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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."
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.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
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.
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?
http://michaelsmith.id.au