* Posts by Chris King

1153 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2009

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

Chris King

Re: Near death experience ?

"Watch that first step, it's a doozy"

Chris King

Re: Aircon Leaks

For those of you offering solutions, the facilities people came up with the bright idea of using the bin because it happened over a weekend, and soon after the "LAN room flooded and on fire simultaneously" incident I've mentioned in a previous On Call.

Problem is, they forgot to tell us until the bin overflowed and water started seeping under the door.

Chris King
Holmes

Aircon Leaks

One of our LAN rooms suffered an aircon leak, with water pouring out of the unit.

Some bright spark decided that regularly emptying a bucket was tedious, and put a large plastic recycling bin under the aircon so they didn't have to visit the room so often.

A bin with no wheels, which was rather heavy and very difficult to move when full of water.

Wileyfox goes TITSUP*: Smartmobe maker calls in the administrators

Chris King

Re: A pity

Have they deployed Oreo yet ? I heard they were planning to.

Bzzzt! If you're in one of these four British cities, that was a drone

Chris King

"Military drones tend to be quite good at deliveries too"

Mind you, the recipients are less likely to complain.

Ghost in the DCL shell: OpenVMS, touted as ultra reliable, had a local root hole for 30 years

Chris King

Re: When men were real men

"And the instruction manual came in a box larger than the system itself".

Your system turns up on one pallet and the documentation turns up on another one.

It all went to crap when the "Grey Wall" was replaced by the paperback "White Shelf", and eventually you had to rummage through all the packaging just to find the documentation CD.

Chris King

Re: The sky is falling in

SIMH is much easier to hide.

Chris King

Re: Happy Days!

"Or just halt in SYSBOOT, set the max privileged UID to something large, and continue the boot. Then every user became SYSTEM".

That one will bite you if you forget to set it back to the right value for your system. Setting UAFALTERNATE used to be a safer option (so long as nobody messed with SYSUAFALT.DAT) but HPE don't recommend it these days.

Chris King

Re: The sky is falling in

One of the reasons HPE still has to support OpenVMS is a promise DEC made to Uncle Sam back in '92, to provide support for at least 25 years. Time's up on that deal...

Looking at the roadmaps, HPE's OpenVMS on VAX and Alpha will be pretty much dead and buried by the end of this year, unless they decide to extend support. Tthey're already "MPS without SE" (tech support, but no new bugfixes) but Itanics on 8.4 get Standard Support until 2020.

VSI's offerings will each get five years of Standard Support then two years of PVS (Prior Version Support) without SE, so no bugfixes for you unless you keep up. VAX won't be supported, but OpenVMS on x86_64 is coming and they say there will be Hobbyist Licencing.

Chris King

Re: VMS. Bulletproof. Depending on the bullet.

You mean UCX ? That thing was a total swiss cheese when it came to security, and the competing TCP/IP stacks (Multinet and TCPWare) weren't much better.

VMS was harder to exploit and kill IF set up properly (and kept up-to-date on patches), but get it wrong and it would be just as vulnerable as everything else out there

‘I crashed a rack full of servers with my butt’

Chris King

I remember seeing a full-size desktop case with a similarly stupid design, but with the power and reset buttons about an inch or so from the bottom of the chassis. Just the right height to be pressed by someone pushing a keyboard against them.

Sysadmin crashed computer recording data from active space probe

Chris King

Re: Hmmm ...

"Nick Kew - You're kidding, right? The guy claims he was responsible for losing 3 minutes of data from a spacecraft, probably Viking on Mars, and that's not good enough for this column? Sheesh."

Who knows, that missing data could have even greater importance in the future...

KIRK UNIT ! V'GER DEMANDS THE INFORMATION !

Chris King

Re: Hmmm ...

I remember one drunken student pulling that stunt in a lab full of PC's... Remote-booting DECStation 316sx's that had no local filestore, not even a floppy drive - and these were machines from the Time Before USB.

Damn fool took out every segment in the lab, and this was two hours before a dissertation deadline.

Fortunately for him, I managed to bundle him out of the lab before anyone else realised what was going on.

Unfortunately for him, I then decided to hand him straight over to his department head. Go directly to Jail, do not pass GO, do not collect £200. Nasty, but safer than handing him over to the baying mob back in the lab who just lost their essays.

(Yes, they HAD turned autosave off, and learned a very hard lesson. It also prompted replacement of the old kit)

Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial

Chris King
Coat

Re: Not a UK plug, but a useless Continental one.

I have a similar box of adaptors, and I swear they're breeding behind my back.

It's like the 2000AD "Future Shocks" story with the coat hangers, but at least they haven't tried to kill me yet.

(Three hangers.....?! Arrrrrrgh !)

Chris King

Re: The customer is always right....

"I've tried using that line on my wife, but I always back down when she starts talking about severance pay!"

Start worrying when she starts talking about severing other things !

Chris King

A repeat from April 2016, but relevant here...

Back when I had to man the front desk, students knew that jumping the queue was a Very Bad Idea.

One guy didn't, and he barged past ten other students queueing up patiently in front of him. Strike One.

He then started talking down at me like I was stupid. Strike Two.

That didn't get him what he wanted, so he started screaming insults at me. Strike Three, you're out !

"Right then, let's see why your account is suspended..."

<clicky clicky clicky> DING DING DING WE HAVE A WINNER !

He was still screaming abuse at this point, so I decided it was time to shut this loon up. I raised my voice from "Normal" to "Everyone In The Building Will Hear Me"...

"YOU ARE MASSIVELY OVER QUOTA AND YOUR ACCOUNT IS FULL OF JPG FILES WITH PORN-RELATED NAMES LIKE DOG-SCREWS-MILF-001.JPG. QUITE A CATALOGUE OF IT YOU'VE GOT THERE, SON !"

Did I mention that all of the other students in the queue were female ? If looks could kill, he wouldn't just be dead, he would have been a rapidly expanding cloud of greasy particles.

Chummy suddenly lost his composure, and I suspected that bladder/bowel control were about to go too, so I let him beat a hasty retreat - hey, I didn't want him soiling the carpets !

"Next please !"

Chris King

If Microsoft REALLY hated their customers, they'd replace Clippy with T-Bot from MS Teams.

T-Bot is far more annoying, and at least Clippy takes the hint if you tell him to go away...

(For those of you who haven't had the misfortune of using Teams, T-Bot is more like the version of Clippy from "Salmon Days")

Chris King

Re: PC world

She probably forced the door shut when it didn't slide in.

I've seen people manage to force CD/DVD drives shut with two discs in the tray, and then wonder why they can still see what's on the first disc.

Everything fits, given sufficient force - but It probably won't work again afterwards.

Virgin Media skulks in disused public toilets

Chris King

The story goes that after doing his sums to figure out the capital's daily drainage needs in the late 1850s, based on the most generous population and sewage production figures per capita, he then realised "we're only going to get one chance to do this properly" – so he promptly doubled the size of all the pipes.

As opposed to Virgin Media, who would probably limit how many times you're allowed to flush the toilet per day before cutting the water supply to your cistern. "Reverse-Bazalgettian" indeed.

'The capacitors exploded, showering the lab in flaming confetti'

Chris King

Re: Improbable

"There's nothing in PC, modern or 30 years old, that could have caused this".

You obviously haven't encountered DIY PC's built by the institution itself, or dodgy kit that was foisted on it by a senior academic with a mate who builds computers, and who somehow managed to get himself appointed as exclusive supplier.

In a previous job, I encountered both - cruddy machines supplied by a nearby university's "Microcomputer Unit" and death-traps built on the cheap by a friend of an academic.

Think of "Deadly Binders Inc." and you get the general idea. Flames shooting out of power supplies, cables overheating, and the old, old favourite, razor-sharp edges on cases. If you timed it right, the fire would cauterise your wounds.

Flying on its own, Thunderbird seeks input on new look

Chris King

Re: To be honest

Fossamail is no more:

This project has been discontinued!

Thank you for your interest in FossaMail, an Open Source, Mozilla Thunderbird-based mail, news and chat client for Windows and Linux.

It was an alternative version of the Mozilla Thunderbird mail&news client, and based on the Pale Moon browser core.

Unfortunately, due to lack of time to maintain the code, and lack of users and funds, we've discontinued this project.

Remember those holy tech wars we used to have? Heh, good times

Chris King

Re: Um....

"When all the kids had Spectrums and Commodores....my Dad bought a Dragon32 and then an Amstrad CPC!"

At least you were never one of the unfortunate kids whose parents bought them a VIC-20 or an Oric 1. Other kids would point at them from a distance, shake their heads sadly and mutter "poor bastards".

Chris King

Re: Curse you, DEC..

Steady there, son. If you start babbling on about TECO, I shall have to call the police.

PC lab in remote leper colony had wrong cables, no licences, and not much hope

Chris King
Pint

Re: Sounds perfectly normal

"Resurrected an SGI system at work, for fun. I was SHOCKED to find no cc, this must be the only UNIX without one".

Bah, that's just a workstation with a greedy vendor.

How about a true crawling-horror Unix box with COBOL as its primary development environment ? For voice processing and IVR ?

Google "Periphonics VPS" if you dare.

Icon, because I had to make one of these things talk to a VAX many years ago and I'm still not drinking enough to forget that. (Let's just say I learned more about reverse LAT and $QIO than a sane man is meant to know)

Chris King

Re: Incompentent or Deliberate - you choose

Occams Razor probably leads to the former, but personal experience (and my cynicism) leads towards the latter... What do you guys say?"

It never ceases to amaze me how many well-meaning-but-clueless folks think about donating their broken old tat to schools in $LESS_FORTUNATE_COUNTRY, not realising that it's already useless (and will need a lot of work to make it work again anyway even if there's a remote chance it might ever be usable).

Cortana. Whatever happened to world domination?

Chris King

Re: Standard action - turn Cortana off...

Also, take a look at Alex Hirsch's Powershell code to "debloat" Windows 10:

https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10

Some of this stuff is pretty extreme, but being able to kill apps you can't uninstall by normal means sounds good to me !

WikiLeave? Assange tipped for Ecuadorian eviction

Chris King

Re: "A third country might offer a new couch"

"Perhaps the offer was more literal. His current couch must be pretty worn out and stinky by now so maybe the Ecuadorian embassy is crowdfunding a replacement having spunked their own housekeeping budget on tissues and air fresheners".

Wouldn't it be ironic if the Swedes sent them an Ikea couch, as a not-so-subtle reminder to little Julian ?

Taiwanese cops give malware-laden USB sticks as prizes for security quiz

Chris King
WTF?

Re: 2nd Prize...

I once got a 419 spam telling that I had won the "Microsoft Word Lottery".

As I deleted it, I couldn't help but wonder if the second prize was TWO copies of Word...

Nvidia: Using cheap GeForce, Titan GPUs in servers? Haha, nope!

Chris King

Re: Whats Next?

Only 'till I can take the little bleeder down to the garbage disposal and break out the 18lb lump hammer.

Beyond code PEBCAK lies KMACYOYO, PENCIL and PAFO

Chris King

"RfC2321 - RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent (aka the rubber chicken)"

As opposed to Rubber Chicken Cryptography, where you beat someone over the head with a rubber chicken because you don't have a rubber hose to hand ?

We have a rubber chicken in the office, not sure where it came from.

Read into that what you will, but I shall leave you with this.

Chris King

WOMBAT ?

Waste Of Money, Brains And Talent ?

'Please store the internet on this floppy disk'

Chris King

Re: Printer Power

"Depends if the resulting fire engine has a printer in it, tbh",

If it does, they'll probably ask if they can put it on the fire and let it burn for a bit before dousing the flames.

Chris King

Re: I'm not sure what's worse

Microsoft shipped something similar in later versions of Windows - the Problem Steps Recorder.

PSR.EXE has helped me diagnose lots of problems over the years.

Chris King

Re: I'm not sure what's worse

Or dealing with someone who wants help with e-mail, but forgot the hide the message that came in from a dating site... Thank goodness it wasn't from Grindr !

Surveillance law slip-up in sight for staff stalking citizens on socials

Chris King
Pint

"Vote local council for another glorious decade of total law enforcement"

No doubt they'll also have a hotline so people can report the stuff the Voter Colonel didn't spot...

"Be a Local Council Informer. Betray Your Family & Friends. Fabulous Prizes to be Won"

(Oh, and have a virtual pint for the Red Dwarf reference !)

How much will Britain's next F-35s cost? Not telling, says MoD

Chris King
Facepalm

Re: "There is one billion on a bunch of drones guarding Wales?"

I misread that as "The price of eternal vigilance is.....sheep"

Must get my prescription checked, and not necessarily the one on my glasses.

Meet R2-DILDO: 'Star Wars' sex toys? This is where the fun begins

Chris King

"[At the time of publication, the author of this piece was cringing as he keyed in the digits of the telephone number and prepared to ask probing questions about sci-fi dildos, as the rest of the office laughed and downed our festive drinks – Ed.]"

Richard, did the Ed make you do this for suggesting the story, or did you lose a bet ?

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the data centre temp's delightful

Chris King
Mushroom

A repeat, but the beanies cheaped out even further...

I was in a new "satellite" branch of a company, and someone had the bright idea of sticking our VAXcluster in a cleaning cupboard behind Reception. A sparky was duly dispatched to install "air conditioning", which turned out to be a toilet extractor fan jerry-rigged with a home-brew temperature sensor.

Unfortunately, it was all set up to keep the power ON until a certain temperature was exceeded, rather than kicking in when things got too warm.

A hot Easter break later, we discovered this the hard way, The enitre cluster was roasted, but recovered once allowed to power off and cool down.

Did I mention this was an electronics company that sold to a number of safety-critical industries ?

Mozilla's creepy Mr Robot stunt in Firefox flops in touching tribute to TV show's 2nd season

Chris King

Re: Extended Support Release track

"I knew there was a reason I stuck to the ESR".

I seriously can't believe they pulled a stunt like this while simultaneously pushing out the ctashfest that is Quantum.

Imagine the scene - you get the plugin, Quantum craps itself (yet again), and suddenly you've got this extra plugin saying hello.

Yeah, that's why we deployed ESR rather than latest-and-greatest.

Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died

Chris King

Re: Great Egg Race

A lot of the "archived" BBC pages won't work with a modern version of Flash - the same thing happened with the "Classic" Doctor Who pages. Even worse, older stuff was RealVideo/RealAudio and that all died when they scrapped their RealPlayer servers (that broke most of their Cult TV sub-site).

Container-flinger pushes Win 10 transformer for legacy apps

Chris King

Re: Ill give it a try

I take it the app won't run with IE in Enterprise Mode ?

'I knew the company was doomed after managers brawled in a biker bar'

Chris King
Flame

Re: It's all fun and games until someone's toes freeze solid and shatter,

"Drop a sizeable chunk of sodium into one and after a few tens of seconds fizzing the resulant explosion would send a jet of flame several feet long back out the plughole"

One of my chemistry teachers tried something very much like this, except in a canal. Apparently, the police had words because they didn't want the local yoofs getting any ideas about depth-charging the ducks.

How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine

Chris King
Coat

Re: To dust off an old chesnut

"Can you tell the difference between this and a Monster cable?"

About fifty quid a meter ?

Chris King

Re: For the next experiment.

UGLY GIANT BAG OF MOSTLY WATER !

Chris King

Don't give BT any ideas now...

They'll finally find an excuse to pull up all the copper...

...then they'll replace it all with wet string and say "everybody has fibre now".

The eagle has been grounded: Dutch anti-drone squadron retired

Chris King

"Now that the Dutch coppers have made their bald announcement, it remains to be seen if the Britons still consider the scheme a golden opportunity".

Hey look, everybody's jumping off that bandwagon - plenty of room for us !

I wonder where it's headed ?

Japanese quadcopter makes overworked employees clock out

Chris King

Aha, somebody beat me to the Karoshi reference - but this is how the US (and probably the UK) would deal with it.

Disk drive fired 'Frisbees of death' across data centre after storage admin crossed his wires

Chris King
Coat

"Annnnd now for the, ahem, Sysadmin* stories from the unlucky few..."

So this is where someone called "Stumpy" makes his debut On-Call post ?

YouTuber cements head inside microwave oven

Chris King
Facepalm

Darwin doesn't always reclaim his own...

Sadly, this kind of stupidity is not unique, and rarely results in anyone being taken out of the gene pool.

Icon, for that "Where DID my glasses (and eyebrows) go ?" moment.

The ultimate vendor lock-in: High school opens on Oracle campus

Chris King

Re: Catch 'em young...

"Who ever thought that Larry Ellison could find Jesus?"

No, Larry's expecting Jesus to find HIM.