How the hell do these people get jobs in IT?

[Daz]

Just have a read of this



On a random note, I can highly recommend subscribing to the RSS of dailywtf. Always good for a read at lunch time if you're a bit geeky

[edit] Any devs out there will find this amusing

[Flibster]

The Daily WTF and Daily Dilbert are requirements for me.

*along with several other RSS feeds... including b3ta, The Dilbert Blog
and My Boring Ass Life*

Simon/~Flibster

[Garp]

Originally Posted by Daz

Just have a read of this

Some of our customers scare the crap out of us, particularly the ones in what is supposed to be the most technical role. I am stunned at the number of times I have to translate basic technical concepts down to plain english, when I'm speaking to the guy 'responsible for the servers' or the IT Manager. Some companies I call I pray that the IT Manager is out and I can speek to the plebs because I always get so much further with them; but the IT Manager is jealous and only lets us speak to him, and him liase with his staff.
Others I wonder why they went with the solution they did. Take "Monkey Advertising" company (name altered to protect the innocent), who specifically requested a Linux managed hosting solution. Great. We love Linux here. Most of our boxes run *nix variants, same as with 99% of ISPs and hosting providers.
This customer already had a Linux box with us that kept dying, and although I'm not sure the exact history, essentially it wasn't our fault and we'd gone out of our way to make sure the box stayed live (may have been a colo box?)
It had also been hacked on numerous occasions because the customer point blank refuses to put a firewall in front of it no matter how many times we advise him to, they insist on all users having /bin/bash shells, and also provide all their accounts with very easy to guess username and password combinations. Wahey!

Customer had the new server commissioned to transfer the sites onto, but wanted to move them himself. Fine no problems, over our 10gb backbone they could guarantee 100mb bandwidth to move the sites from one box to the other. So we left them to it.

them: "I can't log in as root"
Us: "No.. you can't. You need to log in as xxxx account first then su to root"
them: "whats su?"
...
them: "I can't get our fancy web frontend for sites to work"
us: "thats because you've deleted the admin user for mysql through your web gui"
them: "oh, we didn't think it was important."
...
them: "FTPing is a really slow way to transfer the files"
us: "Why aren't you rsyncing them?"
them: "whats rsync?"
us: "We can see in the logs you're FTPing them down to your local box then uploading them to the new server?"
them: "yeah"
us: "Why not go direct from one box to the other?"
them: "how do I do that?"
us: "use the command line FTP client as you would normally do"
them: "whats the command line?"
...

Why get a box you can't manage? We do Windoze solutions, which will even allow them to control the box using RDP, and we can see from the consultation docs this was the offer from the outset given their history of problems with the linux box; but the customer had specifically requested Linux.
We'd even have given them Plesk or something similar thats 99x better than their current web-gui method of admining the website.

[Burble]

'kin hell!

[Nutcase]

I've known that the company that does our network and software and hardware stuff is rubbish, but the icing on the cake was when one of their "tech's" came in and said he was supposed to collect a couple of drives. New to me so I asked for more info. He said look, and said "S C S I" pointing at a bit of paper. Yup, this highly paid chimpanzee doesn't even know what a SCSI disk is...

[Garp]

Originally Posted by Nutcase

Yup, this highly paid chimpanzee doesn't even know what a SCSI disk is...

Oh dear.. I could understand when one of our NOC guys didn't know what an SAS drive was, but then its newish technology and we've only just started seeing it this last fortnight when our new DL360 and DL380 G5s started turning up for customers. SCSI though? Sheesh.

[Mark]

Yeah, SAS is excuseable - even I didn't know what that was until fairly recently?

SCSI? I believe that predates IDE. No excuse there then.

[Nutcase]

DL380 G5? My server is a G1

Must admit I don't know what an SAS drive is, but then it's only in the last year I've started seeing fibre channel come through, so I'm still trying to work that tech out!

Bear in mind where I work deals with used kit, from highly data sensitive clients (banks etc.).

Our "technical" department are a bunch of muppets too. Head of sales was wondering a while back why all the scsi arrays coming through had drives in, but the fc ones just had empty caddys.

Turns out they had no way of wiping the drives, so were spiking them Wasn't until a very large quantity of high value drives were destroyed that we got that stopped. Nobody ever thought to ask...

[Burble]

SAS = Serial Attached SCSI. The last lot of servers I ordered (probably 6 months ago) came with SAS discs. Bit of a pain really as I've got plenty of U320 SCSI discs sitting spare.

[Daz]

The 2950's I ordered a couple of months ago have SAS. The RAID-10's bench very well.

Causing me a little pain in that I'm trying to clone a system onto them that's coming from SCSI. Still, I'll live with it, and the performance difference is measurable so meh.