Ambush! - The Online Geek Community
General => Polls => Topic started by: opiesilver on April 22, 2002, 11:12:43 PM
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Just how many BOFH's are out there?:evil
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what is a BOHF's?
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http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html
Read on! But beware, it may be hard to contain the sudden outbursts of laughter.
Zeet, this is required reading for you buddy!
[Edited on 4-23-2002 by ZWarrior]
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That was TOO FUNNYY :rolling:rolling
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MY STOMACH! (bent over laughing)
BOFH! :rolling
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thats great I love it:rolling
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whats up with this pole anyway (all the ///////////////////////// ) is it a typo???
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All the \\\ wasn't there last night when I put this up. I'll pose the question to the forum admin.
---Opie:hat
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Didn't realize that so many of you were uneducated in the art of the Bastard. Well, your education starts today. What did you say that your user name was?
---Opie:hat
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It is a bug with the apostrophe, in this forum software. Since it's PHP based, the code will escape the apostrophe everytime. Bad code. I am working on getting the upgrade to this code.
I found a patch for that, but now there is a error message that is being displayed. I am working on it.
[Edited on 4-24-2002 by ZWarrior]
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Weird. You just got to love software with undocumented features. :b
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I think anyone that is seeing these so called ////// must be well over due for a reload. I have not seen any on this message board except for the ones you guys post in your replys. If a reload dont do it then lay of the unreal thing for a while, you have probably been fragged way to many times and it is causing both emotional and hardware distress.:rolling
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Huh??? I think that you're smoking way too much these days. :smokin Look in the poll results.8o
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"BOFH's"
Of course I am!!!!
"Better On Frag Hit's"8)
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That's right Spade, dig your hole a bit deeper. :lol
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WOOOHOOO! Three stars!!!!:D
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Ditto that remark, three stars after 25 posts. Thanks Z for lowering the numbers just for the select few.:lol
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yeah im trying for 4 stars and im at almost 60 posts
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when does it go to 4 stars??? or even 5???
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For You
NEVER!:lol
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NEWS FLASH!!!
I just found this under the FAQ link:
Based on the number of posts you have, you are assigned to a rank. Each rank has its own status and its own amount of stars. Below are the user rank settings for this board: Newbie 1
Junior Member 5
Member 25
Senior Member 100
Posting Freak 500
--Opie:hat
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Looks like we will all just be members for a while.>D
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For another few days anyway.:)
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speek for yourself
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It was supost to be funny
(I laghed)
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Yeah, me too! :lol
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good because that was the hole point of it all
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I thought about doing something like that but then I never have been one for the easy way out. ;)
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That's OK, 'cause the moderator/admin caught it, and fixed it. Heh heh :evil
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You Monster!!!:mad::mad::mad::mad:
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now none of the slow guys will get to lagh at my good joke (its not like i did it a lot, just 2 times);(:(
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Or MINE! (whine) I just wanted to have a little fun. |I (whine,sob) And now, (sob) no one will ever get to laugh again (sob,sob,sob) at our posts (sniffle, sob)
Hey, who do I sound like? Wuss-a-rene or Dragon Master? :o
[Edited on 4-26-2002 by opiesilver]
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ouch dont be comparing me to the pussy cat
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Don't make me quote you! :o
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NO YOU WOULDENT!!!!:eek:eek:eek:eek
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Originally posted by Dragon Master
now none of the slow guys will get to lagh at my good joke (its not like i did it a lot, just 2 times);(:(
Waaaaaah! Your staring to sound like Wuss. STOP IT! :mad:
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somtimes you have to do what you have to do to get things done
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You ever have one of those days where nothing seems to go right and the users just aren't calling? Well, I had one about three years ago, and now I'll share it with you. You see, to understand the mind of a BOFH, you must become a BOFH.
It all started with showing up for work as a brand spanking new shift supervisor at 7:00 am and being told that I was going to work the evening and mid shift as well. Talk about your mind numbing experiences. That only slightly altered my outlook on the day, it was going to be a good day wasn't it? I had the power, I had root to over 3000 systems and I controlled the routers and switches for the entire network. Nothing could happen unless I knew about it, thanks mostly to my brand new 50" plasma display on the wall running HP Openview. HA!:o Looking back on it now, I realize I must have been smoking crack in my sleep the night before.
Nothing happened all day. The helldesk maybe took ten calls all day, none of which disturbed my naps. :) Shift change came and went. Still nothing. And then the next shift change came. My day had just gone to hell. :mad:
You see, on the mid shift was my highly prized super troop. My very own PFY! A programming genius who had the gift for system administration. I had gotten this guy because of his bad attitude and general disrespect for anyone of higher rank. (Yes, I was SSgt Goins att. :x) Kinda sounded like a respectable version of me.
I had no problems out of this guy until tonight. The PFY came to work reeking. :beer: From what I could get out of him, he'd only had ten pints of bitter. As soon as I had him laid out in between two servers, the boss shows up along with the new butter bar lieutenant. They just wanted to check out how it was going for me, being the first day as a shift supervisor and all. 8/ That's when the very drunk PFY decided to make his appearance, and hurled all over the boss. :rolling So much for my PFY. (I got him back after a short stay in the brig.):)
The boss decides I can't handle the helm by myself all night and decides to call in one of the other supervisors to help me out. ;( To make matters worse for me, it was the idiot programmer turned admin who was just about clueless.:x
Clueless showed up and immediately went to work on one his pet projects. In doing so, he decided to "educate" me about how a computer works. "Educate ME!?" :mad: So I humor him. I think it was just about this point that I became a BOFH. I couldn't take it anymore! I made a few lame excuses about needing to get some backups done, and left the helldesk for the relative safety of the server room.
Ahh, the humming, droning sound of a thousand hard drives all running at once. It's a sound that can put me to sleep in an instant. But not tonight. I was pissed and the only thing that would satisfy me was the thought of making this egotistical pseudo admin the laughing stock of the base. :evil But how to do it?
I've always heard that a little evil lives in everyone’s soul and waits for the opportunity to get control. Well, tonight was my turn. First I tracked down what sever he was working off of and logged in as root at the console. He didn't notice the log in and I "edited" the security logs. :evil Next I changed user to him and rsh'd to his workstation as him. Just to make sure he didn't suspect a thing, I'd walk out to the help desk and make an entry in the MSL. I took a look at what he was working on. It involved some number manipulation so I went with this for my scheme. I started popping erroneous errors in the console window of his workstation every 10 seconds or so. The messages read something like this: "Warning! System low on numeric resources" and " Warning! Critical error encountered. #0" This goes on for about ten minutes and I decide it's time to go back to the hell desk. And what did I see? Clueless had every manual he could find open and laying around. He had been desperately trying to find out what the errors had meant. And since I dropped the gateway for the Internet back in the server room, that was no help for him either. :compute: I could feel the dread on his face even before I saw it. He had to ask me what these messages meant. For Clueless, there could be no worse punishment than to ask a real sys admin for help. Or was there? :evil
"Hey Del, you every see an error like this?” he asked. <Trap has now sprung> Being the ever-helpful person that I am, I told him about how these errors meant that his system was about to crash hard. After all, he had been crunching a lot of numbers tonight and the machine had simply run out of zeros. Clueless doesn't quite believe me at this point. So I go onto explain how in the old days, systems were manufactured with math co-processors to take care of the number crunching duties. These math co-processors could reset themselves and not take the system down. But because of better methods of programming that evolved, the math co-processors were no longer needed. (DUMMY MODE ON!) In fact processors no longer crunched numbers but are specifically designed for the Operating Systems that run on them. :rolling Take the Sun Sparc processor for instance, which ran Sun OS and Solaris. You'll never see Windoze running on one of those processors now will you?
About this time the crontab entry I had placed on his workstation went off. I t ran a script I (he) placed into his home directory called "xxx.porn". I thought security would love this. First it threw up another console message. "Critical error!! System out of zeros." Next it added another crontab entry to reboot his workstation at random five or ten minute intervals for the rest of the night. Then it renamed most of his home directory with a "-" as the first letter of a filename.
The look on his face was a genuine Kodak moment. He just realized that he hadn't saved the last couple of hours worth of work. And so the dummy asked me, "How do I stop this?" I suggested he contact the commander and ask about getting a hardware upgrade as that was the only thing I knew that would take care of his problem. :rolling
Just before I left, I heard him asking another BOFH, whom I was a PFY to, if he had encountered this problem before. "Oh yes, but I can't remember what fixed it. Perhaps you should send out an email to all in the command and see if anyone remembers how to fix it."
And a Bastard was born.....
--Opie:hat
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OH THATS GOOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D
:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D
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:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D
:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D:lol:rolling:clap::D
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I thought that as I started this poll, I shoud try and keep it on course. I would encourage anyone else to share their stories as well.
And besides, with a post this long, I should get a couple of extra stars. <Hint,Hint> ;)
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that should count as 5 posts:compute:
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Yeah, as slow as I am at typing, it took me over an hour to write that.:compute:
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All I have to say about that story is...
:beer:
I would never have thought of that one.
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was that story true (i think it is but im not for shure)
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Yes it is, but I won't reveal the identities of those whom I wrote about. They may come looking for me someday.
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HA HA HA, i dont blame you.:lol
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Any other bastards out there? Share your stories here. :evil :crash: :gunner::cry:
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I wish I could, but I haven't a BOFH tale to tell. I have been a consultant for so long, that I have lost the touch! :cry:
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Appearantly you have not read enough of the BOFH. Should you choose to read this Sys Admin bible, you will learn of the evil Bastard Consultant From Hell. Not quite as good as a full BOFH, but as a minor demon you can still inflict major amounts of pain and suffering upon those who try and waste your time.:evil
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Oh, I have read the entire series many a time. I even have the first book. But just haven't had a chance to use the skills therein. At least not that I will talk about on the record. ;)
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I'll let you borrow the second book if you want. Besides, we wouldn't really do anything like I've described above :evil except for in story form. Right?!
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Yep yep.
Latest stories from Simon:
http://www.theregus.com/content/30/25434.html
http://www.theregus.com/content/30/25539.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/26285.html
I think that the one released on 6-29 is high on my list. ;)
edit: Heh, silly software through a line break and a space in there! Got it now though.
[Edited on 7-24-2002 by ZWarrior]
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The first two were good, but the last would not load.
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If you look at the url you will see why the third one didn't load try deleting the http://<br%20/>
I would have to say that I'm a BUFH (Bastard User From Hell) I know just enough to give BOFH serious trouble! But not enough to be a BOFH.
Since I've either taught myself, or learned from a BOFH, I know a little about a lot. At times I know what to do to fix a problem before the BOFH does, and have to educate them (kind of like RTFM). Of course when it's me who calls the helldesk, they send a PFY. I definitely know more than they do, and usually hear things like; "How did you get access to that, you don't have rights to it. Blah Blah Blah, I'll have to tell my manager and get the password changed"
as if that would stop me, his manager is the one who gave me the password because he got tired of me calling him twice a day to get access. He prefers to play UT.
The latest incident
Last week I finally got tired of my laptop running so slow (it's a PII 300 with 128mb ram). I "procured" a PIII 1000. Only problem was that I only had 128mb of ram. So I found an extra 128mb module and slapped that sucker in, booted up and started installing the software the way I want it installed. Along comes Mr. LAN "Where did you get that hard drive?" he demands.
"It was in the black box (it's a dell) the whole time. They usually come with hard dirves you know." I respond intelligently.
"No, I mean where did you get the computer?" he reiterates as he realizes he's not dealing with a luser.
"Oh, the computer? I was on a desk, collecting dust."
"Who authorized you to have that machine?"
"My boss." (I had informed her that I was going to get a new computer, she thought it was a great idea)
"Oh, why didn't have us set it up?"
"I didn't want to waste your time, I've got to run to a meeting, I'm late." (because I'm a BUFH sent here to annoy you, but don't want to talk to you anymore so am pretending that I have some important meeting to go to.
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LOL, showed THAT PFY!
I find it's best to go for vague when answering questions regardin hardware that has been procured.
I did some work at a major company a while back, migrating them from Novell to Windows NT.
The team of consultants that I stepped in and took over were culling through HUGE spreadsheets (10-15MB) and manually changing all the information by hand, (user homedir, etc.). Then changing the rights by hand.
I needed a PC, and IT wasn't ready with mine yet. "It will be a few days until we are ready with it, sorry."
I asked the boss if I could look around and see what was lying around loose. He had no problems. I found and snagged a 4x450 with 2GBRAM and 200GB RAID5 storage.
When IT showed up to with my computer I had then install it under the desk, and told them that the other box was for some testing.
But there was only one network jack in the cube. Scammed a Cisco 24 port switch for the cube, and hooked everybody around me that wanted to game to it. Loaded games on the newly delivered workstation and setup times after work to disconnect the switch from the network and everybody played locally on the switch.
Then I scammed an Apex digital KVM switch, to manage the boxes of course.
Then we grabbed 2 more systems to research OS interfaces.
All the while the IT guys were trying to inventory equipment that somehow kept moving around, and the boss is wondering how I ended up with the beefy box as a workstation.
Gosh I miss that box! I eventually had to leave because the project was over.
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I used to work for a company that was contracted to support the Burger Kings in a 4 state region.
Every night the managers would start software to poll each cash register, and get the data from them. Then it would process all the figures, packages it up, and call the main office with it. If anything went wrong, they called us. This was done after close of the store each night, so you can imagine what time the calls would come in. The problem was, I lived in a dorm, and the phone was at the other end of the hallway.
It never failed that you would be sleeping great, and about 2am, the pager would go off. So I grab the pager, the tech support book, and shuffle down the hallway. I call the store in the middle of nowhere, ans ask the problem:
Me: "Hi, this is tech support, you paged me?"
Mgr:"Yeah, hi, about time you called. I have been have having problems ALL NIGHT!"
Me: "Did you page us earlier with the problems?" (Checks the pager, no other pages.)
Mgr:"No, you're supposed to know these things!"
Me:"OK, what seems to be the problem?"
Mgr:"Well the software has locked up. It's stopped working after it did the poll."
Me: "Yeah, there is a bug in the software that will do that. Let's see what we can do to get it working."
Mgr: "Whatta ya mean a bug? I want it fixed right now!"
Me: (Counts to 10 first) "Pardon me? Let's get this running and then we can talk about that."
Mgr: "No, I want it fixed now!"
Me: "Look. With all due respect, I am sitting here in my pajamas, with no computer even near me, and you want me to upload a non-existant upgrade to you? Let's get the system working first, OK?"
Mgr: "It's not my fault you aren't at your office, maybe you should go there first. Then you can send me the upgrade."
Me: "I'm sorry, I'm not going anywhere to upload anything that doesn't exist. Now can we please return to the problem at hand? What is on your screen right now?"
Mgr: "Well, the software is loaded and is sitting there saying it's 50% finished. When is the upgrade due out?"
Me: "Doesn't matter, you aren't getting it tonight. Ok, hold down Control, Shift, and Escape keys all at the time. This should bring up the task manager. Let me know when it is up."
Mgr: "OK, that's up. Now what?"
Me: "Now see where it says RegisterMan in the list? Click that and then click End Task"
Mgr: "OK, now it has another window up asking if I'm sure. Why can't I have the upgrade tonight?"
Me: "Say yes to the window, and there is no upgrade at this time, that's why."
Mgr:"OK, the windows gone, and the software is gone too. When will there be an upgrade?"
Me:" Great! Now click on the Start button, click on shutdown, and then choose shutdown from the list. Click OK after that."
Mgr: "OK. SO when will there be an upgrade?"
Me: "What does your screen say now?"
Mgr:"It's now safe to turn off your computer."
Me:"Go ahead and turn off your computer and then wait 60 seconds, then turn it on again. I'll be right back." (Drops the phone, goes into the hallway and stretches, cursing stupid managers the world over.)
Me: "OK, what does your screen say?"
Mgr:"It's now safe to turn off your computer."
Me: (Silent sigh)"OK, now I need you turn off the computer instead of the monitor. The computer is the box that the monitor, the thing you look at, is connected to. There are 2 cables attached to the monitor trace them. One leads to a box that has 4 cables plugged into it, that is the UPS. We don't want that one, we want the other cable. Trace it to the computer," (which is sitting right next to the monitor usually), "and then push the button that is labeled with a 1 and a 0. Leave it off for 60 seconds then turn it back on, I'll be right back" (finds something to do for 2 minutes)
Me:"OK, what does your screen say now?"
Mgr:"Invalid system disk, replace disk and press any key to continue."
Me: "Do you have a floppy disk in the drive? It's the slot right by the power button. Is there a button sticking out RIGHT below the slot?"
Mgr:"Umm, yeah why?"
Me:"Push the button that is sticking out then hit the spacebar."
Mgr: "Hey look at that it says that windows is loading!"
Me: "Yeah, imagine that!"
Mgr: "OK, I am logging into the computer."
Mgr: "OK, the software is running now. So when will the upgrade be ready?"
Me: "Call your main office in the morning and ask them. We don't write it, we just support it. Good night." *Click*
True story. Things like this happend ALL the time, and usually around 2AM. Sometimes the IT manager for the Owner/Operator would shut off their modem bank to see how fast we would respond. That meant that we started getting calls at about 1 and it would continue until around 3 or later. After a while, we started paging him if we were getting flooded with calls, so he quit answering the pager. So we would quit answering ours. It was an interesting life.
Sorry it's so long, but I thought you might enjoy that.
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Your Way Right Away!
Could I get Fries with that tech support?
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You were way to nice to that (L)user.
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I toned it down a bit, because I had already been talked to about my attitude when dealing with the managers.
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I ran into an old PFY I trained a long, LONG, time ago. He's become quite the BOFH himself. Things he does to his users almost brings tears to my eyes. **sniff** He has now become the lead SA for the US Geological Survey in South Dakota.
My reputation has spread before me. I'm known on two continents now. To make matters worse, my old PFY has passed on to his boss, as a way of sucking up, all of my dirty tricks and bastardly ways. Or so he thought. :evil
His boss, the PHB type, now thinks that I'm a genius. He's right, but I didn't tell him that. The PHB calls me up to their site today and wants to review all of their storage systems and optimize their SAN's and NAS setups. It had apparently been running a bit slow since they added another 300 users last week. The PFY was pushing for a major gigabit network upgrade, not my equipment :swear: , to help relieve some of the network overload problems. The PHB had another idea. Since he had heard of my abilities, he was willing to pay the $400.00 per hour consultation fee to have me onsite.
In about 15 minutes I had the problem solved, but not "resolved". You see, I had to find a believeable explanation why the was a server with a bad ATM card marked 666 was plugged into the network and a desktop was running a script that made 1000 arp requests per minute. Ohhh, sloppy PFY.
I confronted my old PFY and he suggested that we talk about it over dinner. This is the point where all good BOFHs bribe their way out of a bad situation. What can I say? The lobster was good.
So three hours later, I was explaining to the PHB that one of the Cisco Cats had a bad blade and that he really needed to upgrade the network ASAP.
I did leave my old PFY one present on my way out. I set a crontab job to run a script every 24hrs that will change his .cshrc and .profile so that every time he types any command from any shell it will echo on the command line and in the console "System Error: 0x8000034:a004 Asshole on Keyboard"
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WOOOHOOOO!!! 500 posts!
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Ewwww, now that's just plain nasty!