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.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

But smart hackers use machetes.

[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.

[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.

[reddragdiva]

These would be Ericsson management. "Yeah, dig your way in with a teaspoon."

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

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

[reddragdiva]

The walled-in Novell server story.

[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.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

And they won't let you bring your "That's not a teaspoon...THIS (http://www.bizrate.com/nc/buy/noncat_prod_details__oid--26181244.html) is a teapsoon!" I presume?

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

Has that ever been proven one way or the other?

[reddragdiva]

I looked on Snopes and couldn't see it. It would be worth checking.

[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.

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

I didn't know they made people that fucktarded.

*smacks head*

Of course they do. Bwhahahahahaaha.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Hmm... IP and MAC addresses identify a machine, but they don't locate it.

If the routers and switches were part of the building's infrastructure, rather than Ericsson's property, and their locations were known, you could locate the server room to within a cable length by reading a routing table.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Given the MAC address one could determine which switch -- and which switch port -- the host was connected to. That tells you which room. From there you can track the cable back to the host. The switches were Ericsson-owned, as was everything else in those rooms (including, I believe, the A/C and the UPSes).

It helps that I am quite familiar with the Ericsson setup in Melbourne Central -- I worked with David. But chances are that if there were no systems people left then there probably wasn't anyone left who'd think of doing it this way either.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

And they do have records that locate the switches. Somewhere. I mean, we all use names that immediately identify the floor and the room.

[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."

[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.