Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday fumble through memories of jobs on which things didn't go as planned. Or sometimes went in ways it's not possible to plan. This week, meet “Jean” who in the early noughties scored a gig as “a fairly new-to-the-game support engineer for a shifter of overpriced household furniture.” Jean …

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1. 1. Friday 15th July 2016 17:28 GMT Stoneshop
    
    Re: Start with the basics...
    
    I'll think you'll find it's carrier sense (multiple access with collision detection)
    
    Nope. There's a lot of connections that aren't, and those can be way more requiring of dark rituals (goats, black candles and pentagrams in the case of SCSI, for instance)
    
    3 0 Reply
    1. Friday 15th July 2016 19:16 GMT Down not across
      
      Re: Start with the basics...
      
      Nope. There's a lot of connections that aren't, and those can be way more requiring of dark rituals (goats, black candles and pentagrams in the case of SCSI, for instance)
      
      Surprisingly (or maybe not) large proportion of SCSI issues are down to termination (or lack of it). Often due to some people not understanding that the bus needs to terminated. Particularly mixing narrow and wide SCSI can easily trip people up.
      
      Then there are the devices with internal/auto termination that doesn't. Been caught up by that enough times that I get very suspicious when no external terminator is present. Likewise I prefer active terminators to passive ones given a choice.
      
      4 0 Reply
      1. Friday 15th July 2016 19:58 GMT Solmyr ibn Wali Barad
        
        Re: Start with the basics...
        
        "Likewise I prefer active terminators to passive ones given a choice."
        
        Considering that only SCSI-1 allowed passive termination, it wasn't a choice. Having a set of active terminators in the backpack was a must.
        
        0 0 Reply
      2. Monday 18th July 2016 08:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
        
        Re: Start with the basics...
        
        Years ago, had a PC with an internal SCSI drive. Worked fine with Win98 (said it was years ago!) A few months later, tried to upgrade to NT4. Couldn't even install it! However, once I installed the missing resistor-pack terminator thingy on the drive it worked...
        
        2 0 Reply
    2. Saturday 16th July 2016 11:15 GMT Wensleydale Cheese
      
      SCSI and goats
      
      "SCSI is NOT magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then."
      
      -- John Woods
      
      14 0 Reply
2. Friday 15th July 2016 14:23 GMT apraetor
  
  Re: Start with the basics...
  
  Definitely. Particularly if you have recently been mucking about with connectors, installing new disks or cables.
  
  4 0 Reply
3. Friday 15th July 2016 17:13 GMT Stoneshop
  
  Re: Start with the basics...
  
  Always start with the physical layer, in the absence of any other clues. It's common sense, innit?
  
  Which, four times out of five, is a physical entity calling itself 'engineer' or 'technician'.
  
  2 0 Reply
4. Saturday 16th July 2016 11:33 GMT DainB
  
  Re: Start with the basics...
  
  95% of issues I've seen in datacenters were related to Layer 0 of OSI model.
  
  Which is either the person who did Layer 1 cabling or the one who configured switches.
  
  2 0 Reply
  1. Monday 18th July 2016 10:30 GMT Matt Bryant
    
    Re: DainB Re: Start with the basics...
    
    "....cabling....." I'd suggest that's because cabling is usually done on the lowest bid because manglement don't realise that there is a vast difference in quality between cable manufacturers, let alone cable layers. The other contributor to such issues can be no rack cabling standards in use.
    
    1 0 Reply
Friday 15th July 2016 08:38 GMT Anonymous Coward

Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture

"He told us that if we don’t have a database backup by the end of the third night, the underwriters for the company insurance would pull our cover (including employer's liability) essentially putting the company out of business".

I've never heard of such a thing, do you have a link to the text of such a policy? I mean normally senior management are totally disinterested in the intricacies of IT backup maintenance. In fact most backup media out there are unrecoverable. Which won't be discovered until they have a major disaster.

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1. Friday 15th July 2016 08:55 GMT Ol'Peculier
  
  Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
  
  Agreed. Why would you even tell your insurers you had a backup issue?
  
  5 0 Reply
  1. Friday 15th July 2016 12:45 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
    
    Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
    
    "Agreed. Why would you even tell your insurers you had a backup issue?"
    
    Well because if your trying to claim for "business losses due to losing all my data" then you'd have to tell them that, no ? Oh wait you mean Lie . i gotcha .
    
    Yessir - we did have a backup but the burglars stole that as well.....
    
    6 0 Reply
  2. Friday 15th July 2016 12:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
    
    As the originator of the story, I am indeed "Jean", I can tell you that when a company is putting something like £1m (Sterling) into a 6 month project that will transform their underlying data backbone, processes etc, then the beancounters and directors all, will take the quite sensible risk mitigation strategy of taking out Project Insurance to cover any eventualities. Of course, going through your existing supplier to get a better deal is good for the beancounter.
    
    Add to this the fact that the head beancounter * was a whiny bitch, and a director of the company to boot, I'm sure the phrase due dilligence would probably be his mantra.
    
    Anyway, since this took place in the middle of the project to migrate every single remote server and their databases into the head office "datacenter", the DB backups were of paramount importance. ,
    
    Anon to protect my identity and the identity of the shoddy furniture shifters.
    
    * The head beancounter once wanted to edit a few pictures he took on his digital camera, so bought a Photoshop to do it.
    
    13 0 Reply
    1. Friday 15th July 2016 22:03 GMT Adrian 4
      
      Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
      
      Shoddy furniture shifters ?
      
      How could it be anyone but MFI ?
      
      1 0 Reply
    2. Friday 15th July 2016 22:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
      
      Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
      
      > As the originator of the story, I am indeed "Jean"
      
      Three days to migrate a data center and you brought in on the first day? Sounds like the place was being run under what I call 'crisis management'. That is the staff being continually kept in the dark, senior management engage in information hiding and projects being undertaken at the very last minute under the direct supervision of the senior clueless CIO, who only got the job cause he went to college with the owner. If so - then if you ever come across such a business in the future - run like hell.
      
      3 0 Reply
    3. Saturday 16th July 2016 12:34 GMT J. R. Hartley
      
      Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
      
      I'm Jean, and so's my wife.
      
      3 1 Reply
      1. Monday 18th July 2016 01:44 GMT Myvekk
        
        Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
        
        But are you Jean or Gene?
        
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(TV_series)
        
        1 0 Reply
2. Friday 15th July 2016 09:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
  
  Not 'disinterested', should be uninterested, or more truthfully, totally ignorant about IT. Disinterested means impartial.
  
  14 0 Reply
3. Friday 15th July 2016 09:55 GMT Jan 0
  
  Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
  
  @Walter Bishop
  
  You don't for a moment think that an accountant might exaggerate to pile the pressure on? Oh wait, are _you_ an accountant?
  
  11 0 Reply
4. Friday 15th July 2016 10:15 GMT Chris King
  
  Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
  
  "He told us that if we don’t have a database backup by the end of the third night, the underwriters for the company insurance would pull our cover (including employer's liability) essentially putting the company out of business".
  
  If the insurers are putting in clauses like that, then your bean-counters probably cheaped out on the policy and accepted such exclusions to keep the premiums down.
  
  20 0 Reply
  1. Friday 15th July 2016 11:26 GMT Rich 11
    
    Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
    
    Which would explain why the bean-counter was getting twitchy and piling the pressure onto someone else.
    
    17 0 Reply
    1. Friday 15th July 2016 13:15 GMT Chris King
      
      Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
      
      "Which would explain why the bean-counter was getting twitchy and piling the pressure onto someone else".
      
      But three days ? How did they cope with things like Christmas, unless they paid someone to come in and perform/check backups ?!
      
      1 0 Reply
      1. Friday 15th July 2016 15:06 GMT Dave 126
        
        Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
        
        I remember a magazine in the nineties had a frebie on the cover: a mouseball-sized textured sphere with a hexagonal shaft.
        
        Yep, it was actually a tool for cleaning the gunk off the rollers inside mice with a power drill.
        
        Urgh, the horror of mechanical mice!
        
        6 0 Reply
        
        Friday 15th July 2016 15:25 GMT earl grey
        
        Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
        
        mechanical mice
        
        Yeah, and don't forget to clean your mouse balls. Nothing worse.
        
        2 0 Reply
        
        Saturday 16th July 2016 04:05 GMT MrDamage
        
        Mechanical Mice
        
        Always great fun when you open them up, cut the tracks on the pcb, and rewire it, swapping the X and Y axis.
        
        Had half a dozen rigged like that to deal with users who had to be taught a lesson that didn't warrant the cattleprod.
        
        3 0 Reply
        
        Saturday 16th July 2016 12:35 GMT J. R. Hartley
        
        Re: Mechanical Mice
        
        How very cunty. I like it.
        
        0 1 Reply
      2. Monday 18th July 2016 10:02 GMT Alan Brown
        
        Re: Backups underwriters and overpriced household furniture
        
        "How did they cope with things like Christmas, unless they paid someone to come in and perform/check backups ?!"
        
        My system does it over that period, tells me that it's suceeded and sends distress calls if anything goes wrong.
        
        Christmas is easy.
        
        1 0 Reply
Friday 15th July 2016 09:02 GMT Anonymous Coward

When I was in sixth form, there was one computer where the mouse wasn't working.

I looked at it briefly, realised that the cleaners had unplugged it and bent a pin when re-inserting it (it was a 9 pin serial mouse).

Teacher looked over and saw I'd got the connector in my hand and asked what the problem was. He said "just get another one out of the cupboard", by which time I'd already got my multi-tool pliers out of my pocket and straightened the pin... "No, it's alright, I've fixed it already"

6 0 Reply
1. Friday 15th July 2016 09:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  A 9-pin D connector on a serial mouse has a female connector (therefore no pins to bend). Maybe you mean PS/2?
  
  8 0 Reply
  1. Friday 15th July 2016 10:11 GMT TRT
    
    Mullered the socket, probably. One of my pet bugbears was the Art & Design students stretching their legs out under the desk and catching the wires from the keyboard and mouse that inevitably ended up dangling down back there. Pulled out of the ADB socket, caught on the excitingly chunky moulded casing and to all visual inspection appeared to still be plugged in.
    
    1 0 Reply
  2. Friday 15th July 2016 12:55 GMT Chris King
    
    The mouse might have used a 9-pin D connector but connected via a proprietary card in the PC, aka "bus mouse". Most of the ones I saw back in the late 80's/early 90's were Microsoft InPort devices with round plugs, but I seem to recall some other brands used D plugs/sockets - and some of them used male/female the other way round to serial ports so they didn't get mixed up.
    
    3 0 Reply
    1. Friday 15th July 2016 13:10 GMT Anonymous Blowhard
      
      Nope, very early mice were indeed serial devices using 9-pin "D" connectors (I have a genuine Microsoft Serial Mouse in a box in the loft somewhere).
      
      6 0 Reply
    2. Friday 15th July 2016 17:49 GMT Stoneshop
      
      Bus mice
      
      Most of the ones I saw back in the late 80's/early 90's were Microsoft InPort devices with round plugs, but I seem to recall some other brands used D plugs/sockets
      
      Even the MS bus mouse card had room for a DB9 connector, but on all the ones I've seen it wasn't fitted, and no cutout in the slot bracket. There's a Siemens-branded Logitech bus mouse around that has a (male) DB9, but the matching card has gone missing. They probably switched from DB9 to mini-DIN because a bus mouse plugged into a CGA or Hercules card doesn't quite work like one would want.
      
      And the first mouse I bought was a bus mouse with a mini-DIN plug, with a bus-to-DB25 converter block and a DB25 -DB9 pigtail.
      
      1 0 Reply
  3. Friday 15th July 2016 15:40 GMT waldo kitty
    
    A 9-pin D connector on a serial mouse has a female connector (therefore no pins to bend). Maybe you mean PS/2?
    
    ummm... connectors have two pieces... a socket and a plug... the other piece of the connector in this case has pins and getting a new mouse out of the cupboard would not have fixed the problem ;)
    
    3 0 Reply
  4. Friday 15th July 2016 17:57 GMT MOV r0,r0
    
    Maybe a nine pin mini-DIN Acorn quadrature mouse lead? Unbent pins are OK until they break off inside the socket.
    
    2 0 Reply
  5. Monday 18th July 2016 12:04 GMT Alan Brown
    
    "A 9-pin D connector on a serial mouse has a female connector "
    
    A 9-pin D connector on other types of mouse had a male connector.
    
    0 0 Reply
2. Friday 15th July 2016 11:28 GMT Rich 11
  
  When I was in sixth form, there was one computer where the mouse wasn't working.
  
  When I was in sixth form, there weren't any computers!
  
  20 0 Reply
  1. Friday 15th July 2016 12:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    "When I was in sixth form, there weren't any computers!"
    
    I assume you meant there weren't any computers at your school. Unless you were in sixth form over seventy five years ago! :-)
    
    7 0 Reply
    1. Friday 15th July 2016 18:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
      
      "I assume you meant there weren't any computers at your school. Unless you were in sixth form over seventy five years ago! :-)"
      
      There were no computers at my grammar school in the late 1960s. Timetable was written by the lower 6th maths set after exams. We did have Brunswiga machines. In those days, IBM etc. did not have the same influence on school budgets that Apple seems to now.
      
      4 0 Reply
      1. Saturday 16th July 2016 11:35 GMT Wensleydale Cheese
        
        "There were no computers at my grammar school in the late 1960s"
        
        Circa 1971 someone "kindly" donated a computer that had been decommissioned from their workplace.
        
        It was delivered in bits so what could have been an exciting project was thwarted by the cost of getting it put back together again by an engineer familiar with that kit.
        
        It was still in bits a couple of years later when I left.
        
        1 0 Reply
    2. Saturday 16th July 2016 12:52 GMT Anonymous IV
      
      Malchronism
      
      > > When I was in sixth form, there weren't any computers!
      
      > I assume you meant there weren't any computers at your school. Unless you were in sixth form over seventy five years ago! :-)
      
      Seeing as the IBM PC didn't come out in the US until November 1981*, and in the UK the next year, I fear that your date calculations have a very large rounding error.
      
      * I had the edition of Byte to prove it, but it got nicked...
      
      1 1 Reply
      1. Sunday 17th July 2016 20:19 GMT Another User
        
        Re: Malchronism
        
        Commodore PET 2001 was available 1977. It had 1 KB or 4 KB of RAM. Programmable calculators are even older. 75 years ago would've been a Zuse, Hollerith/IBM, Bletchley Park system. So, yes the dates are correct.
        
        3 0 Reply
  2. Friday 15th July 2016 18:54 GMT keithpeter
    
    "When I was in sixth form, there weren't any computers!"
    
    When I was in the 6th form the computer was a very nice old gentleman called Arthur Postwick, a retired bank clerk. He computed the tide tables up the hill at the observatory.
    
    We used to chase geese at lunchtime to pull a feather to make a pen to write with.
    
    Whose next?
    
    Coat: mine's the one with the soldering iron and solder in one pocket and a set of tank cutters in the other/
    
    2 0 Reply
  3. Saturday 16th July 2016 09:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re when I was in the 6th form
    
    Actually no computers at all - 45 years ago for me.
    
    1 0 Reply
3. Saturday 16th July 2016 21:43 GMT cosmogoblin
  
  Yeah, as a teacher I can see his train of thought:
  
  "Oh, that's my break time gone while I fix it, cos there's no chance if I call IT"
  
  "Maybe I can fix it in class, I'll give the kid a spare in the meantime so he can get on with his work"
  
  "Here you - oh you've fixed it already! I wish all my students were like this..."
  
  2 0 Reply
Friday 15th July 2016 09:02 GMT Anonymous Coward

One of the worst things that ever happened to me was defective cat5e cables. I got a call saying the server I replaced is not working right what did I do. Of course not working right is not at all vague. I found out that it's not connecting to the net work. No data is being passed. The LED link light is lit. I grab another cat5e cable. Still a no go. I use my cheap cable tester and it says the cable is good.I call it in thinking it's the NIC. I get a new NIC and plug it in same problem. I'm like hmm. Now seems like good time use the fluke cable tester I just bought. Bad cat5e cable. I go to my car use a known good cable and life is peachy. So I thought. I get a call saying the server is not working right. I get there and they replaced the cable I used with their own. I asked why did they replace the cable I used. They said it didn't match the color scheme. Fair enough. I pull out the fluke tester and yep bad cable. Their jaws dropped. Turns out they got a really great deal on a lot of 10 cat 5e cable from china.

Ok so it was not so bad for me but it was for the client.

10 0 Reply
1. Friday 15th July 2016 12:11 GMT Mine's a Large One
  
  Dodgy cables
  
  Had a contract years ago putting new kit into offices around the country, where I was informed at 16:00 on a Friday afternoon, that one of the other sites had reported some new Cat5e 110-RJ45 patch cables which were incorrectly wired at the 110 end. Only the 3m ones, mind... which I knew I needed about 80 of for work going on over that weekend to install and patch new PCs.
  
  Grab a handful of cables at random, grab the tester, and a few minutes later I've about a dozen cables and each one's dodgy. Bugger. Cue several hours in a cold dark office with 120 patch cables (I did them all, just in case, and I think I only found 3 wired correctly), gently prising the fragile plastic clips on the 110 end to remove the cap, rewiring correctly and then replacing the cap. I recall leaving to drive the 130 miles home at around midnight. At least I got paid!!
  
  7 0 Reply
2. Friday 15th July 2016 13:41 GMT Kevin Johnston
  
  Not sure who this was more embarrassing for but I worked with a contractor who was a bit of a god on the systems we supported. Due to a small problem with renewing his contract he moved on and took the opportunity to try a different path by opening a shop. Knowing his IT he installed IP-based security cameras but despite testing fine on the bench they would not work when plumbed in. I went down to help him and made up some fresh cables which we initially tested out by laying them out on the floor and all worked fine. Fed the cables through and now all was perfect.
  
  Tested the original cables and they were 'less than good' so I asked where he got them......came the reply B&Q.....I went home
  
  2 0 Reply
3. Friday 15th July 2016 17:58 GMT Matt Bryant
  
  Re: AC
  
  "Cat5e"? You were spoilt, lad! In my day, we had to get up an hour before went to bed, drink a cup of hot gravel, then go work 28 hours-a-day wi' IBM Token Ring. Ah, the horrors you young uns never saw.
  
  2 0 Reply
  1. Friday 15th July 2016 19:36 GMT Down not across
    
    Re: AC
    
    "Cat5e"? You were spoilt, lad! In my day, we had to get up an hour before went to bed, drink a cup of hot gravel, then go work 28 hours-a-day wi' IBM Token Ring. Ah, the horrors you young uns never saw.
    
    I'll raise you 10BASE5 and joy of vampire taps.
    
    5 0 Reply