Salutations from the server room
Yesterday morning, I came into work, and happened to be greeted by the sight of the server safe room door, it being open.
The company I'm at hosts their own Microsoft Exchange Server, over a 64k DigiNet leased line. Nothing really wrong there, save for extortionate connectivity costs. Their router has an open Telnet port, for "remote administration.". I cringe whenever that thought enters my mind. Feel free to relay through it without enabling any security priviledges, if you port scan the right ip range and find it. Chinese routers for the lose. Two years back, I told them to close their router. Two years down the line, they still lack the knowledge to do so.
Why don't I close the port, you ask? Because they're not giving me the password, in spite of me complaining repeatedly.
Anyway, getting back to the story.... Naturally, I was curious as to why the server safe was open. Someone was busy doing something server-related, and having been around for a couple of months, I know that spells trouble. There's only one person in this company that I trust to go into the server room, but that's besides the point.
I step inside, to see the server stripped of its SCSI harddrive. "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot....", I hear myself think, as I walk off, looking for the server admin.
Calmly, I make my way to the kitchen, to check if he's there. He isn't. No big loss. I put on the kettle with a view to making myself a cup of coffee. As I stand there, waiting for the kettle to boil, the system admin walks in. I give him a saluatory nod.
"The server fell over."
"Uh-huh.", I reply.
"It downloaded and installed Service Pack 2 last night, and proceeded to see its ass, because it ran out of disk space.", he calmly states, in a tone that shows that he gives only marginally more of a fuck than I do.
"Ok, and we proposed to the manager, what was it, a year back, to upgrade that machine?"
"Uh-huh.", he replies.
At about this point, the propellors on my ROFLcopter start to spin all by themselves. My ROFLcopter warms itself up, and starts lift-off sequence even without me at the controls. I let out a maniacal laugh, and all my co-workers who happen to walk past the kitchen at this point give a look that confirms they think me insane. They're right.
The next four hours are fairly uninteresting. We got the server back up, thanks to the good graces of God, Norton Ghost, and a bigger SCSI hdd.
But there's a moral to this story.
Don't let fucking morons manage your server budget lest they decide disk space unimportant on an Exchange server.
The company I'm at hosts their own Microsoft Exchange Server, over a 64k DigiNet leased line. Nothing really wrong there, save for extortionate connectivity costs. Their router has an open Telnet port, for "remote administration.". I cringe whenever that thought enters my mind. Feel free to relay through it without enabling any security priviledges, if you port scan the right ip range and find it. Chinese routers for the lose. Two years back, I told them to close their router. Two years down the line, they still lack the knowledge to do so.
Why don't I close the port, you ask? Because they're not giving me the password, in spite of me complaining repeatedly.
Anyway, getting back to the story.... Naturally, I was curious as to why the server safe was open. Someone was busy doing something server-related, and having been around for a couple of months, I know that spells trouble. There's only one person in this company that I trust to go into the server room, but that's besides the point.
I step inside, to see the server stripped of its SCSI harddrive. "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot....", I hear myself think, as I walk off, looking for the server admin.
Calmly, I make my way to the kitchen, to check if he's there. He isn't. No big loss. I put on the kettle with a view to making myself a cup of coffee. As I stand there, waiting for the kettle to boil, the system admin walks in. I give him a saluatory nod.
"The server fell over."
"Uh-huh.", I reply.
"It downloaded and installed Service Pack 2 last night, and proceeded to see its ass, because it ran out of disk space.", he calmly states, in a tone that shows that he gives only marginally more of a fuck than I do.
"Ok, and we proposed to the manager, what was it, a year back, to upgrade that machine?"
"Uh-huh.", he replies.
At about this point, the propellors on my ROFLcopter start to spin all by themselves. My ROFLcopter warms itself up, and starts lift-off sequence even without me at the controls. I let out a maniacal laugh, and all my co-workers who happen to walk past the kitchen at this point give a look that confirms they think me insane. They're right.
The next four hours are fairly uninteresting. We got the server back up, thanks to the good graces of God, Norton Ghost, and a bigger SCSI hdd.
But there's a moral to this story.
Don't let fucking morons manage your server budget lest they decide disk space unimportant on an Exchange server.
posted by Mburr at
12:16 pm
2 Comments:
Welcome to the workplace, what you are talking about is in NO way unusual.
However, I am concerned that the box was not running SP4. If there is one thing I have learnt, always keep your computers fully patched.
By
Anonymous, at 2:40 pm
He was talking Windows Server 2003. As far as I know, they haven't rolled out SP2 for it yet, it being scheduled for late-2005 release.
SP1 is out. At least, that's if my knowledge is up to date.
By
Mburr, at 12:08 am
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