Reply to post:

Millennium Buggery: When things that shouldn't be shut down, shut down

Wzrd1 Silver badge

> "Hang on," said Frank, and, because he had the terminal window open at the time, he typed in the command to disable OSPF... on a router to which he was connected remotely.

When working at a US military base abroad, our higher echelon was the only level permitted to work on our firewall or tier 1 router. With predictable results, twice per year.

Sudden service outage.

Telephone rings, sheepish voice from a two hour flight away notifying us that he banjaxed the router/firewall configuration and he'd walk us through the steps to break into the otherwise centrally (from their site, of course) access controlled setup.

No need, with having to do this every other quarter, we could break into our own equipment drunk, sleep deprived and kicked in the head by a camel. Which is precisely what we thought of the intelligence of the caller.

Besides, we already hard coded our logons into the equipment the first time, they entirely missed that fact and we fixed the idiot's error far faster than it would have taken to bypass loading the configuration. We also had taken the liberty of connecting a console cable up to a well secured, highly specific server that those idiots lacked access to and never had to even bother going near the service room.

Although, we were seriously tempted to block all traffic on SSH from their network segment...

Instead, I made certain to mention the incident in our theater wide information security teleconference and our weekly Command and Staff meeting, so that the General got a good chuckle. Along with, well, everyone that was on the line. Some, coworkers of said rocket scientist.

All remembered, before I went into information assurance, I was our installation's BOFH.

As for The Princess clients, we've all had them. All suddenly have a Special Project that absolutely cannot be interrupted for even a microsecond, when it comes time for an assigned service outage for maintenance and patching.

"Absolutely impossible for this quarter, we're in the midst of a major effort here and are busy 24/7!"

"Oh? Well, your services and systems were patched yesterday, while the lot of you were at lunch and your systems globally idle. That's why your systems weren't locked, but had to be logged into when you came back from lunch."

Only had to intervene with three systems and extend the service timeout a bit on the server, as the "enhancement" made the blasted thing a bit slow on starting.

At least, that's what my script e-mailed me to report after patching and our hell desk never had so much as a blip from The Princesses.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon