[ubuntu-uk] war stories, was: RM £169 linux-ok notebook

[Philip Newborough]

On 10/10/2007, Alan Pope <alan at popey.com> wrote:
> Hi Kirrus,
>
> On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 09:40 +0100, Kirrus wrote:
> > AAAHHAHAHAA!!! RM!
> >
>
> Heh. I know a few people who have that same reaction :(.
>
> > I used to go to a school, who got all computers & services from RM. We
> > had at least one major system failure a year. (As in, all computers
> > down.) The Sasser worm was great fun. Running round every PC with a
> > floppydisk, containing the norton free fix... all 250 of them. One.
> > At. A. Stupidly. Slow. Time.
>
> To be fair I've been at a few corporate sites where viruses have taken
> out most of the machines.
>
> Best example I have is..
>
> About 3-4 years ago I was asked to do a weeks work in the USA - Palo
> Alto. I decided to take my own personal laptop with me so I could watch
> programmes on the plane, and generally entertain myself when bored. It
> was running Debian at the time.
>
> I arrived at the customer office on the first day and was taken to a
> Dilbert-style cube where I had a chair, a desk, network cable and power
> socket. The head of the office said "I'll send over the network guy to
> help you setup your laptop". At which point I said "but it's my own
> personal laptop, not a work one". He didn't seem bothered by this (most
> companies I work at won't let you plug your own laptop into their
> network).
>
> I grabbed a coffee and sat down in my cube waiting for the network guy.
> A few minutes later someone turned up with an IP address written on a
> post-it note. This was the network guy. He said "before I give you this
> static IP, I need to ask a couple of questions about your laptop". "Uh,
> ok" I said. "Firstly, what anti-virus software do you use on your
> laptop?".
>
> At this point I thought it could all go horribly wrong, and I could get
> ejected from the building, however it went better than I thought.
>
> "Well, I don't run Windows you see.." is how I started. At which point
> the guy said "Oh, you run Linux, oh that's fine then, here, here's your
> IP address, I'm sure you can sort yourself out." and away he went.
>
> Sure enough I was able to connect to the networked laserjet printer,
> access other network applications and basically do my job effectively.
>
> About half an hour after I was given access there was a lot of wailing
> and gnashing of teeth coming from another cube. (I had never worked in a
> Dilbert-style cube-farm before, and noticed that everyone stands up like
> mere-cats, looking over the partitions when there is a comotion).
>
> One of the guys had been hit by some virus or worm on his work windows
> machine. He actually said something to the effect of "stuff this, I'm
> off to play golf" because his computer was completely unusable.
>
> So there's me, with my Linux laptop, working, and him, with his windows
> machine, constantly rebooting, while he is out playing golf.
>
> I'm sure there's a moral there, and I'm not sure who was the "winner"
> overall. You decide for yourself :)
>
> (by the way, I hate golf).
>
> Cheers,
> Al.
>
I was once that guy :| Back in the day when I was responsible for IIS
servers at a company I once worked. One morning every system got hit
by the CodeRed worm. From what I can remember [I try to forget those
dark days] I spent the entire week checking and cleaning files. It
wouldn't have been so bad except that it hit both development and
production environments and infected not only our company files but
those of our clients too.

Needless to say, I learned a few important lessons that week!

Cheers

Philip