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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.
So a company I worked for had about 80 people in manufacturing and design engineering in one building. Some electrical contractors were doing upgrades to the manufacturing area -- pretty normal. But two guys on the crew wanted to make sure the line they were working on was dead, so they went to the main breaker panel and started systematically flipping breakers to identify their circuit. They had worked their way through all the circuits powering the engineering workstations, crashing Unix machines right and left, and had started on the circuits powering the PC board stuffing robots, etc., in the manufacturing area. The breaker panel was visible in that area, so one of the manufacturing managers figured out what was happening and put a stop to it. Still, it cost us in engineering most of a day to recover.
The manufacturing VP was a cool guy... he immediately walked the whole crew out the front door and called their boss to report their firing from the job... and said the tools they left behind would be sent to them. A lucky friend of mine got to pour all their tools randomly into a moderate-sized crate and wheel it to the loading dock.
Ohh... as to your naming contest... my contribution: Rita Reboot