Crazy IT MacGyver Setups
Over at Slashdot they have a listing of crazy Geek DIY fixes. Well worth the 4 hours you will lose there. A Sample:
Finally we found that the trace went through a disused subnet through a former office LAN in that building. This traced it back to an office, which traced it back to…
… a 386 LCD laptop. The machine had died because the logs had filled up the 1.2 gb hard drive. We couldn’t believe it until someone rebooted the damn thing, and DNS came back up. We had been running production DNS on this thing for over 2 years.Turns out that when the French network architecture was being set up, they had to transfer DNS somewhere temporarily as part of a testbed, so some guy had an old laptop in his office he just hooked up. Then he was laid off before we went live. Nobody ever switched it back, and since the office space was being abandoned, no one every went into the office to turn anything off, figuring it was somebody else’s problem.
More power issues, hangers, and some Muzak system setups(of which you will hear a rant about shortly.
Josh Smith is a blogger, database manager and adjunct professor of business and technology. 
