Yep, passed my test and bought a brand new CBR600 in Anthracite and Copper (Black and orange to normal people). Loved that bike.

Once, whilst working for a three letter german car manufacturer I was flown from Heathrow to Belfast. Collected in a 7-series, driven to dealership, plugged in printer cable, tested printing was now working, driven back to airport and flown back to London on the same plane with the same crew. At least I got a free lunch and some air miles.

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

Re: Not poetic enough

Yep all of that but get the money first. It would make a nice deterrant. ;-)

BOFH: What's the Gnasher? Why, it's our heavy-duty macerator sewage pump

Re: ST225

Yep, defo MFM. I saw many many of these. Everyone used them. Seagate must have made a fortune.

When they 'failed' I used to whack them with a big screwdriver handle and listen to them spin up again. The look on the customers face was priceless.

World's oldest human was a 122-year-old French smoker after all

She famously said "I have only one wrinke and I'm sitting on it".

MAMR Mia! Western Digital's 18TB and 20TB microwave-energy hard drives out soon

Re: Feeling Old...

I've got one of those.

Japan on track to start testing Alfa-X, fastest train in the world with top speed of 400kph

Travelled on several different lines in Japan and all were great (even the double decker one). Clean, plenty of leg room and reserved seats only. The only strange part was when one was shown on the departures board as being delayed. Everyone was taking photos as this was such a rare occurrence. It was two minutes late arriving for us to get on but arrived at our destination exactly on time.

It's springtime for Springtown as Seagate rains nearly £50m on Northern Ireland plant

Totally unlikely if you had any idea what you were talking about. Or maybe you didn't realise what 30 years of troubles were about.

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

I once got to interview a candidate for a technical role where he had stated on his CV that he had been solely responsible for a major e-mail migration project for a certain client. We went all the way through the interview and than I started to ask him about the project. I knew he wouldn't know about it as I had been the person solely responsible for that project and I had never met him before. That piece of CV embellishment really backfired and he didn't get the job.

BOFH: It's not just an awesome app, it'll look great on my Insta. . a. a. AAAARRRRRGGH

Sounds depressingly like here. New intranet website built by one of our subsidiaries. We asked for SAML2 and got OIDC. We asked for https and got http. None of it works. Now they want extra cash to make the changes.

You don't need a PhD to phish a Brit university: Nonprofit claims 100% hit rate is easy peasy

I used to work as a senior systems engineer at one of the UK Universities. Yep, the IT is poor. Ours was bad because of really bad management, project managers who could barely walk and talk at the same time and senior staff being academics instead of people who could do the job. I once has the Deputy Director of IT order me to give Domain Admin Access rights to a third party company who didn't have a contract with us. Naturally I refused and it all kicked off. We also had the dreaded "I've bought this software now make it do the following and I won't take - it can't do that - for an answer". Place was a joke. Unsurprisingly all the decent staff have left.

All good, leave it with you...? Chap is roped into tech support role for clueless customer

Re: Mum Support

Yep, that sounds familiar. All my friends ignore the fact that I work in IT. They buy loads of rubbish that just won't work together then turn to me to fix it. If only they had come to me before purchase I could have saved them lots of cash AND got something that would actually do what they wanted.

What a meth: Woman held for 3 months after cops mistake candy floss for hard drugs

Re: Border wall

The Canadian wall would only have to be a couple of feet high. Most Americans wouldn't be able to climb over that.

Pasta-covered cat leads to kid night operator taking apart the mainframe

Re: Burroughs/Unisys...

I remember those. It was made by Convergent Technologies.

I worked for Unisys in Birmingham in 87/88 and had a few visits to the Milton Keynes training centre. I did work on these.

After that I worked for Bull Information Systems in London and discovered to my horror they rebadged it as well, called it a B20 I think and renamed the operating system to Starsys.

The one I had on my desk had just about every available module and was about three foot long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operating_System

It was actually quite a clever design. Pity my manuals had been translated from American English to French and then to proper(ish) English. Made for some interesting reading.