Startup in a rented house in a residential neighborhood
“Router” was an old PC running Linux with a few network cards, with no case, with a household fan pointed at it to keep it cool
Loose ethernet cables and little hubs everywhere
Every PC was its own thing and some people were turbo nerds. I had my Linux machine with its vertical monitor; there were many Windows machines, a couple Macs, servers and 2 scrounged Sun workstations also running Linux
No DHCP, pick your own IP and tell the IT guy, which was me, and we’ll set you up. I had a little list in my notebook.
It was great days my friends
We went out of business; no one was shocked
with a household fan pointed at it to keep it cool
It had a CPU fan, right?
How??
Oh, you’re not OCP. Funny though.
I kind of want to work there though.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I turned in a time card once that had over 24 hours of work on it in a row. The boss was dating a stripper, and she would sometimes bring stripper friends to our parties and hangouts. We had ninja weapons in the office. The heat was shitty, so in the winter we had to use space heaters, but that would overload the house’s power which would cause a breaker to blow which obviously caused significant issues, so a lot of people would wear coats at their desks in the winter, but that obviously doesn’t do much for your typing fingers which was an issue. I frequently would sleep in the office on the couch (a couple of people were living in bedrooms in the upstairs of the house).
Like I say, it’s not surprising that we went out of business. It was definitely pretty fuckin memorable though. Those are just some of the stories or right-away memorable pieces off the top of my head.
Office Depot. They are still using IBM machines from the 90s with receipt printers the size of a shoebox.
I have posted about this before. I’m pretty sure I win.
I’m not going to name names. I worked for a company, three of their clients include the United States Air Force, the United States army, and the United States Navy. They also have a few thousand other clients, private sector, public, and otherwise. Other nation states services as well.
I worked for this company quite recently, which should make what I’m about to tell you all the more alarming. I worked for them in 2021.
Their databases were ProgressABL. I linked it because if you’re younger than me, there’s a slim chance in hell you’ve ever heard of it. I hadn’t. And I’m nearing 40.
Their front end was a bunch of copy/pasted JavaScript, horribly obfuscated with no documentation and no comments. Doing way more than is required.
They forced clients to run windows 7, an old version of IE, all clients linked together, to us, in the most hilariously insecure 1990s-ass way imaginable, through tomcat instances running on iis on all their clients machines.
They used a wildcard SSL for all of their clients to transact all information.
That SSL was stored on our local FTP server. We had ports forwarded to the internet at large.
The password for that ftp server was 100% on lists. It was rotated, but all of the were simple as fuck.
I mean, “Spring2021”. Literally. And behind that? The key to deobfuscate all traffic for all of our clients!!
The worst part was that we offered clients websites, and that’s what I worked on. I had to email people to have them move photos to specific directories to get them to stop failing to load, because I didn’t have clearance to the servers where we stored our clients photos.
We had legit secure servers. We used them for photos. We left the keys to the fucking city in the prize room of a maze a 12 year old could solve.
Holy shit.
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Is ECO an Ed change order?
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My current company has a script that runs and deletes files that haven’t been modified for two years. It doesn’t take into account any other factors, just modification date. It doesn’t aks for confirmation and doesn’t even inform the end user about.
You should write a script to touch all the files before their script runs.
Thought about it but I use modification date for sorting to have the stuff I’ve recently worked on on top. I instead keep the files where the script isn’t looking. The downside is they are not backed up so I might potentially lose them but if I don’t do that, then I’ll lose them for sure…
Source control relying on 2 folders: dev/test and production. Git was prohibited due to the possibility of seeing the history of who did what. Which made sense in a twisted way since a previous boss used to single out people who made mistakes and harras them
When you lift up the red flag and there are more red flags underneath.
A company making signage and signal lights for road construction, with 15 employees. Their former IT guy had switched all of their PC’s to Linux for ideological reasons and to save money.
Then they found out that they had a long term contract for an accounting software that housed all their customer and billing data, only ran on Windows and required a server-client model.So they hauled in the boss’s private laptop which ran Windows 7, and installed both the server role, database and client software on it. When his employees needed to access the accounting software, the boss had to stop what he was doing and grant them full access to his laptop via teamviewer. When the boss’s laptop was off or he was on vacation, there was no way to access any price info, customer contact info, or financial data (This was during Covid when everyone was working from home).
The laptop was set up to back up (using Windows 7’s integrated backup tool) to an external drive which wasn’t attached and no one remembered ever existing.
The Linux server (which was actually a gaming PC) was running and attached to an MCU when my company surveyed their infrastructure, but no one (including the former IT guy) knew the correct root password, and we never found out what it was even doing.
This is surely the worst of all.
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I started a job at a university department. A previous admin had a habit of re-purposing desktop machines as servers. There were at least a dozen of them. The authentication server for the whole department was on an old Dell desktop. All of the partitions were LVM volumes, and the volume group consisted of 3 physical volumes: The internal SATA drive, a bare SATA drive in an external USB cradle, and an external USB SSD.
This is why we drink.
I’ve often had the impression that universities are the best places to cut your teeth in IT. Even though the pay isn’t great, the environments are said to be some of the most complex you’ll encounter. Any credence to that?
I think that there’s something to that, at least in the case of large universities which are divided into many, many organizational units. They also offer student jobs, which allow good opportunities for learning.
An IBM PC portable. Yes, PC. 4.77MHz, 256k RAM, two floppy drives. Built-in a maybe 8" green CRT screen, and the keyboard could be used as cover for the screen and disk drives.
In theory, this thing was portable. If you were a body builder. The case was steel, and the whole beast was about 15 to 20 kilograms.
There was a time when that thing was state of the art. Wasn’t a long time, but it existed.
The recent Falcon cock up?
I actually disagree. I only know a little of Crowdstrike internals but they’re a company that is trying to do the whole DevOps/agile bullshit the right way. Unfortunately they’ve undermined the practice for the rest of us working for dinosaurs trying to catch up.
Crowdstrike’s problem wasn’t a quality escape; that’ll always happen eventually. Their problem was with their rollout processes.
There shouldn’t have been a circumstance where the same code got delivered worldwide in the course of a day. If you were sane you’d canary it at first and exponentially increase rollout from thereon. Any initial error should have meant a halt in further deployments.
Canary isn’t the only way to solve it, by the way. Just an easy fix in this case.
Unfortunately what is likely to happen is that they’ll find the poor engineer that made the commit that led to this and fire them as a scapegoat, instead of inspecting the culture and processes that allowed it to happen and fixing those.
People fuck up and make mistakes. If you don’t expect that in your business you’re doing it wrong. This is not to say you shouldn’t trust people; if they work at your company you should assume they are competent and have good intent. The guard rails are there to prevent mistakes, not bad/incompetent actors. It just so happens they often catch the latter.
