back to article Reg reader escapes four-month lightning-struck Windows Vista farm nightmare

This week's instalment of On-Call, our regular reader-contributed tale of things that go pear-shaped in the small hours, comes from Carl who tells us that “a couple of years ago I had just been made redundant”. Carl's the kind of chap who sees opportunity in adversity, and so felt it was his time to step up from sysadmin to IT …

  1. YetAnotherLocksmith Silver badge

    But the MD knows everything and is always right

    How could you doubt the MD? He knows far more about IT than the IT professional he hired. He just doesn't have 4 minutes a day to spare fixing it all.

    Seriously, sounds like a micro business that's expanded but never grown up.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

      "Seriously, sounds like a micro business that's expanded but never grown up."

      I made the mistake of working for one of these and trying to get it to grow up. I think my persuasion skills are reasonable but over time my relationship with the MD deteriorated through constantly trying to get him out of his comfort zone. This was, after all, the man who said when we acquired our first hosted web server that he didn't see why any time needed to be allocated to manage it.

      My advice to anybody who thinks, as I did, that they can go in to one of these places and make things better is this: Run and do not look back.

      1. Fatman

        Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

        <quote>My advice to anybody who thinks, as I did, that they can go in to one of these places and make things better is this: Run and do not look back.</quote>

        And spread the word that the company suffers from Damagement Syndrome and employment there should be avoided at all costs.

    2. Roq D. Kasba

      Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

      Worked for one of those in the early 2000's, they spent big (and unwisely) on a system around 2001-ish and the company had three trading weeks left of money unless I (and a couple of others, temporarily) could force their £1M system to work and complete analysis of each dataset in under an hour. These weren't large datasets (17500 elements), but some terrible coding decisions (triple nested loops, for one) made them huge datasets. And the output was an estimate, and unverifiable. Analysis took over an hour for each dataset.

      They didn't like my initial suggestion of adding and removing a small random percentage from each element to get the 'new' despite that being every bit as verifiable as the official system . I then managed to get this spaghetti code to run in 10 minutes with some VERY crude butchery, and a few little indexes sprinkled in, stopping COM+ from linking in every single library under the sun, etc. Not proud of the result, but everyone kept their jobs, and I recruited a successor.

      They are STILL running the same codebase on the same hardware, 14 years later. The code was terrifying and needed urgent replacement back then, now it WILL fail catastrophically, soon. When it fails, it takes over a day to get it back to life, the setup is that precarious. My successor is still there, and rewrote the analysis from scratch using setwise SQL (the right tool for the job in the first place), and it takes milliseconds, but they REFUSE to implement it, or even consider it, despite the ancient system being no better than guesswork, being so completely unverifiable that it is exactly as accurate as guesswork, them having taken over competitors, pay rises, bonuses, beamers and Audi's for the 'C's, yet gambling everyone's jobs on late 90's hardware running a VB6 programme with lots of worst-practice misuse of message queuing, and a triple-nested 17500 element loop with multiple other toxic antipatterns .

      Relevance? C's see IT as purely a cost and inconvenience, and why waste money if they can spend it on new cars instead. They won't be swayed by logic or reason, don't care that they're spending money on salaries for people who are trying to save their asses down the line, who see the huge wave heading toward the shore and trying to inflate the lifeboats. IT is just a cost and one they resent. It takes a visionary C to look beyond the next bonus.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

        "but they REFUSE to implement it, or even consider it"

        Why has he got in the position of being refused. He should have just dropped it into place. Or let a crisis eventuate for which it would have been the heroic solution.

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

        "IT is just a cost and one they resent. "

        In this environment, you make sure your ass is well and truely covered(*), then get the hell out.

        (*) When that wave hits, they'll be blaming the IT guys, whether still at the company or not.

      3. Someone Else Silver badge
        Flame

        @ Roq D. Kasba -- Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

        It takes a visionary C to look beyond the next bonus

        Now, there's a concept! Unforetunately, it is just that -- a concept -- at the vast majority of American companies (especially start-ups). I don't know about Brit companies -- YMMV, but I doubt it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @ Roq D. Kasba -- But the MD knows everything and is always right

          "I don't know about Brit companies -- YMMV, but I doubt it."

          Companies exist but are rare.

          Not too far from here is a company (Dents) that proudly announces that it was founded in 1777, and is still going in the same town.

          Which do you prefer - boom and bust, or 238 years of steady jobs? I think (as with Clarks before the family lost their roots and brought it down) that it's a matter of pride in the product rather than a desire to sit on the pile of money and gloat. (I've bought stuff from small US companies like this too, and the same applies.)

          1. tim 13

            Re: @ Roq D. Kasba -- But the MD knows everything and is always right

            You live in Chesterfield ;)

      4. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

        Since it is obvious that there is a way to save money, is it not possible to implement a smaller more dynamic version of their business and shut them out of their own shop?

    3. streaky

      Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

      Seriously, sounds like a micro business that's expanded but never grown up.

      I once worked at a company that shall remain nameless - but if you made a list of the top 100 companies by revenues in the world it'd be on there - which operated this way.

      Management people are like this no matter what. Tends to be younger managers that are capable of trust, in my experience. Why's this 25 year old (I'm not 25 now but I was back then) telling me the 55 year old with all these years mgmt experience that I'm wrong? Who does he think he is? Why did we hire him? What are HR doing?

      This is why I like working for younger companies, they tend to take it on faith that they hired you for a reason.

      And yeah; new IT = less dividends, in their mind.

      1. Danny 14

        Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

        the best phrase you hear goes along the lines of:

        "but we spent 30,000 modernising the PCs 7 years ago! We don't need to spend 50,000 now! Just patch it up and make it work"

        This is when confronted with a 200gb raid 5 using 36gb scsi discs in a poweredge 2800 - single server running everything; 2k3 server, domain controller, IIS, CA (fair enough I suppose with a small business) with exchange 2003 (good god, bad enough on a DC but with CA too?) on it (apparently it had 4gb of RAM, is this actually possible? Seems so). about 50 OptiPlex 280s running XP. An excerpt from a job my brother started then left july of last year - he was unable to convince the "board" (a "board" for a company with 40 employees....) that the reason nothing was working was because there was 5gb free and exchange wont run with 5gb. Plus the previous guy had registry hacked everything to get the above "working" on one box. They wouldn't listen to even a suggestion that the individual server components should really be segmented away and that a backup solution other than a 36gb tape drive is badly needed.

        Why bother asking for an IT manager if the "board" know better?

        I remember trying to convince one employer that as well as the perfectly legal windows licences he had purchase he also needed CALs plus he needed an external connector due to the intranet he was running. It took a lot of MS documents to prove this (seriously why bother employing me to run the network if you wont trust my judgement) as he wouldn't believe the salesman.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

          "he was unable to convince the "board" (a "board" for a company with 40 employees"

          A very good thing. The second best company I ever worked for (till the owner got badly ill and things went wrong) was small but had a board, weekly board meetings, and even a non-executive director from another noncompeting company. Issues were properly discussed, decisions made, budgets allocated and costs reviewed. Over a three year period there was 200% real growth - and this was a bricks, mortar and product goes out on pallets business.

          If a small business seriously means to grow, it needs to behave like a well run big business, because then it will be designed to expand and have coping methods to deal with the expansion.

          The worst business I ever worked for started off with several investors who were directors, and gradually lost them till only one was left. It's still around, with I think one big customer, but the owner's plans of industry domination didn't exactly work out.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: But the MD knows everything and is always right

        "Why's this 25 year old (I'm not 25 now but I was back then) telling me the 55 year old with all these years mgmt experience that I'm wrong?"

        I suspect age is only one factor. Price is another. This is where consultants come into play. Jim on the shop floor knows exactly what the problem is and how to solve it but he's paid orders of magnitude less than a manager so his input is proportionately worth less. The consultant asks Jim, writes up the answer in suitable jargon & presents it along with a large bill. Because the consultant is being paid something of the same order as the manager his input is clearly worth listening to.

  2. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    woW!

    Good on you for keeping your cool. There's nothing worse than being told you're wrong by the clueless when you've tried your best to undo years of uninformed bodging.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: woW!

      It sounds like one of my previous employers.

      At the interview, they informed me that had "just" upgraded all of their machines and they wee all modern and state of the art... That was in 2010, "state of the art" turned out to be 1.8Ghz Athlon processors, with 256MB RAM, running Windows XP (not even SP1). Well, considering they were expecting the PC hardware to last as long as the plant equipment, I suppose 8 year old PCs were state of the art to them...

      I then found out that, although AV software was installed, it had never actually scanned the PCs, I found out why when I turned it on, it took 72 hours to scan a hard drive and the user couldn't really do much else but watch the hour glass until it was finished!

      But it do show something, that one of the sites was infected with Stuxnet and a few other lovelies. It took weeks to get everything clear. Especially as the plant was running 24/7 and I couldn't take the network off line! The machines were getting re-infected quicker than they could be cleaned and patched!

      The MDs notebook was the worst affected, mainly through porno sites. He didn't like that being pointed out to him and I found myself on the redundancy list...

      1. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

        Got a copy?

        Nothing malevolent or criminal of course, just a few example of what he shouldn't have been... ahh never mind.

  3. K
    Pint

    Suggestion for next time

    Build a DIY lightning rod then earth it to the MD's chair...

    1. TeeCee Gold badge

      Re: Suggestion for next time

      Better still, earth it to the mains supply feeding his beloved Win2K box, shit access control system and antiquated PCs.

      Then leave.

      That way the next incumbent might stand a chance, as it's difficult to argue that something doesn't need replacing when it's all charred and smoking.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Suggestion for next time

        ... it's difficult to argue that something doesn't need replacing when it's all charred and smoking.

        That MD sounds like he'd still argue, claiming it's just surface rust. o_O

        1. Rich 11

          Norwegian BSOD

          "That XP box isn't dead! It's just pining for the fjords..."

      2. hatti

        Re: Suggestion for next time

        An upvote for my newly installed mental image of charred and smoking IT stuff.

  4. cantankerous swineherd

    that jfdi no bullshit approach is what makes small businesses the mainstay of out great nation.

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

      I daresay!

      and as long as you are living next to a minuteman silo, all will be fine!

  5. Bill M

    CEO joins the modern world

    At an old job I was called by the CEO as his PC was not working.

    On looking at it and its vintage I asked him when it last worked and he said he reckoned a couple of years ago, but he just got his PA to do everything on her computer. I said he needed a new PC costing about £600. He said he would think about it and get back to me.

    Time passed and I forgot about until a couple of years later when called me and asked me to raise a PO for new PC for him. On installing it he confided that his children were taking the piss out of him because he could not use a PC. I allocated the most patient of my support staff to show him the basics and be at his beck and call. There was a lot of becking and calling, and a year later his son visited the office, sought me out and thanked me for helping his father join the modern world.

    1. ItsNotMe
      Facepalm

      Re: CEO joins the modern world

      I did some "at home" work about 10 years for the CEO of a huge multi-billion dollar corporation (he was the brother of a friend)...ONCE...who felt that computers were a complete waste of time and money...although they had made him obscenely wealthy. He was a complete arse.

      Oh yes...and this multi-national corporation's Accounting software was running on a Windows 3.1.1 box...and probably still is.

  6. Warm Braw

    Carl sounds a bit passive

    Did he ask no questions in the interview about the equipment budget? Did he not take a look around at the estate of machines he was supposed to be managing?

    His employer sounds positively Dickensian, so I find it hard to believe there weren't some obvious signs in advance that may have warned off a wary applicant - wraiths in chains, urchins sleeping under the desks, typists using WordPerfect 5.1, etc..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Carl sounds a bit passive

      It is very very easy to be taken in at interview by a swanky boardroom and nice carpet. Budget discussion at interview is hardly likely to be cast in stone.

      I always ask if I can go and meet the team as it's both useful to see the actual people with whom you will work and you can see the workplace environment.

      1. theModge

        Re: Carl sounds a bit passive

        also, simple age and experiance. I made any number of silly mistakes with my first employer, but I had no real idea what I was worth to them.

      2. Rich 11

        Re: Carl sounds a bit passive

        I always ask if I can go and meet the team as it's both useful to see the actual people with whom you will work and you can see the workplace environment.

        I'd take it as a bad sign if they didn't show me around the place before the interview and let me chat with a couple of people in the process. That goes for any job, let alone a management position.

    2. phuzz Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Carl sounds a bit passive

      You're assuming they won't flat out lie to get you to sign up. I've applied for jobs and been told "oh, we'll be upgrading all that soon" and the system in question still being in place when I leave years later.

  7. jason 7

    This stuff goes on all the while.

    I sometimes look after a large taxi firm. It makes a small fortune for the owner but any IT has to be begged or borrowed. If it costs more than £40 on Ebay forget it. Their whole taxi booking and accounts system resides on one old XP PC that has no backup or copies of any of the software. They wont buy new software, I've given up explaining that you just cant copy and past software from 2000 over to a new PC from 2015 (well you can if you get lucky or have major patience) and they wont even let me have the machine for an hour to at least clone the HDD so we have a copy. I also work for a taxi firm across the road that has invested tens of thousands in IT and it's a different world. They are also slowly taking over the other taxi firms. I pray it wont be long...

    Seen company bosses that boast to me that they just invested £250000 in new van fleets but when I ask for £600 to replace the 10 year old PC they all manage it from...oh no, can't do that.

    In these cases I just write up a simple "This is what's going to happen if you don't..." report and post it to the boss and the next two or three down.

    Then I simply sit back and wait for the desperate call and that £600 PC suddenly costs £1200...

    1. Sir Runcible Spoon

      Re: This stuff goes on all the while.

      You could always use a VM converter and copy the system across the network :)

    2. Fatman
      Joke

      Re: This stuff goes on all the while.

      <quote>Then I simply sit back and wait for the desperate call and that £600 PC suddenly costs £1200...</quote>

      You forgot at least ONE zero.

    3. Tom 7

      Re: This stuff goes on all the while.

      I've worked in a place where the accountant vetoed any IT budget, cancelled any pay rises and then came to work (from 200 yds away) in a new car where the wheels would have paid for all the above. He, and other management couldn't work out why moral and productivity were so low...

      It was at a time when there were about 3 IT jobs in the whole country so moving was not easy.

  8. Lee D Silver badge

    The phrase you are looking for is:

    "You hired an IT professional for a reason. You can either let him run the IT or you can second-guess him and block every move."

    Have used it. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Either they take it on board and admire your spirit, or they ignore you in which case they would have ALWAYS ignored you. At least then you can walk in the first few days of the job rather than clinging on for four months.

    There's a certain bell curve of how suspicious things look to a future employer depending on the amount of time you were at the previous. 4-6 months is the peak of the curve. If you only last that long, there was probably something wrong with *you*. If you walk early, or work there years, there was probably something wrong with *them*.

    And, sorry, but "rebuilding" the 2000 machine by poke-and-retry, and having to source original hardware at great expense? I judge *you* for that. Has their situation improved for all the work you did on that? No. Do you have backups of that stuff still? When it next goes, are they going to hope they can find another identical model of computer? Did they ever get a lightning rod? You improved nothing.

    The proposal was your saving grace and when that's rejected, yes, you walk.

    It's hard walking into an established place and making changes but it's do-or-die. I have done this at several schools (I work in school IT) and on more than one occasion told them they just need to wipe everything and start again. It was that bad. I got it working whenever I was allowed free reign, on the same hardware, no further cost, by doing things properly. In one case this meant everything down to the network switches, which were purchased as and when and used like mains extension leads to "double" connections, join in new offices to old cabinets etc. In several cases, I made an explicit "I stake my reputation that that's the problem and that it will improve if I can replace this and this" calls to my direct bosses.

    In one case, where an IT consultant had covered the period until they could hire me, I even had to go so far as a: "*I* will *personally* rebuild all those systems, but I'm *requiring* that he get the f*** out of the way and not touch a thing. If I'm right, they will work as I've been promising all along. If he gets in the way or tries to help, I need him removed. If I'm wrong, you can have my cards ready. If I'm right, please get rid of him" call. Guess what, I was still there.

    It's a tough call but everyone is so precious about their jobs that they never want to make such ultimatums. You have to think to yourself, though, what have they hired you for if not to fix their IT, and if they don't listen what are you left with? Known broken IT that you can't fix and which you'll take responsibility for. What the hell kind of job is that to be in? Get out of there fast.

    1. a_yank_lurker

      The internal politics could get one fired with first "do right or not at all" ultimatum. Many PHBs do not want to hear from a subordinate that things need to fixed and money spent before the entire house of cards falls.

      1. Mark 85

        That's usually because the PHB doesn't want to have to go up higher in the chain and admit there's problems. Problems that have been caused by the "don't bring us bad news" style of management. In that environment, everyone lies up and down the food chain. When things go to hell, it's the guy at the bottom who takes the hit and usually the dismissal. The food chain hires a new guy and after he sorts out the previous guys "errors", all is well until the next time.

  9. graeme leggett Silver badge

    disconnect/double thibk

    An employer who is not prepared to consider that hardware needs replacing after several years in use is not to be trusted.

    They are the sort who buys a computer in 2008 and expects it to keep working indefinitely while replacing their car twice in the same period.

    1. a_yank_lurker

      Re: disconnect/double thibk

      There is another problem. Most PHBs, if they can turn on a computer, have only allegedly learned one version of some package. They are scared to death if the package is upgraded that they will lose all their data. I had a boss once who did not understand data stored on a server was accessible to all users who logged in. You had to log in with the actual user on that person's computer. He also did not believe in keeping security programs up to date.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Dr Jekyll the Interviewer/Mr Hyde the employer

    Is, unfortunately, an occupational risk, and made worse once you add IT into the mix.

  11. DainB Bronze badge

    Winning formula

    is not to work for any business with less than 5K employees.

    1. Roq D. Kasba

      Re: Winning formula

      Different, not fewer problems...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Winning formula

      ....so, HP or IBM would have been a good bet then? But you wouldn't have taken that job with a startup called "Apple".

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Winning formula

        'But you wouldn't have taken that job with a startup called "Apple".'

        Well, look what the boss was like.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Winning formula

          "Well, look what the boss was like."

          Some of Apple's early employees were paid partly in shares. I believe one of the cleaners became a millionaire when they went public.

          What the early days of Microsoft, Apple etc. tell us that if the boss is in some ways dysfunctional it doesn't matter if the business is growing very fast because they have other problems than annoying the workers. Problems start when either (1) the CEO doesn't have the necessary delegation skills to allow the company to grow or (2) the company is mature and has run out of good ideas. Large companies are likely to be in the latter situation, which is why, depending on corporate structure and positioning, working for them in an engineering/technical role may not be a good idea (HR or legal on theother hand can be a gravy train.)

    3. jason 7

      Re: Winning formula

      The downside of that is the more employees, the more your actual efforts are diluted in the real world.

      You just become a smaller and smaller and ever replaceable cog in the machine.

    4. Charles Manning

      Re: Winning formula

      You'll find nobody actually works in a company with 5k employees.

      They're just employed. Productive workers? No.

  12. Stuart Castle Silver badge

    Sounds like a typical manager who knows a little about computers and thinks he knows a lot more.. I've had managers like that. Ended up doing a lot of unecessary work because of one (three months of re-entering data that he accidentally deleted with no back up).

    That company ran their "IT infrastructure" on an elderly IBM AT with several dumb terminals wired into it.

    Another company expected me to do some quite heavy duty number crunching using Lotus 123 on a 286 with 1 meg of ram while our manager had a (then) state of the art 486 with 4 meg of RAM that he only every seemed to play minesweeper on..

  13. Bob H

    I've worked for a large company that also ran things a bit like a small company. I once got bored with the cobbled together 100Mbit/s switches and just ordered a 48 port gigabit switch without asking, without following the procurement processed and just put it on the company credit card. I claimed it as a business expense and told the FD it was on a short term discount and we needed it. He grumbled about processes but he was so tight that the discount kept him quiet.

    Took me ages to convince them to get a backup server, when one of the directors lost his laptop that was the final straw and I won the battle.

  14. Terry 6 Silver badge

    Not just about IT

    The lightening rod bit gives it away.

    And in fact it's an old story, long predating IT in the workplace.

    I learnt about it from my late father - a factory manager.

    There's a certain type of usually self-made owner/MD. He has become successful, maybe due to business acumen, or maybe by being in the right business at the right time.

    And they don't like investing in anything that doesn't add revenue.

    So, if they have new orders and need a new machine they'll buy it - often without working out if the new business they're getting is secure enough or even if it is worth the capital cost. To the point that they will actually get the business into debts it can't repay.

    But if an existing machine can still be used for cranking out widgets, it can't be replaced, no matter how slow or unreliable.

    In one place my dad spent more time keeping ancient machinery creaking along than he did managing his workforce.

    In another he was quality control manager. The slow unreliable machinery meant that they were struggling to keep within delivery times, so the bosses cut corners on the work, and then wouldn't let him reject merchandise that failed to meet the standards set by the well known and fussy high street retailers that were their only major customer. So the owners fired most of the managers, working from the general manager down. Dad left before they got to him. And shortly after, of course, they lost the contract and it folded.

  15. Joerg

    " If 30-minute boot times for a Pentium 4 with 2GB of RAM can be considered an upgrade. Or even a PC."

    If any PC capable of running Windows Vista takes 30 minutes to boot into Windows Vista then the hardware must be defective in the first place.

    1. James O'Shea

      err... no. There are numerous 'Vista-ready' machines out there which will run Vista, but only very slowly. Remember Microsoft said that the min spec for Vista was 1 GB RAM and a 1 GHz single-core processor. (500 MB for Vista Starter) When Vista launched there were vast herds of machines running XP roaming the countryside. XP, according to MS, required 64 MB RAM and 233 MHz CPU. This meant that a significant number of 'Vista-ready' XP machines had CPUs in the 1 to 1.5 GHz range and had 768 MB to 1.5 GB RAM, or not quite enough to barely enough. When you add in The First Rule of Microsoft (double the min RAM and CPU if you want actual performance) this meant that, yes, it would take 30 minutes or more to boot some 'Vista-ready' machines which had been 'upgraded' to the minimum spec. (After all, MS said that it'd work with the minimum, right? Why are you spending more money than that?) I know one company which attempted to run Vista on a flock of 1.4 GHz Celerons with 1 GB RAM and were very unhappy with the results. And were even more unhappy when I told 'em that they would have to double or triple or quadruple the RAM and significantly increase the power of the CPUs if they expected an improvement. They basically told me thanks, but no thanks, and don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out, we know you're trying to pull a fast one, MS says that this is the min spec and we know it'll work. When Win 7 came out they ended up getting multi-core systems with 8 GB RAM, having struggled for years with the old ex-XP machines.

      I once did some work for another firm (I was out the door there as quickly as possible...) which was running NT4 for its servers and Win98 (and not Win98 SE) for its workstations. (Active Directory? What's that?) This was in 2007...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Or corporate IT got their hands on it and put various interesting software widgets on board to enhance security.

  16. Cincinnataroo

    We need to quarantine these businesses...

    I believe that gypsies and such used to have a system of markings for people's gates.

    Kinda said, "Mean sod who won't give you anything"

    "Will hire you but cheat you"

    "Decent sort if you're hard working and honest, heaven help you if you try to cheat or are lazy"

    "Complete clueless idiot, self confident as all get up, avoid"

    "Beware of the dog"

    ...

    There are ways to leave the marks around a business. Post its on the computer cases. Notes on the manuals. Stuff in files.

    Maybe we need to propose a few emoticons (next year?) to make it short, sweet, standard and incomprehensible to the dinosaurs.

  17. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
    Coat

    Am stuck in such a company at the moment. They have money for other things, but my manager and myself have to battle to get new IT equipment.

    We recently got in a new Mikrotik for load balancing the network outgoing to the Internet so that youtube etc won't bog the line down. Was an epic battle.

    Main server is more than 5 years old, and I have been moaning about it for a long while now, and is doing backups on a regular basis because you never know. Still battling there.

    Also wanted to go on some IT course (on company expense) but CFO still is hemming and hawing about that. I cannot afford to pay for these...

    Recently it was discovered that the heatwave we're experiencing in Sunny Souff Effrika caused the server room aircon to trip... My manager managed to get his foot in the door and got the server room a nice inverter aircon, so we can run it from UPS should it ever come to that.

    And I'm looking for another job, one where the people will value me, and listen to my suggestions.

    Been there, done that, is there a T-shirt for us sysadmins? (El Reg, here's a market segment still unexploited :p)

    Going to the pubbe for an extended brekkie hour, I need it now.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re : "is there a T-shirt for us sysadmins?"

      "I fixed your computer and all I got was this lousy T-shirt ?"

      1. MrDamage Silver badge

        Re: Re : "is there a T-shirt for us sysadmins?"

        "I'm not ignoring you, I'm just waiting for the cattleprod to finish charging."

  18. Zork-1

    My old colleague?

    "And it came with a rural setting: the office was in converted farm buildings adjacent to the owners home." ...

    And they do time and attendance, access control and CCTV stuff too! Sounds too much like my old company!!!!

    Glad to know you survived.

  19. GX5000

    Gawds I feel his pain.

    The hell we went through making sure Vista was not implemented as we were finishing WIN7 migration because our new Head of IT at our GOV Dept said it was the future and we should drop everything we were doing...ghaaaaa !! So happy Carl found a better gig. Have a Scotch on me, ya earned it.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seen a ton of this

    Gawds I feel his pain.

    The hell we went through making sure Vista was not implemented as we were finishing WIN7 migration because our new Head of IT at our GOV Dept said it was the future and we should drop everything we were doing...ghaaaaa !! So happy Carl found a better gig. Have a Scotch on me, ya earned it.

  21. Woody 1

    Been there, done that.

    Before I got out of IT I worked as an independent consultant. I was referred to a small company (10 in house and 2 on the road employees) to do some "housekeeping". When I arrived the office was also a mish-mash of PCs and OSs, email was on an in-house Exchange 5.5 running on SBS2000. The server was throwing off warnings that the UPS batteries were bad and needed replacement. I told the owner, he said "I'll take care of it." Meanwhile I got busy patching and updating the machines.

    A week later I get a call to come in to take care of a minor issue with the server backup. I come in and see the same UPS warnings, and now the tape drive was acting up, it hasn't been cleaned in years! I clean the tape drive, do a test backup and all goes well. Once again I ask the owner if he would like me to replace it? I even said that on my time I would drive to a CompUSA (that's how long ago it was) get a UPS, install it without down time because the server has redundant power supplies. "No thanks I'll take care of it!"

    Two weeks later a panicked phone call! Power went out, Exchange went down dirty and now won't start up, oh and can you bring a new UPS! Two 12 hour days of recovering Exchange and a $1500 dollar invoice later the Exchange is up and only lost a few emails which were later recovered from the email provider.

    Next project: New server! Excellent I say, spec out a full blown server with a full blown Exchange, with all needed licenses. Great the owner says! two weeks later a box arrives, I open it and lo and behold it's another Windows Small Business Server variant. The invoice was for a few hundred less than I speced out. I installed, configured it, gave them a bill, got paid, walked out and never came back.

  22. eJ2095

    Lol the joys

    I volunteer my time at a charity that gives money to various other charities/clubs

    How ever this is a 1 man operations.

    Machines are that used :-

    486dx running dos 3.1 with wordstar

    Pentium 100 running Windows 98 (1st edition)

    And he did have an old athlon machine running win xp with 256mb ram. Outlook express makes me shudder.

    As i am generous i had an old Hp dc 5750 lying about upgraded it to 4 gig ram wanged a 500gb drive and and installed win 7. Works like a charm

    Now getting moaned at as doesn't like thunderbird (Used this as i couldn't skin it with outlook express skin)

    And dragged him off IE onto firefox (That also skinned to look like IE)

    Bear in mind hes 74 years old and stuck in his ways

    1. Expectingtheworst

      Re: Lol the joys

      Watch the 74 and stuck in his ways bit.

      75 and still going ! However I am still on WIN7 but glancing over my shoulder at WIN10. Maybe/possibly next year or so ! Main OS is Yosemity as I find it far more stable and much less hassle than Windows. I do also have a WIN7 desktop and laptop for programs that don't exist for OSX.

      Before you all get on your high horses It does have its problems. but for what I do it is the better OS.

      Ran my own business (11 employees) and started with Commodore PET 8k ! upgraded to 32k dynamic RAM at about £400 in 1979/80. Ram quite a few scientific programs I wrote in BASIC.

      1984 got a BBC B which over time was upgraded and this produced better word processing than the PC till WIN3. Spread sheet and data base (Interword, Intersheet etc.) Good BASIC or alternate languages also available.

      PCs all self built through 286, 386, 486 and Pentiums. Gave up and bought after 2008. Sold the business but the computers, network and backup bits are still in my spare bedroom.

      Now act as consultant and the old stuff is still useful. Surprising what 'old' info is still useful.

      Always upgraded about 3-6 months after software came out, but avoided Millenium, used WIN2000 pro but got caught by Vista ! Still got a stand alone XP for some legacy bits.

      Computers were cheaper than any equipment we had and provided sales, technical and IT, all of which helped the business. Computers are very cheap now !!

      Started in 1972 with HP FFT analysis machines. Used on Polaris I think. Cost the company I worked for £50,000.

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