Installing disks is basically LEGO, right? This admin failed LEGO Welcome to another Friday (!) and therefore to another edition of On-Call, The Register's column in which we let readers vent about jobs gone bad. This week, meet “Ian”, who once worked in a data-centre-for-hire, doing all the stuff that tenants needed done. Of course he's had some mirth-making moments along the way. “In my …
Did you mean STFU?
Also, it must have been a pretty crappy server chassis if the idiot was able to fit the drives into the caddies the wrong way around; most caddies have a securing mechanism that locks into the screw holes of the drive (either regular screws or pins from a quick-release mechanism) and the holes in the drive are asymmetrical front-to-back so you can't put the disk in the wrong way around.
Maybe the "server expert" drilled his own holes for his "special" drives?
Ah, Urban Dictionary....
Who could forget the Dirty Sanchez?
Seriously, it's pretty fucking awesome at obscure slang, but, now that the vast majority of terms are in, the point system gaming seems to drive people towards coining terms for ever more inventive and unlikely sex acts. The poor DS is looking almost mainstream nowadays...
Maybe the "server expert" drilled his own holes for his "special" drives?
I've seen enough people try and force things into obviously wrong slots on motherboards and such like, to think that some people are just too stupid/ single minded / determined to think this is tricky what happens if I try it the other way round?
Quite willing to belive someone like that would actually use a hammer to force a companent into a space that is obviously not designed for it.
A guy I know worked as level 2 server support for Dell in the mid-90s. He got a call from a customer with a misbehaving server. Back then, most VGA adapters had a forty-pin feature connector. Customer hooked an IDE hard drive up to the feature connector to "give the graphics card more video memory".
Warranty voided.
A guy I know worked as level 2 server support for Dell in the mid-90s. He got a call from a customer with a misbehaving server. Back then, most VGA adapters had a forty-pin feature connector. Customer hooked an IDE hard drive up to the feature connector to "give the graphics card more video memory"
Hmm, I remember the DB9 Token-Ring plug would, when plugged into the DB9 CGI video card, spectacularly crash the network.
Not a hammer, but will publicly admit* to using a hacksaw an 8-bit ISA card that had part of the board hanging down so it wouldn't fit into the only free 16bit slot in the PC. Much to the amusement of the office.
Should point out that a) had a spare card in case it didn't work and b) after closely examining the PCB and deciding that the area I was cutting into was for an optional parallel port that wasn't installed.
Worked though!
* but still AC
ISA cards were so much less fiddly, though. Much more space to get your tools in there. And when I had to stick 6 HDDs in a unit with only four IDE device capability on the mobo, very useful that was too. Most cards for disk controllers didn't have switchable addresses, and those that did were eye wateringly expensive.
So you take an IDE controller from the old, old, old days when IDE controllers weren't integrated with the mobo. Grind out a gap in two of the address lines, I forget which ones now, then cross wire them. This swaps the address of the card's controller into an unused segment of the memory map. Bit of a tweak in the PCI address settings in Windows 95 which expected things to be in very defined places and Bob's your uncle.
PCI-e comes in a variety of lane lengths, once it's beyond 1x physical the rest of the connections are just data. Server boards tend to have PCI-e slots that are less than 16x physical. It's useful to use graphics cards in server boards sometimes, they're practically all 16x, and 1x graphics cards are ludicrously expensive.
Enter.. the hacksaw. Carefully saw off any part of the connector that's longer than the slot. Alternatively use a scalpal at the end of the PCI-e slot to cut it open. People have done both, and it works.
I looked at the feasibility, likelihood of ruining a board, ran away screaming and bought a slot adapter cable. It does mean the cards sit higher than they should, and that it's more difficult to get them into a case, but at least no hardware is ruined.
I once saw a VGA cable that the user had managed to plug in upside-down. Yes, they even got the set screws to thread and tighten. Needless to say the shell was a big mangled and the pins were all bent. But they got it to mount to the port on the PC, and that's all that counts (until you actually want it to work).
I had a client who built a "high spec" gaming system, in a micro ATX box. finding that the honking great graphics card with its three fans and an aluminium heat sink that Scotty could have used to keep the warp core cool was getting fouled on the cables of the hard drive he resolved to move the hard drive forward in the case. He achieved this by taking the hard drive out to his shed, sticking it in a vise, and then drilling four carefully measured, and centre -punched holes via his drill press, straight into the disk chamber. He brought it to me when it mysteriously refused to boot.
I work in schools.
Often get called / sent to a struggling school as a favour between my employers and their sister schools.
Went to one tiny independent (i.e. private) school that were having "a lot of IT issues with their contractors", and I was asked to tell them if they were being conned or not.
They had no permanent IT staff, so were paying through the nose for support from a "specialist" firm of contractors for educational IT for absolutely EVERYTHING to do with IT.
In the space of one morning, I found:
- The "wireless network" was one 802.11b WAP sitting out in the open in the IT suite (not even screwed to a wall), which only had WEP on, and was plugged into a network point right next to the computers (no security, no port isolation, no VLAN, get the WEP key and you're online on the school network unhindered - and this was in 2015!)
- The "server" (singular!) was a desktop PC with a RAID card in it, sitting in an office behind someone's desk.
- The "network" was 2 or 3 small unmanaged switches placed in random locations and usually out in the open and not even in a cabinet.
- The "IT Suite" was ten Dells stuck in a room with no settings, security or anything. Just joined to the domain, off you go.
- The "Internet connection" was an old ADSL line that barely kept 1Mbps, but also was swamped with Windows Updates and all kinds of stuff because there was no management of traffic whatsoever.
But the best bit:
The "server" had previously gone offline, because they ran out of space. Obviously, it had held EVERYTHING from finance to pupil work to staff profiles. They paid the consultants for the upgrade. A guy came in. This is how he "upgraded" the storage on that lone server:
- Pull hotswap drive out of RAID5 during the school day, let it degrade.
- Put in larger blank drive.
- Sit and watch it resync for 8 hours.
- Charge a day's labour at extortionate rates.
- Come back next day, do same to next drive.
And then at the end, he would resize the RAID array to fill up the disks and presumably charge to watch that progress bar too.
Except... well, it didn't quite go to plan. Obviously after several days of constant RAID resync, one of the old drives fell over. No hot spare. RAID corrupt. Dead. Gone. And, the guy found out at that point, no backup. Seriously, he hadn't even checked if there was a backup, or made one, before embarking on the RAID upgrade of the ONLY SERVER that held everything. Total data loss.
Cue massive arguments with the school where they:
- Paid for his time.
- Paid for the drives.
- Paid for data recovery on the remaining array drives.
- Accepted blame for "not having a recent backup beforehand" (the school was basically run by two non-IT people, and these contractors were supposed to do EVERYTHING for them, including supply, support and manage backups!).
- Paid for them - by the hour - to restore the only backup they *did* have from a few weeks prior.
I threw a damn fit when I was then brought in to report on the state of their IT, and my report was extremely damning while being nothing more than factually accurate. These guys were screwing over the school royally, overcharging for said privilege and still not accepting liability for any of their screw-ups, or providing anything near an IT service.
I wrote up a report for their bursar, sent it to them, and then they hand-wrung for a few months or so and I basically gave up on them ever doing anything about it. As far as I know, they're still with the same company and people, and paying through the nose for them.
It's a back scratching free-for-all.
Set up an independent school, make yourself governor, employ your friends and family as teachers, and outsource the rest to the ones who look after you the most. Not the school, you, personally.
That caper can run and run. You just have to make sure you don't employ anyone with a soul, who might consider the money being sidetracked to elevate the lives of the greedy, should actually be squandered on educating the little cherubs.
many businesses simply have no clue how to maintain office computers. I had a lady through a friend call me because they know I do software development pleading with me they lost their entire MS office contact base and records on their windows 7 machine died .
I told her I couldn't do anything .. I didn't want to get involved.
was called to fix a PDP11 that was totally dead. Well, power on, fans running and a few lights here and there, but none of the blinking that indicated a happily running CPU. Now PDPs were the PCs of their time, with a lot of installations getting interfaces added or removed as needed, by third parties or the customer themselves, with even homebuilt, wirewrapped prototype cards being used. Because of this one of the first questions when troubleshooting invariably was "Did you reconfigure anything recently?".
In this case, the answer was a resounding "No", so said colleague opened up the machine and started testing. After a short while he turned to the customer, asking innocently "Did you hear a loud bang or clunk when you switched the system on?" "Uh, no." "Well, there must have been. All the bus continuity cards have popped out of their slots, bounced against the card cage lid, and gotten jammed back in turned around 180 degrees".
A PDP11 with the old Q Bus? We had those. One time we bought some hardware for one of them, and the vendor had their people install it. Those idiots didn't understand the idea that you cannot leave any gaps in the Q Bus slots (all slots from the first to last device had to be filled), so they couldn't get it to work. Even with me explaining it repeatedly.
Unibus, where you need to fit bus grant cards in all empty slots, with the cards often being flip chips, roughly half a linguine square, instead of full-size two-row cards. Because those didn't have any guiding markings or cutouts and only went into a single row you could put them in the wrong way just like that. For Q-bus you only needed grant cards in any unused slot between the processor and the last card on the bus. Those cards occupied both rows, with a ridge between the rows making it impossible to put them in wrong.
#include <cobwebs.ico>
I used to service robotic tape libraries and frequently got called out when the customer would put the tapes into the library upside down.... In the early 2000's that was ok because you'd get a good call out rates after hours.
Eventually you'd feel soory for the idiots, so I printed a photo and attached it to the library door. That went ok for a while - but because nobody wants to do the tape juggling - the staff soon left to take on more responsibilty (usually that meant backup admin - i.e. Moving from mopping the floor to the fries)
So the new tape juggler arrived in the job - and soon the call outs started again. Turns out that the new guy put on the barcodes upside down - and the other new guy therefore put the tapes upside down in the robot.
I could've started billing these idiots, but they had a nice cafeteria and subsidised lunch....
I know several people who could probably fail at putting 2 bricks of lego together. These are the sort of people who should never be in a function where they are of any consequence but unfortunately always end up being "Manager of" X where they will do most damage to productivity due to their particular brand of incompetency.
Worse yet are power users, that is to say people with a little bit of knowledge but not nearly enough wit to realise how little they know.
Many years ago I took a support call whilst working for a particular dodgy ISP. Their main site name was $FOO, but their infrastructure was still named $BAR because nobody could be bothered to change the domain names.
So, when this power luser sees his machine connected to $FOO internet regularly making connections on port 53 to machines in the $BAR domain on his newly-installed firewall, he panics and uses this firewall to block these connections, thinking it to be a hack. Then, as he put it, this terrible hacker must have done something truly appalling to his machine since the Internet went ever so slow.
As slow, in fact, as a machine trying to connect each time to its primary DNS, getting blocked and timing out to hit the secondary DNS server...
These are the sort of people who should never be in a function where they are of any consequence but unfortunately always end up being "Manager of" X where they will do most damage to productivity due to their particular brand of incompetency.
Reminds me of a passage from The Silver Chair by CS Lewis :
When the police arrived and found no lion, no broken wall, and no convicts, and the Head behaving like a lunatic, there was an inquiry into the whole thing. And in the inquiry all sorts of things about Experiment House came out, and about ten people got expelled. After that, the Head's friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.
If you're out in the sticks and need to get a PC fixed, you can usually find some half-baked "expert" preying on the locals, and charging them over-the-odds for shoddy repairs.
"Cowboy Keith" was something special though. I could have made a career out of cleaning up the mayhem he left in his wake, but then I would have had to charge danger money to make some of his "repairs" safe...
One machine had a RAM upgrade, with four completely different sticks of RAM - FPM, SDRAM, EDO and who knows what the hell the fourth stick was, but "compatible" it certainly wasn't. He also claimed to have fitted a "brand new" CD drive in the machine, but I found it was caked with dust.
Another machine got a new no-name PSU which promptly set fire to its own cables (I've never seen PSU cables that thin before or since) and he'd used super glue on a CPU heatsink, to hide the fact that he'd overclocked a slower processor and charged the customer for something faster.
There were several other "experts" I encountered in that job, including the local "computer shop" that complained that I wouldn't send business their way. Maybe if they hadn't stiffed me on a personal order and caused me so much data recovery work with their "generic" (spelled C-R-A-P-P-Y) floppies, I might have been a little more charitable.
Then again, wailing that I was threatening their business and demanding my dismissal hardened my stance somewhat.
Years ago, I was trying to reflash the BIOS on my home PC - IIRC, to enable it to handle disks bigger than 1GB - and the process failed halfway through, leaving me with a large brick.
I knew what type of chip it was, and the code was on the motherboard manufacturer's website. Went to my local Cowboy Keith shop, and asked if they could run me up a new BIOS chip.
They looked at me as though I had two heads and was speaking Martian. Had no idea what BIOS was.
In the end, a new motherboard was little more expensive than a new BIOS chip. And Cowboy Keith is still in business.
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