Tales of IT Idiocy 181
snydeq writes "IT fight club, dirty dev data, meatball sandwiches — InfoWorld offers nine more tales of brain fail beyond belief. 'You'd think we'd run out of them, but technology simply hasn't advanced enough to take boneheaded users out of the daily equation that is the IT admin's life. Whether it's clueless users, evil admins, or just completely bad luck, Mr. Murphy has the IT department pinned in his sights — and there's no escaping the heartache, headaches, hassles, and hilarity of cluelessness run amok.'"
Tales of Dumb IT (Score:5, Funny)
Reading InfoWorld is about number 6 or so.
Reminds me of one of our clients. (Score:5, Funny)
They were running an older CRM version that still used direct file access.
Because of this, their backup solution (for which they hadn't bought the live file backup module) would fail every night due to someone in the office leaving the program open.
So they "fixed" it.
6 months down the road they had a server crash and lost everything.
So we're like "Okay, let's roll to backups. There's still data loss, but minimal, a day or so."
Uh. What backups?
Their "fix" had consisted of simply deleting that CRM program's directory from the backups (see: NOT BACKING IT UP) so their backup reports were all nice and pretty.
The latest real backup this company had was over 6 months old.
The company that was in place to handle their IT was out on the curb with smoking ears and a boot-print on the ass shortly afterward.
Make it idiot-proof... (Score:3, Funny)
"I can't log in when I type in my password! It's broken!" - The problem? They weren't typing in their username, they were only typing in their password.
My all time favorite was a customer who was very unhappy with an application we had created for them to send out event invitations and what not. I get an angry e-mail passed to me. The claim: "Whenever I type in someone's e-mail address, instead of e-mailing that person, the system figures out who their spouses and children are, and sends them the notification instead!" I had to repeatedly confirm that what they're describing is not possible. Even then, the person still angrily refused to believe me. If I were to create software that somehow psychically figure out all of that information, I'd be very rich, and probably be working for the government.
Re:What about clueless admins? (Score:4, Funny)
Given the obvious competence level of these admins, do you think they knew how to make ntpdate work as a non-root user?
Ya, neither do I. And yes, they were logging in as root....with a shared public/private key set. Note: BOTH private AND public keys were shared amongst all 500 servers.
Because ssh keys are more secure, don't you know.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:5, Funny)
And little things can become very big (in your mind) if you obsess over them long enough.
Wait, what? I don't think it's gotten any longer.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Funny)
So, in your mind, absolutely anyone who makes a six figure salary is by definition a "dominant, exploitative jackass". Is it just maybe a little bit possible that you're bitter about your own salary?
Apparently so. The existence of engineers who make that much and more by technical wits alone seems to be a myth in the poster's mind.
Re:What about clueless admins? (Score:5, Funny)
I can understand being ignorant of ntpd, but not even being aware of cron is criminal.
Whoa, I just looked up cron.. My god you just saved my job man! I couldn't get my sleep script to run in the background right... Jesus I've spent 4 weeks on this job and now I can move on to the next. Getting every system to default saving files to root:root from smb shares!
Thanks for saving me...
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:2, Funny)
Bullshit's flammable????
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Funny)