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Admin
OK, are we gonna use Discourse or not?
She's the Frist line of defense!
Admin
Admin
Which RAID-Level is required to stand a bazooka attack?
Admin
But honestly: I'd really like to know the original version of the story...
Admin
Yeah, me too... Not that this version is not funny, but I'd let it to Scott Adams, to make a good Sunday strip out of it.
Admin
I call BS on this one. In early 2000, no IT people were looking for jobs - they were all too busy laughing from the amount of money they made out of Y2K.
Admin
I liked the snoofle stories better before their mandatory TDWTF embellishments.
Admin
There's something to be said for having your servers upstairs. A friend of mine once did disaster recovery for a firm that had a basement full of mainframes. These had the main cooling fans in the bottom, which blew air up through the racks. Unfortunately a main sewer burst, flooding the floor, and the fans continued to run for a while....
Admin
Bazooka proof,maybe. Would it survive a hit from a GAU-8??
Admin
I worked at a company where they placed the two data centres far enough apart that if a plane crashed into one (we were near an airport) and bounced, it would not hit the second.
Admin
Admin
I found this funny. Do this guys go to work with an AK-47 and full combat gear or are they simply going to hug very very very hard their servers 'til "the battle for the racks" is over?
Admin
Have you never had to go to work to do programming while also being armed? It's an odd feeling, trust me!
Admin
He was interviewing with the development team. What other background would he of had? Also, they had a development team. Surely they had IT backgrounds too.
Admin
Well....
Admin
Reminds me of trying to remote diagnosis for a firm of estate agents who were having trouble with their server. Network was an OS/2 server in the basement, plus various OS/2 and MS-DOS clients spread around the building.
The symptoms they were reporting about problems with the server didn't seem to make any sense, until someone at our end asked "Are you really sure nothing has happened there which might be causing problems?". The reply was, "No - it should be fine. All the water has been pumped out of the basement now."
Admin
You must be new here. Let me explain: No.
Admin
Dumb. Exaggerated to the point where, while I would be curious to know what the submitted story actually looked like (if there even was one), I'm sure it had almost nothing to do with the extremely-fictional story that was posted. Anonymization is fine, writing a loosely-based-on-reality fantasy story is not so much. We came here to read WTFs in IT, not WTFs in story anonymization.
Admin
Admin
The former Computing Centre of the Eindhoven University of Technology was designed to have the computers (i.e. mainframes) on the first floor (for Americans: the second floor). Because computers were large and heavy, and easily filled a room, this floor was very heavily constructed, with massive pillars to bear the load.
What they didn't think of is that computers got much smaller and lighter very rapidly, which left them with a massively over-engineered building (bit like the Forth Bridge), with the mainframes on the ground floor.
Admin
Worst story ever!
Admin
Admin
So, the uh... It hit the fan?
Admin
Admin
I can obviously not answer for everyone else, but I'm not gonna use it at least.
Admin
Let me flip the situation around, still no.
My replacement for one position had a technical background but no development background. He had done training videos explaining the details on how to use a piece of software. but had never built anything or coded a single line.
Admin
@others: the story is fairly close to the submission. Pretty much only the nationalities of the folks involved and the size of the secretary were changed.
Admin
Maybe no Elbonians, but --
I worked as a developer during my college years at the University of Minnesota (a long time ago now). One day my manager rushed into our room and grabbed me and the other two devs, and ran down the hall into the server room.
Someone had scheduled some construction in the server room; said construction to start with a concrete saw making a large square hole in the floor. In the server room. In the server room with lots of expensive servers running. Which would have filled the room with concrete dust. Which would have ruined said servers.
The solution? Shut down all the servers, physically disconnect them, and haul them out of the room. Because we didn't have the authority to stop the construction, being just -- you know, students.
So that was the day I saved the University and the State of Minnesota probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, by protecting the servers from not Elbonians, but Union workers.
Admin
Anonymizing the story to this degree is our frist line of defense against the article being the slightest bit funny.
Admin
Of course, the problem here is that the workers are Unionized...?
Admin
I worked for a company that located their server room in a walk-in, first-floor cupboard. About twenty homeworkers connected to the server doing data entry. As it turns out the cupboard was directly under the building's main water tank. The rest you can fill in for yourself.
The director of the same company once came running in with flash of inspiration: wouldn't the main editing suite - a large, open plan, sparsely populated space - look great if the main access to it from downstairs was via a shiny new spiral staircase? I had to doodle him up a diagram pointing out that this would put the bottom of the stairs in the ladies' toilets.
The same director once decided that we absolutely had to log and monitor all internet use from the office. I investigated, installed and trained the director and an admin on this logging tool and left it running on an old PC under the stairs. 6 months later - I forget why - the director was in a flap and wanted to see the log. When I went to check the machine it was chugging away happily, monitoring traffic and not logging it. The director had turned the logging off - he didn't want his usage logged.
Later they installed roof-high glass partitions around three sides of the development room in the office. This give you about 10-15 seconds warning if the director was coming down the corridor. A colleague of mine took to grabbing his laptop and working under his desk when this happened. The director never once asked were he'd got to.
Admin
Admin
Umm...
Surely your manager was there? Was he a student? (I'm guessing not.) Did he have the authority? Did he actually ask them to stop? Did someone forget to put a 'making big hole in server room floor' in the calendar?
Sounds like you've got half a story here: what's the other half?
P.S. In defence of unions and union workers I'd like to cite, well... most of the 20th century. :-)
Admin
I think only RAID-8 would do.
Quick run down of RAID levels: RAID-0 Oh, my files are gone! RAID-1 Yes, I can! RAID-5 Those files may dive RAID-6 There's nothing you can't fix RAID-8 84Z00K4'5 1473
Admin
Some time in the 1990's a former colleague went to a job interview for a C programmer position. The actual job location was somewhere in the Middle East. One of the questions asked during the interview was did he know how to handle an AK-47 and could he lead a squad of similarly armed co-workers if circumstances required it. He declined the job offer.
Admin
This version is not funny
Admin
Amen to that. But at least it's not another Hanzo story. shudder
Admin
So... apart from the casual racism and sexism.. is there a WTF?
Admin
If I was expected to work in a room without air conditioning, but putting a server in that room would guarantee the addition of air conditioning in that room, I'd be taking Admin-B's position as well.
Well, I probably just wouldn't work at that company...
Admin
Admin
Admin
this isnt a comment - this is a call out to battle.
ALEX, I CHALLENGE YOU TO A ONE ON ONE CODE OFF.
THE LANGUAGE? MUMPS.
THE PLACE? CHILIS IN LAS VEGAS NEVADA SECOND FLOOR.
THE PRIZE? IF YOU WIN, ILL NEVER SHITPOST ON YOUR WEBSITE AGAIN.
THE FAILURE? IF YOU LOSE, YOU MUST MAKE ME SITE ADMIN FOR A DAY.
Admin
Speak for yourself. Some of us have such tedious lives that we're happy to read anything mildly entertaining.
Admin
That's not fair, you should offer the person you challenge the choice of weapons.
Admin
also, get a life.
Admin
Admin
Be honest... you don't come here to read WTFs, you come here to complain about them...
Admin
Admin
Admin