back to article Tired sysadmin plugged cable into wrong port, unleashed a 'virus'

Welcome once more to “Who, me?”, in which Reg readers ‘fess up to messes they made in the pursuit of IT excellence. This week meet “Iqbal” who told us about a Week from Hell he experienced in the year 2010, when working for a law firm. First came “a virus outbreak that infected Windows desktops” that required him to travel …

  1. John Crisp

    Common trick

    That's a normal one by little shits in schools according to my bro who was an IT manager at one until recently.

    I ought to get him to list some of their other interesting experiments in 'how to screw a network in 30 seconds'. Some pearlers that make me howl :-)

    1. herman

      Re: Common trick

      Actually, it takes about 10 minutes for a broadcast storm to bring a network down due to a looped cable - just enough time to make your escape.

      1. Justin S.

        10 minutes is 9 min 58 sec too long

        Once upon a time, I crashed a Cisco 6509 core switch by connecting a new, yet-to-be-configured Netscreen firewall into it-- trust and untrust ports both. I hadn't realized that model firewall shipped in "transparent" mode, so it formed a loop on the switch.

        I plugged the second interface in and, maybe two seconds later, every port indicator on the 6509 went dark and I heard some relays tick-over. Portfast was enabled on the switch ports.

        After disconnecting the untrust port and configuring the firewall for NAT/routed mode, I was able to reconnect the untrust port without the switch falling over, so it wasn't electrical.

        It probably didn't crash from the storm, either, but from a bug in the firmware-- I can't imagine a multi-gigabit, enterprise switch crashing from a measly 100 Mbps loop, but that's what happened.

        1. Phil W

          Re: 10 minutes is 9 min 58 sec too long

          BPDU Guard is your friend.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Common trick

        It depends on the amount of broadcast traffic. On a busy network it'll go down in seconds.

      3. steviebuk Silver badge

        Re: Common trick

        I'm not 100% on routers but I thought Cisco's protected from this?

        1. Martin an gof Silver badge

          Re: Common trick

          Our 2950 / 2960 switches are very old, so they only do "old fashioned" Spanning Tree - the protocol which protects against loopback. Old fashioned STP takes about 30 seconds in "learning" (blocking) mode before it transitions to "passing". We have had occasional problems with this, particularly kit which wants a network as soon as it's booting. To this end it is possible to put switch ports into "fast" mode, which allegedly bypasses the learning phase but still allows STP to work. I can see how this might allow a loopback storm to begin... I think.

          M.

    2. wyatt

      Re: Common trick

      Bet the little darlings never own up to it though!

      I had to deal with a 'network' related issue at a police force, they decided to unplug a span cable to a voice recorder so no calls recorded. They never admitted to it, however it worked before a certain key card accessed the room and stopped shortly afterwards..

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Common trick

        "they decided to unplug a span cable to a voice recorder so no calls recorded"

        I can think of half a dozen ways of ensuring that pulling that kind of shit would result in a number of instant alarms along with some methods of physically securing the ports (tamper-evident) to ensure casual interference is not an option.

        That said, that some rozzers would try perverting the course of justice doesn't really surprise me, nor does the matter that others would cover for them ("good cops" who cover for "bad cops", aren't)

    3. Sgt_Oddball
      Devil

      Re: Common trick

      We just used to add computers we were using to different rooms thus sending the network admin on wild goose chases trying to figure out who was saturating the internet connection (a whole 10meg back in 2000 when that was enough for a whole college). Happy times...(for us at least)

    4. Horridbloke

      Re: Common trick

      "how to screw a network in 30 seconds".

      A schoolfriend of mine apparently took out the network (which was only one large classroom / computer lab due to it being the eighties) by buying a 3.5mm-jack-to-BNC adaptor from Tandy and plugging his Sony Walkman into the network.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. onefang

          Re: Common trick

          Computer Games by Mi-Sex?

          1. Youngone Silver badge

            Re: Common trick

            Mi-Sex? Have an upvote sir.

            I might be old.

      2. ArrZarr Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: Common trick

        I almost took some internal tech down last year. My Crime? Opening a page that had recently been released to the live interface that was hidden away in the settings and then going for lunch.

        When I got back, I found out that my PC has been given a hard shut down as the devs had figured out I was the only person who had access to the page and could have it open.

        It was sending so many requests to the DB that everything else had come to a halt.

    5. Nick Kew
      WTF?

      Re: Common trick

      I find it mildly disturbing how many commentards seem to regard this as normal practice.

      Damn, where's the comment icon for "Shocked, I tell you"?

    6. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Common trick

      "That's a normal one by little shits in schools according to my bro who was an IT manager at one until recently."

      loopback-detect enable

      loopback-detect action block

      If you have a network where people pull this kind of shit, then having switches which can cope is not optional. - if not on a per-port level then at least on a per-segment one.

    7. sisk

      Re: Common trick

      This happened to us exactly once. Then our network manager enabled BPDU guard across the whole network. Real quick easy fix.....well, would have been quick and easy if we didn't have a couple hundred switches to change the settings on anyway.

    8. 0laf
      FAIL

      Re: Common trick

      Yep. Except I did it and I was the IT guy. In my defence the points on the wall weren't put in by me and they were unlabelled.

  2. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

    Saw that loopback coming halfway through the story .. /smugmod

  3. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

    I found a home router in our network a couple years ago being used as a hub.

    Still happily offering to hand out IP addresses and collecting followers

    1. tim 13

      We had that too. In a room we didn't know existed. And I'd worked there for at least 10 years at the time.

      1. Korev Silver badge
        Boffin

        We had someone attempt to get their own smartphones on the network by plugging in a D-link SoHo router which also started generously handing out IP addresses. The corporate DNS servers (QIP?) then stopped doling out IP addresses for that subnet meaning a number of the laboratories went down.

        We never found out who did it, but you'd expect scientists to know better -->

        1. jmch Silver badge

          "you'd expect scientists to know better"

          Scientists? I would be surprised if they DID know better. The stereotype of "brilliant in their field but absent-minded and/or clueless about anything else" IS rooted in reality

        2. Alan Brown Silver badge

          "We never found out who did it, but you'd expect scientists to know better"

          Scientists are like anyone else - they're good at what they do, but don't expect them to know anything about other stuff, like electrical thingies(*) or networking, which is why any shit like that gets an instant lockout from our network.

          (*) Yes, we've even caught the occasional one using nails to replace fuses that kept blowing.

    2. Martin an gof Silver badge

      I found a home router in our network a couple years ago being used as a hub.

      Still happily offering to hand out IP addresses and collecting followers

      We have a projector at work which hands out DHCP even though its address is configured manually and the DHCP function shows "off" in all the relevant menus. Panasonic just deny it's possible.

      We also found some "unknown" devices on the network recently. Turns out that the one Mac on the network would happily "share" its network connection with any iDevice nearby. This one was possible to turn off, but unfortunately some users of that machine need Admin (on the machine) rights, so there's nothing to stop them turning it back on again. We suspect it was simply the easiest way to download files from an iPad...

      Our "pool" addresses were always banned from external access, but we've turned them off altogether. If DHCP doesn't have your MAC, you don't get an IP. It's only a minor pain when setting up new kit.

      M.

      1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

        If DHCP doesn't have your MAC, you don't get an IP

        An excellent policy , and so much easier than all that :

        "Make the switch port learn the mac and then lock up when it changes" bullshit.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          "Make the switch port learn the mac and then lock up when it changes"

          Not just that, but "only one mac allowed on the port", which discourages people pulling games like plugging in dumb hubs and "only authorised macs allowed", which stops them plugging any old shit in and "802.1x", which stops them mac spoofing to get around the previous rule.

          Ports stay disabled until unplugged and authorised equipment is plugged back in.

          On the other hand anything acting as a DHCP server gets the port permanently knocked into a "naughty step" vlan until we have a discussion with the user. Users who wander around the building plugging into random ports to get around this policy find themselves unpopular with their peers for some reason.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        We have a projector at work which hands out DHCP even though its address is configured manually and the DHCP function shows "off" in all the relevant menus. Panasonic just deny it's possible.

        Had the same problem with an extra wireless access point at home. DHCP off but still handing out addresses. No, can't happen according to vendor.

    3. DuchessofDukeStreet

      At the call centre offices of a previous employer, there was an area of meeting rooms (for impressing prospective customers) with unsecured public wifi. I suspect there were a lot of things wrong with the setup overall, but it all went very wrong when an unidentified helldesk grunt decided to resolve a complaint of slow performance by plugging a corporate network cable into the router and exposed the entire estate to any passing pedestrian with a wifi enabled device. Given that the corporate philosophy for that particular office was to remove authentication from any system that didn't absolutely need it, that also meant open access to vast swathes of corporate data and systems.

      The immediate fix when I reported it to the InfoSec head (because he'd bailed me out of a hole with a customer recently and we were quite good pals) was to remove the cable. The local head of IT was very disgruntled when I also asked what was being done to stop it happening again. "We've told people not to do it". Every single person, including visitors who might be in one of those rooms? SIlence.....

      1. J. Cook Silver badge
        Devil

        The immediate fix when I reported it to the InfoSec head (because he'd bailed me out of a hole with a customer recently and we were quite good pals) was to remove the cable. The local head of IT was very disgruntled when I also asked what was being done to stop it happening again. "We've told people not to do it". Every single person, including visitors who might be in one of those rooms? SIlence.....

        That's one reason why I have a pair of GreenLee 727 cutters in my network toolbag that's capable of cutting through 6 gauge stranded copper cable (the fat stuff that's used for DC power)- It's big and mean looking, and very dramatic when it's used to neat *snicker-snack* the offending cable in front of the dolt that decided it was a good idea to do that. (along with mentioning that it'll go through fingers just as easily to drive the point home...)

        On a side tangent, we had a vendor decide to plug their crappy D-link whatsit into our corporate network, and wondered why the port got shut down and twenty minutes later one of the network admins came strolling in to collect the patch cable...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A common occurrence

    Many IP phones have a pass-through port to enable a phone/PC combination to connect via a single network point.

    You'd be surprised how many people try plugging both cables into the wall. This is what loopback protection is for...

    1. n0r0imusha

      Re: A common occurrence

      those "pass through" adapters are dumber than a hub.

      i bet they sneak through any loopback protection

    2. bish

      Re: A common occurrence

      Those 'pass through' ports are, in my experience, often 10 Mbit/s. So when you've specifically allowed for two gigabit ports per desk, to ensure the thin clients' remote desktop connections glide along smoothly without being snarled up by the ancient phones, it's rather frustrating when, every couple of weeks, the office staff do a tidy up and some smartarse decides to start daisy chaining devices, and you immediately get support tickets for 'help! URGENT!! computers are slow again'. And no one will admit to even realising the cables were there, much less having dared to touch them.

      I'm so glad I don't work there anymore.

  5. derfer

    Network related

    I used to work in an office that had a huge MS access database shared by lots of people, that would invariable fall over at least once a day resulting in ten minutes of recovery by the IT peeps whilst the rest of us had a break.

    When they took smoke breaks off us (as it wasn't fair to the none smokers) I found a handy correlation between database crashes and the network socket my PC was plugged into. All I had to do was 'accidentally' unplug the network lead whilst a query was running and could then have as many smoke breaks as I wanted!

    1. TonyJ

      Re: Network related

      "...When they took smoke breaks off us (as it wasn't fair to the none smokers) I found a handy correlation between database crashes and the network socket my PC was plugged into. All I had to do was 'accidentally' unplug the network lead whilst a query was running and could then have as many smoke breaks as I wanted!.."

      I've always argued that smokers - as addicts - are selfish.

      Had many an argument with my father-in-law when the law came into force banning smoking in pubs etc. His argument was that "non smokers don't have to go in there" and "it should be optional".

      And yeah - regular smoking breaks outside of normal breaks are hardly fair to non-smokers.

      1. Graham Newton

        Re: Network related

        When I worked in an office with smokers, if the weather was fine, I would join them and have a virtual fag. I would then find out from them what was really going on.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Network related

        "And yeah - regular smoking breaks outside of normal breaks are hardly fair to non-smokers."

        Which is one of the reasons why non smokers became smokers in the military.

        1. el_oscuro

          Re: Network related

          In boot camp in the Army on other side of the pond, the drill sergeants actually recommended us to start smoking if we didn't already for this very reason.

          That same Army banned indoor smoking in all buildings Army-wide about 6 months later.

      3. Simon Barker

        Re: Network related

        I've always argued that smokers - as addicts - are selfish.

        Reminds me of a conversation I once had with the CFO of a small firm, he jokingly lectured me on all the extra work I'd get done by not taking smoking breaks, rather missing two small details:

        I only ever took smoke breaks by subtracting the time from my lunch hour, so the company didn't lose anything.

        Taking those breaks was incredibly helpful for coding, when stuck on a difficult problem being able to clear my head (then fill it with smoke) and re-approach the problem got me through an awful lot of tricky problems.

        I did give it up in the end but always felt my productivity took a hit in the process, can't say I really miss the lectures from people who think they know better especially so while they're getting less work done than you.

  6. chivo243 Silver badge
    Windows

    Mini switches and hubs! Grrr

    I once tracked down a loop in our network when we allowed these devices on the network. I really lucked out, I saw an office was moving desks and printers around. And half an hour later we had a broadcast storm. Talk about serendipity! We could have been searching for sometime...

    Now we have a strict policy about con\prosumer crap being attached to our network.

    1. Nunyabiznes

      Re: Mini switches and hubs! Grrr

      We've got the same policy. Unfortunately our CAO believes IT policies are only there to be roadblocks to innovation and encourages other departments to actively skirt them.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not sure if this is a true story -

    Just because of the line -

    Iqbal’s colleagues recognised that he’d already bled for them in the previous week, so promised to fix it and let him go home.

    Yeah, right!

    1. 's water music

      Re: Not sure if this is a true story -

      Just because of the line -

      >> Iqbal’s colleagues recognised that he’d already bled for them in the previous week, so promised to fix it and let him go home.

      Yeah, right!

      Overtime?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    tech support team woes

    As tech support manager I was immensely worried when our team suddenly started getting performance issues, lost connections etc, after all we were connected via a local switch to the core network in the data center next door, what was happening elsewhere on the network.

    A couple of phone calls to managers in other departments revealed that the end users and the dev teams were not affected, just tech support (including the network team).

    They were scrabbling around like ants when I suggested we treat this like any other LAN performance issue and the sniffer was dragged out. We were getting lots of dropped packets collisions etc and then we performed a TDR tdr (yup it was back in thin coax days) test. the network segment in a 20*40 ft room was over 200 meters long when it only had to connect 13 desks.

    We had just had the room refurbished and the desks had lovely deep cable management channels in them.

    Sure enough on opening the lids it turned out that just about every team member was using a pair of over long cables to connect to the network. every techie had cabled up their own pc between the over use of long fly leads and the real requirement to use them on the network management station, where we had to be able to pull switches easily for testing, they had managed to cripple our network segment. In a couple of cases releasing the lid of the cabling channel had resulted in an explosion of cables as team members had used a pair of 15 metre cables where 2, 3 metre cables would have done. In another couple the ridiculously long cables had been neatly cable tied together in compact bundles breaking all rules about turning radii All in all it was a demonstration of how not to cable up a set of desks, they would never, ever had done this in a customer office.

    A quick phone call to our cable supplier later and we had replaced everything with premium cost 1-3 metre cables and normality was restored. I did have to call in a favour to get the cables at short notice then bury the invoice in another job and the incident was never mentioned outside the room.

    1. Timmy B

      Re: tech support team woes

      Time-domain reflectometer - the most sci-fi sounding bit of IT kit.

      1. DropBear
        Trollface

        Re: tech support team woes

        If you needed any more proof that "spacetime" is a single entity - TDR takes in time and spits out space units...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: tech support team woes

          So a TDR is a bit like Han Solo?

          1. Bluto Nash
            Joke

            Re: tech support team woes

            So a TDR is a bit like Han Solo?

            "You've never heard of my ship The Beryllium Vulture? It's the one that made the cable run in less than 12 meters"

      2. swm

        Re: tech support team woes

        I built a TDR in the ancient 75 ohm 3MBit RG 11 U foam coax ethernet for tracking town problems . It was neat - I could see all of the 50 ohm connectors on the cable and I could locate bad tranceivers easily. Fun times - way before TCP/IP etc.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: tech support team woes

        TDR: Ah, a "cable is buggered apx here" detector.

  9. pmb00cs

    Odd Network issues

    Once worked at a place that had an interesting, and difficult to diagnose, network problem. The network kept going down, and it looked like a routing loop, but would recover on it's own sporadically. Turns out that when you use virtualisation on Windows 10, and team two network interfaces together it helpfully uses spanning tree protocol to prevent routing loops. Unfortunately it uses a very low ID for this, so in this case become to root of the tree, every time the dev plugged his laptop in to the wired network it became the root of the tree, and sent traffic out over the wireless link (that didn't support spanning tree) which was then passed back to the wired network. And when he left his desk for a meeting and unplugged his laptop everything recovered. Took hours of my collegues running around trying to figure out what was going on to get to the bottom of that one (and we all learned the importance of telling your network switches which ports were allowed to use spanning tree protocol, and which switches were authorised to be part of the tree). I dodged a bullet by having that morning off.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Beware Manglement with DHCP laptops

    One place I worked allowed Management to have their laptops configured for DHCP so they could connect to their home networks, sorry *other sites within the company*, easily, and they had local Admin privs because they were far too busy and important to wait until one of us could cross the road from our office to theirs when they worked onsite - literally a 2-minute walk, including the stairs..

    Not a problem with most of them, they knew not to mess around with things that they should not be messing around with, but one particularly enterprising soul discovered he could make it easier for himself by not just having DHCP enabled but by setting his laptop as a DHCP Server. With his home network setting rather than the corporate network settings.

    Oh the fun the Networks Team had trying to explain to him why this was not a good idea...

    Anon because I believe he is still there, and still pulling the same sort of idiocy, and I don't want to get my ex-Colleagues in any more trouble ;-)

    1. teknopaul

      Re: Beware Manglement with DHCP laptops

      What year was this?

      I cant imagine working at a place without dhcp where you could not start work until an IT turned up.

  11. TonyJ

    Not a loop, but...

    About 10 years ago I did a piece of work for a council. New Windows 2003 servers, new Active Directory domain from NT4 and a new bunch of Citrix servers.

    The servers were all HP ProLiant DL360's and a nice pair of shiny new Cisco switches for them to be plugged into.

    We completed all the work and the customer was happy.

    A few weeks later, I got a call to say Citrix had ground to a halt.

    I'd got an account and RSA token to support them remotely so I duly connected and indeed it was terrible but from the remote session. I couldn't see anything wrong.

    Of course, nobody had changed anything...

    So I drove all the way to site (a 5+ hour drive). On arrival, I went into the server room, and right there in front of me, two cables came out of the front of server cab from the uplinks on Cisco switches. They went overhead into another cab which held an ancient (even by then) 100Mb half duplex 3Com switch.

    Their network manager their had decided for some reason it was needed/a good idea.

    I was amazed the lot even ran. But obviously popping them back into their correct switch ports and a reboot later, everything was resolved.

    I was somewhat annoyed at the stupidly unnecessarily long drive for that visit .

  12. Pascal

    I looped switches like that too once, except...

    .. that when I did it, I also took down a border router of my then-ISP, which apparently disrupted service to a few dozen other customers of theirs.

    Happy times :)

  13. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Had a rogue D-Stink device on my network doshing out DHCP packets.

    The problem got resolved when the wrong firmware got uploaded to it by accident.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One looper, one just piss poor

    A/C because Lawyers....

    Looper

    I used to work for a firm of money grabbing back stabbing bastards.. (shortened to Lawyers ), who had a couple of branches.

    I was not allowed to turn on spanning tree because the IT manager didn't understand it.

    There was a site with two IT "professionals"(the type of professional that takes a photo instead of a screen shot for documentation) in it.

    They managed to loop a network connection, but couldn't remember which one. I was half way through a long drive to fix it when the "found" the looped connection

    Piss poor

    Turns out train companies arn't just crap at rail networks.

    a place in Glasgow would hand out "a wee hub" anytime a PC needed a network connection (and I mean a home D link 4 or 8 port type) who knows how many PCs were attached to a single port on a main switch. The ping times across the city were astronomical for the distances involved.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's why the network boys are paid the big bucks...to know about spanning tree, BPDU guard and configure it...

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Network loop

    A small web design company I used to work at had its developer desktops running off a rats-nest of cheap Netgear hubs and manky cat-5 cabling snaking all over the place beneath the desks .. all covered in dust.

    As a result of this nightmare setup, I occasionally accidentally 're-patched' the wrong end of one of the cat-5 cables into one of the many hubs, causing a network loop and jamming all the Windows desktops. (which I'm pretty sure I recall were running mostly Win98 at the time, despite WinXP being the current desktop of the day)

    I quickly learned that if I heard groans begin to circulate the office above the desks while messing with the cabling, to jam the bugger back in the socket it came from originally and stay out of sight until the network sorted itself out.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Token Ring

    I'm glad I missed the twisted pair days of Ethernet as it sounds a right mess! We had good old type 1 cabling and lively rings that generally* just worked.

    *Unless you wired a whole corporate office into a single ring on a switch and put printers etc on the other switch ports...

    1. Olivier2553

      Re: Token Ring

      "I'm glad I missed the twisted pair days of Ethernet"

      Huuuu? You know that Ethernet is only twisted pairs now? I bet you meant coaxial Ethernet?

  18. StuntMisanthrope

    Bending the Rules. On fire!

    When it comes to all-nighters, wise heads, often set themselves up for the task ahead with a bit of dutch courage. Comms active, confidence in spades and opportunities identified. The secret to success. #hotgirls #moreimportantlyrespect #andlaserjudgement #kingofpool #thenetworkkid d:-)

  19. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Remote site phoned early one morning, network was down. Toddled all the way over (1hr drive)

    Had to play the usual game of "Hunt-the-Terminator" but found none. Went round the site a second, then a third time.

    Found two terminators hidden neatly into a recessed conduit in the floor, and an extra T-piece. Disconnected the coax cable from t-piece, plugged in the one terminator, added the "spare" T-piece and second terminator to the other cable and voila.

    I'm just glad coax networks have gone the way of the dodo.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      "Had to play the usual game of "Hunt-the-Terminator" but found none."

      One of the more obscure problems I had was traced to a bad batch of terminators which had a tendency for the centre pin to dislodge. We got into the habit of looking, plugging/unplugging a couple of times, looking again, plugging into one side of a T or barrel, _measuring_ and then painting them so that subsequent removals were obvious. If you needed to pull the end, you took the T off too.

  20. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Confessed? Really?

    I would have just said "oh? really? wow, that's incredible... good job finding that, mate!"

    Anyway, I had a problem 15 years ago where the network would go down at 3pm every day.

    Turns out the new network admin had taken a fan-out of 6 hubs side-by-side and reconnected them serially. Ethernet really doesn't like that many hops, but I never figured out why it went down at a particular specific time every day instead of just having problems all the time.

    1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

      Re: Confessed? Really?

      Intermittent problems are the shiz, yo! Gotta love these as they make you swear for hours on end.

  21. Olivier2553

    Coax and policies

    When I started working at my current place, we had two Ethernet thin coax network running in parallel. One was for TCP/IP, Unix, etc. and I think the other one was for Netware. Among the first thing I did was consolidating both networks into one, it was running much better and was easier to maintain after that.

    To reply about rogue DHCP, home routers that florish on the net and so on, we established a policy, that got endorsed by the management and has provision for penalties. When a problem arise, we have the ground to take action. And being a university, with most of the students boarding, the problem arise often, but not only with the students.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I worked at a data center were the boss was an idiot. Word leaked that he was going to fire 3 people for his mistake . some how cables got randomized and put into the wrong port. Documentation walked

    1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
      Trollface

      "Documentation walked..." and what then?

      Maybe you got interrupted by a packet storm?

      1. onefang

        The rest of their comment was included in the documentation that walked, so if you want to read it, you'll have to run out and catch it.

  23. Anonymous Crowbar

    We had a security office go to a DC to run vulnerability scanning. This was the normal [terrible] process. He plugged his laptop with nessus in running as a DHCP server, and took down the enitre network, including a 60TB oracle db. Fun times!

    That ridiculously stupid process was changed very shortly after that.

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