There is such a thing as too much creativity

This pilot fish works for a company that supplies software to automobile dealerships. And to make sure everything runs smoothly, every install includes a device to let the dealer's system connect with the vendor's main office.

"My department is responsible for maintenance of those devices, so any trouble tickets for them or their connections get routed to us," says fish.

"One afternoon, we got four tickets sent to us simultaneously. They all came from the central networking group, which monitors the VPN servers that these devices connect to."

All the tickets are the same: Connection is down, rebooting does not resolve, please send field technician to troubleshoot.

Fish and his cohorts pull the tickets and start investigating. Very quickly they notice something: According to the customers' files, all four of them are using the newest type of connection, one that talks to fish's company over the Internet.

But when fish contacts the field technicians, he's told that these dealers are scheduled to be upgraded to Internet connections, but that won't happen for a while yet. According to the field techs, all four customers should still be on dial-up connections.

"So we started snooping in a different direction," fish says. "We checked the logs and found out that several minutes before these connections 'went down,' a single individual from the central networking group had been able to connect successfully for several minutes.

"We dug further. We were able to access the devices remotely through an alternative method, and discovered none of the settings appeared to be legit — gateways were missing, DNS entries were missing, etc. Every single one was nowhere near a good configuration to ever have worked with the new type of connection.

"We eventually confronted the employee from central networking. He fessed up."

Turns out the networking guy's boss had told him to "expedite" the conversion of a long list of customers to the new type of connection.

And since "connection down" trouble tickets get more attention than "connection conversion" tickets, the networking guy decided to get creative and change the device settings to force the connection down, in order to expedite the conversion.

But the networking guy also tried to cover his tracks by changing the connection listing for those customers to indicate an upgraded connection, and deleting the dial-up accounts from the dial-up servers.

"What he didn't expect was our group to go through the logs so thoroughly," says fish.

"He also didn't expect to be on speakerphone for the whole department to hear when he confessed.

"We were able to 'expedite' his efforts to go back through the four accounts he 'converted' to get their connections back up and running."

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