Posts by Chris King 1153 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2009
One of our techs got a call from someone who called to complain that they'd put a CD in the drive, but were still seeing the contents of the last CD they'd used.
Somehow, they'd managed to put the a second CD in the tray on top of the first one, and slam it shut.
"Well, it did take a few attempts to close the tray !"
*facepalm*
Not data-centre related, but it does involve being locked in...
I went to visit another organisation for an evening event. Their building had a "glass cube" in front of the reception area, with automatic doors either side controlled by sensors (and push buttons for disabled users).
Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell the rent-a-guard that there would be people in the building slightly later than usual, so he locked up and buggered off at the usual time.
I pushed the button to open the inner door on the cube, only to find that the outer door was locked. The inner door automatically locked behind me - three other people had followed me through the door, so there were four of us stuck in there.
Fortunately, I had my phone on me, so I googled for the switchboard number (said switchboard being on another site a couple of miles away) and asked them to recall the guard - thankfully, he arrived a few minutes later, it was a cold night and that's not the sort of place you want to get stuck if you need a toilet break - there's nowhere to hide, and Exhibit "A" (possibly "B", "C", "D" etc) would be in plain sight.
BT took all of their kit away ? Did somebody not pay the bill or something ?!
Getting BT to haul away their old crap usually means having to dump it on them next time they turn up to fix something, and it's usually followed by howls of "Awwwww, do I have to ?"
Last job insisted on using an ordinary electrician for data cabling and telephony - it's just another bunch of wires, right ?
Most of it worked, some didn't, but hey he was cheap. For one particular lab I called in an engineer I'd used on previous gigs, to show them what PROPER Cat5E looked like and behaved like. Yes Chris, we like the pretty graphs from his test gear, but he's too expensive, limp along as you've done before. Grr.
For an encore, fibre runs were done by a sub-contractor of the electrician. Bog-standard unarmoured fibre between buildings, and ST cables tested by the good old-fashioned method of using a barrel connector and a lamp. The local rats liked to vary their diet, and the coating on the fibres hit the spot nicely.
Eventually, the whole lot had to be replaced. All 7.5Km of it.
"Between him and Smith they have promised the world in the past few weeks, and I bet none of it ever gets delivered if they get elected".
Typical politicians. They promise you the moon on a stick, and all you get if you're very lucky is the stick - smashed over your head.
An old tale I've told before, but worth retelling...
AC starts leaking in a LAN room, and a rack-mount UPS takes a shower, shorting out and catching fire in the process - giving us the unique situation of a LAN room that's flooded and on fire at the same time.
My boss asked how this was possible, and was told "Well, we usually have the fire on top and the flood below !"
.gz and the app won't work? Sigh
"Those wouldn't have been 3CEME modules, would they?"
These switches were bog-standard SuperStack series, nothing to do with the Eclipse series but the management modules on those things dived more often than continental footballers.
Management was happy with the free "lifetime warranty", even though I was frothing at the mouth about six-week turnaround time and not being allowed to carry spares.
An academic decided that he was going to teach "IT security" to his final year Informatics students, stressing the importance of protecting physical kit and taking regular backups.
Next day, he plonks his laptop on a desk, turns his back, and someone runs off with it.
Bonus points for losing three weeks of lesson plans, presentations and course materials that weren't backed up anywhere else.
"If the couple has had sex in the water wheel, it can fall under the heading of sexual molestation – if people become annoyed by it."
Why am I now thinking of the Swedish Police asking complainants to rate the performance, followed by something like this if they fail to impress the judges ?
I was with them on dial-up from 1996 to 2000, and spent an ungodly amount using the Orange ROMP with a mobile when out-of-office - remember HSCSD ? It harks from the time when Orange still cared about cool tech (Line 2, Fax and Wildfire, anybody ?) and good customer service, so that's going back a very long time.
Before I finally left Demon I bought a .co.uk domain, with the domain name being the same as my Demon login name. For several months my e-mail signature contained a simple instruction...
"I'm moving - so exorcise the Demon !"
My e-mail has been ISP-independent ever since, having burned through a succession of ISP's - FreeServe, ClaraNET, NTL, Nildram and finally AAISP.
"Just wondering... Does the company that Earl tried to do this work for still exist?"
I'm guessing not - if they were in such a bad state for so long and needed help with their accounting system, I'd be wondering if their accounts bore any resemblance to reality.
Maybe they were trying to get the system fixed because the tax man wanted a cosy chat ?
Maybe that ad was on Craigslist for so long because Earl wasn't the first person they stiffed that way ?
As for sharing monitors - if the client is THAT cheap, that's all you need to know about your chances of getting paid.
Someone must really hate players, if they want to lure them into Birmingham New Street.
I hate it when they turn up with some new shiny that you just KNOW isn't going to integrate with the rest of your network.
One salescritter tried to persuade me to install massive MFP's in student labs, knowing full well that anything with less armour than a battle tank isn't going to survive that environment - let alone a big, fragile white shiny with lots of trays to jam and buttons for people to mash randomly.
The following day, said shiny turns up on the back of a truck.
"Go on, kick the tyres and see what you think", he said to me over the phone - the usual salescritter language for "just print off a couple of test sheets and sign here".
After he rang off, I started moving boxes of paper to where the printer was lurking.
"Are you really going to kick the tyres ?" one colleague asked.
"No. I'm going to smash the driver's window, break the steering lock, hotwire it, take for a few donuts round the car park and then set fire to it !"
Poor critter nearly choked when he collected it and checked the page count.
Hey, I needed a new set of OpenVMS and Cisco manuals, what can I say ?
So it sounds like the car slammed on the brakes, but thought there was a car in front ?
Right decision, possibly wrong reason - what if the car was programmed to respond differently if a pedestrian stepped out ? (i.e brake harder to avoid contact at all costs ?)
"We would have sustained no damage whatsoever by striking that animal"
You're preaching to the choir here, AC...
Router down - "DNS is broken"
Remote site is down - "DNS is broken"
FOTT (Firewall On Too Tight) - "DNS is broken"
Chain a bunch of CNAMEs together and remove one in the middle - "DNS is broken"
Mail server is blacklisted - "DNS is broken"
Users' favourite cat picture site breaks their database - "DNS is broken"
...and so on. Sadly, routinely arming DNS engineers is not an option. It's not so much a health and safety issue, the cost of ammunition would cripple the business.
I'd recommend you do put the boot in before they set debt collectors on you for payment of an invoice you never received.
That advice applies to ANY ISP, telco or mobile phone service.
Make damn sure they've agreed that you don't owe them any more money, and get that in writing. Preferably in triplicate. In blood.
Is it me or does anyone else find their "street chuggers" overly agressive?
Oh hell, yes ! (Cardiff)
They won't take no for an answer, assume you're with one of the "big four" and assume that you only want to change ISP because you want a cheaper service.
Sometimes, I enjoy watching their brains dribble out of their ears when I try to explain that I've got a TalkTalk Wholesale line at home. (AAISP Home::1) and it's so much better than the crap they're trying to foist on me.
"I worked for 3Com, designing Token Ring switches...evil things, and almost impossible to get through emissions testing, what with all the ports switching at the same time."
Evil things... That described a lot of the 3Com kit I had to herd. Especially the NetBuilder II and a LinkBuilder MSH that was the core of our network - I dreamed of using their replacement (a fully-laden Catalyst 5500) to crush them both, but they had to leave the machine room intact because they had trade-in value.
The mouse might have used a 9-pin D connector but connected via a proprietary card in the PC, aka "bus mouse". Most of the ones I saw back in the late 80's/early 90's were Microsoft InPort devices with round plugs, but I seem to recall some other brands used D plugs/sockets - and some of them used male/female the other way round to serial ports so they didn't get mixed up.
"He told us that if we don’t have a database backup by the end of the third night, the underwriters for the company insurance would pull our cover (including employer's liability) essentially putting the company out of business".
If the insurers are putting in clauses like that, then your bean-counters probably cheaped out on the policy and accepted such exclusions to keep the premiums down.
"Do you have a microscope and polishing kit to hand?"
If they're cutting and terminating cables like that, probably not.
And they probably "tested" the cable by plugging both cables into a barrel connector at one end, then shining a torch down the other end.
This is what happens when you cheap out and subcontract networking installations to the local sparkies, and he subcontracts the fibre installs.
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