Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file
- Reference: 1685950215
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/06/05/who_me/
- Source link:
This week our rapscallion of record is one "Roy" (not his real name) who once served as IT manager for "a well known environmentally conscious international organization". It was the sort of place where many bright-eyed idealistic young activists worked – complete with their disdain for "the man" and any sort of corporate diktat.
This became a bit of a sticking point when iPods became all the rage. Every hip young person of the age needed to possess the hottest gadgets. And naturally they then synced them to their company-provided laptops. Which thanks to Roy's diligence were backed up to corporate servers. Which had only so much space.
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This was an environmental org, remember – massive amounts of electricity and magnetic media being consumed to accommodate thousands of copies of The Smiths latest album was not exactly on brand.
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Roy started receiving "awe-inspiring alerts" warning that storage capacity would soon be utterly depleted. He issued instructions that the company laptops were not to be used for backing up tunes – instructions that the prevailing culture deemed worthy of being unread and disregarded.
Who reads memos from the nerds anyway, right? That's not cool, man.
[4]Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password
[5]Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity
[6]An important system on project [REDACTED] was all [REDACTED] up
[7]Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel
Desperate times called for desperate measures. A file-system script was devised, which according to Roy would seek out music files stored in the backup server (these were iPod backups, remember, not iPhone backups – so no encryption).
Once a music file had been identified, it would be replaced by a file that had exactly the same name as the original and retained other metadata so it would be synced back to the users' iPods. The content, however, would be altered somewhat.
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In place of their original many-minutes-long songs, the tree-hugging activists would hear only a few seconds of gentle mooing. This was in most cases not Cery entertaining, but took up vastly less room on the server.
The script ran over a weekend and into Monday morning, when the various laptops were re-synced (against company directives) to their iPods – and dozens of wide-eyed idealists were convinced their music had been kidnapped by cows.
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Re: That's the way to do it
It's Moooooius.
Re: That's the way to do it
He certainly deserves a pat on the back.
Re: That's the way to do it
Did he find the decent music and mooove it to his own directory?
Re: That's the way to do it
> He certainly deserves a iPat on the back.
FTFY
Re: That's the way to do it
It's an old story, but he had to milk it...
Re: That's the way to do it
Genius indeed: a cow has four stomachs - and the crud (cud) was following it's own four-stages: iPlayer --> laptop --> server --> backup. Our man was simply...err...reverse-engineering the process in delivering back the moo - the raw material, if you like. The users should have thanked him for such dedication ;)
Re: That's the way to do it
Just wondering. Did this company have corporate branded jerseys?
Re: That's the way to do it
Why is my iPod playing up?
Must have a flat buttery.
" In place of their original many-minutes-long songs, the tree-hugging activists would hear only a few seconds of gentle mooing. "
That, my friends, is how you deal with these clowns who don't read the f**king memo .
A former boss (a long long time ago) forced me to write down IT proposals on paper before he'd evaluate them. A pointless exercise when you know they do not read the paper. Together with the PFY we wrote a new proposal that ended with:
There are no direct costs involved to this project, but there may be some non-IT related monetary expenditures while performing the tasks as explained.
Of course, without reading, the boss said OK for the project. The PFY and I went straight to the store and bought as much cola as we could carry (a lot) and I presented the bill to the boss for a refund, mentioning the appropriate wording from the proposal. The boss gave me a bunch of paper to repay the debt. However, it was more than owed and I did not have any change. The boss said: keep it, that is for the next time you pull such stunt.
:-)
> That, my friends, is how you deal with these clowns who don't read the f**king memo.
They probably did, but thought it was a load of bull...
I thought that, but I herd different?
Hmm
I am surprised that the story didn't include some higher-up that was less than pleased.
magnetic media being consumed to accommodate thousands of copies of The Smiths latest album
The Smiths split up 14 years before the first iPod was launched. The kids must have been listening to solo albums by Moo-rissey.
Re: magnetic media being consumed to accommodate thousands of copies of The Smiths latest album
I'd imagine horse noises would have been more appropriate for The Smiths, but there will inevitably be nay-sayers.
I was mooved by the udder genius of this story. Simon would be so proud, although I strongly suspect he'll be using a different sound or combination of sounds.
"Hey, why have my moo-sic turned to cow?"
"Have you read the memo?"
"What memo?"
Y'all know what? This need more... COWBELL!
I'll hoof it out of here now.
A few cowmediams round here
One begins to suspect a certain amount of Larseny...
??
I don't understand this. iPods synched via iTunes, not directly with files on disc and certainly not with "iPod backups", so the files being backed up were the music files in the iTunes library. Changing the track in the company backup would only change the track on the user's PC (and iPod if they synched) if they did a recovery from the company backup to their PC, wouldn't it?
Am I missing something.
Re: ??
Yes, a sense of humor
Re: ??
It does sound a bit odd; I'd guess that perhaps people were using their work laptops as their primary iTunes machines?
I do remember, back in the very early days of compressed music, we had a local unix sysadmin, who had a thing for "underground" D&B music, which came on home-made CDRs with inkjet-printed covers.
As he had a lot of these CDs, he decided to import them all onto his work Windows PC, and then get rid of the physical disks. And he did the sensible thing of putting them onto a separate drive, so they were safe in the event of a windows reinstall.
However, these were the days when DRM was all the rage, and whatever software he was using (I *think* it was the built-in Windows stuff, though it may have been RealAudio?) defaulted to encrypting all of the audio files with a key which happened to be stored on the windows drive.
So one day, the inevitable happened, and our poor sysadmin found himself left with hundreds of files which had effectively become complete junk...
Immediately made me think of Atom Heart Mother - but that’s my age.
Moosic to my ears....
That's the way to do it
That's udder genius.