Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tales of IT Idiocy

Posted by samzenpus on from the was-that-wrong? dept.

snydeq writes "IT fight club, dirty dev data, meatball sandwiches — InfoWorld offers nine more tales of brain fail beyond belief. 'You'd think we'd run out of them, but technology simply hasn't advanced enough to take boneheaded users out of the daily equation that is the IT admin's life. Whether it's clueless users, evil admins, or just completely bad luck, Mr. Murphy has the IT department pinned in his sights — and there's no escaping the heartache, headaches, hassles, and hilarity of cluelessness run amok.'"

5 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Tales of Dumb IT by mwfischer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Reading InfoWorld is about number 6 or so.

  2. Reminds me of one of our clients. by Chas · · Score: 4, Funny

    They were running an older CRM version that still used direct file access.

    Because of this, their backup solution (for which they hadn't bought the live file backup module) would fail every night due to someone in the office leaving the program open.

    So they "fixed" it.

    6 months down the road they had a server crash and lost everything.

    So we're like "Okay, let's roll to backups. There's still data loss, but minimal, a day or so."

    Uh. What backups?

    Their "fix" had consisted of simply deleting that CRM program's directory from the backups (see: NOT BACKING IT UP) so their backup reports were all nice and pretty.

    The latest real backup this company had was over 6 months old.

    The company that was in place to handle their IT was out on the curb with smoking ears and a boot-print on the ass shortly afterward.

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
  3. Re:Sometimes it's the little things by VortexCortex · · Score: 5, Funny

    And little things can become very big (in your mind) if you obsess over them long enough.

    Wait, what? I don't think it's gotten any longer.

  4. Re:What about clueless admins? by ae1294 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I can understand being ignorant of ntpd, but not even being aware of cron is criminal.

    Whoa, I just looked up cron.. My god you just saved my job man! I couldn't get my sleep script to run in the background right... Jesus I've spent 4 weeks on this job and now I can move on to the next. Getting every system to default saving files to root:root from smb shares!

    Thanks for saving me...

  5. Re:Sometimes it's the little things by sam_nead · · Score: 4, Funny

    You have to dry it out first, but yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_dung#Uses