[ale] New worm destablized Internet

[James S. Cochrane]

I STILL tell stories about some of the idiocy there... Like the time I'd 
taken one of their old 386/20's in to the shop, and they diagnosed the 
problem as a fried motherboard, and wanted something like $400 to replace 
it (this was in '95 or '96, we were ordering new P75's and P90's for field 
sites), Mac Warren harangued me for my decision that it wasn't 
cost-effective to have the motherboard replaced, because a new system from 
Gateway would have cost $900 (and would have been at LEAST a P90, had a 
considerably larger hard drive, considerably more memory, etc...)  Heck, 
they didn't even bother to take me off the security company contact list, I 
got called a year or so later that the alarm was going off and they 
couldn't reach Dale...  At least you saw it in the new offices, the old 
offices had serial cables running to every office for dumb terminals, with 
a VERY thick bundle of mostly unlabeled cables (at least 18" across) going 
into the server room.  Mac didn't believe us when we said we wouldn't need 
a cable duct run to the new server room (such as it was), since we were 
switching to ethernet and a terminal server, so he had them run one up near 
the top of the wall anyway...  He just couldn't believe that 'all' of that 
data would go over a little bitty CAT-5 cable...  As for the IT department, 
their original developers/system administrators did ALL of their coding as 
root, and didn't document any of it.  We finally gave up on trying to track 
down all of the dependencies, and left the basic configuration the way they 
had, with users having full root priveledges but hidden behind a ksh menu 
system...  (best laugh I had was that after I left, Keith apparently 
dropped their new server while moving it from my cube where I'd built it to 
the 'server room', causing a hard drive crash... and it'd been a few weeks 
since I'd been there, which was the last time a backup had been 
run...)  The ONLY good thing about that job was it got me resume fodder as 
a sysadmin...

James

At 10:28 PM 1/26/03 -0500, you wrote:
>I used to work for CTMS in 97 to 98 (not in the IT section, though). What a
>company.
>Small world, huh ?


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