What are your best bandaid solutions?
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I saw this hilarious thread on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3ptd1j/ok_guys_tell_me_about_your_bandaid_solutions_we/and I figured you guys would have some good stories too.
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I had a client that used an old DOS base modeling program in the oil/gas industry and needed to be able to print from it. Being DOS based it could only print to an LPT port. Of course the laptop no longer had a parallel port to plug a printer into, much less a printer that hooks up parallel. My workaround was to install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter, share the usb printer back to the computer and map it to the lpt1 port.
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Last place I worked had lots of money but wouldn't ever invest in a small cache of replacement parts. This led to lots of hilarious fixes, possibly my favourite being stealing my boss's laptop HDD to get a giant vacuumforming machine working agian.
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Another memorable one;
Forklift crushed one of the steel reinforced poles in the warehouse that happened to have cat5e run through it. Couldn't pull a new line ($/hour to cease production = prohibitive) so I went out there with a soldering iron, half a foot of cat5e and spliced that mofo back together. Worked once I set the port on the switch to 10mbit half duplex & turned off PoE.
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Had cable installers in the building a few months back to run fiber from floor to floor so we could have a Gbit backbone between our lame 100mbit switches. Installers ran out of cable lube so I told them I had a substitute and ran down to borrow some no name astroglide they use in the lab. Installers both turned red when they saw what the bottle was used for previously.
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We once ran a server room, which had long been housed in a wall mounted massive steel box, on a fork lift while the wall that it was normally on was replaced and all of the electrical re-run. No downtime, the forklift DC worked great.
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I did this for a few weeks a couple years back until the new server came in.
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@JaredBusch said:
I did this for a few weeks a couple years back until the new server came in.
If it works,.. why not.
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@scottalanmiller said:
We once ran a server room, which had long been housed in a wall mounted massive steel box, on a fork lift while the wall that it was normally on was replaced and all of the electrical re-run. No downtime, the forklift DC worked great.
So you powered the server room using the fork lift batteries?
awesome.
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@MattSpeller said:
Had cable installers in the building a few months back to run fiber from floor to floor so we could have a Gbit backbone between our lame 100mbit switches. Installers ran out of cable lube so I told them I had a substitute and ran down to borrow some no name astroglide they use in the lab. Installers both turned red when they saw what the bottle was used for previously.
Not quite the same, but the people who built the building my wife's practice was in didn't put an inch of polypull in the conduit. We had the 2nd to last office space from they service entrance.
When the ISP was installed, they of course didn't have a way to getting the cable down the 80 feet of conduit.
Luckily I had a bucket of polypull and my shot vacuum. Tied a series of loose knots in the end of the polypull and used the shot vac to push it down the pipe..
Of course it was fun trying to get this done since the pipe was in the ceiling - at the roof line of a 16 foot building, and I had a 12 foot ladder...
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I've done some 'non approved' cabling too - taking two telephone extension cables and rewiring them so I could use then as network extension cables.... using any 2 pair phone cables....
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Nothing big, but in my previous company where we have restrictions and EACH and EVERY purchase, when the server network cable clip was broken, used a pen cap to keep it secured on the server network port
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@Ambarishrh said:
Nothing big, but in my previous company where we have restrictions and EACH and EVERY purchase, when the server network cable clip was broken, used a pen cap to keep it secured on the server network port
done basically the same thing with a folded wad of paper...
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When I worked at IBM they had an abandoned chem lab that they turned into a server room. IBM was full "regular IT" and full "shadow IT." Regular IT did nothing, literally nothing. It was a scam for political reasons (all IGS, same reason I'll never do business with IGS as I've seen them from the inside and you'd have to be insane to do business with them.) But they could stop shadow IT from working as having the claim that IBM used IGS was worth more money than the rest of the company even functioning. It was truly madness.
So a secret computer room with old white box desktops sitting on a chem lab shelf running Linux and MySQL - zero IBM gear because it couldn't be trusted. Zero support, all makeshift stuff. Everything ran off of these servers. Tons of empty cardboard boxes stacked up in from of the desktops so that no one could easily see them. All lights kept off. Totally secret, had to be undocumented, could not do anything "normal" and the entire division relied on them for everything.
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When I was at my last employer we had a 300-Tonne Punch Press where the clutch brake would occasionally go into a fault state. Well the apparent fix for this is to reinstall the class A programming.
Which uses a very specific cable (cost $1400 at the time for a modern USB one) and an XP Laptop.
Well it so happens that this press would lose power rather consistently (due to maintenance etc). Finally getting fed up with this, I pass it off to our maintenance department to address.
Any time the machine goes down (since we're a 24/6) shop they can fix it.
Bandaid applied.......
