Posts by Turkey_Bender

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

Re: Walking on the live rail

Remember- everyone has a test environment. Some people are lucky enough to have a dedicated production environment too!

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

We had a developer that thought the "ILOVEYOU" virus seemed interesting, and he wanted to examine the code.

Unfortunately, he executed it by mistake.

But because the universe loves to punish us, he also had a drive mapped to a production volume containing thousands of photos. (yeah- things were less strict in those days)

Took us over a week to get all the image files back from tape. (yes- tape. a different time)

The developer was the only person who understood a key product, so he just got a slap on the wrist.

*sigh*

Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully

The old NT Manual Defrag

I seem to recall that at one time, the M$-approved method for defragging Windows NT was "Take a backup, format the disk, then restore the backup"

Ah, the good old days.

We had tech from a small-shop acquisition who was convinced that his department's slow performance was because we needed to defrag the NAS (which was an Appliance, on the Network). He even tried it once (fortunately the software he was using refused to run against network drives).

Turned out that the users located in the Midwestern US were configured to get AD authentication from London. But it took me 4 months to convince him to even look at that.

Don't miss those days.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Typical

I had a HellDesk job where we were required to support laptops provided to Real Estate agents (not our main job- inherited with a misguided acquisition)

Got a call from a guy on behalf of his mom. First thing he tells me: I'm a Computer Scientist, so I know what I'm doing here.

Oh goody.

Next he tells me "she was having issues, so I formatted the hard drive"- he installed Windows, but now none of the devices work.

I spent the next 2 hours walking him through downloading and installing drivers, which he was completely clueless about. No idea what was wrong to start with, but I'm pretty sure we could have fixed it without a rebuild.

AWS scoops Intel silicon and 8TB of storage into new Snowcone edge box

I don't care what CPU it has...as long as it doesn't SnowCrash.

I'll see myself out.