Tales From the Tech Trenches

GMGruman writes "Anyone in IT has a story or two involving stupid users, crazy co-workers, kludgy technology, and airhead managers. Lisa Blackwelder has collected top tales of the tech trenches, covering user antics, office politics, and unusual technical challenges that IT pros faced (usually) with aplomb, insight, and savvy."

Oh, what's cropped up this month....

[KublaiKhan]

This month's horror story concerns a user reporting a nasty security issue.

The user comes up to the helldesk and reports that they have a, quote, "mysterious cable" coming out the front of their computer. Given that at $company we pay a little more attention to security than, say, Gawker, one of my fellow Ops techs was dispatched to the user's desk to determine what this cable could be and why it was so mysterious.

A few minutes later, he returned, having successfully traced the mysterious cable out the front USB port all the way to the keyboard.

Upon reporting this finding, another tech asked who the user was--and then noted that she had given said keyboard to said user, who had plugged the keyboard into the USB port herself.

Driftnet

[lyle101]

Several years ago, I was the Network Administrator at a medium sized manufacturing company. We had a problem with some of our employees viewing inappropriate content while at work and we didn't have a robust content filtering system at the time. So, I set up a sniffer port at our Internet ingress point and connected a laptop with Driftnet to get a real time picture, literally, of what was being accessed. One of my fellow IT workers saw what I was up to and decided to DoS me. He created an image of a Nazi Flag with my picture superimposed and the words "Network Nazi" underneath. He then uploaded the image to his personal web server with an auto-refresh script and for the next 20 minutes, the only thing I saw was the image he created / posted.

One Way Cable modems ....

[tinkerghost]

At one point I did tech support for a company that had inherited a block of 1 way cable modems from a company they bought. One way cable modems are the very definition of asynchronous - 56Kb upstream & 3MB downstream at the time (55:1 ratio) - as they bond a dialup connection upstream with a cable connection downstream. Not only does this compound the number of problems - all the problems of a dialup modem and the problems of a cable modem with the added joy of bonding issues - but customers were completely unable to grasp the asynchronous nature of the process.

One customer in particular was quite upset that it took so long to upload his files. I can only blame myself as I asked "What kind of files are you working with?" I then endured a 20 minute rant on how it didn't matter what kind of file it was because he had downloaded the files quickly from the newsgroups earlier and it shouldn't take hours to repost his new donkey porn videos to a different newsgroup.

Re:Just reply here

[deniable]

Copiers here. I put a note over the power point (covering the plugs) saying "Don't unplug this without our permission." They fllipped the note up and did it again. We then taped the thing down properly. Our next planned step was international picture language: disconnected cable and man with bat.

Re:Ah yes.

[MichaelSmith]

I once worked on the traffic signal system in my city. The linking for a block of 120 or so signals was handled by a computer attached to a modem rack by a bunch of ribbon cables. Each cable handed eight channels. On this day I had to pull all the cables out of the modem rack and the piled up at the bottom. When finished I hooked everything up again and powered the system up. Every signal site in the system went to flashing yellow. I actually stepped out of the building to see what I had done to the surrounding suburbs. Not pretty. So I slunk back into my workplace and tried to figure out what had gone wrong, quickly. It took about five minutes to find. I had missed the bottom modem enclosure because it was covered by spooled cables. The cables for that row were in the row above and so on. Having fixed that all was okay except I had come close to a heart attack.

There you go, my fuck-up. Want to hear more?

Missing equipment

[digitalhermit]

I used to work at a shipping company. They used to provide higher volume customers with a PC that ran their shipping software. One of my responsibilities was to maintain this equipment at the customer sites (upgrade software, fix PCs, etc.). So the company assigned me to the Florida West Coast (Naples, Ft. Myers, etc.). I arrived at the facility with a list of about a dozen customers to see that week. My first task was to get the spare equipment to replace/install at customer sites. There was supposed to be a small room with all the equipment. I went to the room but it was empty. I called the home office... They said something to the effect that "It's a large room with a whole bunch of PCs, monitors, keyboards. You can't miss it." So I looked again. Even though it was a good sized warehouse, there were only four or so rooms. Nope, couldn't find all that equipment. Finally got in touch with the manager there.... Yup, my predecessor had loaded all the equipment into a truck and taken it away.

I called my office. And yeah, I figured that something suspicious had happened but I had to play it dumb (can't go around accusing someone of theft if I wasn't certain). Call went something like:
"Hey, the former admin took all the equipment away. Where did he take it?"

"What do you mean he took the equipment?"

"I understand that he loaded everything into a truck last week and drove off. Let me know where and I will see about moving it back."

"What do you mean he took the equipment?"

"The facility manager said he took the whole day loading everything up into a Ryder truck. Then he drove off."

"Where did he take them?"

"I don't know. I just got here today. "

The beauty of his move was that he maintained all the inventory... So when it came time to see how much equipment was supposed to be there, everything showed as empty or at customer sites or disposed off... A roomful of brand new equipment was marked as "Disposed" or "Sent back"...

Animal Urine on a laptop is my worst

[Intrusive_Rogue]

A client of a previous consultant job owned a wild life rescue. One day she brought in her laptop that a Raccoon had used as a litter box (It was a Gateway, so not far off.) Rubber gloves, masks and moving to the companies attached garage with a card table was required to get the data off the HD and into the new one she purchased. The garage reeked of Raccoon musk for quite a while.