classic IT story - oh the memories

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pandus13

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-yep, the 90's
playing with port 25
watching the teaching assistants really excited about the email from Bil Gates/Microsoft (this was the mostly Unix/Novell department)
-checking why a printer didn't work: the local IT lab assistant (Lady doing this for 20 years) managed to shove the 25-pin parallel port cable at 180 degree. nope it didn't work. diagnose, not good at inserting shapes when a baby
-shove a 5.25 diskette, folded in half into the 1.44MB disk port. oops, nothing to read?
-server plugged into same power strip with the tea maker: guess who has priority? secondary question: why is the server down? i guess a whole department email is not important
-[censored] electrical connections (state university): yey, the joy of taking european 220V (good for rheumatic threatment)... I wonder why all the BNC network didn't work on that branch...
-superintendent of maintenance didn't talk to nobody, just done stuff. decide to paint server room. decide walls dirty (former smokers room, hooray for me the non-smoker guy). they wash the walls. i come back Monday morning to 2 servers not working....
-same guy, changes the hydronic heating system in whole building. they test it. yep, they didn't close/cap two lines. of course is in the computer labs....
-6 years later, healthcare building, different job, they are adding a floor/level. drill wholes into the ceiling, then start pouring concrete. yep, they used water to "catch better". yep water was pouring into the server room. whew , servers where in the other corner of the room.
-forever teaching assistant (all the ladies after him). has 32 characters passwords. after a long night (some bridge (the gamecard)+alcohol involved) he forgets the long password. he proceeds to change it from the root. Yep, he changed the root password, then because of the morning sickness we could not find him for 2 days.
-university computer labs. students figure it out they could not have classes if the BNC terminators disappeared or where twisted just right...

now your turn!
no personages where hurt in the making of this movie inspired by true events.(true/false)
 
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haha

When I was in high school, circa 2001/2002, we would play Yahoo games in our CAD class. There were a couple of use that could buzz through the classwork and then we'd play each other in pool. Apparently there were enough of us doing it that it put an excessive load on the schools servers and they claimed we were crashing them. Those that weren't quick enough with keyboard shortcuts got caught.

I didn't get caught.
 
I remember installing Sound Blaster cards and fighting with the various IRQ settings until it would work right. Oh, and make sure the "Turbo" button on the 386 is depressed, or Windows 3.1 will take FOREVER to load.
 
How about this: Get a call that server(s) are down (in thermal protective shutdown). When I get to the site the a/c is out in the entire 15,000 sq ft building. However the dedicated 2 ton A/C is working great in the server room so they opened the server room doors to let the cool air out and even had a fan blowing it out.
 
Originally Posted By: racer12306
Those that weren't quick enough with keyboard shortcuts got caught.

this is because you had the Qwerty keyboards..
did you try the ABCDE...Z keyboards? (change buttons...)
Boy, that Lab assistant was [censored] for a long time....
 
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
... or Windows 3.1 will take FOREVER to load.

:-P
nope:
-flooppy booting disk was scratched
-install disk 5 of 7 was corrupted
:-P
 
Originally Posted By: InhalingBullets
How about this: Get a call that server(s) are down (in thermal protective shutdown). When I get to the site the a/c is out in the entire 15,000 sq ft building. However the dedicated 2 ton A/C is working great in the server room so they opened the server room doors to let the cool air out and even had a fan blowing it out.

i had all my servers cases open because of that.
also, had a big fight with the HVAC tech because he could not get it why i need AC to work in -30C winter temperatures....
we ended up just keeping the windows open while at work....
 
Woman claimed she broke the cupholder on the computer. WHAT???? Oh, she was putting drinks in the CDROM drive!
25.gif
 
Late '90s...email is broken, go to tell the grumpy IT "expert" in the next row of cubes.
"Jeff, my email isn't working."
"Send a message to 'tools'."
"I can't because my email isn't working..."
"If you have a problem, SEND A MESSAGE TO TOOLS. I can't jump for every request you guys have."
"How do I send a message to tools with no email?"
"I'm busy, SEND A MESSAGE TO TOOLS."
I finally use somebody else's account to send him a message about MY email not working, say it was Brian's account I borrowed. No action, back to the IT guy.
"I sent a message to tools about my email not working and you didn't do anything."
"I got a message from Brian and his email is working fine, that was a waste of my time!"
"I SENT THE MESSAGE FROM BRIAN'S ACCOUNT BECAUSE MY EMAIL IS NOT WORKING!"
"How am I supposed to know that...if you have a problem, send a message to tools."


Not quite IT related, but we used Apollo workstations at my first job and the was zero security on the network...you could log in to anybody's machine and change whatever you wanted.
We had a giant man who worked in drafting, he was generally good natured but also had a volcanic temper. My cubemate had the idea to change the gain on the giant's mouse to zero and see what he did...we could see him from behind across the room from over our cube walls. I was the lookout while the dirty deed was performed...there was no reaction for several seconds and I was just about to tell my friend that it didn't work when the huge guy stood up, yelled "GOODARNIT!!!!" (or something close), and threw his mouse against the wall as hard as he could.
I ducked down and frantically whispered "Changeitbackchangeitbackchangeitback!!!" Then I peeked again and saw the big man pick up his mouse, test to see that it was working again, and then nod his head like he was thinking, "Yeah, that took care of it!!"
 
Originally Posted By: John_K
Woman claimed she broke the cupholder on the computer. WHAT???? Oh, she was putting drinks in the CDROM drive!
25.gif


I remember the one 24 hr lab at university had a bunch of old tower computer boxes with most of the blank plates knocked out of the front and people would put their mug of coffee inside to keep it warm...
It was also interesting to look down into the old computer room that the computer science building was built around in the 60's.


In my time it was pretty empty! I guess no one took Moore's law too seriously at first.
 
Originally Posted By: IndyIan
Originally Posted By: John_K
Woman claimed she broke the cupholder on the computer. WHAT???? Oh, she was putting drinks in the CDROM drive!
25.gif


I remember the one 24 hr lab at university had a bunch of old tower computer boxes with most of the blank plates knocked out of the front and people would put their mug of coffee inside to keep it warm...
It was also interesting to look down into the old computer room that the computer science building was built around in the 60's.


In my time it was pretty empty! I guess no one took Moore's law too seriously at first.


I am seeing many 3278 terminals for the operators, maybe 3400 tape drives, in the back I see some 3330 disk drives to the right and 3350 disk drives in the center.
 
Had a system we were going to field for the USAF. We sent an example suite to the testers. A Sun 630MP server running Sun OS (Solaris 1.x)

Then sent back word it failed testing.

Asked why. They said it kept going down.

So I go over to the building where the testers are located and the server is plugged into the same circuit with a space heater. When the space heater kicked on, it tripped the breaker and the server went down.

I suggested they not plug the server into the same circuit as the space heater and re-test....
 
yep space heaters had many victims....
now: brand new HP server (beauty of a rack), first plug-in and start... after 2 minutes down....
yep the circuit jumped. repeat a couple of times.
call back to HP, they need a 20amp dedicated.
all the circuits in the newly renovated building where not that....
hooray for the meeting (NOT) of the IT and construction guys.....
 
How about FORTRAN programming on the cards....
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PROGRAM program-name
IMPLICIT NONE
[specifi ti ca on-part]
[execution-part]
[subprogram
-part]
2
[subprogram
END PROGRAM program-name
 
Sitting in the computer lab which had individual partitioned stalls at college back in 1983 my friend is sitting there at an IBM PC with win 3.1 and he can't get floppy disk out of the drive bay. It was stuck and the more he tried the more aggravated he gets until after about 15 minutes and the floppy shredded and still stuck he loudly yealls " If "Doctor XXXXX wasn't such a complete [censored] I wouldn't be doing this project and wasting my whole evening here!!"

He wondered why all the guys and girls in the lab were on the floor laughing until he got up and realized Doctor XXXXX was in the stall next to him....
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Originally Posted By: Doog
back in 1983 my friend is sitting there at an IBM PC with win 3.1

Doog, I thought Win 1.0 came out in '85... and Win 3.1 in '92
are you 10 years younger? :-P
 
Got a server from a coal mining company sent to the Sun office in St Louis. They said the server kept shutting down. Since the server was in a mine in a remote location, they shipped it to us.

Unboxed it and some coal dust came out.

Powered it up and it looked like a diesel powered server. It was literally rolling coal.

The server was overheating and powering down because everything inside was covered with coal dust.

Imagine that, a server in a coal mine might get covered in coal dust.
 
Originally Posted By: pandus13
Originally Posted By: Doog
back in 1983 my friend is sitting there at an IBM PC with win 3.1

Doog, I thought Win 1.0 came out in '85... and Win 3.1 in '92
are you 10 years younger? :-P


Yeah....you are right....it was 1.0 and must have been in 1985 because it was all new. Wow am I old......
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1985.... LOL! I was 5! Got my first computer in 1988.


It was always fun at school in residence to troll for network shares and shared printers. You could have a real blast with that. Ended up running an FTP site off of somebody's desktop for months without them knowing. Had an entire IRC channel accessing it, hahhaah.

I've had similar stories to ones already shared:

- Huge laser printers plugged into the same UPS as the server. Nobody could figure out why the server kept going down
smirk.gif

- The "server" computer in a doctor's office was being used as a desktop with admin rights by one of the staff and they got it infected with all kinds of goodies as it was running absolutely no A/V
crazy2.gif


More recently:

Was asked to aide with some network issues at a local business that was experiencing some stability and connectivity problems. It looked like the Best Buy networking section exploded in there. You had daisy chained routers and cheap $5 switches galore with enough serial NAT that I'm shocked it worked at all. They had the customer guest and the two businesses all behind different cheap routers on the same network, but they weren't separate, like you'd have the customer network behind another router behind the one business network, so if anybody was smart enough to do a traceroute they'd have been able to access the company network with ease. All if the important information was kept in a "server" computer which was a desktop with a single hard drive and no backup
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When I first started working in healthcare and going into hospitals I was absolutely blown away by the amount of ad-hoc junk that gets plugged in that I'm sure the folks running the show aren't aware of. Or at least I hope they aren't. Had a workroom that had a bunch of researchers in it that had daisy-chained about 5 different cheap 5-port hubs from one network port on the far side of the room. We were moving them to a new lab and I disposed of all of it and there was a bit of a disconnect as I was trying to explain that there were sufficient ports for all of their equipment at the new location. I must have explained it five times and just gave up told them I would show them at the new site, LOL!
 
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL

- The "server" computer in a doctor's office was being used as a desktop with admin rights by one of the staff and they got it infected with all kinds of goodies as it was running absolutely no A/V
crazy2.gif



hehe... HP very old server, used as a desktop. Win NT 4.0 unpatched. moved like a 286....
cleaned up and install Win2K. it recognized all drivers (including SCSI), worked much better, had an antivirus (updated also).
Used by,...... CTO of the company. Lady who deal with computers for at least 25 years at that time....


Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
When I first started working in healthcare and going into hospitals I was absolutely blown away by the amount of ad-hoc junk that gets plugged in that I'm sure the folks running the show aren't aware of. Or at least I hope they aren't. Had a workroom that had a bunch of researchers in it that had daisy-chained about 5 different cheap 5-port hubs from one network port on the far side of the room. We were moving them to a new lab and I disposed of all of it and there was a bit of a disconnect as I was trying to explain that there were sufficient ports for all of their equipment at the new location. I must have explained it five times and just gave up told them I would show them at the new site, LOL!


I saw something similar in hospitals,clinics and universities. It was because they probably knew 06% about anything computers, and the rest was by somebody from another department who did this when it had the time with very limited resources (try convincing 75 years old profs you need anything technology, yeah right). the guy usually ended up really frustrated and left the job for a career change for more $$$ (Physics teaching assistant, very good with BSD, left for the newly minted Alcatel mobile programming division.... He also parlais francais, so he's good now)
 
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