Slashdot Mirror
Stunts, Idiocy, and Hero Hacks
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."
I once fixed an issue that was holding up the operations of a $50 million dollar a year company with one well placed rubber band.
I got "lucky" to solve a problem for someone back in college: she had written her thesis on a 3.5 floppy, had no backup (this is when you had to go to the "computing center" to work, as practically no one had a machine of their own, so you had to take all your stuff with you), and had run the disk through the washing machine.
She came in, crying hysterically (it actually took a few tries just to figure out what was wrong), and realized what had happened. I had one of the few "eureka!" moments of my life, and grabbed another floppy, carefully cut it open, did the same with her disk, then air-dried it. I put the platter in the "new" disk, with its dry fabric covering (whatever that stuff was...), taped it shut, and put it in the Mac (SE...no hd) and yep, the disk was readable and I was able to get her thesis off and onto a network drive, then we copied it back onto a new disk and assured her I'd hold onto the thesis on the network drive until the end of the semester.
Funny thing, she kept the disk I had used, taped around the edges, and the next year I saw her again and asked how things were, and she was still using it. Go figure.
I don't have a story on the the scale of any of these but I remember fixing my Commodore 1541 drive by adding an extra screw. The drive belt had gotten stretched somehow and I was getting all kinds of read errors, and being poor, decided to attempt a repair. Turns out there was an empty screw hole near the drive belt, I put one in, stretched the belt around the screw to take up the extra slack and that drive was still working when I finally got rid of my C64 a couple years later.
I know, cool story bro.
I worked with Paul a long time ago at a mom&pop in NH. And I know that he personally did the drive trick and it worked. It was a 9 gig scsi drive with an smtp mqueue on it. He was extremely elated that it had worked, and his portrayal of the story to a wide-eyed netadmin noob (me) was one of those late-night, sipping coffee at the Red Arrow while the raid rebuilds sorta memories that you'll take to your grave.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Back when I was a computer tech for one of the big retailers, I had a customer bring in a machine that wouldn't boot. After interrogating the customer a little more, it turned out he had tried 'upgrading' his CPU, and in the process had broken off one of the Athlon XP's (shows age) pins by inserting the CPU in the wrong orientation.
The dude couldn't afford anything new, so I offered my most MacGyver-ish attempt. I went over to the car-audio shop, grabbed some speaker wire, spliced out some copper about the same size as a pin, and voila!
After bending some of the pins back with a mechanical-pencil tip, and inserting the new 'pin' into the socket below the missing pin on the CPU (cut to semi-correct length), it booted right up! He took it home and all was well. I don't work for said company any more, but how long that 'fix' lasted is questionable.
Never told the boss about that one.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
The first "stunt" depends on your point of view. If you have nicely brainwashed and duped by marketing material that "Vendor gear good, PC bad" that may sound as a stunt. If you actually know what you are doing you can run networks for years on this.
Nearly any laptop today has the forwarding grunt of an upper end of a 3800, there are plenty of servers that are on par with a 7200 or low end 7600 and most supervisor modules. You can run a network on this on a daily basis and do a _LOT_ of things a Cisco cannot do or cannot do at sufficient performance.
To put the so called "stunt" into a perspective, I used to run a production installation with 20+ 802.1q trunks via 800MHz Via EPIAs with 600+ entry ACL lists including content filtering with VRRP failover, load balancing to multiple upstream uplinks, OSPF, hardware accel-ed openvpn and ipsec, 16+ class hierarchy CBQ QoS and a few more bells and whistles. For years. Not for 48 hours.
Nothing wrong with it if you can do it. If you cannot - well, not everything in life is learned on CCXX and RedRat certification courses. C'est la vie.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I once had the servers using a backup database on a machine slower than the main database! ...
Okay, that's pretty tepid.
I did figure out how to recover a day's worth of offsite data saved on a corrupted USB key. I've had to start ancient-but-still-used hard drives by repeated power cycling after the power went off long enough for the UPS to lose battery.
Nothing too exciting.
I had non-booting server board back in the late 90s and managed to track the problem to a scratch through one of the traces on the bottom of the board. Something had fallen between the board and the offsets and had worn through the circuit.
Having nothing to lose, I fired up the soldering gun and pulled out the only wire I had from a pair of speakers and sure enough, once the circuit was made the board booted and remained stable long enough for us to order and install a replacement.
Trust me, they will come in handy in the lab at some point. Even for sudden headcrab infestations.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I once took my laptop and used it to set up an Apache + DNS server while replacing a webserver that died. All I did was to post a "Emergency Maintenance" page while we swopped out the server.
Every IT guy who has been in the trenches for 10+ years has "I once" stories. Oftentimes they salvaged hundreds of thousands of rands of damages for the company, or helped mitigate a bad management decision.
The thing is, one of several scenarios invariably happen:
1 - You get no recognition because no one understands what you did. ("Oh, you had another web server running on your laptop, that's dandy!")
2 - You get an accusing look. ("How was it possible that this happened? Sure you fixed it but this should not have happened, make sure it doesn't happen again.") - I saw something like this happen to a senior network admin once, something totally out of IT's control that occurred due to a bad management decision not to buy a spare router. We used an old PC with IPtables to route traffic on a network over a weekend while our suppliers tried to source one.
3 - The dark suit analogy: Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
Being in IT is a bitch, and management doesn't help - IT is honouring the impossible promises of management to unthankful clients.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I once repaired a critical UPS that was attached to a critical database server actively recording data in the middle of a test shot with jumper cables and the battery from my truck. All that just to replace a fan that kept sending the UPS in to panic mode for an overheating battery and trying to start a shutdown sequence on the database server.It was a 12v power source for the UPS (old, old equipment) coming out of the AC to DC power supply. The UPS was part of a suite of equipment that included the database server, the array, a backup device, a network switch and the UPS hardwired to each of them in it's own rack. Don't ask me who made it. All I know is it was an Informix based DB and the maker was some esoteric, specific solution company I never heard of and before my time anyway. All I knew was the replacement parts had a 2 week lead time and I have no idea why this company chose to hold up such critical data with such arcane and unsupportable equipment. But, I had to shutdown the UPS to do the work but the battery didn't have enough juice to support the 30 minutes it was going to take to do the work. The battery power would have been killed once the unit was off anyway.
So I attached my jumper cables and the 600 amp battery from my truck to the output rails on the UPS, after the control switches. From there it was just juice to the rails and then to the server and it's data array. The car battery had about 45-55 minutes of juice for the suite to run on full-tilt. So I shut the UPS down and the servers, thankfully, stayed up! Had a box fan blowing on the battery and jumper cables. I disassembled the UPS case, cut the bad fan out and spliced the old connector on to the new fan I got at a local surplus store for $3. Plugged it all in, reassembled and turned the UPS on. It went through diagnostics and everything went green. Then the overload light started blinking and the warning chime came on. I pulled the jumper cables off and the overload warning went away and things stayed stable. The fan stayed on and nothing went down.
I probably should have gotten an award for it because it was a test shot for a multi-billion dollar contract but I was more afraid of disciplinary action over the risk than getting any praise for it. As far as I know, to this day, only two other people at that company know what happened
Look for scratches on the bottom side, brush with toothpaste (the plain one, no additional abrasive ingredients), rinse, read.
he said share your bread. not charge for it.
Read radical news here
Stunts, Idiocy, and Hero Hacks
With a title like that, I was sure it was going to be another Wikileaks story.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
where all employees are rewarded exactly in proportion to their value?
Do you have any idea the thankless heroics that school teachers, lifeguards, EMTs, nurses, firefighters, etc., etc., pull everyday?
IT has got to be the whiniest fucking field out there.
I remember once back in the day, a friend of mine called me to help her with her new computer because there was some problem with the modem. The box had been delivered a few days back and everything seemed to be working perfectly but the modem would not connect to her ISP (dial-up). I tried *everything* on both the software and the hardware side. The support guy also had no idea. Everything seemed ok on their side, too. The drivers were ok, the hardware also, we were dialing the correct number, the username/password was active. Then I set the volume of the modem real loud. And lo! The modem would whine and purr, but amongst the whines and the purrs there was something like a female voice coming out of the metal box...
Then my friend suddenly stood up, pounded her head against the wall (metaphorically speaking) and explained: the part of the town where she was living had a *really* old telephone network: if a neighbor was making a long distance call you could easily get charged for it and visa-versa. To avoid such problems she had called the telephone company and had a barrier placed that would block all numbers starting with a zero! When the modem dialed the ISP number that also started with a zero but would give her cheaper internet prices instead of normal call prices a recorded female voice would answer the call explaining that a barrier had been placed for such outgoing calls! Of course, the modem would ignore her and try to mate with her with no success...
After about 4 weeks into my first programming job (~15 years ago), I lost all the source files in my cwd by mistakingly typing "rm *>o" instead of "rm *.o".
Of course at that time there were no tape no backups and my last commit was about a week or two earlier. I went to see the sysadmin and explained my situation.
In about 2 minutes he wrote a C program that opened and read from /dev/hda in blocks, looking for some variable/function names that I had provided him. This
yielded a big text file, and it took me about a day to untangle and reconstruct the various source files. I remember that had impressed the hell out of me.
Had a similar story, worked as an intern in a plant, plant security system (286?) had a 10 MB disk that DIED (would not POST). Replacement unit was $1200 from the supplier. Managed to 'unstuck' the armature by 'twisting' the exposed armature shaft (allowed the machine to boot). System ran for months until it was replaced.
Late at night doing the stock prices, if one card of the COBOL pack was wrong, you'd find a punched-out confetti on the floor, and stick it back in the errant punch-hole, using a tube of polystyrene cement. Quick dry, no snagging, no delay. Just don't run those packs if you find them crisp in some archive.
Ya, I had that happen once, but I simply rapped my SCSI drive with the handle of my screwdriver - hard - right on the spindle head while the controller was trying to spin it up - "WHACK". Sucker spun up on the second hit. Still works fine.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Let me tell you a crazy story about how I got my Xbox to work after a RROD!
I involves chewing gum, rubbing alcohol, a tweezer, a prophylactic and a wire coathanger...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Simplest was splicing in a 4th drive power cord for a machine that needed another drive.
Also wired an ISA card directly to the motherboard after the socket snapped off.
Wired a laptops power supply to the motherboard, again after the socket ended up broken.
Had an old sparc station that had a pin broken off of the keyboard/mouse cable and had to wire that together as well.
In the Dim Times, my company had a couple of hard drives (those newfangled 3.5" Scuzzy drives) that wouldn't spin up and had critical data on them. My solution:
2. Hold the drive in my fingertips (so the platters were parallel with my palm)
3. Power on the computer, then "snap" the drive with a twist parallel to the platters, relying upon inertia to break the stiction.
4. Recover data from now-spun-up drives.
5. Power down, then physically destroy the interface pins on the drive to ensure nobody tried to use it again.
Since then, I've used that trick several times on dead/dying hard drives. As long as the heads are trying to move (indicating electrical life), it's worked every time.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I once was a sysop for a small company's Data General system, where large datasets were stored as TAR archives on nine-track tapes; some poor soul had copied TO the tape instead of FROM the tape, and desperately needed to recover a file that was still there on the part of the tape beyond the end of the inadvertent write. You could read up to the added end-of-tape marker, but the tape just wouldn't read any further. Screwed, yes? Well, not quite. I set the system to rereading the damaged tape, waited 'till just before it reached the offending end-of-tape marker, and briefly put my thumb on the roller that measured tape travel, causing the drive to jump the tape ahead ('cause the sensor said "the tape is not moving!") and right past the EOT marker. Voila! The system read out the rest of the files on the tape, fortunately including the one they really needed, and I was briefly a hero. Hero never lasts, of course, but it was fun.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I'm surprised they didn't mention the technique for unsticking recalcitrant half-height RLL and MFM hard disk drives by slamming them gently, but firmly, down onto a smooth horizontal surface (like your desktop). They would occasionally stick when the heads became goo-ed to the platters due to breakdown (or solidification, I was never sure which) of the lubricating material. When all other hope was abandoned, and you knew the drive was headed for the graveyard, a good, solid (but gentle) whack would often get it spinning again. The idea was to keep the drive as parallel as humanly possible to the horizontal surface. It was one of the few hardware tricks I had to summon male assistance to handle--my hand was not large enough to get the necessary firm one-handed grasp on the drive. Boy, do I feel old. Probably because I am old.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
This was about a decade ago. I had to get a serial cable working, but did not have the proper cable. I got the doco for the massive UPS I was working on (required strange cable config) grabbed a CAT-5 cable and tore apart an existing serial cable. One of the wires had to be a loop back, which I had a devil of a time doing. Eventually, I connected it by using my thumb. Baked the inside of the thumb actually. It was quite uncomfortable for two or three days.
I once used the articles full url, instead of the print URL, so that the company who paid the writer, the web developers, and hosting company might actually get a little benefit from my visit.
http://infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/jackass-it-stunts-idiocy-and-hero-hacks-932
If he existed.
In a previous life as a network admin, I went to check out a warehouse that my department was taking over.. Everything was normal, as I made my list of comptuers, and started writing a to-do list for myself.. on about the third day I noticed the picking line had stopped.. I went over to the pickers area and saw the local IT guy opening up a computer.. so I asked what was up.. He said "oh this hard drive sticks now and then"... it was an non-network 486 running Windows 95 that had the entire carousel database on it.. without the info on that drive there was no way to get ANY parts out of the carousel, let alone run the carousel... anyways, he popped the case off, and the harddrive was already opened up, he then spun the platter by hand to "kick start" it... I asked how long it had been like this, and he told me "a few years now, but in only happens every couple of months"..... long story short, I replaced that computer that day, put the DB on the network and when the acquisition was complete, I didn't offer him a job,.
Back in my days as an engineer at Boeing, I supported some automated test equipment on the factory floor. One day, one of the ATE failed to download the required s//w update, so I was called out to investigate. It turned out that the network drop adjacent to the equipment had been disconnected in the nearby network closet. (locked, of course). So I, with the factory manager in two, called the IT department to get it plugged back in.
Me: "I'm in the Renton plant, at column XYZ and we need this network drop reconnected. Production has been halted."
IT Operator: "OK. We'll start a ticket on that. But standard turn-around is 24 hours".
Me: "We can't wait 24 hours. We need to get this equipment updated to get the line up and running. Is there any way to escalate this?"
IT Operator: "Sorry. That drop is was identified as being inactive and was unplugged."
Of course it was inactive. The ATE is only powered up when needed. At other times, the little light on the switch in the closet would be off.
At this point, the factory manager asked for the phone. Very calmly, he spoke to the IT operator.
Manager: "You can cancel that ticket. My engineer assures me that he can reconnect the drop once he gains access to the network closet. The plant fire department is just downstairs and we'll have them bring up a fire axe to open the door."
The IT department dispatched a tech who arrived within 15 minutes.
Have gnu, will travel.
End cutters. Don't forget the end-cutters. The flat claw kind, not the slanted ones. Great for stripped bolts.
Someone had to do it.
I once heard a story from an individual who worked for a motherboard manufacturer. One day his boss came in with a frown and a few motherboards. The company had manufactured a whole bunch of these boards and NONE of them worked (I got the feeling this was from the "50MB HD, 60Mhz processor days). For the next few days he looked over the schematics and boards. Until he noticed that there was a circuit on the board that wasn't on any of the plans. He raked a screwdriver through the circuit and then plugged it in, it worked fine. For the next few weeks there were several employees whos sole task was to do the same thing to box after box of motherboards. I imagine he got quite a pat on the back/bonus from his employer, but probably more than a couple angry lears from his fellow employees for the next few months.
I don't think my parents were ever as impressed with me as on the day when I rescued their data, including many years of precious photos, from their crashed hard drive. After diagnosing the click of doom on their drive, I wrapped it in a towel, then two bags of that blue freezer gel, another towel and a plastic bag, and in this state left it to freeze overnight. It had a SATA cable and a SATA power adapter cable sticking out, and I did my best to seal the plastic bag with tape to avoid condensation once I took the thing out. The next day, the wrapped, frozen hard drive actually booted and was able to transfer a few gigabytes of the data onto a new drive. I repeated the procedure until I rescued the rest. I still can't believe that worked!
One of the coolest [no pun intended] I did was to place a hard-drive in the freezer overnight so that I could recover data from it the next morning. It took about 3 or 4 days to completely recover the data I needed to, but it definitely worked wonders.
Back in the early 60's I was on a three man combat targeting team and we had two minuteman missiles to startup and target one day. So we went to the first site and the maintenance team had just finished installing a new guidance and computer package and the nuclear warhead. They closed the 80 ton door that protects the missile and so it was out turn to perform.
We started up the on-board computer and ran some checks and then began loading in the targeting data such as whether it was a air burst or ground burst and all of the war-plans associated with it as well as the launch codes and targets.
After this is accomplished then the guidance package goes through some testing and self calibration and finally becomes "ready"
Ready is actually called "Strategic Alert" and lights a green light on our console.
The missile system sat in strategic alert for a few minutes and so we figured we had completed our job and would button up the site and head to our second site.
Suddenly the "Launch Commanded" light lit on the console and a fraction of a second later the "Launch in Progress" light also lit.
I quickly popped out a bunch of the circuit breakers on adjoining panels causing the support equipment to stop functioning.
At this stage we did not know if we had a bad console (portable between sites) or a computer failure on-board. Anyway the missile did not blow the umbilical nor launch so we believe we stopped it just in time. If we tried to check our technical data then we would have been dead most likely.
We contacted job control and they agreed not to attempt a restart and rather have maintenance replace the guidance/computer package yet again and return it to Autonetics for repair.
The next site we went to for startup went perfect and the console worked flawlessly...
That has been nearly 50 years ago now and i still occasionally wonder if the missile had actually entered "launch" or if the on-board computer was giving erroneous launch status.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
These remind me of the classic 'Magic' vs 'More Magic' switch. http://ftp.sunet.se/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Real IT heros have things like routine backups with offsite storage rotation, N+1 replacement hardware policies, and sensible password policies.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The (only) supply pipe from the lake reservoir in my city got a hole in it about 15 years ago. Ever since, it's been held together with a 2x4 and metal strapping.
I love the look on the faces of the new city councillors when public works explains why we need a new pump station.
I had to recover a drive from a test machine that was holding up about $300K worth of product from shipping. I didn't have a backup of this machine because someone deleted a folder on the file server recently. (I still don't know who did that). I tried freezing it, but the drive heated up too quick to get the data off. So, I took the drive, put it in a ziploc bag, submerged it except for the opening of the bag with the cables coming out of it in a bath of ice, water, and salt. The combination kept the drive cold enough to run a full disk to disk copy. We got the shipment out that night.
A small addition was made to the autoexec.bat on the client, simply to run curl to access the Perl CGI script, then feed the output to the settz utility, thereby properly setting the time zone of each client every time it booted
Being able to modify the autoexec.bat file, they could have written a solution that required no third-party software. I used to change all manner of systems settings via .bat files, even modifying registry settings by creating .reg files on the fly and calling regedit to load them.
The old pizza box NeXTstations, if left to sit powered down too long, would sometimes lose their boot proms. My friend Jake had one go out, so he booted machine a, took the prom out, put the prom from machine b into it, wrote the bootloader back into the prom, then put prom a's prom into machine b. They both booted on next power cycle. Much sighing of relief and drinking of tea followed.
"bubblegum and duct-tape fix"
Yeah.. as if a Watch-guard, NOKIA, or CISCO firewall are any better than a Laptop running Debian.
Sounds like the writer knows nothing about firewalls at all.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Recovering from an interrupted "rm -rf /" when you've already lost everything in /bin: http://www.justpasha.org/folk/rm.html
It was the 3rd year of undergrad and my roomie and come to me with a problem: his brother's computer goes black on booting up to windows. Safe Mode wouldn't work. Finals was the following week and his brother had 2 papers on the computer, unfinished, which had to be turned in on Monday. I told him to bring the computer down and I'd do what I could.
I hooked his computer up to my KVM (best low-space hobby troubleshooter investment I ever made). I booted up and the diagnosis was definitely correct. The second Windows tried booting, the screen would go black and Safe Mode crashed on each attempt. He didn't have a recovery disc for his factory installation so I just had to wing it... without seeing my actions on screen.
I booted up to XP Pro on my computer (which he was using on his) and wrote down all the keystrokes, tabs, enters, etc. in order to get down a method of setting the display settings to minimum settings (Windows key, up x times, right once, etc.). That didn't change anything. I then set out to uninstall the drivers, again writing down the operation as performed on my computer and then repeating the process blind on his. That still didn't fix it. "Oh!," I thought, "Maybe I'll uninstall the device and reboot... duh!" I did that blind, rebooted, and the desktop was viewable. I spent the next 3 hours removing viruses and malware.
Lesson to the brother: Don't install ATI drivers for their built-in software overclocking when you have an NVidia card.
Lesson to me: Fix computer, get beer.
Seems to be Pretty Perlific in these stories.. and reported by a hack of a website ;-)
I once had an old Dell laptop. One day the hard drive gave out. Of course, I hadn't done any backups. Anyway, quite by accident, I discovered it would work correctly if I held the laptop upside down. Well I didn't have an external monitor or keyboard so I had to have my wife hold the laptop in the upside down position while I typed the appropriate commands to copy my data. Needless to say it was a very strange position so naturally we had some wild sex and funky sex.
really the solution for "stiction" is just a 2lb hammer. tap the corners of the drive case. if this doesnt break
it free, tap harder. repeat until drive starts spinning again. we used to have no end of trouble with this
and drive that used to be never turned off. the grease would vaporize in the long heat soak and if the
drive ever cooled the grease would condense on the platters and stick the heads in their landing zone.
sun conner oem drives were notorious for this problem.
modern lubricants seems to have resolved this issue mostly.
both power supplies failed in our wireless router. i dont use it, but i would hear about it if it
wasnt working. of course, they are custom jobs so i have to buy the vendor's power supply.
in the meantime, take one apart figure out it is a 48V with a 12V standby, remove the output
caps, cut the traces, patch in some benchtop power supplies and voila. running in under 3
hours.
no one cares -- "we can surf the net again? good."
I can safely say after reading the story that this is the first time I have ever heard of someone fleeing a stuck disk by HEATING it. I always FREEZE them. Heating sounds like it is far too likely to destroy the electronics or cause the magnetic media to be wiped.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I once jumpstarted my car from a UPS.
I always carried one of the bigger APS units in the back of my work wagon, it was a popular seller in the winter months when peoples power started blacking out. One day i found myself way out on a clients ranch (installing a network in his barn... dont ask)...& when i came back out, car wouldnt start, no power... dead battery. Not just flat, but dead.
I kinda panicked around a bit, client wasnt on site to take me into town & buy a new batt, co-workers were hours away in the nice warm home office & the sun was going down. I thought long & hard about (temporarily) swiping a battery out of the clients tractor when i remembered that these UPS's basically just have 2 motorcycle batteries in them wired up series for 12V DC.
So i took it apart & cobbled the batteries into my engine compartment with some duck tape & bits of the UPS's power cord & drove home on it.
IIRC i later re-assembled the UPS & probably ended up selling it LOL
OK, I've got to post this anonymously, but the deal I have with my wife is that each "save" is worth something a little extra special in the sack. Make sure you negotiate before the save, because once the computer is working again, the distractions / office work is back!
I have a hard time believing any but the cheapest jumper cables would overheat handling 60 amps at 120v for standard jumper cable lengths. A standard 4 gage jumper cable has 10 times the cross-sectional area of a 15amp rated 14 gage power line.
Does anyone take you seriously with your inability to spell, horrendous grammatical structure or lack of basic reading comprehension?
A friend on an IT coop asked for my help when a student repoted that the paper they had been writing all semester long was corrupt (stored on a floppy disk and no backup copy, of course). Needless to say, the student was very upset.
I wrote a quick little program (in Pascal I believe) to read as much of the document file as possible and output just the printable characters. Told the student they'd have to reformat the text and double-check it but essentially it was all there. It felt good to help.
That was before I played with Linux or the 'strings' command. ;)
I had the most weird IT experience arising from almost the same situation
One night, circa 3am, I get a frantic phone call from a friend who claim she had just lost all of her thesis (no backups, of course). She was basically using a glorified typewriter : pentium 120, windows 3.1, word 6.0 - no internet, not even a CD drive. From what I'm told between sobs and hysterical outburst, I understand the thing boots to DOS (the screen is "all black with a C:>"), so I guess it's just a matter of minutes, and tell her to type "win" and then return. Fails, because the keyboard outputs "zin" - there, I begin to understand the night is going to be a bit longer than expected. I live in France, so we use "azerty" keyboards and obviously her computer had reverted to a "qwerty" layout.
So next step, I tell her the DOS command to display autoexec.bat (figure it, on the phone, without the computer in front of me... "type qutoexec/bqt") and... it fails ! autoexec.bat had simply totally, completely, vanished from her system ! So, letter by letter, with my win95 laptop as a guide, I dictated over the phone a working autoexec translated in qwerty she entered after the famed "copy con autoexec.bat...". It seemed to last hours (and maybe it did).
But in the end, it worked, and the machine booted right into win, so I instructed her to make a backup now and then, and I guided her in the process. Once it was done, I told her to shut it off and that I would come the next day to check if it was safe to carry on on that same machine.
Next day, I drop by, and soon realize something's still off with the machine ; not much, but caps lock doesn't work for instance.
So I open and check literally everything until I open the keyboard casing and find 1/2 inch of liquid trapped inside. I burst in laughter, accuse her of spilling her tea over it. She takes it sternly, things start to get bitter (we hadn't slept much, both of us), until she has an "eureka" moment and realize she's been washing her contact lenses over that same desk for years !
Problem solved, but I still can't figure out how a flooded keyboard can delete the autoexec on its own will...
After Hurricane Katrina, I along with several other co-workers from New Orleans had been moved out to our Atlanta office. One day, one of my fellow transfers (I always hated being called a victim) called me up all flustered. She had just gotten internet installed at her place, but her computer hadn't survived the move and they really needed it so that her husband could try to find a new job. I tell her to bring it by my apartment, and I'll take a look at it.
As soon as I open it up, I can see that the plastic retaining clip for the heat sink had broken off and the heat sink was rolling around in the bottom of the case. A quick call to Dell and I was told (surprise, surprise), that they didn't sell the retaining clip and the only fix was to purchase a new motherboard from them. Knowing that, like me, her financial situation had taken a hit due to the hurricane, I said "no thanks, hung up the phone, looked at the motherboard, and noticed that the heat sink was significantly larger than the processor and overlapped onto a plastic base on all 4 sides of the processor. It looked like I could "glue" the processor down, but I wasn't sure what kind of glue would withstand the temperatures required.
Then I remembered that I still had a tube of RTV sealant in my trunk from a water pump job we'd done on one of my friend's cars a month or so before. So, I carefully applied the sealant to the edges of the heat sink, seated it in place, and stuck a heavy weight on top and left it over night. The next morning, I powered up the computer and ran it through some operations meant to stress the processor to make sure that once it got hot, it wouldn't overheat. Everything worked like a charm and a year later when I left that job, she was still using the computer with the RTV'd heat sink.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Well, im not sure this qualifies but i think alot of you can get a good giggle out of this. I once worked for IBM ( dont laugh yet ) - only problem was that i was (am) very good at talking, but wasnt that good at the real deep tech stuff. To make a long story short, i worked there for 3 years before i quit: and i honestly can say that i solved alot of things, by use of... IRC and search machines. All i did was: Get the problem - for instance, install this DNS server in another country. Great - jump on a plane, enter the hotel, wake up next day, go to highly secure server room, open laptop and hook up mobile phone, place it next to the server, and begin searching for "how to setup DNS", while chatting on various IRC channels asking people for how to do this. And, it never once failed me. The funny thing is, after i quit, i got headhunted for another major company (wont name it here due to various reasons) because of my work for IBM. I turned down that job, and has since then never worked with computers professionally again.. too much stress for me. :)
But i think this qualifies as a hack - albeit a slightly different one. :)
Merry xmas guys!
Kind of makes the whole "Ctrl-Prt-Screen" save as bmp, make it a wallpaper, then hide all of the icons, wait for the victim to ask why when they click on anything nothing happens pail in comparison doesn't it?
I think of Buzz Aldrin setting a busted off circuit breaker with a felt-tip pen that happened to be the right diameter so that Apollo XI could get off the moon.
My uncle told of a legend where during a launch preparations the computer asked for a cookie. The operator asked his supervisor what to do, and was told to give the computer a cookie. As the legend goes, that worked and they launched the rocket.
Their they're doing there hair.
Once my company server has the great BSOD. It was the email server, so naturally all email traffic was stop. The problem was that the server keeps rebooting after the BSOD was displayed for less than one second, too fast for me to read it. Unable to get exactly what the hell was going on, I stared onto the keep-rebooting-flashing blue screen for several agonizing minutes until I finally took out my handphone with a camera in it and record the flashing screen. In the resulting movie I skip frame by frame until I can get a bit fuzzy but clear view of the BSOD. Turns out that one backup driver has to be removed, I installed it and reboot the server. The mail server is working again and I silently praise myself.
I have once fixed a situation where there was display output needed for a production machine that was built from normal desktop parts and only had 1 16x PCI-e and 2 x 1x PCI-e. Raid card took the 16x slot so I did what any responsible sysadmin would do to get a 16x PCI-e graphics card to fit into a 1x slot: Cut some excess parts away from the card to fit it to the slot as PCI-e works regardless of if you are using a 1x or a 16x slot and cutting the motherboard didnt seem like a good idea. Quick test with a test board to see that the newly doctored card does not fry everything and then install it to the production machine.
lesson: you can make a round peg to go into a square hole if you have a hacksaw.
LGA existed well before Intel put it on their processors. Look at the processor in a HP9845 for instance...
Two weeks ago, one Sony printer started to drop packets (5-10% - nothing fancy), and generally, refused to print films (35x43cm). It is connected to a Cisco switch, same as about 20 other devices that work fine, thank you for asking. Interestingly, printer's web page works fine, printer reports all test are o.k. but switch keeps bringing errors and no films.
No changes in settings or connections were made to printer or switch, but it simply stopped working.
.
The switch costs about $3,000 and printer about $10,000. Bummer.
.
After IT guys combed through this problem, printer was disconnected, and sony service contacted. No luck with them either.
Then, one MD needed an hardcopy baldly, and tried to connect printer back to ethernet socket, but could not find UTP cables of sufficient length. So he took $10 SOHO switch, two UTP cables and connected printer back to network. ...you guessed it.. it works fine now.
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
Back in the 1990-s my friend was working at one institution where they had 3T mass spectrometer. The machine developed a error and it would work for two-three weeks, and then it would die. Each servicing was taking tens of thousands of dollars, so my friend started tearing the machine apart one day.
.
After his boss went nuts, and basically, everybody left the building trying to get him of campus, he discovered that one lens for laser was of incorrect type, went to optics shop, bought new one for $1, replaced the lens, and repaired the machine. Original lens was too large and it would simply flip out of the socket after even a gentle nudge.
.
Company that made this device it is long gone now, but this machine still works without even single quenching.
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
It's got nothing to do with what the wire can handle. A constant draw generates heat which builds in the cables. They get heat soak and as temps go up, so does resistance which generates more heat. That heat soak becomes a problem since copper's melting point is much higher than the rubber insulation surrounding it. If the rubber insulation melts, it can not only catch fire but it exposes the live cables with high current running through them to shorting out. A 90 amp short makes for an impressive and very dangerous show.
This is why they make thicker wires. They can handle more current before heating up to dangerous levels, otherwise we'd all be running inexpensive 16 gauge with high-temp insulation.
The one you linked to is broken. It only shows about 20% of the article.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
I was working at the HQ of a famous (but nameless) speaker manufacturer who's engineering department insisted that all traffic went through their 5baseT coax-Ethernet. The data center was on one side and the users (sales and marketing) on the other. All the equipment was in the same room. We had gigabit Ethernet in our side (the data center) and so did marketing on their side. The old 5 megabit coax-Ethernet was killing performance so when the manager of the data center (an engineer) wasn't looking I (I was a contractor working for IT which was distinct from engineering - go figure) quietly patched the system around the coax. Everyone thought I was brilliant and "Engineering" was never wiser for it.
Maybe he would, but if you got all excited about his ideas and said "hey this guy should be in charge, we should make his ideas into law" and tried to overthrow the government and make him your new leader, he would say something weird like "my kingdom is not of this world, if it were, my followers would fight" and disappear into a crowd of people, only to reappear in the next town over.
Having had the need to serially connect to a bricked wifi router and a 3.3V level serial USB cable ready - but with undisclosed layout - I used a glass of salt water and the resulting amount of electrolysis-generated gas to find TX, RX, and GND.
Now call me Angus!