Associate
- Joined
- 3 Oct 2008
- Posts
- 1,890
- Location
- South London
I've not been in the gig long (coming up for 5 years) but i've seen a fair few of these moments 
A couple for you:
Builders!
Builders Dug through a 50 pair Voice cable, not once but twice. After laying a steel culvert and concreting over it the first time. I still to this day have no idea why they decided to dig up a driveway less than 1 month old... This lost voice to an entire building of secretaries and i'm sure you all are aware how they live on their phones and how ****y they get when things go wrong
BT!
a) BT quoted us for 3 1Mbit leased lines and refused to do a site survey at two of our sites (despite us knowing the areas were poor for Data services and specifically requesting one), come install one line could only manage 512k and another was borderline attenuation. They also had the cheek to want to charge us the quoted 1Mbit annual rate for the 512k line.
b) The line with borderline attenuation kept dropping so a BT engineer came to run it on 2 local pairs as this apparently would make it more stable, however the NTEs natively clock at 2mbit on 2 pair operation and thus it continued to play up as one end was running twice the speed of the other.
The above made worse by an ancient DEC Alpha Billing/Booking system that closed all terminal sessions to preserve data integrity of shared files each time the link went down for more than a few seconds.
Foxes.
A Fox managed to bite an above ground 4 core fiber cable strapped to a 410V external lighting main. Fractured all 4 cores causing the whole above ground section to be replaced with expensive armoured cable and to top it all off the 410V run was intact and the bugger didn't fry for it
this killed data to an outlying office building 
Consultants.
AD consultants conducted a netware 4.x to AD migration. We'd done an NT4-AD2k3 migration at another site and they seemed good. Now whenever we create an exchange mailbox we have to wait 15 minutes before Outlook can see it and it can be setup. They didn't tell us that DNS HAS to point to the DC else logon happens slooooow. Lucky I knew that already. One of the shares on the server was configured to contain one folder per dept. But users could delete their own departmental folders..... Also logon scripts were .bat not .vbs. I'm still learning stuff about AD and it's inner workings and the more I do the more I see dubious configuration decisions.
A company who we let out space to also used a consultant to set up data and VoIP after turning down our offer to provide a VLAN, routing and Extension/DDI range on our PBX. They plumbed in two ISDN2s and an ADSL line. 8 Months after install they'd run out of capacity on the Switch and the 2800 got hacked... We believe this to be due to them using TELNET to support the Router via either the IDSN or ADSL line. We had more issues as they'd provided a normal ADSL line not a business one and when they used a hosted system via RDP it all fell appart because the upload was pathetic.
ISPs.
Fluidata installed a temp link to facilitate and office move while a WES10 was in the pipeline. It consisted of two ADSL2+ lines with a Cisco VPN over them. Simple task, chuck anything that comes in one end over the VPN to the other. They got this wrong and it took them 4 days to get it right and it still didn't ceased to work until their "guru" had a look. Despite him looking at it for an hour and it miraculously working again they insisted there was no fault and we must have altered something our end. Being the only Cisco Certified person that deals with our WAN routing I can say we changed nothing.
1200 users, 5 sites and no internet or external email for 4 of them, including BACS transfers
Makes you feel secure in your job knowing such incompetance surges through the industry
A couple for you:
Builders!
Builders Dug through a 50 pair Voice cable, not once but twice. After laying a steel culvert and concreting over it the first time. I still to this day have no idea why they decided to dig up a driveway less than 1 month old... This lost voice to an entire building of secretaries and i'm sure you all are aware how they live on their phones and how ****y they get when things go wrong
BT!
a) BT quoted us for 3 1Mbit leased lines and refused to do a site survey at two of our sites (despite us knowing the areas were poor for Data services and specifically requesting one), come install one line could only manage 512k and another was borderline attenuation. They also had the cheek to want to charge us the quoted 1Mbit annual rate for the 512k line.
b) The line with borderline attenuation kept dropping so a BT engineer came to run it on 2 local pairs as this apparently would make it more stable, however the NTEs natively clock at 2mbit on 2 pair operation and thus it continued to play up as one end was running twice the speed of the other.
The above made worse by an ancient DEC Alpha Billing/Booking system that closed all terminal sessions to preserve data integrity of shared files each time the link went down for more than a few seconds.
Foxes.
A Fox managed to bite an above ground 4 core fiber cable strapped to a 410V external lighting main. Fractured all 4 cores causing the whole above ground section to be replaced with expensive armoured cable and to top it all off the 410V run was intact and the bugger didn't fry for it
this killed data to an outlying office building Consultants.
AD consultants conducted a netware 4.x to AD migration. We'd done an NT4-AD2k3 migration at another site and they seemed good. Now whenever we create an exchange mailbox we have to wait 15 minutes before Outlook can see it and it can be setup. They didn't tell us that DNS HAS to point to the DC else logon happens slooooow. Lucky I knew that already. One of the shares on the server was configured to contain one folder per dept. But users could delete their own departmental folders..... Also logon scripts were .bat not .vbs. I'm still learning stuff about AD and it's inner workings and the more I do the more I see dubious configuration decisions.
A company who we let out space to also used a consultant to set up data and VoIP after turning down our offer to provide a VLAN, routing and Extension/DDI range on our PBX. They plumbed in two ISDN2s and an ADSL line. 8 Months after install they'd run out of capacity on the Switch and the 2800 got hacked... We believe this to be due to them using TELNET to support the Router via either the IDSN or ADSL line. We had more issues as they'd provided a normal ADSL line not a business one and when they used a hosted system via RDP it all fell appart because the upload was pathetic.
ISPs.
Fluidata installed a temp link to facilitate and office move while a WES10 was in the pipeline. It consisted of two ADSL2+ lines with a Cisco VPN over them. Simple task, chuck anything that comes in one end over the VPN to the other. They got this wrong and it took them 4 days to get it right and it still didn't ceased to work until their "guru" had a look. Despite him looking at it for an hour and it miraculously working again they insisted there was no fault and we must have altered something our end. Being the only Cisco Certified person that deals with our WAN routing I can say we changed nothing.
1200 users, 5 sites and no internet or external email for 4 of them, including BACS transfers
Makes you feel secure in your job knowing such incompetance surges through the industry
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