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Chris C-B wrote: auditors (from one of the 'big five'...) plugged a virus-ridden USB stick into the server Let me guess. Toilette & Douche?
Interesting post, thanks. Maybe there should be a board for sharing these kinds of war stories.
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A long time ago I was working as a network technician with 30-odd customers, and I can assure you and everyone else that what you have is outstanding stats!
Especially the 'just moving a file' did happen way to often. And then they wondered why they had to have so 'strict' security settings. It was for their own sake. It was cheaper that way
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I used to think that backups could be thought of as being overly cautious, but please read the following, totally true, cautionary tale.
Way back when (90's) our company decided with great wisdom to out-source our email. They chose a company that was well-known for telecoms at that time - I shall call them Cable & Hopeless (C&H) as they still operate today, in some remoter parts of the world.
While I was happy to let our department's emails be managed and stored elsewhere I was less than happy about trying to access 30 Outlook mailboxes over a 64 kb/s ISDN line. I therefor implemented a policy of setting up Outlook to keep a local copy of the inbox and seting up individual local folders for all users on a local server. This was immediately criticised by the upper powers as they couldn't access the entirety of my users e-mails. (My immediate boss quickly informed them that it was illegal to do so and that all our mail was top secret anyway, so they could take a walk).
Fast forward a couple of years, my system is humming along nicely despite Outlook's attempts to corrupt .pst files if there was the slightest network time-out. I had GFS backups of everything mail-related and the world was bright and shiny, until... "Mail server is off-line".
Day 1: We contacted C&H who said "don't worry, it looks like a disk failure but it's RAID 5 so you'll be OK. Please wait while we swap out the disk and the array rebuilds".
Day 2: "Erm it looks like more than one disk has failed, we can't understand it, we're trying to rebuild with 2 disks" (I start to hear alarm bells)
Day 3: "Erm well it appears that you can't rebuild a RAID 5 array when 2 out of 3 disks have failed"
"So this is the 2nd disk to fail in the array then?"
"Looks like it"
"So why didn't you replace the first one when you got the alert?"
Silence..
Day 4: "It looks like the alerts were set up to email someone who has since left the company. Anyway we're re-installing your Exchange Server and will be able to restore from backups."
Day 5: "Please be patient, we're looking for the best backup."
Day 8: "Erm, it looks like all our backups are blank! Anyway your server is up and running and we're adding accounts as we speak"
Day 9: "Apologies but it appears that we forgot to plug the SCSI cable in to the tape drive, there have never been any backups of the server!"
"Didn't you get any alert messages?"
wait for it ...
"It looks like the alerts were set up to email someone who has since left the company."
My 30 users were very happy to find all there past and present emails available to them. The rest of the company (200 accounts) had to grin and bear it.
At a later stage the powers that be decided to bring email back in-company, even then they still managed to omit to back up Active Directory. This blew up in their faces when a trainee with admin privileges hit "Delete" on the main tree and then tried to fix it himself.
Guess who did have a backup?
(Finished blowing my own trumpet, but don't forget the first law of IT, "If anything can go wrong, it will do so in the worst possible and least expected manner")
So old that I did my first coding in octal via switches on a DEC PDP 8
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Clumpco wrote: If anything can go wrong, it will do so in the worst possible and least expected manner
Or in the case of outsourcing it's usually the most expected manner.
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They just made mistake upon mistake upon mistake, very amateurish, and I'm pretty sure you could sue for that because you could expect better from such a company.
On the other hand, suing won't get you your emails back.
Trainee with admin privileges in the AD? That was asking for trouble...
Too bad they didn't listen to you.
Every company should have someone like you (in management), a backup nut
I've never been religious on backups and I lost my entire music collection like that once (I was like 16 though, so I didn't know any better, nor did I have the means to make a good backup).
I didn't learn anything from the experience and it could happen again
I've been meaning to look into it, but you know how that goes... "I'll get to it someday"
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Chris C-B wrote: Any ideas how to reconnect a soft-ejected drive to an XP system without unplugging/replugging or turning off/turning on again?
I believe I've done this in the past by going to Device Manager and telling it to look for new hardware.
If it works at all, it'll probably work for XP.
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Do you prefere the waiting lines inside or outside?
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Depends on the whether...whether I want to be inside or out!
I'm hiding from exercise...I'm in the fitness protection program.
JaxCoder.com
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Indoors you're breathing the same air as everyone else, outdoors you're having a constant exchange of air, so the air you breathe is getting diluted with fresh air.
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I'll go for C: I prefer VIP treatment.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I should hope not. However, I think that is a very popular video game, hilarious or not.
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0x01AA wrote: We can somehow bring the economy back up, but not the dead. We need more people who think that way. I'm sick of hearing the opposite (although only half of the equation is ever mentioned).
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I don't trust you, you're kidding me once more...
anyway
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Mark_Wallace wrote: (although only half of the equation is ever mentioned).
Do you mean the part about, if the economy goes down the drains, we can't pay for the hospitals any more and a lot more people are going to die?
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And the people who live are out of money, can't pay their mortgage or their rent, have to visit the food bank and are overall just very stressed, tired and unhappy which leads to health issues and earlier deaths
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It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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I'm just not a fan of Queen
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Don't see the relation, sorry
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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At first, I was just replying to Jörgen's post, who's kind of a buzzkill so I just rolled with that.
Then you replied to me and I just told you, unrelated, I'm not a fan of Queen, which is also a bit of a buzzkill, but which came easy after Jörgen's initial buzzkill and my buzzkilling reply.
All in all this is turning into quite the buzzkill.
So let me just finish off by saying, yes, we shouldn't focus so much on the economy and instead focus a bit more on the things that matter.
When this is over, find a job closer to home, take the bike to work, talk to strangers on the subway, spend more time with your family.
The economy was booming, but we were all (generalizing) stressed out and slowly killing the planet.
Roll over economy, make room for happiness!
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Quote: to let me just finish off by saying, yes, we shouldn't focus so much on the economy and instead focus a bit more on the things that matter.
I'm released you are a good one Serious: Sorry if I responded too angree with too much
[Edit]
I like Queen/Mercury but I think that is really a detail
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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0x01AA wrote: Sorry if I responded too angree with too much Sorry if I responded with too much sarcasm and dark humor
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Sander Rossel wrote: we shouldn't focus so much on the economy and instead focus a bit more on the things that matter. We can do both. It won't do anyone any good for all of us to come out of this healthy but unemployed.
Social Media - A platform that makes it easier for the crazies to find each other.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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