Coworker wrote a very useful in-house utility that they named "ATH." I of course made a joke about the next version needing to be called "ATDT." Half the team didn't get it. We work in telecom. I feel old. #sysadmin#bofh
Today's unsolicited request for support comes from the Nashville Electric Service of #Tennessee.
I'm hoping that the person is new and doesn't know who does their IT support. Because the idea that a electric company is officially requesting help from a volunteer on the internet doesn't bode well for their infrastructure.
(They were asking about an internal #inkscape extension which I can't possibly know anything about)
Is it over the top to remind everybody right in middle of a discussion about DR servers that you're going to be on vacation on Monday and including a 😏 at the end?
If presented w/ something I both haven’t seen before & can’t respond to real time, it’s a hot mess.
I have qual that suggest aspie but didn’t recognise until adulthood (thx #BoFH ).
The majority of my net positive interactions w/ others are at least partially pre scripted.
Thats saved my tail in sales jobs over the years, but I was born 1981. Sitcoms were only frame of ref I had, real people were terrifying unless/until I knew what the right script was.
For those who aren't aware, those old Sun boxes were built to run for years without having to shutdown. redundancy was at every level. Redundant, hot-plug power supplies, and of course, hot-swap HDDs.
You could even swap out memory cards simply by opening the box, pressing a button to disable one of the memory banks, swap it out for one with good RAM, and then with a press of a button activate the replacement or upgraded RAM.
Those machine's were beasts!
Imagine you're a small company with about 100 or so employees, drivers, foundry workers, office staff of about 20 or 25 people, all of your accounting, invoicing, order/inventory control, and even the jobs you receive from Home Depot (where you get most of your kitchen installation orders) come into that one machine, which has plenty of spare parts to replace virtually anything that fails...
@gabriel just asked this hypothetical, I presume in jest, because he wants to hear war stories or maybe how field engineers look at problems stemming from a customers irresponsible behaviors test our impatience, bringing out the #BOFH in all of us, lolz...
Just making sure that I correctly understood your request...
>Give me backup tips like I just lost all my data and you want to rub it in
You mean like the time I arrived on a client site to find that a second HDD on the Sun Enterprise Server Solaris box in the RAID 5 Array had failed, yet they chose to run the machine in that degraded state w/o calling me to simply plugin a hotswap drive and rebuild the array before the second drive failed?
Or maybe when I told them, no problem, I'll just rebuild a fresh array from scratch, and then just run a full restore from the previous night's DLT tape?
Or perhaps when I saw that look in their eyes and they admitted that they hadn't been swapping tapes each night for about three or four months?
Their CFO looked at me as if everything was still going to be okay (Coz I'm a fucking Rock God) and said: "Well, we've never had a problem before." to which I did my best to respond without letting loose a condescending gufaw....
I like to announce a reboot of our home wireless network by flashing the lights and playing a pre-recorded message on the speakers throughout in the house, where a female voice calmly intones: "3 minutes until self-destruction." #BOFH