What are some good IT stories? And by good I mean horrific

[yinan]

At my current position the lead for the virtualization initiative in a new building we are standing up wanted to cluster vCenter using MSCS and physical hosts. Everyone that was competent in the product said it was a bad idea and was overkill and to just install it in a VM like normal and let the VMware HA take care of keeping it up all the time. He didnt listen and I was told to install it in this configuration. Spent a month and a half installing/troubleshooting the thing until it became too much of a pain and it was installed in a VM and in 3 days I had 3 networks completely functional.

I hate it when people dont listen...

 

[Red Squirrel]

At my current position the lead for the virtualization initiative in a new building we are standing up wanted to cluster vCenter using MSCS and physical hosts. Everyone that was competent in the product said it was a bad idea and was overkill and to just install it in a VM like normal and let the VMware HA take care of keeping it up all the time. He didnt listen and I was told to install it in this configuration. Spent a month and a half installing/troubleshooting the thing until it became too much of a pain and it was installed in a VM and in 3 days I had 3 networks completely functional.

I hate it when people dont listen...

Sounds like at our work... they added some new ESX servers and decided to go with ESXi because it's cheaper... but turns out they had to pay money for it to support HA and all that anyway... now we have lot of issues moving VMs from ESX to ESXi and vise versa. It works, but we had to do a bunch of changes in cpuid flags and stuff. Very dirty imo.. should of just sticked with the same thing accross the board.

 

[yinan]

You shouldnt have had these issues. ESX/ESXi are essentially the same product except ESXi doesn't have a supported service console. If they are the same type and model of CPU you can move them back and forth all day. ESX/ESXi also cost the same to attach to vCenter. ESXi is only free when it is unmanaged by vCenter.

 

[Demo24]

I always like the ticket of "Help! I have deleted the internet!". Unfortunately solving that would mean a 10-15 minute drive to the destination, attempt to find the room, the problematic computer, and then restore the IE shortcut to the desktop.

 

[ussfletcher]

I always like the ticket of "Help! I have deleted the internet!". Unfortunately solving that would mean a 10-15 minute drive to the destination, attempt to find the room, the problematic computer, and then restore the IE shortcut to the desktop.

I bet this happens fairly often, I almost want a low level tech job... just to have stories like this.

 

[Demo24]

I bet this happens fairly often, I almost want a low level tech job... just to have stories like this.

Or something just as dumb. I only had to do those for awhile before I moved myself up into networking. Also an intern, so I could just pass them off to the official techs if I wanted. ^_^


Another fun one was when this ladies laptop HD was dieing. This was before we had roaming profiles, so everything was on that. Well, apparently she knew better than us IT people and instead of letting us get her data off, for free I might add, she took it to some people who proceeded to completely screw up and she lost everything. Of course she brought it back to us, barged right in the door, and demanded we fix it. We sort of acted like we were doing something, but it was hopeless. Eventually we just gave it back to her with a new image on it. She was mad and bad mouthed us, but it didn't really matter. She got fired a couple months later.

 

[Exterous]

My best "IT" stories are actually from way back when I worked at a best buy tech bench.

Everything from cockroaches infested pc's to transvestites throwing laptops. Corporate IT is boring by comparison.

Heh - yeah I haven't had anything thrown at me, had my life threatened or actually had to go to court since I left big box support.

Anyway is one of my 'new' ones:

Kinda of a 'do'h' moment for me. We had just acquired a company in the UK and I was going over some information with our new IT guy in the UK office by phone. I gave him the password which included a #, which I called 'the pound sign'. It wouldn't let him in. Fast forward a couple of hours of troubleshooting and making sure the connection to our server stateside were working. We were chatting about plans after work and I asked him how much a pint cost in the UK. When he gave me the price in pounds I finally figured out what the problem was......

 

[Exterous]

Oh and I can't get our Senior Network Admin or DBA Admin to consistently send out notifications of server reboots

Recently the Senior Network Admin even retired one of our DNS servers without telling anyone. I found out when a number of our lab and HVAC control computers, which needed static IPs, suddenly stopped connecting to our network

 

[skyking]

I handled the caps lock password phone call about an hour ago.... some things never change.