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Reminds me of one of my favorite bash.org quotes: "<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't fi

Reminds me of one of my favorite bash.org quotes: "<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is." I'm sure as machines become smaller, such events will become more frequent. . . . That is, of course, right up until we start implanting our machines directly in our brains.

SwellJoe 19y ago
I've had that happen dozens of times in my years as a sysadmin. Servers in development shops, in particular, have a habit of hiding in strange places. I once found that a regular office that hadn't been in use for about a year, and the whole team that had worked in it had long since left the company, housed a server (really just a desktop that was used as a dev server, and then became the production server when they finished developing the application) that was running one of the companies customers website and database. No one knew where it was, but it was still working so nobody had gone looking for it. It only found its way into the server room when the whole company move to another location. It's worse when it comes to figuring out which Windows workstation is infected with a virus (they're easy to see at the gateway box, if it's a machine that can run ethereal or tcpdump). I would just unplug the fastest flashing port on the network switch and yell out, "Alright, who can't connect to the Internet?" Whoever spoke up was sitting in front of the infected host.
- TheTarquin 19y ago
  We had a (passingly) similar situation at my office recently: a line of boxes that had been humming along happily for as long as I've been at the company. Someone (certainly not me, oh heavens no) needed a network connection and asked around "is this box hosting anyone's project"? Getting nos all around, I (er, I mean, someone) snagged that box's cable. Turns out it wasn't hosting anyone's project, but it WAS acting as the gateway into our network that my boss used on a daily basis.

SwellJoe 19y ago

I've had that happen dozens of times in my years as a sysadmin. Servers in development shops, in particular, have a habit of hiding in strange places. I once found that a regular office that hadn't been in use for about a year, and the whole team that had worked in it had long since left the company, housed a server (really just a desktop that was used as a dev server, and then became the production server when they finished developing the application) that was running one of the companies customers website and database. No one knew where it was, but it was still working so nobody had gone looking for it. It only found its way into the server room when the whole company move to another location. It's worse when it comes to figuring out which Windows workstation is infected with a virus (they're easy to see at the gateway box, if it's a machine that can run ethereal or tcpdump). I would just unplug the fastest flashing port on the network switch and yell out, "Alright, who can't connect to the Internet?" Whoever spoke up was sitting in front of the infected host.

TheTarquin 19y ago
We had a (passingly) similar situation at my office recently: a line of boxes that had been humming along happily for as long as I've been at the company. Someone (certainly not me, oh heavens no) needed a network connection and asked around "is this box hosting anyone's project"? Getting nos all around, I (er, I mean, someone) snagged that box's cable. Turns out it wasn't hosting anyone's project, but it WAS acting as the gateway into our network that my boss used on a daily basis.