Posts by Ikoth

Dial "m" for Radar

A long time ago I worked for an IBM reseller who counted a local council as one of their customers. The Service Department took a call from a user at a newly opened office, complaining about a spurious letter “m” that kept popping up every few seconds in the middle of their terminal emulator session. An Engineer was duly dispatched and confirmed the problem. Checking the IRMA config, drivers and Token Ring cable didn’t solve the problem. A replacement PC was ordered and installed – no improvement. The senior Engineer was called in who repeated all the tests, with identical results. While sitting at the problem PC, staring through the window and pondering his next move, he noticed that across the field behind the office, he could see the radar tower of the nearby airport. After a few seconds he realised that the appearance of the rogue screen character coincided with the rotating radar dish facing the office. Some lateral thinking later, a metal sheet was procured from somewhere and placed between the system unit and the monitor. Problem fixed.

Bullsh*t Bingo Winner?

Oh please:

"We're applying targeted mitigations to a subset of affected infrastructure and validating that it has mitigated impact. We're also making traffic optimization efforts to alleviate user impact and expedite recovery."

Is the excuse department on piece rates? Lookout chaps, ChatGPT is coming for you.

Operator Purée

In the dim & distant, I I worked for a mid sized finance house, where all the important stuff ran on IBM Kit. As part of a major system upgrade, the company acquired a swanky new tape robot backup system.

This consisted of an eight sided cylinder, about 10 foot tall lined on the inside with hundreds of tape racks and a forgotten number of drive units. Mounted in the middle of the cylinder was a robotic arm that moved the tapes around, with impressive speed & dexterity. I was part of the WinTel team and had nothing to do with the mainframe stuff, ever. But management decreed that everyone who ever needed to set foot in the computer room HAD to attend mandatory safety training on the new tape library. And very entertaining it was too.

The silo included a half height access door, which could be used to enter the library for maintenance. We were all told about the procedures required to access the insides of the beast, which included removing your tie (finance house), in case it got snagged on anything. But the really interesting topic explained what to do in the theoretically impossible situation of the library waking up, while someone was inside the machine. This basically amounted to standing upright and keeping still, overriding the natural instinct to duck out the way as the arm started moving. The reason, we were told, is that the arm did a slow speed, 360 degree rotation, in both directions, while changing heights, checking for obstructions. If it touched anything during these safety sweeps, power would immediately be cut. The description of the potential consequences of avoiding the arm during its obstruction check have stayed with me for over 25 years - "no one wants the job of cleaning out operator purée. Oh and you'll invalidate your warranty too.."

It's all the same, innit?

In the early 2000's I did a stint as a "Systems Engineer" for a large reseller / integrator. We SEs were a chargeable resource with the responsibility of installing & configuring whatever the sales guy could flog. In other organisations we'd have had the title "Consultant", but I guess that title would have commanded a higher salary.

At the time, their sales crew were the very definition of "coin operated" - if there was cash on offer they were all over it like a rash, and obviously selling professional services was very lucrative indeed. The SEs were allocated to a particular sales region with a mix of abilities and specialisms with each team. With a few notable exceptions, most of the sales guys didn't have a clue about what they were selling - one had been selling fleet verhicles in his previous job.

This caused no end of problems as by and large they had no understanding of the skills needed to deliver a particular project. Culminating in me, a fully paid up SQL / IIS MCSE, coming back from holiday to find I'd been allocated as the tech lead on a country wide Unix / Oracle roll out. When I challenged the offending sales guy he uttered the never to be forgotten line - "it's just servers and a databases, you'll be fine".

WFH

I've been WFH since before it became trendy - for about 12 years in fact, and I never want to go back to office life.

I've managed this by taking jobs with companies that don't have a UK office. For a couple I've been a full employee with salary & benefits being handled by payroll agencies (with variable success). For the other I'm a freelancer and I take care of my own tax affairs.

I find I'm more productive WFH. I don't get embroiled in (as many) unnecessary meetings. Jumping on early calls with APAC based contacts, or late calls with those in Western US time-zones is easier without having to factor in the dreaded commute. In previous lives I worked in the centre of Manchester, which in ideal conditions, should take about 75 mins door-to-door. In the real world, I'd be looking at 2 hours each way, every damned day. I started leaving home earlier & earlier to get a head start on the traffic. Some days I was at my desk, 90 mins before start time, MaccieD breakfast in hand. Then I'd start looking at the clock from about 3pm, wondering how bad the traffic was going to be that night, what time I was likely to get home. - utterly soul destroying and my health suffered.

Now, I have time to relax in the mornings, I have a proper breakfast. Some days I'll walk the dogs at lunchtime. Some evenings I work late if calls or projects dictate, but I'm happier, healthier and more productive than I ever was working in a office.

Sweary Error

In a previous life, a guy I used to work with, had done a stint with the developer of a popular AIX accounting package. He recounted the story of being called into his manager's office to be quizzed about a problem with one of the modules he'd written. Apparently one of their important customers had called the support line after his system had thrown a fit and dumped him out to the command line, with the accompanying error message "what the fuck are you doing in here?"

He never went into details about the fallout, but as he no longer worked there, we drew our own conclusions.

Ultimate Jobsworth

Around the turn of the millennium I did a contract stint for a local authority on a project to hook up all their schools to the internet. The job was split into phases – the comms crew would hit site to install the CPE, a week or so later the cabling guys would arrive to CAT5 the building and then my team would turn up to install the (singular) Cisco switch and get some lights blinking. Another crew would follow in our wake to install the (singular) school server and back office PCs.

On one occasion me and my (staff) partner arrived at one site to find that the cabling crew hadn’t plugged network cables into the patch panel in the comms rack, where we were installing the switch. Instead, they’d just left a box of unopened cables in the corner of the room. My sidekick immediately pulled out his phone to talk to his manager about “the problem”. I literally could not believe what I was hearing. I pointed to the box of cables and mimed opening a zip-lock bag, uncoiling the cable and plugging it into the patch panel and switch. Still in deep conversation with the boss, he ignored me. So I went over to the box, picked out a cable and pulled the bag open. At this point he bellowed STOP!!!! at the top of his lungs, muttered something into his phone and thrust it into may hand. At which point I got told in no uncertain terms that I was not, under any circumstances, to plug in the patch cable, as it “was not our job” and that the cabling crew would be scheduled to go back and plug the missing cords into the patch panel.

We then had to explain the problem to the school secretary and apologise that it would be another 4 – 6 weeks before their school would be connected.

I vowed to never take another public sector contract again.

These two paragraphs summarise why Linux will never have true mainstream appeal, and I speak as an enthusiastic Mint user.

"Mint was an early adopter of the MATE desktop, as well as building its own desktop, Cinnamon – which originated as the Mint GNOME Shell Extensions, which made GNOME 3 more "traditional": taskbar, start menu, and so on. It also offers an edition with the lighter-weight Xfce desktop.

Recent versions of Xfce and MATE have both switched to Gtk3, and Cinnamon has always used it. In an attempt to reduce duplication of effort between the projects, especially the closely-related MATE (a fork of GNOME 2) and Cinnamon (a fork of GNOME 3), the Mint team develops the XApps suite – versions of the various accessory apps with traditional user interfaces: conventional title and menu bars, rather than GNOME's CSD."

It reminds me of my first attempt to install Linux, some 15(?) years ago. I was using a Thinkpad at the time, and the installation instructions started along lines of "you first need to recompile the kernel, to support the system hardware..." After a brief "WTF!?" I went back to Windows.

There is such a thing as too much choice. Especially when it comes to enticing non-technical users away from the cosseted, familiar worlds of Microsoft & Apple.

Bloody BBC

It galls me no end that the BBC spaffed a shit ton of license fee money on their Micro:bit vanity project, rather than backing the tremendous UK success that is the Raspberry Pi project.

Depending on how much time I have available, I either string them along for as long as possible, acting as THE dumbest user imaginable. Or, if time is short I either give them a blast of a personal attack alarm down the handset, or unload the vilest imaginable abuse at them. Honestly, I hold nothing back. It would make a '70s docker blush. It's so cathartic, especially if I'm having a crap day.

To Quote Marvin...

...Sounds ghastly.

In the early 2000's, I was working for a large manufacturing company and helped with their roll-out of internet for everyone – up until then it had only been available for us in the IT ivory tower.

We ran a big information campaign – email, posters, training courses on browser use, acceptable use policy, yadda yadda yadda. One of the things we stressed was that all access was logged by IT, with full details of sites, addresses, user ID, etc.

One of my tasks was to setup and manage a proxy server and produce weekly usage reports for the IT manager to peruse. Not long after we went live, a certain username and dodgy looking URL kept appearing in the reports. Being a conscientious sort, I followed the link and landed on a hardcore BDSM site.

I showed my boss the site and the username of the frequenter. He decided, as it was still early days, to send out an email to all staff, reminding them that IT were logging ALL their online activity. No change, the same name and site kept coming up in the reports. The boss sent an email directly to the culprit, warning of consequences if the activity continued. It did.

In a final attempt to fix the problem, before getting HR involved, my boss arranged a face-to-face meeting with the user. He never disclosed the full details of their conversation, but when he returned from the meeting, me and the rest of the team were genuinely concerned for his health – his face was bright red and he was covered in sweat.

Apparently, the drop-dead-gorgeous, part time model, marketing assistant wasn’t phased in the slightest about her browsing habits being subject to scrutiny, and in fact complained that it wasn’t fair for her “stress relieving” internet activity to be restricted.

Shortly afterwards I was tasked with finding a more sophisticated proxy solution that could actually block sites, based on content.

Water Cooled Racks? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

A few jobs ago I worked for a UK company that had a site in Sweden, on the campus of a university. Being Swedes, they were keen on environmental stuff and the campus had a fancy, experimental, heating & ventilation infrastructure. The system was comprised of water filled pipes running everywhere to move heat from where it wasn't needed, to where it was. This included the server room in our leased building. The uni's facilities people connected all their plumbing and heat exchangers into special server racks they'd had designed for water cooling. Everything worked well for about 18 months or so, until the day there was a leak elsewhere on campus. We lost several Proliants and a storage array. The liability arguments were still raging when I left the company.

"Resolve" is an interesting word

“JBS USA’s ability to quickly resolve the issues resulting from the attack was due to its cybersecurity protocols, redundant systems and encrypted backup servers,”

Or, to put it another way, "we paid the f***ers off"

Domino

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time...

From what I recall of my Lotus Notes days, it was a mediocre email server mated with an even more mediocre database. Maybe things have improved in the intervening, ummm, decades? I do love these Reg stories that remind me how bloody old I am. As if the aching joints and increasingly fuzzy memory aren't enough. Now, where are my glasses?

Auditing?

Sounds like the bank needed to up their logging / auditing game.

Back in the mists of time, my first IT job was with an IBM reseller. One day I was assigned to go fit a memory upgrade in a PC/AT machine used by a local engineering company. The machine was installed in the design office, an open-plan room filled with 30 or more drafting boards. Because this was the late 80's smoking in the office was still a thing, and apparently all the draughtsmen were chain smokers (the constant blue haze in the air was a big clue as well).

I opened up the PC and literally could not see a single component on the motherboard. The thing was completely smothered in several cm of grey dust which I assumed was years of accumulated fag ash and congealed smoke. It was unbelievably vile. I carted the thing out to the carpark and blasted it with two full cans of "spray-air" to clear the crud out so I could install the upgrade.

Life Lesson

"Never volunteer for anything" - the most valuable lesson we learn on the journey from PFY to greybeard.

IBM Ashtray

Back in the mists of time, my first IT job was with an IBM reseller. One day I was assigned to go fit a memory upgrade in a PC/AT machine used by a local engineering company. The machine was installed in the design office, an open-plan room filled with 30 or more drafting boards. Because this was the late 80's smoking in the office was still a thing, and apparently all the draughtsmen were chain smokers (the constant blue haze in the air was a big clue as well).

I opened up the PC and literally could not see a single component on the motherboard. The thing was completely smothered in several cm of grey dust which I assumed was years of accumulated fag ash and congealed smoke. It was unbelievably vile. I carted the thing out to the carpark and blasted it with two full cans of "spray-air" to clear the crud out so I could install the upgrade.

TUBE

Given the utter arse that was TLJ, I thought Abrams had a good stab at fixing things. It tried too hard to tie lose ends up and was overburdened with the fake emotional guff that mars so many current films. But overall, I enjoyed it.

I was a Systems Engineer for a local IBM reseller at around this time. The company made TONS of money performing "miracles" with PCTools, Norton Utilities and Maynard parallel port tape drives.

These were the days when an SE's competence was measured by 1) who had the most Microchannel Adapter Description Files in his recovery toolkit (the most obscure, the better), and 2) who could cram the most drivers into Himem.sys and autoexec.bat. It was always tricky finding the space to get the drivers for the Token Ring NIC, external CD ROM, and the aforementioned Maynard units to load.

Now, where's my pipe & slippers...

Back in the mists of time, I worked for a very large IT services & hardware company. One of the grey beard sysops I was friendly with relayed the following tale to me. I have no idea if its true, but it sounds feasible.

The company worked very closely with the "Computer Department" of the local Uni and a couple of times a year, it held guided tours around their Ops Centre for groups of students

During one of these tours, the group of fresh faced little darlings were being herded out of the machine room, when one of them pointed to the big red emergency stop button by the door and shouted over the noise of fans, printers and whirring disk packs, "what's this for?" Unfortunately, he misjudged his arm length and / or the distance to the button, and depressed it. As in the original story, the button was of the "release to break" type. As coincidence would have it, the tour guide was standing right next to the phantom finger flinger and immediately smashed his hand down over the student's screaming "Don't move!!!"

According to the legend, the lad had to stand in place, holding the button closed for well over an hour while the Ops Team frantically arranged for workloads to be shifted and large beige boxes to by gracefully shutdown. Unsurprisingly, the button was fitted with a perspex cover shortly afterwards.

I spent the late 90’s in the infrastructure team of a large finance house. I made (in)appropriate use of their fairly impressive internet pipe to feed my Usenet binaries habit – I was on dial up at home. The bank’s security team were still on the learning curve of how to deal with these “newfangled PCs” – until then everything had been run on a mainframe and a couple of minis.

As the security team skilled up, they started making changes to firewall policies and started blocking unapproved ports, which of course included Usenet’s 119. That was the end of my bandwidth pilfering, until a few weeks later when I received an email from my premium Usenet provider, announcing the availability of their service over port 80!

Downloading resumed and all was well for another couple of months. Until the day the Security Manager stopped at my desk and said quietly – “Very bloody clever. Now knock it off…” and walked away. I was grateful for how he handled it, so immediately curtailed my leeching. I found out later that they’d started analysing the firewall logs and my activities stood out a mile.

At around the same time, I was working for a large manufacturing company and helped with their roll-out of internet for everyone – up until then it had only been available for us in the IT ivory tower.

We ran a big information campaign – email, posters, training courses on browser use, acceptable use policy, yadda yadda yadda. One of the things we stressed was that all access was logged by IT, with full details of sites, addresses, user ID, etc.

One of my tasks was to setup and manage a proxy server and produce weekly usage reports for the IT manager to peruse. Not long after we went live, a certain username and dodgy looking URL kept appearing in the reports. Being a conscientious sort, I followed the link and landed on a hardcore BDSM site.

I showed my boss the site and the username of the frequenter. He decided, as it was still early days, to send out an email to all staff, reminding them that IT were logging ALL their online activity. No change, the same name and site kept coming up in the reports. The boss sent an email directly to the culprit, warning of consequences if the activity continued. It did.

In a final attempt to fix the problem, before getting HR involved, my boss arranged a face-to-face meeting with the user. He never disclosed the details of their conversation, but when he returned from the meeting, me and the rest of the team were genuinely concerned for his health – his face was bright red and he was covered in sweat.

Apparently, the drop-dead-gorgeous, part time model, marketing assistant wasn’t phased in the slightest about her browsing habits being subject to scrutiny, and in fact complained that it wasn’t fair for her “stress relieving” internet activity to be restricted.

Shortly afterwards I was tasked with finding a more sophisticated proxy solution that could actually block sites, based on content.

TUBE

Once took a call from a user who's PC was showing a "301 Error" on boot (it was a long time ago).

I told her that usually meant there was a problem with her keyboard. To which she exclaimed "My Keyboard!!! It's gone!!!" and promptly hung up.

Turns out one of her colleagues had "borrowed" the keyboard and she hadn't noticed in her early morning, pre-coffee daze.

Priorities

There are lengthy stretches of the West Coast Main Line with no signal of any kind, Yep, that's right, one of the main UK North - South rail lines has patchy phone coverage. It's not like we're even a big country.

I'd sooner see that fixed before the 5G bun fight starts.

Drones replace models on Dolce & Gabbana catwalk

Good.

Shame

P0rnhu8 will be so upset they've fixed the system:

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/after-missile-alert-confirmed-as-false-alarm-this-is-how-hawaii-celebrated/

TUBE

One beloved of junior doctors, and when possible administered to attractive young ladies -

Totally Unnecessary Breast Examination.

We moved house last October, to an area where all six cabinets on the local exchange have FTTC. Apart from the one serving the new house. Openreach's "When can I get fibre" page said the cab was to get FTTP "within six months". I thought that acceptable and so we moved.

Over the succeeding months, my daily checks saw the wait time come down to four, then three months. In May, we even had BT contractors in the road pulling the fibre into the ducts. Then, in July the availability checker jumped back up to "December 2017".

In frustration I contacted the local MP who promised to take the issue up with BT. Several weeks later he replied, forwarding BT's response which was just a regurgitation of the information I had included in my complaint, and a closing paragraph which amounted to "screw you, we'll finish the job when we're ready".

It comes to something when the local MP can't even get a meaningful response out of these b4$t4rd5.

Having also suffered extensively at BT / OpenReach's hands when I used to manage a 15 site, MPLS network, I am no longer able to articulate how much I loathe and despise them and their de facto infrastructure monopoly. I sincerely hope they're first against the wall, come the glorious day.

Depending on my disposition on the particular day, I either unload a torrent of abuse that would make Malcolm Tucker blush - I find it very cathartic; or I explain that I don't have a computer, or a phone or electricity as I live in a tent. In a field.

A variation on the last one, for the "you had an accident" scumbags, is to agree that it was indeed a very serious accident, in which I died. The longest period of confused silence before they hang up is currently seven seconds.

The site is literally 1/3 of a mile "over the border" into wales, less than five miles from the city of Chester, and three and a half miles from the massive Airbus factory at Hawarden. And if that's still too parochial for you, its 12 miles from the center of Liverpool.

The western side of the site has been sold & cleared, but the eastern side is still there. It looks like a set from 28 Days Later and needs some tlc from an industrial sized strimmer, but there are plenty of offices, sheds and other assorted buildings there. I drive past it most days.

"thinkfluencer" ?

Oh @*%$ off!