The Stupid Human Network Tricks Anecdote Contest--UPDATED

At the first company I worked at out of college we didn't have any physical security for our servers. The main file server was located near the receptionist's desk, and the CAD group's server was in the CAD area, next to a refrigerator. One day a printer near the primary server ran out of paper. The user's (we never did find out who) response was to reboot the server, taking out the entire network.
We moved a few months later. One of the things that we did was to make sure that we had a proper server room, behind a locked door.

One day, a mobile user called to say that his laptop was no longer functioning. After a lengthy phone conversation, he disclosed that he had spilled an entire can of coke on the keyboard. He continued by telling me that he had tried to dry it with a hair dryer, but that it still would not boot. I asked him to send it back to me, and that I would have it repaired. I received it the next day, and unboxed it. Upon opening the laptop, I discovered what the real problem was. This gentleman had not used a "hair dryer", but must have borrowed a heat gun at one of our locations, because all that was left of the keyboard was a cooled pool of molten black plastic. Luckily, the laptop was covered for "accidental" damage, although the support call is one I'll never forget. Since then, I have always made sure that his laptop is completely covered.

We had an issue in one of our offices whwere the file server and associated peripherals would get reset every evening. The network admin could not figure out what was going on. It turned out that the whole kit was on the light switch outside the door. The cleaning person would clean the server room and 'turn out' the lights as she left. When the lights did not shut off, she moved the switch back to the on position and left the room. After a week, we finally figured it out..

In my early days as a mini system field technician I had an accounting customer that lost his air conditioning system. I had told him many times of the perils of heat on his systems. He took this news to heart and as he was under the gun to finish extended tax returns (July), he went out and got something to cool his system case. Knowing water would cause damage, he bought a block of dry ice. He put the block on the cover thinking it would keep the system cool. It instantly condensed the humidity out of the July heat and rained on his system board wiping it out. After I replaced everything, he 'fessed up to what he had done. I had to charge him for parts and labor as stupidity was not covered under his maintenance contract. Three days later he complained that the video subsystem had failed and he could not work. After telling him that I had NOT charged him for these parts in the first call, he took an oath of silence.

At one of my old companies, we had a Novell server and many Windows clients. In order to install MS Office on several workstations we placed the MS Office install CD in the Novell drive and mounted it. I went to the first workstation and started the MS Office install. The install stopped and I lost my network connection. Suddenly everyone else was down. Novell had instantly crashed into debug mode disconnecting over 200 users.

We assume that the MS Office install CD determined that it was a CD by trying to write to the media.

Since the VP loved MS Office, we fixed the problem by installing a new Windows server and sending the Novell server to never never land.
It was one of the most expensive installs we ever did.

I had server that had a tape drive on the fritz. The drive was called in and a replacement was sent. I went out to the remote site to replace the drive during business hours. Thinking I was god like in my network admin abilities I decided to replace the SCSI tape drive while the server was running. You can guess what happened. I made the connection and the server went crazy. Even though it continued to run it wasn't quite right. I had to come back out to the office after hours and reinstall the server, which also happened to be running exchange. So what could have been fifteen minutes of work turned into three hours. From that point on no changes are allowed during business hours, not even for the god like admin of the firm.

2 things:

1. A friend who runs a small office's network asked my help with a simple task: His server's hard drive was filling up with huge daily reports and log files that they don't need. He asked me to write him a script to delete all files older than 2 weeks. I emailed him the script and got a very quick emergency call back.. he accidently ran it from the root directy instead of the report directory. Unfortunately, even the OS was over 2 weeks old:). Of course the backups were of no use (the disk was mirrored and he assumed that was good enough:)
Luckily, an undelete program recovered everything important.
To make sure it doesn't happen again: first - no "quick favors". Next - display a list of files about to be deleted and ask for confirmation, and finally, limit it to 1 directory at a time, and only specified file extensions.
In my defense, I thought he was smart enough to understand how to edit the script for his needs

2.Same friend:) His office staff has been complaining for months that the printers aren't working correctly- sometimes perfect, sometimes garbled, sometimes real slow, etc. He couldn't figure it out.
I go to take a look.. I delete the printer driver, download and install the current version, and it works perfectly.
I leave and get the same call the next day. Doesn't work. I go, and the printer is just printing out garbage. BUT I notice it is a different printer connected to the computer.
So I finally figured out the problem: they have a big laser printer used most of the time, but when they need color, they unplug the printer cable from the laser printer and plug it into a color inkjet.
How to solve: They had so many computers nearby, but only 1 printer cable. I made them buy another printer cable and hook the other printer up to a different computer:)

About two years ago we received a warning from AOLs abuse center warning that our organization would be blacklisted from sending e-mail to AOL recipients due to spamming. I very firmly, but politely informed them that we did not engage in such activities, that we blocked user access to send e-mail other than through our servers and valid addresses, and that I would like to see samples of the alleged spam. AOL complied with the request and provided me e-mails from one of our employees personal e-mail accounts at AOL. The mail she received was indeed spam and had been received at her AOL account from our server. It was autoforwarded by a rule she herself had setup to forward all e-mail to her personal account including messages our system had flagged as spam. So she spammed herself, reported it to AOL, and AOL didn't look close enough to see that she had forwarded them to herself and that we were not the originator. AOL rescinded their warning, we spoke sternly to this user, and changed our mail forwarding policy to a much more restricted status.

A user in our organization decided to bring in their personal laptop and connect it to our network in defiance of company policy. She thought she was so slick, she had even named her computer {usersname omitted}SlickLaptop. Took about 2 minutes to track her down. About a month later, she did it again. Her manager was contacted and she was reprimanded. We recorded the mac address and blocked it from the network at that site. About two months later, she changed jobs in the company and went to a new site. Thinking she was clear, she reattached her personal laptop to the network and was once again fingered, blocked, and chewed out. Note, after the first time this user was so "slick" she couldn't even be bothered to rename her computer. Apparently the laptop was slicker than she was.

I was doing telephone support for a user who was new to a GUI interface. No matter how many times I stepped through the process of "using the mouse to move the pointer to the icon on the screen" the user still complained of issues. Eventually I travelled to the site and asked the user to demonstrate, to witness the user lifting the mouse off the mat and rolling it around on the LCD Monitor attempting to nudge the onscreen pointer toward an icon.

In the glory days of Windows NT I was working at the company where management listened more to the users than to IT people, well, I it looks like almost nothing changed from those days. On the request of the PowerFul(l), not Power users, they were granted administrative rights on the domain. On one night when I was working late, it definitely did not change since, one of the users came to me and complained that she was not able to launch some application. After short investigation, I discovered that somebody moved the application directory on the server, probably by accident just drugging it to wrong place. The good part was that this accident let us to convince the management to limit the power of Powerful users to their workstations

We had a issue with one of our remote sites dropping off the network and all the servers powering off. Come to find out the cleaning people where plugging in there floor scrubber into the same ciruit that our servers and switches where on. When they powered up the scrubber it would blow the breaker. The servers would stay up until the UPS died, and then they would go down. The cleaning service could figure out why there scrubber would not work. They plugged there scubber into another plug, that was on a different circuit, and it worked. They didn't realize how quite the room they where cleaning got. We ended up putting plug covers on all unused plugs and labeling them as do not use.

Years ago I was working at the main office of a highly decentralized organization. We were connected to the outlying offices by ISDN using a CSU/DSU device. The CSU/DSU and associated computer servers in each outlying office was located in a locked closet that served as a server room.
One week, we started getting connection errors between one offsite office and the home office that lasted for about 20-30 minutes every day and always at the same time (11am). Puzzled, I spent the next several days trying to troubleshoot the issue with the phone company, the connectivity provider. But to no avail.
Finally I convinced my boss that I would have to make a trip out to the offsite office in an effort to figure out the problem myself.
The morning of my arrival, I was sitting my the remote office of one of the managers responsible for the computers (small company...many hats) and discussing the problem and possible fixes to look at. While sitting there, I saw the secretary of the remote office VP go to the server room, unlock the door, go inside and close it. Then 15 minutes later come out of the server room with a pot of coffee. Puzzled, I went to inspect the server room...That's odd, everything was fine...and where's the coffee maker that made that pot of coffee? And sure enough, there was a connectivity loss during the time she was in the server room.
I went to confront the secretary and this is what she told me:
She said that a recent policy by the VP at the remote office had been put in place that all coffee and drinking must be done before work hours. No drinking while at work and no drinks at peoples desk. His reasoning was that people getting up and getting coffee and drinks was a productivity drain. But since he was the boss, the policy didn't apply to him...so to prevent the smell of the freshly brewed coffee from inciting the workers, he instructed his secretary to use the computer server room since it was the only place with a door that could close and it had it's own ventilation. The coffee maker was hidden inside an old tower computer that was sitting in a corner. And when the secretary went in to make coffee, she would plug it into one of the power strips...unfortunatly, as she pointed out, there were no available plugs, so she unplugged one of the "bricks" and plugged in the coffee maker...Her assumption was that all the things she owned at home that used one of those wall-transformer power bricks were non essential, so she assumed the same thing in the server room...she made it clear that she didn't touch any of the "important" plugs...
Turns out that the "brick" she unplugged was the power supply for the csu/dsu...
Fortunatly for me, this was not a situation I could solve...a new policy handed down from the home office that dictated anyone could have a coffee using the office coffee maker in the kitchen. Plus, I changed the locks on the server room door..
Ed
web/gadget guru

A few years ago, a small business with a self-appointed 'IT Guru' on staff bought a cheap no-name server, equipped with an even cheaper tape drive. The office ran Peachtree Accounting on the server, with staff dutifully changing tapes every morning.

My consulting firm was called in one day, when the entire Peachtree database disappeared as an overzealous 'disk-cleaner-upper' on their staff accidentally deleted the wrong folder.

No problem -- just mount the tape from the night before, and... Ooops! - not a single successful backup had completed in over two months. MANUAL re-posting of two months' worth of accounting transactions was required to recover.

Meanwhile, we replace the dead tape drive, and I teach the office IT Guru (and two other staffers) how to open the backup program, check the logs, run periodic 'test restores', and in general, take command of their backup and disaster recovery destiny.

Fast forward six months: the SCSI 'Data' disk crashes, and in spite of countless pledges of eternal vigilance, no one kept an eye on the backup logs after the first few months of smooth sailing. You guessed it -- media errors galore, failed backups for many weeks, and ANOTHER two-month manual posting party ensued. Not surprisingly, the 'IT Guru' left her position for 'a better opportunity' elsewhere the next week.

Back in the days of 10 base-T networking we had a sudden network outage. After tracing the cables checking each connnection in turn we came to the office of a fellow who had decided to rearrange his office. He was the last user at the end of that cable run. He had disconnected his computer from the network, moved it and reconnected. Being the economical sort, he didn't see why he needed a T connector, so he just plugged the end of the cable straight into the connector on his network card. Of course, the card did not have proper cable termination, so the entire leg of the network he was on ceased operating.

I was hired by a firm to help them setup a Linux Cluster for Parallel Processing. The purpose of the cluster was to sell computing time to a local school for whatever business the firm was in. I had advised the IT Manager in an email that the cluster should be hardened before it was placed into service (it was part of the my contract) and put into a DMZ to protect their organization.

However, the IT Manager did not wish to add to the complexity of the network or spend the extra time on hardening the operating systems and database. He opened the firewall up to the cluster and within 2 hours the cluster was completely compromised, along with his business network. The IT manager was released from the company when the owner of the company saw my email about protecting the company.

Thankfully the former IT manager (actually the owner's son...) had hired another consultant earlier that week and they had a good backup of their servers, which I used to restore their business. I understand that they hired the consultant who installed the backup services as their new IT Manager.

I would have loved to been a fly on the wall at dinner. The lesson learned by good old dad was that gratuating from a school with a degree in physical education doesn't make you an IT guy!

I set up a wifi firewall/router in a small office and have everything working perfectly. The following Monday I got a panicked service call that no one could access any network services at all. Stepping the secretary through some testing, I determined there was no signal at all from the router - but it was apparently on (based on the blinking lights) and functional (wired connections worked).
When I arrived in person, I found the problem: the secretary thought the small blue box with antennas I put on top of a tall cabinet was unattractive, so she put a large fountain - made of steel - directly in front of it to hide it.

One of the worst faux paus I've ever seen was when our benefits co-ordinator replied to an email solicitation from HR for feedback on an internal job applicant, mistakenly replying to all, criticizing the applicant for not being a sharp enough dresser. She got the job anyway!

This is one of those events you'd swear had to be apocryphal. However it is true.

I was the Vice President and Director of Operations for Wyoming.com, an ISP, at the time this happened in 1997. One of our tech support staff members, (David J.) was working in the call center when a new subscriber who had gotten both an account with us, and modem, as a Christmas present called. The call went like this:

David J.: Tech support. My name is David, how may I assist you?

Subscriber: I can't get make the Internet work.

David J.: OK, have you ever been able to get on line?

Subscriber: I don't think so.

David J.: OK let me get your username… [David J. proceeds to look up user info, verify access privileges and account status. The account is in fact new and the records show the user has never been online.]

David J.: Let's start at the beginning. Do you have your modem connected to the computer?

Subscriber: I have lights on the modem.

David J.: Good. What lights are on?

Subscriber: CD and AA

David J.: OK. Is this an internal or external modem?

Subscriber: What do you mean?

David J.: Is it inside the computer?

Subscriber: It's sitting on top of the computer.

David J.: OK, can you find the switch on the modem and turn it off and then back on?

Subscriber: Where's the switch?

David J.: Well it will probably be close to the power cord that the modem is connected to.

Subscriber: I don't see any switch.

David J.: Can you unplug it?

Subscriber: Yes.

David J.: OK plug it back in.

Subscriber: OK

David J.: Are the lights back on

Subscriber: Yes.

David J.: The same ones?

Subscriber: Yes.

David J.: What brand of modem do you have?

Subscriber: I don't know. There's no name on it.

David J.: What does it look like?

Subscriber: It's green with a silver handle.

David J.: Do you have the cable from the modem to the computer connected firmly?

Subscriber: What cable?

David J.: The data cable? Didn't the modem come with a data cable?

Subscriber: No.

David J.: So the port next to the power connection is empty?

Subscriber: What port?

David J.: Do you not see a port?

Subscriber: You mean the gold fingers?

David J.: What do you mean Gold Fingers?

Subscriber: It's what I have the alligator clips connected to. Of course I had to try a few of them before I got the lights on.

David J.: Did you say you have alligator clips?

Subscriber: Yes, it's the only way I could get the lights on.

David J.: And the clips are attached to the modem? What's on the other end of the clips?

Subscriber: Wires to my battery.

David J.: So… this is a flat green board with a metal bracket on one end and something that you might describe as computer chips on the board and along one edge there are little gold strips?

Subscriber: Yes! That's it exactly. You know how to make it work now?

David J.: Well I would have if you had put it IN the computer instead of ON it and hadn't hooked up the battery to it, yes. But I'm sorry Sir there really is nothing I can do for you now.

Following the call David J. completed the call log notes and wandered with a dazed expression over to his supervisor, Paula. It was Paula who first told me about this.

A nightly batch job was programmed to spit out a report to the back office printer every night. Suddenly one week the reports began to mysteriously fail. The only problem that could be found was that the print server would seemingly be hung with all of the leds flashins. Resetting the server it would continue to function throughout the day as normal. Next day flashing leds...no reports. Running tests from the UNIX based system using the exact same job that runs overnight does not reproduce the problem. Being on flex time I often arrive later and stay later. As it happens one evening when I am leaving I notice a member of the night cleaning crew fussing with the wall outlet outside of our office (wait for it) the same wall where the printer is located...(still waiting?)...the nice gentleman is trying to plug in a vacuum cleaner that has had the plug removed...yes that's right he's jaming bare wires into the outlet...LOL. Apparently the vacuum plug became so dodgy that he had just cut it off. Okay so it wasn't a users fault but still hilarious.

I work as a technology instructor in a high school. We use a program called Grade Quick for all the teachers to enter their grades on a day to day basis. One of our teachers has classes in multiple classrooms and wanted to have access to her grades on each computer. I showed her on her main computer how to save her files to a mapped drive on the server (P:) and told her she would need to do the same to access the grades on each computer she signs onto. The following morning I get an email that all of her grades were corrupted. I met with her at the end of day to find out that she was trying to open her grading data files on the other computers with Microsoft Word instead of Grade Quick. She didn't realize that she needed to use the Grade Quick on each computer.

I never get tired of this one. A few years ago I was hired on contract to a local government office as the junior sysadmin. That is right "the", not "a". My hiring doubled the staff. So I'm getting to know the lay of the land over the next few weeks and continue to get calls about lost files. Turns out that the files are never lost, it's just that users are using Word to find Wordperfect files and vice versa.

Apparently, many years back, all staff took a computer night course that taght them to use their word processor as a file explorer. All of them, including the "IT Services Manager", used either Word or Wordperfect to look for any file on their system, local or network. After show a few people the problems with this change was slowly taking place, except with my boss. He insisted that it was the right way, and would not change.
One day, I came back from lunch to find him running around, literaly, muttering about lost files. I asked what was wrong, and he said that the Netware server had crashed and lost all the config files, as well as all the user files. I imediatley went to the server to check it, and low and behold, missing file errors and the entire User directory is gone. After some checking and fiddling, I got to the log file and found that the admin user had deleted the directory and files. I asked my boss what happened, "I don't know" was the inevitable response.

After restoring the server from tape, something else that I initiated, all was well. That is until the managment started to question what had happened. Eventually my boss admited to using word as a file explore, and on seeing the User and other directories empty decided they were not needed.

I know have an IT Consulting firm of over 80 employees because of his error. I was awarded the contract for the office, hired my first 2 employees, and eventualy expanded to service 9 other offices in the area. I haven't heard from my old boss since, but think of him often.

When I was a windows admin at a small company, I tripped over a cable in the data center. No problem, I'll just reconnect it.

Well, it happened to be the mouse cable to a unix system. Being the careful guy I am, I immediately informed the Unix admin and told him what I did.

His reply, "that's why the Oracle database froze!" made me glad I confessed.

We moved the monitor/keyboard/mouse across the room so that it was next to the server so that the mouse cable didn't run across the floor anymore.

I was working for a small account for a big company with two other admins. This office had one main file/print server running NT 4.0 that everyone used. One day one of my co-workers complained that we always used my ID when we logged in the server console and he wanted to log in with his ID. I told him to go ahead, he logged me off and logged himself in. When all of the shortcuts disappeared from the desktop he rebooted the server!

Management noticed his technical genius. When the site manager retired, they made him my boss.

One morning I came in to the office, and everything was running fine. After awhile some of our users started to complain that they couldn't get to the internet, or some of our servers. After performing some troubleshooting on a couple of the systems, it was determined that they could not get to any system outside their own subnet. Other users were not experiencing any problems at all. After further investigation it turned out that one of our users had configured his system at home to be a dhcp server, and had used the same IP addresses of our network. His machine suddenly became the default gateway for the segment. He was informed that this was not acceptable, and we never had the problem again.

Home Networking 101…One day I decided to expand my home network to the upper level of my 2 story home. My router was set up in the basement and all but one port was occupied so I decided to use that port to liven up a new 5-port switch in my attic and make network drops to the bedrooms below. I completed setting up the network to the upper level bedrooms and tested the connections with great success (gave myself a pat on the back, grabbed a beer, sat in my easy chair and turned on my favorite sports channel). 15 minutes later my 17 year-old daughter came downstairs !!!RAGING#!? “You ruined my computer!�… Of course…If I couldn’t get into MY IM program and chat with the 1000 contacts in my “buddy list� I’d be in a “RAGE� too! Being a good dad, I looked into it right away. I went into the attic, checked the network switch, it was working alright, I checked her computer and it was working alright. “So what’s the problem?� I asked my daughter who replied sheepishly “Well it wasn’t working before.� I turned off the attic light and closed the attic door and returned to my easy chair to practice my relaxation techniques. 5 minutes later my daughter is “RAGING� in my face again! I go up into the attic turn on the attic light and … you guessed it “HOME NETWORKING 101� always check the power. My network switch was plugged into the attic light switch cicuit, when the attic light was turned off so was my network. My apologies to my daughter Katie, IM away.

Our court had a satelite office with a server set up in a 'extra' cubicle. A call comes in that the server boots up for a minute, and promptly shuts back down. Everything worked fine the day before. Nothing reported over the phone helps. A drive out there revealed what turned out to be hilarious. The cleaning crew, folks on probation doing 'chores', accidentially unplugged the UPS. And proceeded to replug it back in to the nearest outlet - the UPS! Hmmm, did we find perpetual energy - Nope, but the UPS could power itself - briefly.

I'm probably not the only one with this story, nor the funniest - BUT I WANTED my shot at the backpack with mystery goodies.

I was working as a regional IT manager when we had a new-hire come in to fill a network admin position at our new Texas call center office. He had good qualifications and was very experienced with Microsoft Back Office apps.

This having been said, I'll bet he never saw a UPS wired into a circuit coming from the street. On his first day, he finds the large MGE UPS which supplies power and backup battery power to the entire server room. The server room houses an enterprise class Avaya PBX switch, several Cisco switches and routers, as well as 14 Compaq Proliant servers running various Microsoft Server apps.

Upon examining the UPS, he finds a small red button with the label EPO. In his own words (his friend told me later), he thought: "I'm the network admin, I need to know what every button in my domain does." Since a manual for the UPS wasn't immediately visible, he presses the little red button.

BOOM!

The entire server room goes dark as well as most of the lights in the call center. The only saving grace was that this was 1 hour before closing on a Friday. He found out what most admins should know already. NEVER PRESS STRANGE RED BUTTONS!

This red button was the "Emergency Power Off" button for the UPS; hence the EPO label.

After cutting power over to direct street power using a large lever on the UPS, power came back up. It still took him the entire weekend and a call to MGE before he found out what that button did. Lucky for me, he was transferred less than a month later.

I was working for a support company in Florida. We had a contract to support a mini computer at one of the facilities in Key West. A service call came in that the keyboard was unresponsive and they demanded that a technican be sent, as no one at the customers site had any experience with this specific system and they where unable to do any work.

Being the next guy on the list for a service visit, I was asked (actually told) that I was being flown from our office in Central Florida to Key West with a spare mini computer in the event the one at the customers site was actually dead.

So off I was sent to Key West with an overnight bag, some tools and a 400 pound mini computer on a local commuter plane. I wondered what the cost for all this was!

I arrived at the airport, where the customer met me with with two pretty large guys in a cargo van. We arrived at the job site, and I saw the machine was powered on, the monitor was showing the correct time, and the keyboard was not lite up and the computer did not respond to any keyboard input commands.

I walked around the back of the system and plugged the keyboard in, as it had apparantly fallen out! The customer was very happy about how fast their box was back in service.

My boss on the other hand was less then overwhelmed with the whole service issue. It cost him over 1,000.00 dollars for me to plug that keyboard back in.

My company dropped that customer's site during the next round of contract negotiations.

Sadly my family likes to tell people that I can fix computers. My dad’s old boos who is now retired got his Company Laptop (Dell latitude C series, with a Dock) And wanted to use dial up to AOL with his laptop but every time he plugged in the phone cord into his Dock the phones in his house ceased to work. I tired fixing it over the phone no luck. He then said I am just going to buy a new desktop, so he did. 3 weeks later I got a call same problem with his desktop. He called gateway and no luck; they wanted to send a new modem out for him to put in. He got the modem but even before he tired the new modem he paid $110 for a new telephone wire to be run in his house from the DMark to his computer, Still same problem. He then asked me to come put his new modem in. I got there looked in the back of his computer and what did I find, he had no modem in his laptop or desktop, he was using the NIC and that is why the house phone cut out when he plugged it in. Why Gateway was going to send him modem when he didn’t have one to begin with. Needless to say, he is now running DSL and is using the NIC. So this would never happen again, I had to sit down and explain the difference between a modem and NIC. S0 about 6 weeks later, $1800 new desktop, $110 new phone line it was fixed.

Second one, I get a call from a user who in her words “went out and bought one of those fancy mice with the laser for her laptop� the problem she was having is it was not working. I asked her if the laser was on, she said “no�. I asked her where she plugged it in and she said the port in the back of her laptop. Well as soon as she said that I knew it was wrong that series of laptop had no USB in the back only the side. So at this point I had to go she what she did, I walked in her office and she had the USB port plugged into her NIC, I switched it and explained to her what she did she said “I wondered how I was going to use my mouse and be online a the same time� To make sure she didn’t do it again, I used a laser labeler to label the ports for her. I never knew a USB could fit into a NIC but it CAN

I work in heavy industrial construction, an industry that resists change. In the early 90s I joined the construction division of a large multinational company. The division was located in leased space in a suburban/rural part of the state. With an office staff of about 100 there were maybe 15 PCs in the office when I hired on. The network was put in before the division moved into the space but it was primarily used for printing.

As time went on more and more PCs were attached to the network. The network was still mainly just providing printing services and some application development. As more PCs were added intermittent problems would crop up, PCs would lose the network, printers wouldn't print, and HQ couldn't be reached on the tie-line. But the problem could never be replicated or the source of the problem nailed down and it's happening all to regularly now.

Finally it was decided the problem had to be in the cabling. The home office had paid the local, non-Bell, phone company install the network cabling before we moved into the space. The hotshot phone company network technician and his assistant came out to test the cabling to prove they weren't at fault. The network is brought down while they test it all out and that takes most of the day. At the end of the day the network administrator (a knowledgeable user) and his cohorts (the other three of us that recognized that there was a problem) are waiting for his results.

He comes up to us and says, "I wired this place. There's nothing wrong with the cabling. I checked every outlet. I sent a signal down every circuit (he had the marked up blueprint to prove it) and I was able to get a dial tone on every one. Your cabling isn't the problem." With that he and his assistant left.

He must have seen four guys with their jaws on the floor. A couple of calls to HQ and someone finds a copy of the purchase order issued to install the computer network wiring. The brain trust at HQ let a PO to install “1 lot network wiring�. The phone company was cheapest so that's what they went with. Which is why we got the cheap patch panels and bell wire.

Over the Christmas holiday break the bell wire came out, Cat 5 went in. The patch panels were replaced with the "name brand" ones. Come the New Year everything worked like a charm.

"Practice makes perfect."
I work for a federal agency. We had a web survey being administered in compliance with a Federal law. Our network people decided to turn off the server hosting the survey over a holiday long weekend. About a month later (I guess to show that it was no accident), they migrated the survey host to a new server, but did not provide write permissions. The long weekend outage cost us dozens of responses. The "write-free" maneuver crippled the survey (no one knew about the problem till we found that responses stopped on a Friday at midnight ... My response - take up dancing lessons - tap dance and soft shoe.

I was a developer at a large consulting firm with a large Unix shop. It had a conputer room with access restricted to appropriate personnel. One day the main Database server crashed. After a long wait one of the sysops reported that a hardware technician had needed a keyboard for a new machine. Seeing a keyboard that was never used, he disconnected it. That keyboard was connected to the main database server.

Never heard what happened to that technician!

I was the main support person for a 135 site distributed data network for a large grocery retailer. In the developement of the application that pulled information from one system and applied it to my remote systems (about 1500 total in the 135 stores), the developer was told to limit the data held on-site to 7 days of historical data. As time went on, random failures of the the in-store servers started happening. No specific frequency pattern was seen, only that when the system failed, the entire Operating System had to be reloaded. After months of study, analysis and head-scratching, we found the problem...when the developer wrote his program for the store server, he 'assumed' that his process would be invoked from the same directory every time. And his script just deleted all files older than 7 days in that directory. Unfortunately, the process did not invoke his script from the same place each day. It invoked it from whichever directory the last process left the command prompt in. After a number of days, the command prompt would end up in the root directory, and delete 90% of the Operating system, which then crashed the entire store. Fortunately for the developer, he had already left the company for another opportunity. We fixed the program by calling his script with an absolute reference.

I work for a telecommunications company and used to support a large number of field service technicians. Over the years I have seen thousands of different ways to trash a laptop, but there is one incident I will never forget.

The standard laptops my company used to deploy were the Compaq Armada M700s. These laptops have metal cases with a black powder coat finish.

One Monday morning, a user (with a long and continual history of mysteriously dead company PCs) left his laptop in my office with a note saying “Won’t boot, don’t know why�.

This laptop was only 3 weeks old, replacing his previous one which died a horrible death by becoming a rubber/asphalt interface (he ran over it with his rental car).

Strange and mysterious things always seemed to happen to this guy’s laptops. Self cracking screens, keyboard keys popping off like popcorn, disintegrating CD drive trays, the list is endless.

My favorite though, was the self installing software that always seemed to be messing up his systems. Several file sharing apps, online games, ripped DVD’s etc. Of course every time I pointed out that this stuff was causing most of his problems, he always swore that he had no idea how they got on there or that they were already installed when I gave him the laptop (right).

This guy was a real PEBKAC case (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair).

The first indicator that he might have some idea of why it wouldn’t boot was that a lot of the black finish on the case was bubbled. When I picked it up, the finish literally began flaking off in my hands exposing the bare metal beneath. It looked as though the thing had been dipped in paint stripper. In 3 years of working with these laptops and seeing all sorts of stuff spilled on them, I had never seen the finish come off like that. So I called the user and asked him if anything had been spilled on the computer. His response (verbatim), “I put it in my bag on Friday and put the bag in the trunk of my car. I pulled it out this morning and that was the way I found it. I swear it just sat in my car all weekend�.

Being a wise and experienced PC tech, I asked him if anything had spilled in his car’s trunk or maybe in his carry bag. Of course the answer to both was “Nope�.

When I opened the laptop, I noticed that the LCD panel was almost completely fogged and had a rough surface. It was pretty obvious that something had been wiped across it. The keyboard was also a total lose because most of the keys were completely blank, no symbols on them at all.

Still no liquid found. Mystery deepening. Time to get out the tools and crack the case.

Opening the case revealed a complete and utter mess. Wires with melted insulation, IC chips with white powdery surfaces, missing patches of varnish on the motherboard, etc. etc. etc..

At this point I noticed a faint odor like paint thinner or nail polish remover. Pulling the motherboard out of the case revealed a small pool of clear liquid. It was obvious I had found the source of the odor and the cause of the slag-like remains of a once proud and functioning computer.

So, since the user wouldn’t come clean with the truth (even though he wouldn’t have gotten in trouble) I had no choice but to speak with his manager.

It didn’t take long for the user to crack under the hot spotlight of his manager’s glare. Turns out the user and his wife had taken a romantic weekend vacation and the laptop had gone along for the trip.

In the hotel room, they had placed the PC on the floor by one of the night tables to play some music. He was painting her toenails and managed to spill an entire bottle of nail polish remover on and into the open laptop (I thought I recognized that smell!). To cover his tracks he opened the case and tried to clean it out the best he could. He said, “I was afraid to pull the motherboard because I thought I would break it�.

The solution his manager and I came up with was pure genius.

I made a functioning laptop for him out of parts of other dead machines, the list follows.

His case (black finish missing and all).

An LCD panel with a crack in one corner taken from a laptop that died of acute deceleration trauma (fell off a van roof and hit the ground).

A keyboard with a dead mouse pointer stick (this guy hated using the glide pad).

A motherboard with dead mouse and USB ports forcing the use of the onboard pointers (see line above).

The slowest CD drive I had.

A tiny 6gb hard drive that was mostly filled with company apps (try storing those ripped DVDs on my laptop now buddy).

Well, that’s my story. It’s all true, I swear on a stack of Microsoft security bulletins.

I was working in Hotline Tech Support for an ECAD/CAE company in 1987. Essentially we were front line support, that gets all kind of calls... The users population we were dealing with were mostly knowledgeable engineers and system/network admins.

Back then, top of line was 80286 (PC AT) and disk drives were still ST-506 and 20MB drive is considered HUGE. Our customers were using disk packs (Fujitsu 12" platters in desk side boxes that hold around 400MB of storage).

A certain customer (large company in Pacific Northwest) just hired a system administrator for their chip designs group. Whenever he called us, he would always announce "this is so-and-so from XYZ, _System Administrator_!" (emphasis on the SA). So the joke around the office is Mr. SA just called and everyone know who that was.

Our software run on a proprietary UNIX like OS, and this guy does not know UNIX (or anything else for that matter, read on). So his company sent him to our HQ in Moutain View, CA, where we are based for training. In class, he learned all about scripting, the various UNIX commands, such as find, ls, rm and so on.

Our SA was very excited, when he got back up North, he wanted to show just what a hot SA he was by showing off his new learn skill. We know he got back, because he was calling us everyday to help troubleshoot his "scripts" that he was writing.

A few weeks after he got back, he purchased "the" UNIX book (I forgot the name now, but it was a classic). In that book, he learned about the compress command. A problem they were having is that ECAD files are getting large and they are always running low on disk space....

Ah ha! He will put his new learn scripting skills, the compress command, plus the find recursive ability and rm into use.....

Da dum.... da dum.... da dum....

Yep, early next morning, I was working the 5am-3pm shift, I got a call from a panic stricken Mr SA. His two scripts consist of:

find / -exec compress {} \;

and

find / \( -ctime +30 -o -mtime +30 \) -exec rm {} \;

Anyone? Anyone? He thought that by compressing all the files on the server, he will gain so much space. Then any files that is older than 30 days is supposed to have been backed up already, so can be deleted.

He started the scripts (in 2 separate windows on the server) the night before going home. In the morning he came in and the server was down, can not start....

1. The first find line compresses everything from the root directory (/) recursively. Most OS, including Windows, does not work too well if their binaries are compressed by an external program.

2. The second find line deleted everything (recursively) older than 30 days.... well, that includes OS files and utilities, and CAE programs, and....

Fortunate for him, there was backup, but as for the server, we had to sent an SE out to reformat and re-install.... they were down for two days.

I don't know what happened to MR. SA. I left the ECAD company not long after that...

When I was working in the IT Department of a large retailer as network administrator, my Novell file server started crashing intermittently - several times a day. I figured the problem was power - and in the end it got to the point where the IT Director met me at 6.30 in the morning to figure the problem out.

The problem was that my line manager had unplugged the power cable from the clean line that fed the server's UPS to plug a cable of his in - and plugged the server's feed into a socket that was on the same circuit as... the building's lifts. Every time the lift was used, there was a chance that even the UPS wouldn't filter out the power spike.

I think I stopped this problem from happening again with threats of physical violence.

I once spent the night (11 hours of square-eyed hell) before going on holiday depserately clearing down 190 user's accounts on a Novell server because my line manager (same guy as last time) wouldn't let me impose disk quotas on users.

I stopped this problem from recurring by saying it was HIS turn next time.

I had a segment on my network which repeatedly suffered from mysterious problems.

The mystery was why I didn't check what my line manager was doing sooner. He'd plugged a media adapter into a cat5 socket to allow the networking (over good ol' coax) of some IBM Unix-based kit... and hadn't realised he needed a terminator.

I got around this problem by drawing a diagram, and smiling a lot. Although I did run out of red pen...