I am the dim locator. Don't call me dim!

[reddragdiva]

A tale I probably haven't mentioned yet:

I left Ericsson AsiaPacificLabs Australia at the end of 2001. Around September 2002, they folded that entire division (all development in Australia — Ericsson was haemorrhaging red ink so badly they were cutting off limbs to survive). I heard a story on the mailing list for our section's ex-employees. The story went that they had by that stage lost all their sysadmins, and in fact all their systems workers in general. They had a small problem: it seems no-one left knew where the actual server room with all the machines they were using was. THEY LOST THE SERVER ROOM, SOMEWHERE IN MELBOURNE CENTRAL TOWER.

Did I get in touch and tell them? CUE LOUD CACKLING FROM THE DIRECTION OF LONDON.

Comments

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

What, you didn't respond and tell them where it wasn't?

[reddragdiva]

Damn, no I didn't. "It's through that door THERE. Yeah, you'll definitely need an axe."

[andrewshead.livejournal.com]

You get a large thumbs up for that.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

*snort*, that's just fantastic.

[andricongirl.livejournal.com]

hehe

awesome

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Considering that I used to work with a tech writer at Ericsson in 2001 who related similar stupidities (the company laid off the people in charge of hardware inventory first, so they had no way of telling who had laptops and other items or whether they'd already been brought back), that story didn't leave me laughing until I coughed up blood. That story left me coughing up urine.

[reddragdiva]

One of my important jobs was a complete hardware inventory. (I still hold that auditing things is an excellent way to start a PFY off. The job sucks, it needs to be done and it shows them where everything is immediately.) I did such a comprehensive job of it they said I should come to their section and just ... do ... audits.

[reddragdiva]

Oh, the other story was about laptops. It seems one of the EDS outsource persons - a particularly stupid and incompetent example - had stolen a laptop and pawned it. The pawn shop switched it on, noted the "ERICSSON STANDARD DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT" banner - he hadn't bothered wiping it - and called the police, who called us. The police were waiting for him when he came to claim it. Quite a few people relished the news.

[baralier.livejournal.com]

Having worked for their PABX fault logging area (well we were outsourced) it all sounds so familiar. When changes had to be made to the logging software they had to hire back an ex-programmer at huge amounts of money because none of the remaining techs knew how to programme it.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

*laugh* Brilliant.

Reminds me of a story I once read about a company who, one day, realised that they didn't know where their server was. They could ping it and use it, but they couldn't find the physical machine. It turned out that, during a renovation some years ago, the builders accidentally walled it in. The immured server, which presumably wasn't running Windows NT, ran without a hitch for several years, and nobody noticed its absence.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Probably Netware. It's the undead possessed OS, so it never dies.

[reddragdiva]

The walled-in Novell server story.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

See if you can chase that story down.

It's plausible in at least one sense: the cabling in a tower block is untraceable once it enters the lift shaft - or, in more modern buildings, it enters a vertical service shaft that passes through floors that you don't have access to.

On the other hand, the building management company would know... Wouldn't they? I mean, the the fire-suppression system (no water sprinklers) and maybe the air-conditioning would mark out a server room, and someone pays rent and extra maintenance charges for all that.

Unless, of course, Ericsson leased space in a shared or sublet server room in an arrangement known only to the systems manager and the other tenant involved.

You know, this could actually be true.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

The thing that makes this feasible is that Ericsson had quite a few machine rooms in MC, most of them completely full. If you didn't know which one your gear was in you'd have a *very* hard time finding it.

But given the IP and MAC addresses it should have been possible to have the networks people track it down. Just would've cost a heap 'cause that had been outsourced to EDS.

[poggs.livejournal.com]

We have a PABX room with sprinklers.

Water sprinklers.

They've not been removed, because the landlord won't do it for "health and safety reasons".

WTF!?

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

That's so beautiful...I laughed hard at that one! :)
I hope you don't mind, but I had to forward it to a mate who used to work there too, and was one of the many axed from Ericsson in Melbourne Central when his department was given the chop.

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

Hmm, replying to my own post, bad form, etc. :-P

His comment was:
Hah, that's really funny. The server rooms did tend to be tucked away in otherwise normal looking floors, behind bookcases and such.

Behind bookcases?! Was the infrastructure of the place set-up like a James Bond Super-Villain Lair?

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

"Don't pay the power bill. When they shut off the juice, run around the building listening for the dying screams of the UPSen."

[phelyan.livejournal.com]

Bah... now I have coffee all over my keyboard... *giggles*

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I once got called in the middle of the night when a client's financial news distribution system went down. There were supposed to be four servers in a redundant cluster, with any one of the four machines capable of keeping the system going on its own. At the time, they were down to two working machines, partly due to gormless sysadminnage, but mostly due to an exec who was frankly barely intelligent enough to tie his own shoelaces. He would turn off the A/C in the machine room to save on electricity bills, then get angry when he had to pay to replace a large number of SCSI drives that keeled over and died due to overheating. He once shipped two servers to me rather than pay travelling expenses for me to go into London. They were just sitting loose in a big cardboard box, sent uninsured to save on shipping costs. One of the two was completely totalled -- a very solid 19" rack case was bent and twisted, the other looked OK but wasn't working. I managed to salvage one of four SCSI drives, one motherboard, a network card and a spare Pentium Pro. Out of TWO machines.

Anyway, back to the story. I pinged each server in turn. Two were known dead because they had suffered hardware failures of various kinds (generally the drives would die due to overheating, see above) and since the cluster still worked, said execumoron wouldn't OK the necessary work to fix them. I pinged the other two. No response. I phoned their night sysadmin.

"Oh, [name of executwat] had them loaded into a van to be taken to Leeds to the ISP's machine room".

I replied, "Er, how exactly are they supposed to work when they get there?".

"Dunno."

"Who is going up there? Is [name of clueful admin] going to set them up?", I asked, suspiciously.

"It's just [office junior] and [nontechnical guy]."

"Do they have a mobile phone with them?"

"Yes".

"Tell them to turn round and come back again."

The following day, [execudribblingidiot] chewed me out for countermanding his order. And for the fact that the cluster went down. I chewed him out for being stupid. Which didn't come close to making us even.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Geez: and here I thought that you had to go to Southern Methodist University to produce an executive that stupid. (SMU's business school is little more than a last resort for party animals whose parents want them to have something to show for eight years of keggers besides a coke habit and syphilis, so any rational person in the Dallas area who reads the memo that says "[Your new boss] recently graduated from SMU with a degree in business management" knows to get the hell out before the entire company implodes. Some spectacularly incompetent individuals have a track record of dozens of companies that they've driven into the ground, and yet otherwise flourishing companies continue to hire them.)

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

"I know the information you require my rate is $large_num (GBP) per hour or part of", payment in advance.

[king-of-wrong.livejournal.com]

Nah, most contracts these days seem to want proof that you've returned or destroyed all Confidential Information (including ideas, know-how, knowledge of organisational structure, details of potential clients, etc.) upon leaving.

If one were to claim to be able to help them out of such a mess (or one caused by a non-existent backup policy) then it would probably result in the company suing for breach of contract...

There's only one viable course of action: point at them and laugh your arse off.

[reddragdiva]

Nah. If they wanted to ask me they could have found me. Eventually.

(I believe I was one of the few who left rather than being pushed.)

[andymariachi.livejournal.com]

That's fairly brilliant O;-) I'd suggest to them that the only way to access the room was via SSH *grins*

[steer.livejournal.com]

oooh... If only I could be sent by ssh. I need never pay train fare again!