IT Support Mishaps

Burnsy2023 said:
Has anyone shutdown rather than restarted a physical server in some data centre somewhere? This is frustrating when you have no idea where the server is an how to get someone to turn it back on.
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No, but I have done shut down instead of restart when doing overnight support. Which meant a drive in to work at 2am to push the power button.

The two incidents that stick in my mind (though neither was mine thankfully) where both server room issues. The first was when a contractor accidentally hit the emergency power cut off for the server room. Cue lots of beeping as the servers switch to UPS and non critical systems start to do controlled shut downs.

The second was when someone doing renovation work in the server room accidentally hit the Inergen release button. 30 cylinders of Ingergen dumped into the server room making an almighty bang and knocking out ceiling tiles and blowing open doors. Amusing but expensive!
 
Burnsy2023 said:
Has anyone shutdown rather than restarted a physical server in some data centre somewhere? This is frustrating when you have no idea where the server is an how to get someone to turn it back on.
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Yes, and also been on the receiving end of such actions many, many times.
 
I didnt have much luck with power in my early IT career (back in the mid 90's when I was very green)

The first time I tripped the mains was when I plugged an NE2000 card into an ISA slot on a PC ... whilst it was switched on! DOH

The second time was when a few of the lads where chucking RG58 terminators around the workshop. I tried to catch one but it deflected into an open switched on PC I was working on and it shorted it out on the mobo. Power tripped again.

The third time I tripped the power was when one of my b*st*rd mates flipped the PSU to 110. I switched on. A nice loud bang followed and the power went out again.

The breaker box was up above the office. There was a time where the ladder to it was just permanently left there because of all the power outages.

Customer wise, I was once talking a customer through using Windows 3.11 over the phone and made the mistake of telling her to move the mouse around the screen. I heard the clink on glass of the mouse hitting the monitor and the customer exclaiming that she didnt know it could be used this way.
 
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Working at a place that had quite a heavy lunchtime drinking culture... came back after several pints, went to disconnect a troublesome circuit and acidentally hit "disconnect all", which was the button immediately above it, hence cutting off all the comms for that site. I had to stay rather late to get everything back to normal. My boss was alright about it, though. :o
 
Burnsy2023 said:
Has anyone shutdown rather than restarted a physical server in some data centre somewhere? This is frustrating when you have no idea where the server is an how to get someone to turn it back on.
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I worked at an ISP back in 96 and we had problems with the modem banks between 6 and 6:30 for a couple of nights.

Guess what the cleaners were unplugging to do their hoovering.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
Has anyone shutdown rather than restarted a physical server in some data centre somewhere? This is frustrating when you have no idea where the server is an how to get someone to turn it back on.
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Hrm, anywhere sensible will have all the server iLOs patched up, configured, and in DNS to get around this! :D
 
Burnsy2023 said:
No it doesn't.
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Lol! The data protection act has got to be one of the most mis-interpreted/mis-quoted acts of the 21st century. It wouldn't harm the majority of people to actually read and understand it. As you've just highlighted above, it does not necessarily cover you for things you think it does, and it also covers you for things you didn't realise.

Edit: I agree with you - on reading that back it looks like I'm telling you to read the DPA, I'm not.
 
The only huge mistake I remember making was back in 1989 when I was looking after some ICL mainframes and wrote a quick JCL script to automate cheque printing. Green was for Expense ledger, pink for Purchase ledger, unfortunately my hangover at the time caused me to reverse that and hundreds of cheques went out to customers and suppliers and every one of them was drawing money from the wrong account, my boss at the time went bat **** mental at me.
 
James J said:
I was given the job to try and retrieve photos of his kids from his dying hard drive

However, his windows vista was password protected and he supposedly didn't know the pass.

.....
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You were trying to perform data recovery from a failing disk drive by booting from it? and he only wanted the photos, not documents, music, emails, contacts etc?

Either this is bull or you are incredibly incompetent.
 
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Nitefly said:
Errrrr, error!!!!!! :eek:
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Back in the 90s, when many in IT were able to surf for "adult content" from work, a colleague of mine forwarded some rather explicit pictures on to a colleague.

Unfortunately my workmate sent it to another guy who had the same name, unfortunately the recipient was the IT VP in New York. :p He got away with a written warning. :D
 
I just rolled out a new windows 7 build to 100 users and they all had roaming profiles and a redirected my documents. It was working perfeclty. I was trying to set up a new pdf server that allows user to connect with rdp and convert pdf to word saving it in to the dm. I tried to share the my documents folders with the pdf server and it basically broke everyones my documents folders. Luckily at that stage there was about 20-30 users on the new build, i had to manually fix everyones my document folder permissions.

I knew a guy once that was working with me, a drive failed in the raid array for the exchange server, this was before it was visualized on a san. Well for some reason when he got the new drive, he took a working drive out first and then put the empy drive in and then the working one. Well the array wiped itself syncing to the blank drive. They had to recover the whole exchange from tape backup.
 
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I joined a new company about 10 years ago and was logged into a server I was building as root, but had su'd to my own account to check my mail using Pine or Elm. I sent a mail to my girlfriend, with some soppy stuff in it. For some reason even though I had used su - it sent the mail from [email protected] so when she replied it went to all my new colleagues.

Cue years of **** taking after.

Burnsy2023 said:
The worst thing is that they called almost straight after absolutely fuming. That was an uncomfortable call to say the least. Also, they didn't spend another £20k on licences that we were in negotiations for. Funny that.

Has anyone shutdown rather than restarted a physical server in some data centre somewhere? This is frustrating when you have no idea where the server is an how to get someone to turn it back on.
Click to expand...

Have done this before, the server was colocated in Frankfurt (I worked in Munich) in the offices of a telecoms company that had recently moved out and our kit was the only thing in the whole building. That was a pain getting someone to go to the building and turning it back on.

These days I assume everyone uses lights out management though.
 
James J said:
Only one I can think of doing personally was when I worked in a well known electrical retail chain on the high street and a customer brought in his PC to be fixed which he bought 9 months previous from our store. Due to me being the only person who was remotely IT savvy, I was given the job to try and retrieve photos of his kids from his dying hard drive and back them up onto an external one.

However, his windows vista was password protected and he supposedly didn't know the pass. I thought that was very odd (seen as it was supposedly his laptop) so I got past it the old fashioned way (awww yeee) and started looking at his pictures.

Was disgusted at what I found as he had an album of his kids next to multiple albums of him ****ing some woman who wasn't he wife in loads of hotel rooms by the looks of them. Videos and everything...

I refused to do the backup based on the utter filth in the same folder and subfolder as photos of his kids and we reported it and the laptop was confiscated. Customer went mental (naturally) but when we told him why, he just left in a hurry lol. Never saw him again!
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And what do you think gave you the right to do that? It's none of your business what pictures they have on there as long as it isn't something illegal like child porn or something
 
BunnyKillBot said:
You were trying to perform data recovery from a failing disk drive by booting from it? and he only wanted the photos, not documents, music, emails, contacts etc?

Either this is bull or you are incredibly incompetent.
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That may not be true.

I have done recovery for people where they have said I only want the images, I am not bothered about anything else.

Documents maybe stored online (Dropbox, skydrive etc)
Music can be re-downloaded (or from a CD)
Emails - Online
Contact - Online

If my PC was failing (apart from my backup) then the pics would be my first port of call. Everything else can go as long as they are safe.
 
freak2002 said:
That may not be true.

I have done recovery for people where they have said I only want the images, I am not bothered about anything else.

Documents maybe stored online (Dropbox, skydrive etc)
Music can be re-downloaded (or from a CD)
Emails - Online
Contact - Online

If my PC was failing (apart from my backup) then the pics would be my first port of call. Everything else can go as long as they are safe.
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I think what he was getting at is the fact he booted windows off the drive (a long and painful process when a drive is dying), rather than gathering the files by putting the drive in a caddy first....a much less arduous task.
 
One that comes to mind is not a mishap as such but quite funny. I am IT Support at a 6th form college.

Lad who is borrrowing a laptop from additional support on behalf of us comes up and says his laptop is not turning on at all. 'have you tried it with the charger in mate?'
'No'
'Ok let's try that first'
No joy.

Spend a while checking this thing over and notice it smells a bit sweet.

'So it just didn't turn on when you got it out the bag for your lesson?'
'That's right yeah'
'Fair dos'

It seems fried for whatever reason.

We proceed to open the hard drive compartment to see if we can at least get onto the hard drive and get his locally stored work off. We take the screws out and take the 'lid' off to be greeted with a pinkish runny liquid flooding out all over my desk.

'What the hell is that mate?'

'Oh well I spilt Strawberry milkshake on it'

:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

Didn't even need to ask why he didn't mention that as it was obvious. To this day I don't know how he managed it.
 
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Going back a while here, but once whilst speaking to a lady in a shop supporting their EPOS system I asked her to press 'Any Key'.....

No word of a lie, after around a 30 second pause in the conversation she asks, which key is that!! :rolleyes:
 
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