Shark Tank: Work-arounds

This pilot fish is running network traces one evening to diagnose problems accessing e-mail, and he discovers that one user's workstation is generating a barrage of network traffic that's maxing out the server. "When I called the user, he finally confessed that to defeat the pesky screen-lock timeout foisted upon them by the security folks, he and his buddies would bring up the e-mail client, put a pipe cleaner around the F9 key to keep it stuck down, and voila! -- the screen wouldn't lock. That night, he forgot to unstick the key, so it ran all night. Unbeknownst to the user, the F9 key forces a rather server-intensive refresh operation. No wonder our e-mail servers have been bogged down lately!"

@#$%!

New user complains that the network has slowed his PC to a crawl -- and on top of that, he says this sys­admin pilot fish is calling him names through the network! Fish fixes the performance problems remotely, then asks user why he thinks fish is insulting him. "Turns out that his autogenerated log-in was so many letters from his last name plus so many from his first name," says fish. "The generated name implied that his parents weren't married."

Hardware fix

Programmer pilot fish's new PC keeps rebooting itself, and he can't identify what's causing it -- until he realizes it only happens when he shifts his chair. "The case was on the floor under my desk, and the wheel spokes under my chair had a slight lip on them," says fish. "When I moved, the base of the chair would swivel, and a spoke would hit the reset button. Solution: I put the new computer on a piece of one-by-six board, raising the button just enough that the spoke wouldn't hit it."

Just what you asked for

When new employees are hired at this manufacturing company, part of the paperwork includes choosing a password that's eight characters long and uses numbers and capital and lowercase letters. "We received a new hire's password that was six digits followed by two capital letters -- the second of which was written a half-line lower than the rest," says an IT pilot fish. "When we contacted him about correcting it, he said it was the way he wanted it: six numbers followed by a capital letter and ending with one in lower case."

The password is Sharky. Send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com, and you'll get a snazzy Shark shirt if I use it. And check out Sharky's blog, browse the Sharkives and sign up for Shark Tank home delivery at the Sharkives.

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