bad admin...nay "badmin"

I walked off with about 4 old school computers when I was high school. They were old, and outside a classroom. They didn't have the cameras when I did that. But I had fun taking them apart for useful parts.

I also hacked into the cisco router they had from a library computer using a user name other than my own. (friend showed me how to attack it with a buffer overflow they were vulnerable to at the time), but since I didnt know any commands, I didn't do any damage.

Ok, that's not "bad"... that's theft! lol :p
I accidentally formatted the wrong drive a few times early in my tech-years. doh!! one was a school computer :(

I've done that to customers.. but only because they specifically checked the box to erase the hdd and reinstall windows. Then they were like: "where the hell are my files."
If they were jerks about it we charged them for data recovery, because we always explain what a format and reinstall means, but some people just dont get it.
I know I could never make it running my own computer store, because IMHO the customer is always wrong, and unlike the pussy I had for a boss, I wouldn't back down to intimidation or angry people. Its one think to try to make them happy, its another to let them walk all over you like he did.
 
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Well, this isn't TOO bad, but figured it belongs here.

This morning a coworker heard that the local brewery was having a pancake breakfast, so...

OFFSITE MEETING!

nothing like starting a monday morning at a brewery eating pancakes, sausage, and a beer :)

Hit up starbucks on the way back too, BEST MONDAY EVER. haha.
 
thread resurrection!
I thought of this thread because yesterday I couldnt find of the techs, i located him passed out in a procedure room (we are in a hospital.) Good work little buddy; the force is strong in that one.
 
I've been working IT full time for the past 2 summers at a state university, come this monday I was a little jittery coming off my morning coffee and was starting a windows xp install on an image machine. Little did I know I forgot to unplug one of our most critical and frequently used external hard drives while choosing the drive/partition to install xp onto so I just fired away with the D, Enter, L sequence down the list of available drives and by the time I was done (oops) my boss' reaction was "did you really do that?!" my reaction was D'oh!. Needless to say I blamed it on windows XP's installation prompts and from about that point until now we have spent about an hour a day this week recovering/reformatting/putting data back onto the drive. That has to really be the definition of one step forward and 2 steps back
 
lightingguy32 ... did you learn your lession about having backups of important things?

Shame I never looked into this post sooner. In the past 13 years I have done a few things that qualify as shameful. Here are a couple.

1)Went out to investigate a Time Clock that had gone down at the Monte Carlo Resort. I found that engineering was doing some electrical work across the way from the clock and had tripped some breakers for safety's sake. After asking the electricians we found that the clock was on a dif breaker and it probably got tripped accidentally and off he goes to reset it for me. While waiting on engineering to reset the power the Head Chef comes up to me and reading me the riot act for the clock being down. After attempting to explain that power was down and I was waiting on eng this dude actually had the nerve to get in my face and tell me I was incompetent for having the clock down. My response was to unlock the clock unpluck the power cord from the wall and while brandishing it towards him "Listen here Motherfucker, if you can shit electrons then we can plug this into your ass and the clock will work, otherwise you need to fuck off and wait for power to come back" He turned a nice shade of red, turned around and I never heared from him again.

2)Several years ago I worked for the company who provided the chat services for Microsoft's Web TV. Load balancing was quite simple, the client parsed a text file and depending on the rules in the file picked the appropriate server cluster to go to. One day I needed to edit the file in a hurry, so rather than ssh to the box in question and vi the file I edited it with notepad. Bad idea, apparently asci and binary formats are different lol. The chat service went entirely down and it took the noc staff 2hrs to figure out what was going on and get an engineer to fix the issue. (Bad on them, but still more bad on me for breaking it in the 1st place) I did take the blame for this when I found out what happened.

3)Most security guards stationed at checkpoints are ether lazy, stupid or more than likely a bit of both. (Then again I don't really blame them... there are only a few jobs that I can think of that suck more than that) I can't count the amount of times when I forgot my Corp ID and found that waving any id shapped object in their general direction with a bit of confidence works just fine. Sometimes I would do this even if I had proper credentials just cause its nearly as entertaining as fucking with the recipt checkers at Frys.

Reality is that I'm pretty decent, just have a short temper towards pushy or incompetent people. Combine that with a bit of a passive aggressive personality and I have found that interesting things happen on occasion. My most recent finding is that user specific QOS settings are the shit. You go with your 16k dial up speed lan connection... "My internet is slow!" .. "I don't know what your problem is.. works fine for me" ..
 
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I've got 2, but I didn't do either.. really

First one. Found out that my work blocked torrent's because someone brought down a DS3 because he was downloading so much

Next one. One of our "engineers" walks over to the NOC,where I work, and calmly says that he just rebooted a core router. Now, to give you an idea on how bad this is, it killed about 500+ connections, and brought down about 1000 people. He had 2 SSH sessions up. One in the core router, and one on his desk. Guess what one he thought he was in. We could have killed him.

Ok, one that I did. I worked at a place that had about 10 machines with HP workstations installed in them. Well, a lot of time they were just sitting idle. What better use then put SETI in a hidden directory. :)
 
Ok, one that I did. I worked at a place that had about 10 machines with HP workstations installed in them. Well, a lot of time they were just sitting idle. What better use then put SETI in a hidden directory. :)

WOW. You've got balls. I swear I've read at least three articles about sys admins getting fired for secretly loading up SETI/Folding on work computers. Uses more company paid-for power, decreases the life of the workstation, etc?
 
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