• neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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    11 hours ago

    My previous job needed this sign. The problem was that so many (thought they) needed access to various hardware for various reasons, that it was hard to enforce anything. Too often someone would come along and “You know what, this particular thing would work if I just connect this over here”.

    Sure, things kept working, but as the company grew from an office of 10 people to 100 people, it ended up so messy that nobody could troubleshoot anything, and no diagrams or cable lists matched reality. And this server room was supporting remote field operations where downtime could cost millions per day.

    It got to the point where my coworker and VP IT went over to the building manager and simply blocked ALL access. Nobodys card would work unless they really needed it and they’d be given an intro on proper rack hygiene. I joined around this time, and one of my first tasks was to help tear out almost everything and rewire it from scratch during a few days of scheduled downtime.

    After cleanup was done there was a pile on the floor with several kilometers of leftover cabling. Most of the spaghetti had been replaced by proper use of VLANs, and this way it was easy to let Server A talk to Toaster B by just remotely opening a route between the two instead of adding another cable.

    That room wasn’t really part of my job, as I mostly dealt with field hardware. But I had a router stack there that was mine, so I got to keep my access. Rarely needed it, though.

    Funny thing is, about a year later the company moved to a different building. When moving was close to finished and our lease was officially out, my card somehow still worked. So VP IT needed me to let him in the day we tore out the final bit of hardware.

    My guess is that it was down to the fact that my access card needs didn’t really fit any of the standard “profiles” in that I needed access to the server room, the manufacturing lab, and storage, but not the usual stuff such as cantina and most of the office floors. I mostly worked from home or in the field.

  • uservoid1@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    I had a non-IT boss that used to power off and on an entire rack when one of their VMs acted funny, without notifying anyone. Some of the servers were production. I’m not sure a sign would help and dogs do not like the cold.

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      16 hours ago

      Send boss a memo of the number of work-hours lost per month due to data loss caused by power-offs.
      Multiply each colleague’s lost-work-hours by their salary and sum it all in the end, telling the boss how much that’s costing the company.

      You your boss has a boss, CC them to make sure they know the reason for why your boss will be trying to set you up in the future.


      Oh, I just realised the “had”.

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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    22 hours ago

    Whatever you do, do not look into the eyes of the pizza delivery person that lives in our serverroom, do not accept their goods. Its a trap.