Stunts, Idiocy, and Hero Hacks 208
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia serves up six real-world tales of IT stunts and solutions that required a touch of inspired insanity to pull off, proving once again that knowing when to throw out the manual and do something borderline irresponsible is essential to day-to-day IT work. 'It could be server on the brink of shutting down all operations, a hard drive that won't power up vital data, or a disgruntled ex-employee who's hidden vital system passwords on the network. Just when all seems lost, it's time to get creative and don your IT daredevil cap, then fire up the oven, shove the end of a pencil into the motherboard, or route the whole city network through your laptop to get the job done,' Venezia writes."
Re:Floppy disk in the wash (Score:5, Informative)
Did you get laid for that one? I had several such opportunities resulting from obscene levels of gratitude.
I came to a school as a sophmore, and ended up staying in a co-ed mixed year dorm. The school didn't have a heavy (any) IT/CS focus, and this was right around when the quality of floppy disks and drives was "questionable" - on a good day, with very careful handling (1999-2001), you might get a disk to work in a drive that didn't write it. All it took was one successful dd recovery of a floppy disk and the word got around.
I loved that old Toshiba floppy drive: it was so much more reliable than the drives of the era, ran quickly, and could read pretty much any 'corrupt' data. Very rarely was anything unreadable.
As someone else said, being poor, on a time crunch, or limited by other people's failure to plan does seem to result in some pretty good 'hacks'. I didn't think the list they picked was all that spectacular: many of the "unconventional" ones have been done before by many others, I'm sure.
* Riser card creep? Hot glue (I always keep a gun handy now)
* Routing traffic through a Linux laptop? That might be a "jackass hack", but many people do it on a planned, regular basis, and have for the better part of a decade. Move along...
* Cook your drive? I've never heard of that trick, though I have frozen drives to recover data (bucket of ice, water, and a little water purifier salt, with a triple-bagged hard drive).
* enable password on the network? Anyone using rancid and no encryption does this; I'm sure there are others.
* heartbeat - I had to do this temporarily (or something like it). I used netcat.
* The timezone settings? Pretty sure that there's nothing 'jackass hackish' about that - that's just a common part of remote system deployment. I've worked at several places which have done things in a similar fashion.
Other "jackass hacks" I've done (that I don't think are all that incredible):
* Expensive network MFD printer's built-in ethernet died - but it had USB. Hooked a laptop up and shared the printer, with scans getting automatically dumped to a shared path until a replacement could be acquired (small office).
* Could not get a back plate adapter for a supermicro tower chassis from them on time to use a standard, quality ATX PSU, as I'd already had multiple (shit) PSUs from SM. Spent an hour that night at home cutting one from an old Dell Optiplex case via a cardboard stencil so I could get the system back up.
* Plastic CPU mounting bracket used for the HSF on a first-generation Opteron cracked due to the OEM tension bracket being too tense. -Carefully- drilled 4 small holes in the board and attached the HSF via a cat5 insulated strand garrote, tensioned on the back of the board.
* Modem bank had modems that were hanging with regularity. Better airflow helped, but no cigar. Determined the wall wort PSUs were getting warm and causing the modems to crash. Wired up an old(er) tower PSU to provide the power to the modems directly, and threw in a couple 12v fans for good measure. Problem solved.
* Customer complains about server noise. Five minutes and a drop of machine oil on the CPU fan and the problem is 'fixed' - no charge, and the customer is happy.
* Virtual server had a controller + disks blowout... put the system's VMs on a remote network share from backup and booted it from USB. Had it back up in slightly more time than it took to copy the images over.
These are just the tricks of the trade: we make hackish decisions like this every day to "just get the job done". Hopefully we can go back and fix them properly at a later time.