"That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case"

You never know when that iomega zip-drive complete with several zip disks, or that 8" 128 kB floppy disk labelled CP/M 2.0 will come in handy

Re: "That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case"

In our loft, I still have the original packing-boxes for equipment that is long gone. Some of them contain a single lead which was probably vital to function......

Re: "That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case"

Same here - boxes of old software packages returned (c/w manuals) to their original packaging, boxes of assorted leads and adapters, old drives (including at least one Zip), old computers (including a ZX81 and a maxed out Acorn Electron), several old PDAs (including a Psion II, Psion 3a, and a Palm Tungsten), several laptops and a couple of iMacs. A year or so ago I emailed several computer museums around the UK, offering it to them for free. One asked for one of the Electron modules but I didn't want to split it up. Another said they were interested in taking the lot but, when I tried to contact them to arrange delivery (I even offered to hire a van and deliver it on an 800 mile round trip), they didn't reply. It's all still in my attic gathering dust. I expect it will all go to the local tip when I pop my clogs (or my wife decides we're going to move house and downsize).

I've even got a trunk containing all the UK printed versions of Elektor magazine - I started subscribing from issue 1 and only stopped when they stopped paper issues. Again, more for the recycling centre one day.

Re: "That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case"

Yellow Ethernet thin cable works perfectly to make cables for your hi-fi and brag about you have a special cable too. If you have time you could also braid three cat3 utp cables and make another esoteric hi fi cable for loudspeakers at a very low cost.

Not me but the same….

Came in one morning and one segment of the network would not connect. This was about 15 years ago

Now the windows admins had set a profile which basically locked all machines if they couldn’t see a domain controller so this one was going to be hard.

It took a good while searching but eventually I found someone had attached a server running whatever the Citrix thin client manager was to the network and it was happily giving out ip addresses with itself as the default router whilst getting its own gateway as itself.

Due to the locked down machines it was difficult to track what the problem was in the first place.

Once I had found the machine and removed it everything went back to normal.

This is when we started moaning about locked down machines. Our windows admins had set the machines to first run through a group policy disabling all “admin” type functions, and then for people such as myself who needed to get to lower level commands to do our job, it would then apply another policy to remove all the restrictions it had just applied - this took about 10 minutes from turning a laptop on to being able to do anything……. They also foisted Microsoft direct access as a vpn client which could take up to 20 minutes to log you in great if you get called out on a urgent problem.

Been there done that, but it wasn't me

Poor WiFi in the breakroom so I gave the pimpliest of PFYs a spare home WiFi router I had in the aforementioned pile and told them to try and set it up as a WiFi extender/access point.

Naturally they managed to enable DHCP

Since this was a startup running on wet string and no support it took a while to work out what and why was happening

Re: Been there done that, but it wasn't me

When I did this stuff, I had a simple rule. If adding a Wi-Fi Access point with a device that had a router option, always, always, set it up in bridge mode. If you still think you want to set it up in any other mode - stop - go for a beverage of your choice; and when you come back, it is hoped that your brain is now working, then set it up in bridge mode .

Re: Been there done that, but it wasn't me

Too many of those "beverage of choice" and enabling the DHCP server would seem like a good idea!

Re: Been there done that, but it wasn't me

So it was you!

I had to deal with the fallout from someone doing this a few years ago. We never found the culprit...

dhcp woes

I was a teacher (at the time 'Acting Head Teacher') in a TAFE (Tech College) here in Oz.

Early one afternoon I have one of the guys who supports the college network infrastructure come to me and ask if I knew of a rogue dhcp server in our area. I did not.

We did eventually track it to one of the computer labs where the students had gone to lunch, and had been building virtual networks (a couple of servers and a client or two) using vmware-workstation and were (if they had followed instructions) meant to have all those on their internal virtual network.

One student had a habit of skipping steps and in this instance had set their windows ad / dhcp server virtual machine to attach to the real network (bridged), and started merrily handing out dhcp addresses to all and sundry. we tracked the machine down via the switch it was connected to, and as we couldn't log in, I decided to press and hold the power button.

one of the other teachers said "you can't do that, he'll lose any unsaved work!" I responded that I didn't care and that this was affecting machines across the campus. I left a note for him to come and see me after he returned from lunch.

we had a quiet chat about reading and following instructions - and not putting rogue dhcp servers on the network.

Re: dhcp woes

"he'll lose any unsaved work!"

That made it an excellent learning opportunity.

Holiday Wind Down

For a start, never make any changes, deletions or additions on a Friday - unless you are working the weekend as normal - and if you are on holiday next week, then holiday wind down basically starts on Monday of that week and do not make any changes unless you really need to. That way, you can be assured that your systems are running satisfactorily (to the best of your knowledge) so that you can relax and be blameless when you are away. Always remember Murphy's Law and always CYA.

Re: Holiday Wind Down

"if you are on holiday next week, then holiday wind down basically starts on Monday of that week "

That means that by Friday afternoon there's nothing much to do which in turn means that it's a good time to play with random bits of discarded kit.

Re: Holiday Wind Down

Hmm nice In theory, but I had last week off (as it is a bank holiday in the uk I am back tomorrow)

Friday morning spent isolating a problem with a line card in a chassis

Then debugging a dhcp problem, testing new wireless configuration and Friday afternoon spent writing a handover email which came to 2500 words due to the number of projects I am working on before getting hit with a load of questions about 4:30.

Didn’t help that I got hit with a norovirus of similar on Monday / Tuesday which screwed up my schedules somewhat….

Not Over a Vacation, But ...

As a tech at a large organisation, I was sent out to install an Ethernet card into a PC. This was something I'd done there many times.

Rhe secretary waved me into the empty office with the kit.

The PC was an IBM Microchannel architecture machine, which was a new thing, as was the 3Com MCA card.

The docs were excellent, and I quickly had the card installed, and fairly-quickly configured and connected to our network.

Looking at the labels on the three floppy diskettes, I saw one was a card-testing program. Wanting to be careful and thorough, I thought, "I should run this." I found the relevant spot in 3Com's manual explaining how to use the (DOS-mode) program, and followed the directions.

The program came up, put up a nice screen display ... and then nothing happened. No completion message, no error message, nothing.

After a minute and a half, I Control-C'd it, got a DOS prompt, and went back to the manual.

I re-checked the steps, did them again, and ... nothing.

About half a minute later, the phone rang, and I answered it. It was the head of Networks calling. "What the hell are you doing?!"

"I've installed an Ethernet card and am running 3Com's test program."

"Stop doing it, and don't do it again! That card is bombing the network with malformed packets!"

"Yes, sir!"

On the up side, the card worked perfectly with our DOS-based networking software (TCP/IP and IPX/SPX, for Novell Netware and DOS or Windows 3.X).

Marketing made the setup more "friendly"

Problem is, thick people removing meaning, to make things "easier to use" and "more friendly".

The question *meant* "Should I provide DHCP service?" not "Do you use DHCP?"

The latter is ambiguous, since, as the user found out, the answer "Yes, we do use, and are already using DHCP, so don't you go interfering" is also the [YES] button.

DHCPing and ARPwatch

A beer to each.

When you have the custody of a network to which the great unwashed of tertiary education having unfettered access these two sidekicks were indispensable.

Whether it was an old wifi router with 4 or 5 lan ports brought from home or a tethered phone bridged on to the lan, a DHCP service was invariably active.

Students were normally guilty of sheer gormlessness but staff could apply considerable talent and originality to produce truly magnificent cockups.

Somewhere langishing on a shelf, unconnected and unpowered, is a WiFi gadget with just a single RJ45 and power as its only sockets acquired 2nd hand (no docs) to use as a bridge on the home network.

With only one network connection it wasn't exactly the sort of thing to set up as a modem/router/gateway device. Nevertheless it defaulted to being a DHCP server - after all, why not?

Gotta love DHCP servers

At $~WORKPLACE they get used fairly heavily for running software development setups. Everything gets flashed with a PXE ROM and then boots from a host PC running a DHCP server loaded with whatever tweaked software binaries they need.

The original plan didn't foresee IT wanting the host PC's set up with standard corporate Windows 10 installs, and also required them added to the company domain with domain logins. As a result they were hooked to the company network to allow this to all work.

This was found to be a very convenient way to run development setups, so naturally it wasn't long before the hardware engineers found out about this nice useful tool and started doing the same. Naturally they weren't as careful/understanding of the hazards of a DHCP server.

Ever since there has been the occasional network borkage thanks to a engineer applying less than the required amount of diligence when setting one up.

Rogue DHCP server? Ban the operating system!

I worked for a multinational which was mostly Windows based, although some there was some Linux development (I was one of them), and a few remote site deployment types had Linux laptops for certain data analytics, as well.

One day, one of those site people came to home base for some training, and while there, he plugged his laptop into a network port. It turned out his laptop was running a DHCP server because his was the gateway machine when in the field. In a properly secured environment, a node running an unapproved server like that would be blocked, but this company was not like that. Once they found the offending laptop and identified it as being a Linux machine, a VP sprung into action. In classic shoot the messenger fashion, he declared that Linux was the culprit, and that the downtime caused by Linux was in the tens of thousands of dollars. Invoking his authority as VP of Procurement, he formally declared that Linux was officially banned from the company, henceforth.

For those of us working on Linux applications there at the time, we just shrugged, and told our management that we wouldn't be able to deliver, what with this new edict. It was most amusing watching horrified executives discover that a VP had ordered put a stop to three major projects a week before delivery. They tried to tell people to ignore it, but everyone was in malicious compliance mode, and no way were they refusing a direct edict written by a senior VP.

" If he's stupid enough to ban Linux without knowing what he's talking about, what's he going to do to people who disobey him? " was the thinking. Management spent almost three weeks before they were able to get Linux usage formally removed from the list of termination offences.

As for "the last thing before leaving for vacation" events, I have two. Both were a site administrator. And yes, the same guy.

The first was an upgrade of VMS for the Vax. He got the tapes just before he went on vacation and decided to upgrade it before leaving. He finished the job around 4:30pm on the Friday. He logged in, things looked good, and went away for three weeks. Although he'd restored the data disk with all the projects, he'd unfortunately, neglected to re-enable user logins. He could log in, as administrator, but no one else could. The company came in to work on Monday morning and discovered their Vax was effectively offline, and would be for the next month.

The second was two years later, where he made some upgrade to the hardware rack configuration. Naturally, you install new hardware before going away for a month, right? It was some classified overclocked imaging system that ran hot. As in really, really hot. It came with a secondary unit, basically a refrigerator. However, the refrigerator made a hell of a lot of noise, and the administrator thought the heat wasn't that much, so he turned it off. Then he locked the system room, and went on vacation.

At 4am, alarms went off, and security staff went to the system room. They couldn't get in, and the doorknob was hot. They had to call a locksmith in to drill through the door so they could get into the room. Supposedly the room temperature was 42C. One of the flimsy plastic chairs in the room was apparently warped by the heat already. I don't know if they turned off the imaging system, turned on the refrigerator, or brought in buckets of ice, but they got the room down to bearable levels in about an hour.

No, I don't know how that administrator managed to not get fired, but I suspect that being a drinking buddy of the CEO may have been a factor.

Just before Christmas

Just before I went of leave we rolled out a Windows NT 4 Service Pack (3 IIRC - was a long time ago) overnight, everything went OK except at remote site, where the remote link went down in middle of systems updating, which left 50 or so machines behaving erratically and if rebooted crashed.

Reason the remote link went down - due to differences in the 64k lines modems and the 128k line modems we upgraded to, which I had missed in docs, not setting the control lines meant the equipment would occasionally switch the modem into test mode due to the data on line (would likely not been an issue if not encrypted), shutting the link down.

Many jobs ago, we upgraded our Novell stock from 3.12 to 4.11; and at the same time we deployed new Compaq servers across the country. This usually meant getting the hardware delivered to the site and racked by local staff, then one from my team travelling to site and setting up the Netware software, bringing it online and finally upgrading all the local PCs with NDS-capable clients. This was usually pretty a cushy two-day job as there would only be a dozen or so clients per local office.

And then you'd inevitably get a text message from one of your colleagues when you were on the train home, asking if you'd remembered to 'set reply-to-get-nearest-server off' when cutting over to the new box, as the rest of the users were complaining about an extremely slow network. By design, we wanted all client and such client tasks to be handled by the beefiest 4.11 servers in our central data center that had been installed first; but of course, any new servers we installed in satellite locations were slightly newer and completely un-loaded, so they responded faster - even if they were two router hops (and likely at least one ISDN link) away. It was a simple enough change - just change a single config line and then kick all the (non-local) clients off the server (let's face it, that's going to be a server reboot) - but whoever went on site always forgot it (yes, including me). The issue wouldn't be observed immediately; it would take a few people calling in from different regions before whoever was on helpdesk duty caught on.