Posts by Flightmode

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: Sop?

Ah, the classic "According to the firewall log, the last config change was made by you three weeks ago..."

Recline of the machines: Terminator felled by dodgy battery

Re: I used to like

I seem to recall it even saying "Keyboard missing - press F1 to continue"? Maybe that's a false memory, though. (Though as I recall, memory errors were just loud beeps in certain sequences?)

Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

In places like airports, train stations and food courts, I wonder if there’s any central override control of these screens? Like, if the need would arise, someone could flip all the signs to say ”EMERGENCY - please make your way to the nearest exit!” or something similar? That way, I could really see the benefit of deploying such signs.

But for the love of God, make them less twitchy.

User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Re: Blame the computer

This was in the early nineties, so it’s not too long after the era you’re describing (wait, that can’t be right… right?). We were in an adjacent area of business (several of our customers were print shops); so it’s possible someone else had explained this to her, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have had the experience herself. We were in logistics and inventory planning and she was too young to have had another career before that job.

Interesting history lesson, though; thanks!

Re: Blame the computer

I had a colleague once that was adamant that "PC Load Letter" meant that the printer didn't support the font she'd used (because fonts are letters) and that you'd have to install (load) it into the printer somehow. She couldn't understand why IT would install fonts on your PCs that you couldn't print. Most printers allow you to bypass the Letter paper prompt and print on the standard A4 if you just pressed the big green button. Which she did every time. And then said "Huh, this actually looks pretty close to the font I used anyway."

When a previous employer was subjected to what can only be referred to as a hostile takeover (at least from a staff perspective), there was a whole new management team installed. About a week later I was on helldesk duty when I got a call from our new CEO. ...'s husband. Who was clearly at home, on their personal computer, having problems with something he was trying to do, even though he SAID he was calling on behalf of his wife, who as he put it, was my new boss. I managed to sort him out after some back and forth; most of the issue stemmed from the fact that he thought the word "CANCEL" meant "CONCEAL", at least that's how he pronounced it - this was in a country where English was (at best) a second language.

After I recanted the story in our next team meeting, my boss could sense where things were going, so he decided that from that day on, we were to ask all helldesk callers for their asset tag (which was on a big blue sticker on every PC, clearly visible) before we could open a support ticket to work on, and that there was to be no work done whatsoever (not even a password reset) without a ticket. And yeah, sure enough, not six months later we were all outsourced.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Re: When they (think they) know enough to be helpful

>Back in the days of CRT monitors, persistent (actually) blank screens often turned out to be our users having moved something about on the desk and somehow managing to turn the brightness down. Or the so amusing colleagues who waited for someone to leave their desk and turn their monitor down.

In open plan offices, there was the ol' leaning-over-your-colleague's-monitor-to-have-a-chat-and-surreptitiously-pulling-the-power-cable-when-they-were-looking-the-other-way-move. Or the perhaps more frustrating situation my wife had when she worked for a newspaper and was equipped with a brand spanking new Power Mac G4 Cube. With the power button on the top. With people constantly placing stuff on it - papers, books and even coffee mugs. I think it lasted about a week before she had to move it off her desk.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

I had a colleague like that in a previous job. We had to do a few office moves over the course of a couple of years, and he refused to let movers handle his (apparently extremely fragile and priceless) bog standard Dell office PC between sites, so he always stayed late in the afternoon (dude never showed up before lunch anyway) on the eve of the move and packed up his own PC into his yellow Cinquecento and drove it across town to the new office and connected it up himself. Every time he would get a stern talking to by management saying that by doing it himself, neither him nor his car nor his PC were covered by the company's insurance and that he would have to pay for any damages himself. (He didn't care.)

I'm sure I've told the story here about the aftermath of one of those moves? He'd gotten his stuff wired up and zip tied all neat and pretty on his desk (let's just say that his Cinquecento was another story) and then someone discovered that our new desks were electronically adjustable. He too wanted to see how high his desk could get (he was a big guy), and as he pressed the Up button, all his neatly tied zip tied cables caused his monitor to end up in pieces on the floor. I believe the company replaced that one, though, as it technically happened in the office.

Help desk boss fell for ‘Internet Cleaning Day’ prank - then swore he got the joke

Re: What's work if it's not fun.

Back when I was young and (more) foolish, I went to the Windows 95 MCP course. We had one of those guys in the class, let's call him Marcus, who already knew everything and needed to show that off to the rest of us. He finished all the exercises first (easy when you're just copying commands from the book without thinking) and then spent the next 27 minutes goofing off - sending messages to the rest of us across the network, deleting files we'd just created and other such "fun" pranks. The teacher caught on to what he was doing the first afternoon and decided to stop it - he called out to him, "Hey Marcus?", then snapped his fingers and the guy's screen went completely blank. He restored it when the rest of us had finished, then immediately re-broke it again when he saw that Marcus had finished the next batch. He eventually promised to show Marcus how he did it - AFTER the last day of the course.

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

A friend told me many years ago about when he was printing out a report to turn in at university. He got that undefinable feeling when printing that something went wrong with the printout - somehow his spidey sense told him that it'd printed seven pages instead of the six he expected... He checked the printout and sure enough, five words from page four had been omitted and left a gap in the text. The same five words were printed on an otherwise blank page five, in the right position and all. The five words? "The ghost in the machine".

AI browsers face a security flaw as inevitable as death and taxes

Oh - perhaps that what's causing my issues when playing Worldle (which is essentially a Google Street View interface)? I often find that when clicking to pan around, the "panning mode" sticks, and I have to click again to disengage it. That's pretty much the only thing I'm doing on my Ubuntu VM at the moment, and I'm using Vivaldi for it.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: "enhance security and user experience of Windows 11."

Signing up for that would come back to bite you in the ass for sure.

Microsoft confirms it found a way to make Crocs even uglier – with Windows XP and Clippy

Ancestry

>…the Office Assistant, aka “Clippy”, that was an early precursor to Copilot

Only in the same way that Mozart was an early precursor to Del Tha Funky Homosapien.

Don’t go blaming Clippy for Copilot.

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

Re: Never delete the old web site, only rename it

I seriously have files named "...even-olderest-but-not-quite..." in some folders somewhere.

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Re: Thus it is

My experience from 30-odd years in the networking field is that the best managers know just about enough about the tech side to know when someone is trying to bullsh*t them but also don't have the desire to dig into the details of every situation and instead leave that to their specialists. And conversely, to shield said specialists from bullsh*t coming from other directions. I am fortunate enough to have such a manager now.

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

In the early 2000s. a colleague-friend of mine went to the USA to visit his then-girlfriend-now-wife and for a laugh he bought us a pair of Nerf guns on the way back. Or colleagues quickly learned to recognize the squeaky-clunk snap of cocking the springs so the novelty wore off pretty quickly (though I still have mine in a box somewhere).

My favourite was always the suction cup darts rather than the velcro tipped ones. Once I managed to hit my colleague clear across the room (at least 10 meters) in a parabola over six other colleagues and their bulky monitors, hitting him square in the ID-badge hanging around his neck so that the dart stuck. While he was presenting something to a guy from a different department who was leaning over his desk, which I obviously didn't know as I fired. I was told he didn't blink or miss a beat in his presentation.

> They were good enough to hit a sprinkler head early in the game, which of course did what it's supposed to do and started sprinkling. Splinkering ? Springling ?

Thanks for letting me start the week off with a laugh. Have one of these!

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

Re: Who to blame?

Me: We have conclusively proven that there is packet loss introduced between router F and router G, both manufactured by you and directly connected with a DAC copper cable delivered by you. Can you help us troubleshoot this issue?

Vendor: It seems that the server hooked up to router A in your data center is connected with a third party SFP. Before we can troubleshoot this issue further, we're going to need you to replace that SFP with a Genuine Vendor Ultra Plus brand to ensure that the signal quality is good enough for the path.

Me: ...that's not how any of this works?

Vendor: Case is now Cust-Pending.

Microsoft crams Copilot AI directly into Excel cells

Re: Is nothing sacred?

...which is exactly what they're doing in this video.

WHY would you collect "coffee machine user feedback" in Excel in the first place?

Meta used Flo menstruation app data to sell ads, jury finds

Re: Heresy

Your comment reminded me of a short clip from Tornado, a sketch-based Swedish comedy show from the 1990s. The link between each sketch was an Olympic torch bearer running from place to place, passing by random situations on his run. The camera kept panning with the runner and it'd simply come to a halt when he ran past the next skit. One of the tableaus he ran past was a political demonstration held by people in full business attire. One of the placards they had proudly stated "WE ECONOMISTS DEMAND THAT WE ECONOMISTS ARE NECESSARY" (sic! - it's a clunky sentence in Swedish too - "VI EKONOMER KRÄVER ATT VI EKONOMER BEHÖVS"). Not-so-subtle satire, I'm sure; as this was in the wake of one of the larger privatization rushes in Sweden.

(Icon for protests, generally.)

Cisco donates Agntcy project to Linux Foundation in the hope it gets AI agents interacting elegantly

It feels to me like both Google, IBM, Anthropic and Cisco (and all the others) have realized that in spite of the effort and resources they've spent, they've gotten nowhere because it was much more complex they initially thought and that this is a way of disposing of the projects while still looking charitable. "Let someone else figure it out."

What can, indeed, go wrong?

Microsoft bolts Copilot Mode onto Edge to chase AI-browser crowd

When the public’s response to every new feature they present is ”How do I disable it?”, you’d think they’d start getting the hint that perhaps they should consider revisiting their overall path?

This does not only apply to Microsoft, but boy are they trendsetters in the area.

German team warns ChatGPT is changing how you talk

Re: Plan

The Germans would know, right?

Die Mensch-Maschine

Halb Wesen und halb Überding[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnVofSKsWh8 just in case you don't get the reference.

Techie went home rather than fix mistake that caused a massive meltdown

I'm a ISP network engineer, and across all teams working on the same platform we have agreed on Read-Only Friday.

Techies thought outside the box. Then the boss decided to take the box away

I know it's an old joke but on the topic of office signs...

...I still occasionally chuckle to myself when I think about the sign saying "STATIONARY CUPBOARD" with the hand-scribbled addendum "Yep, it hasn't moved in at least a week.".

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

Re: The Dragon Book

Oh Jacques - poppez le tag, s'il-vouz-plait!

(I assume a PE router would be a 'routeur EP' in French?)

Re: Bin there and suffered

I was at a networking conference in Amsterdam many years ago, I think the topic was IPv6? In any case, since this was an international crowd, most of us pronounced the word "routing" as the Americans do - /ˈraʊ.t̬ɪŋ/. After about half an hour of initial discussions, a gentleman (there's no other word better suited to describe him) spoke up to respond to some question or other, and started his reply by saying "First of all, can I just clarify that it's pronounced '/ˈruːt.ɪŋ/'. Trust me, we've been using the language a LOT longer than they have. Anyway, to answer your question..."

(I still pronounce it the American way.)

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Re: I Really hate printers

> I've got a printer next to me that requires a connection to halfway around the world which means it regularly fails to print..

Tangentially related: In the late nineties I was doing helpdesk duty, and was called upon to check a networked HP LaserJet printer that had been slow and unreliable for months. Since our cabled network was a bit iffy at times (my team didn't own or touch the wiring), I decided to start by moving it to another patch point to see if that made any difference. This was was in our customer service area, which was on a section of raised flooring in an old automobile manufacturing hall (long and narrow). The printer was next to one of the small stairs that led up to the raised floor, and as I started pulling the cable, I realized that it went up the post next to it, then across the stairs (tautly stretched between the poles), down the post on the other side and continued off along the floor (neatly tucked in between the wall partitions and the desks, all the way to the end of the hall and back - SIX TIMES, then patched into an outlet on the post it had just gone down. Having rolled it all up, I found myself holding a mass of partially frayed Cat 5 cable that I couldn't even estimate the length of in meters - it was at least FOUR WEEKS long! I replaced it by a 2 meter drop patch to the outlet right next to it (on the same pole the old cable had gone UP), and after that it worked perfectly again; snappy as anything and completely reliable once more.

When I asked the nearby staff if they knew who'd installed it they said that it'd originally been installed on the other side of the stairs (where it was plugged in), but they'd wanted to move it for some reason and then the cable hadn't been long enough... so they'd found a longer one next to the trash compactor and used that one instead.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Re: Ah, production databases

As some wise person (I think on here) put it - "Everyone has a test environment. Some are fortunate enough to have a separate production environment."

Re: "WHERE ID=xxx"

I run a small fan-created website for a band in my spare time. We had a contest a couple of years back where we asked our readers to send an email with their quiz answers to a particular mailbox. Some genius posted a comment to the contest post with his list of answers (because I'd not coded a "disable comments for this post" function yet). I posted a very courteous post explaining that you shouldn't post answers in the comments, then started up the mysql-client to replace his comment with a "This comment was deleted by the administrator." message. Only, OF COURSE I forgot the WHERE clause and deleted eight years worth of comments. After that I coded the "disable comments" feature AND the web GUI for managing comments.

But that sort of pales next to the people who have made PROPER mistakes as described here. Icon for my brothers.

Re: XMLT

Juniper Network's Junos OS allows you to extend CLI functionality by writing your own op (operational) or event (triggered on system events) scripts. These days, I hear you can do Python, but initially they only supported XSLT and the abomination known as SLAX. The version of SLAX that was supported when I was into scripting directly on the routers only supported "immutable variables"; that is variables that you can assign a value to, but you can't change them once they're set. You know, what us normal people refer to as "constants".

After some struggling (and a couple of choice words I would normally reserve for Python) I finally had a script that would tell me, in just five seconds or so, what routing-instance, layer-2 circuit or bridge-domain an interface belonged to. That's two days of my life I'm not getting back, especially since a colleague managed to achieve the same result with a "show conf | disp set | match ..." command that comes back with the same information instantly. THEN, to add insult to injury, he mapped that string to a keyboard shortcut in SCRT.

Need a Linux admin? Ask a hair stylist to introduce you to a worried mother

Re: If you screw up, say so and say how

We're interviewing people for a vacant position in my team of network engineers, and I've been helping out as a technical resource. My favourite question to ask candidates is "What's the biggest mistake you've done on a network? At least, that you haven't gotten away with...". That tells you both how honest they can be with their mistakes (because, as Pascal says, they will happen), and also what skill level they're at. "I shut down the wrong interface once" is not quite the same magnitude as "I once tried a regular expression with thirty wildcards on a Cisco 7505 and in doing so brought down all our US peering capacity".

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

Re: once upon a time at the pub

GNU Sir Terry

Speech now streaming from brains in real-time

Re: that's really cool and

Yeah, this is nothing short of amazing for a first implementation.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Re: I definitely need new glasses

A place I worked for in the late 90's had a CRM application we regularly had to install on agents' PCs. The installation progress bar didn't have a number on it, but it continued a couple of notches past the end of its predrawn box, so when someone had problems we always used to ask if they'd remembered to install the full 107% of the application.

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

Re: I could only wish my work lasted that long

Every time there's a Voyager thread I feel the need to recommend the 2022 documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" about the scientists and engineers that run the Voyager project. It's well worth a watch.

As Amazon takes over the Bond franchise, we submit our scripts for the next flick

Whatever the plot…

I fully expect Bond telling Miss Moneypenny how he’s supplemented his income between cases by working at the Amazon warehouse, and how flexible and convenient it is for him who moves around a lot and that he can more or less control his own hours.

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

Baah, humbug.

This open text-to-speech model needs just seconds of audio to clone your voice

Re: My bank...

The basic authentication rule is very simple: Something you have and something you know. If they want to use voice recognition as the "have" then fair enough. But it shouldn't ever be the only test made.

My suggestion is to agree with everyone you speak to regularly - at least parents, children, your spouse and close friends - on a "vocal handshake" you can perform so that you can always verify that the person asking you for money for a new phone / ticket home / medical bills / whatever is the person they say they are. It is absolutely vital that the information used to complete the handshake is not available anywhere online and can't easily be inferred from your profile. Either make it something you had together Before The Internet that you've never discussed in emails or on social media, or agree on a nonsense question with a deliberately wrong or fake answer - "Q: What's the capital of Bulgaria? A: Mike Dinosaur Junior" - or a favourite movie quote that needs to be responded to with an unrelated line from a song from a band you don't normally listen to. Make it a habit to always ask this question when being asked for money or whatever it is and NEVER volunteer the answer before being asked the question - "Can you please help me transfer 1000 moneys to this offshore account? Oh, and before you ask, the capital of Bulgaria is Mike Dinosaur Junior."

We all love to think that we'd never fall for a scam, but I'm not so sure. Especially not with voice replication technology at this level. Better to have one more safeguard.

Re: In Italy such technologies were used to impersonate the Minister of Defence...

After seeing the founder's TED Talk, I registered as a "voice donor" with a company, VocalID, that had as its mission to provide voices for people who have lost theirs, as I thought it sounded as a wonderful idea. At the time I was going through some family issues and a move, so I didn't get the time to sit down to bank my voice with them for over a year after registering. It wasn't that you needed to record everything in one go, but it relied on you being able to record audio in a controlled, quiet setting; and that wasn't my everyday life at the time. When things eventually calmed down, I thought I'd give it another shot and went to their site only to find a message that they'd pivoted from their initial plan of helping people to "research into commercial applications of speech synthesis and artificial intelligence" or something similarly vague. I'm guessing they're into this kind of applications now, so I'm pretty grateful that I never got around to it. (I tried going to their site now, but our office proxies even block access to the site as "suspicious", so that's pretty telling.)

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

Re: Check yourself before you wreck yourself

My dad was cat-sitting for his neighbors for a few weeks a couple of years ago when they were back home in Germany. He went to their house a couple of times per day and usually stayed about half an hour after feeding to give the cat a bit of company should she want it (she rarely did).

I went with him a couple of times when I visited, and on one occasion we sat talking in the living room when I for some reason came to think about this very strip and told him about it (only I misremembered and said 200 rolls of toilet paper).

…only to have a crisp female voice respond from a remote corner of the room ”I’m sorry, but there seems to be something wrong with my Internet connection so I can’t process your order”. Luckily they’d powered off their router before hearing out. (The fact that she said it on German somehow made it worse…)

Sonos CEO steps down after smart speaker app upgrade hit bum note

Re: CEOs rewarded for failure, peasants told to collect their P45s on their way out

"We'll make sure you'll never work in this business again" is supposed to be a threat, not a promise...

Devs sent into security panic by 'feature that was helpful … until it wasn't'

Suspicious translations

An ex-colleague told me that him and a friend at a previous job always ran their more personal emails through Google Translate to Mandarin before sending them to each other, as they had circumstantial evidence that their manager was snooping on internal staff emails. Once, my ex-colleague wanted to convey that he couldn't come along for a pint tonight as he just wanted to stay in and have dinner - or, as he put it in Mancunian, "I like to have my tea.". When translated back and forth to Mandarin, his friend was somehow presented with the statement that "I enjoy the fact that my brown is eaten.".

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

Re: Opportunities for error

Ah, the Cisco wildcard mask.

I once had to write a classic IOS extended access list which allowed certain traffic from every fourth /28 network out of a /22 - meaning for example 10.10.0.48/28, 10.10.0.112/28, 10.10.0.176/28, 10.10.0.240/28. 10.10.1.48/28 all the way up to 10.10.3.240/28. Rather than one line for each subnet, totalling 16 lines per TCP/UDP port, I experimentally discovered that a single line per destination port with the source range 10.10.0.0 0.0.3.207 worked just fine. I'm still proud of that one, even though more than a decade has passed.

Astroscale orbital janitor gets within 15 meters of space junk

Re: If you can see it from the ground it's avoidable.

Could it be that we've all had the wrong idea about Asteroids all these years? Perhaps it's NOT a game, but a training exercise in making space junk smaller and smaller until it's negligible?

Bitfinex heist gets the Netflix treatment after 'cringey couple' sentenced

This was actually covered in the documentary (which is worth a casual watch, but nothing amazing).

Bitfinex has apparently given their affected customers one "token" for each dollar-equivalent that their customers had in their account at the time of the heist, with the promise that they would "redeem that token into actual dollars as soon as they can". Their head of communications and marketing, who was interviewed in the documentary was very proud of the fact that they had "fulfilled all their obligations to their customers" through this. It is envisioned that the seized Bitcoin will (eventually) be sent back to Bitfinex, meaning that Bitfinex will end up with the net gain between the customer compensation tokens and today's BTC value. Since the hack itself apparently didn't kill Bitfinex as an exchange/wallet company, that comment from their representative in the documentary surely will... (Lawsuits are in progress by former customers.)

Also, there's still about USD 1bn worth of BTC still not accounted for.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

hash bang slash bin slash bash does have a nice rhythmic feel to it.

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

always do "copy run start" then "reload in" [or its platform equivalent] before starting your work

"Copy run start" - what kind of new-fangled talk is that? It's "wr mem", everyone knows that! :-)

But I'll attest to being saved by Juniper's "commit confirmed 5" command ("If I don't type commit[0] again within 5 minutes, roll back my last config changes, please") many times. No reboot required.

[0] If you don't want to add another commit state to your history (only the last 50 commits are stored on-box for easy comparison and rollback! ;-)) a "commit check" will do nicely.

Re: Context matters

I fully agree, and the "current" Cisco OS, IOS-XR, does in fact do this:

RP/0/RP0/CPU0:router(config-if)#sh

% Ambiguous command: "sh"

RP/0/RP0/CPU0:router(config-if)#sh?

show shutdown

RP/0/RP0/CPU0:router(config-if)#

(And also, IOS-XR doesn't execute commands immediately, you need to explicitly run the "commit" command to activate your pending changes.)

And anyone who's been in the business long enough will have internalized using "sho" when you mean to type "show". For the reason that Sherlock encountered. :-)

Context matters

”sh<tab>” will resolve to ”show” everywhere where there isn’t a better match, such as in interface configuration mode, where ”shutdown” is available. So in this case, Sherlock would have simply run the ”shutdown” command on a remote interface, And since in classic IOS commands were executed instantly - branch, meet saw.

One should note here that the command to do something on a Cisco is never ”sh”, there’s always a full, expanded command (”show”, ”shutdown”, or even ”shim” in some places) being executed (even if you don’t see it at the prompt). It’s the console cowboy’s responsibility to know what he’s typing. And believe me, I’ve mistyped a lot of IOS/XE/XR commands over years.

Juniper’s JunOS CLI, on the other hand, auto-expands the commands as you type so you’ll know what the router thinks you meant to do before you hit enter. (You still need to know what you’re doing, though!)