Shark Tank: T.G.I.F.

This company has been having trouble on its network for months. "Every Friday afternoon, there had been a mysterious packet storm that was bringing our network to its knees," says an IT pilot fish on the scene. "And it was causing our help desk to overload with calls from users."

One senior network analyst has tried nearly everything to fix the problem -- and that includes unplugging portions of the network and blaming the problem on the engineering people.

After months of beating his head against the wall, the analyst comes back from a training session with a new set of skills. And the following Friday, he uses a sniffer to check out packets during the massive spike in network traffic.

And he finally gets his answer. Turns out that, for some earlier testing, the network analyst had set up a bogus e-mail address. But the name he chose for the test account is the same as the name on the account that all undeliverable mail goes to.

"So the corporate mail server would save up all undeliverable mail all week," fish says. "Then when the mail administrator would do maintenance on Friday afternoon, it would send all the undeliverable mail for the whole corporation to our network analyst -- resulting in bringing down the network.

"We all had a good laugh at his expense, but had enough compassion not to turn him over to the users."

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