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What Bizarre IT Setups Have You Seen?
MicklePickle wonders: "I was talking to a co-worker the other day about the history of our company, (which shall remain nameless), and he started reminiscing about some of the IT hacks that our company did. Like running 10BaseT down a storm water drain to connect two buildings, using a dripping tap to keep the sewerage U-bend full of water in a computer room, (huh?). And some not so strange ones like running SCSI out to 100m, and running a major financial system on a long forgotten computer
in a cupboard. I know that there must be a plethora of IT hacks around. What are some you've seen?"
Here in Trondheim, Norway one of the weirdest IT-setups I've heard of comes from one of the largest high schools (let's keep them anonymous) in Norway.
Four years ago (2003) The IT-department were to re-wire one of the older buildings (that had been refurbished in early 2000) and to get the job done they had to remove old cables from the building to give space to new ones. In the process of this they decided to make sure there was no devices still "live" on the LAN in the building. After shutting down all networked computers, printers, etc known to the techies they were a bit puzzled to find one switchport still alive, besides the uplink. To resolve the matter they followed the cable from the switch, down a hallway and.. straight into the far end brick wall.
There was no doors in the wall, and when they went around to look for the cable exiting on the other side they found no trace of it. After a little investigation back at their office they found that the wall had been put up during the refurbishment more than 2 years earlier. They decided just to unplug the cable and proceed with their network re-wireing.
Two weeks later the students and the employees returned to their building for a new term. They had only been there for a few hours when IT Support started getting calls about printing not working. A techie was dispatched to the building but could find no printer errors. The techie asked one of the employees to show him what they were trying to do when the error occured. The employee quickly pulled up a file and pushed print. No response.
One week later and still no printing in the building the team that had been doing the network re-wireing was asked to resolve the matter. They unplugged all ports in the local switch and tried to put them back in one by one printing one page each time. Still no pages showed up at the printers. Then one of the techies decided to put the last cable in, it was left over from before the re-wireing. It was the cable that went into the wall. Right then, after putting the cable back in the printers all started spewing out documents queued up for printing. Confused by this the techie went back to the office and asked his boss to ask the janitor about the cable in the wall. The school janitor told them that he had no idea, so they had to go pull the blueprints of the building up for reviewing. After looking at the blueprints it turned out that the wall had been put up to mask a door into a part of the building that had been removed. On the side of that door there was another door.
Armed with a sledge hammer the janitor and two techies returned to the building and smashed a hole in the wall at the point the prints said there was a door on the other side. Behind the wall they found a door, and inside was a little room with an old networked computer on a small table by a wall labeled "printserver", happily humming along. The room was full of dust and very hot. Within a few days the edges of the banged up wall was fixed, the dust removed and the door replaced with a new one. The printserver inside were left to do it's task.
In the end the morale of this story must be that when refurbishing old buildings one should always consult IT about the network before -- not after the job is done. But we all know that, ofcourse.
"-Who said sit down?!"
-- S. Ballmer @ MSDC 2003.
Shades of this.
meh