Weird and Cringe things you've seen while working in IT - Since everyone is too lazy to make such a thread where IT bros can vent

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Thread tax:

whatthefuckbro.PNG

Somebody care to explain what the thought process was here? How is it even possible to do this? Was this guy playing tetris with his partitions?
 
/AMP/ said:
Thread tax:

View attachment 8628389

Somebody care to explain what the thought process was here? How is it even possible to do this? Was this guy playing tetris with his partitions?
Click to expand...
Dysk 0 looks like it was setup for linux, I think Windows marks Linux partitions as unreadable but there should've been a FAT partition for the bootloader
Dysk 2 looks like they needed to convert a drive from one filesystem to another but they didn't have another drive with enough free space to move files to and did the old partition shuffle but never bothered to re-merge all the partitions.

All on all I guess it was someone trying to do something clever with their computer without really understanding what they were doing
 
Last edited:
Betonhaus said:
Dysk 0 looks like it was setup for linux, I think Windows marks Linux partitions as unreadable but there should've been a FAT partition for the bootloader
Dysk 4 looks like they needed to convert a drive from one filesystem to another but they didn't have another drive with enough free space to move files to and did the old partition shuffle but never bothered to re-merge all the partitions.

All on all I guess it was someone trying to do something clever with their computer without really understanding what they were doing
Click to expand...

All in all that thing was a literal nightmare, two Operating systems (W10 and 11) sloppily installed, 2 gigs of free space on drive C:, another drive failing and that fucking V: letter for no reason added like a cherry on top of a cake. My ass really thought IT was going to be a straightforward career path
 
Betonhaus said:
All on all I guess it was someone trying to do something clever with their computer without really understanding what they were doing
Click to expand...
I remember being 10 years old and thinking I should RAID 0 two different partitions on the same HDD
 
seri0us said:
I remember being 10 years old and thinking I should RAID 0 two different partitions on the same HDD
Click to expand...
For a while this was actually a thing with SSDs. Operating systems were optimised for HDDs and would trickle out writes sequentially, because that’s drastically faster for them, but SSDs just want as many writes dumped into cache as quickly as possible and don’t really care about physical layout.
 
UnsufficentBoobage said:
I blew through 10 CDs with diffirent roms, none install :(
Click to expand...
It might be easier to troubleshoot that then try to come up with some painfully complicated solution like connecting the drive to another computer and installing with an VM and editing the OS so that it installed the correct drives for the proper hardware.
Is this image one of the ones you tried? https://archive.org/details/win98se_201607
How did you burn the disk, and how did you access the bios to tell it to boot the disk?
 
DavidS877 said:
This is why you keep a few rewritable CDs on hand.
Click to expand...
Depends on how dodgy the od disc readers are. But some systems won't boot from a cd drive so you'll have to load a bootloader onto a floppy disk. I'm not familiar enough with the exact hardware to know what it needs.

My work's network setup concerns me a little. Since I only use a computer to log hours on each task and to view blueprints and load programs onto usb drives and floppy disks for the machines I probably don't know the full details of the backup and security, but from I can tell everyone has full access to the entire server, including accounting (I haven't ever checked if there's anything important I can read on the accounting folder, but the setup seems to imply I have full read/write access to everything important). If we ever got a virus or something then everything important would get lost. We might have a backup but the lack of security concerns me that the backup might be sketchy. Plus we are running Windows 10 and the computer has a notice that it's no longer supported, though checking update history it seems we do get some basic security updates once a month or so, probably IT is manually installing them.
 
Last edited:
Betonhaus said:
My work's network setup concerns me a little. Since I only use a computer to log hours on each task and to view blueprints and load programs onto usb drives and floppy disks for the machines I probably don't know the full details of the backup and security, but from I can tell everyone has full access to the entire server, including accounting (I haven't ever checked if there's anything important I can read on the accounting folder, but the setup seems to imply I have full read/write access to everything important). If we ever got a virus or something then everything important would get lost. We might have a backup but the lack of security concerns me that the backup might be sketchy. Plus we are running Windows 10 and the computer has a notice that it's no longer supported, though checking update history it seems we do get some basic security updates once a month or so, probably IT is manually installing them.
Click to expand...
From what you just described that sounds extremely concerning. I would take everything you just wrote and send it to your manager. From your description of usb drives/floppy disks it sounds like it could be an air-gapped system, maybe (not having win10 upgraded by now probably tells me they don't have a resilient air-gapped solution). Hiring somebody to fix it would be cheaper than getting attacked.

I don't know your role but it sounds like you aren't in a position to start changing things yourself. If you aren't, maybe start looking somewhere else if they don't take it seriously. If the company went down and couldn't recover for months would you still get paid?

If you can start changing things yourself there's a lot you could begin implementing but it would be a lot of work.

But, see what your manager says. See what the response is. If they ask you more about your concerns be direct and don't treat an attack as a theoretical, "well, if this happens one day" and explain it as "when we get attacked" and maybe they'll get you to start fixing some of the shit.
 
Palmer Bangs said:
. From your description of usb drives/floppy disks it sounds like it could be an air-gapped system, maybe (not having win10 upgraded by now probably tells me they don't have a resilient air-gapped solution). Hiring somebody to fix it would be cheaper than getting attacked
Click to expand...
No, it's because the programs are G-code which get run on CNC machines running DOS, and installing floppy to usb adapters or a network cared on these things would be expensive. A lot of our paperwork is offline and the staff hopefully small enough to not click on suspicious links (though recently my supervisor thought he lost the machine pre-use inspection templates because excel cleared its recent file history and we had to search for where the files actually were located on the server, and when we switched from Volo View to DWG TrueView I had to make a printout of how to configure the plotter for printing the blueprints and he still hasn't mastered switching from landscape to portrait as needed). My role generally has me in the shop so I don't spend much time in the office staff, so I don't have a lot of opportunities to say "hey we might want to look into improving our network configuration" but I did get a computer tech diploma from back when it almost meant something and it does bother me.
 
Betonhaus said:
No, it's because the programs are G-code which get run on CNC machines running DOS, and installing floppy to usb adapters or a network cared on these things would be expensive.
Click to expand...
Gotcha that makes sense. Not gonna lie, it sounds like a ticking time bomb. Seeing you are working the machines vs the infrastructure I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to get too involved in the mess. I'd just make sure you keep good (offline) backups for the stuff you do.
 
UnsufficentBoobage said:
I blew through 10 CDs with diffirent roms, none install :(
Click to expand...

Yeah getting some CD-RWs is good for testing out things first, can be rewritten if something fails.
Are you using the method of installing without the need of a floppy disk? (http://www.winstall.com/win98/install98stepbystep1/indexfullpagethumbs.htm) - I haven't tried this method out but it looks legit. Apparently Windows 98 needs a floppy disk before you can actually use the CD to install anything.
CD Drive failing is also a possibility, so if you don't have a spare one to diagnose, try to listen for activity in the drive itself (just put your ear close to it, should at least hear the thing spinning up and the laser assembly moving).
Also, since you are most likely connecting the CD and HDD with IDE (PATA) cables, make sure the HDD is set as master and CD drive is set as slave (with small jumpers, most often to the left of the IDE connector)
And as mentioned, don't just put the .iso file on the disk. Personally I use either CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn to write Installers to CDs, but CDBurner has easier to navigate GUI, try it out if you haven't yet
 
/AMP/ said:
Are you using the method of installing without the need of a floppy disk? (http://www.winstall.com/win98/install98stepbystep1/indexfullpagethumbs.htm) - I haven't tried this method out but it looks legit. Apparently Windows 98 needs a floppy disk before you can actually use the CD to install anything.
Click to expand...
If possible, put the Win98 installation files directly on the harddrive(in a folder of course), boot from a floppy and then run the setup from c: \ winInstallTemp or whatever you named the folder.
 
UnsufficentBoobage said:
While we are at it, can somebody tell me how you install Windows 98? I dug up remains of my childhood Pentium MMX and want a retrogaming box. No virtual machines, just me, my old pal and my old keyboard.
Click to expand...
get a 98 SE image from somewhere then put Window Update Restored on a floppy and install it from there. you may need to install ethernet drivers on your own but that should find everything else, functions the same as windows update did and should get all your other drivers.
 
Betonhaus said:
Dysk 0 looks like it was setup for linux, I think Windows marks Linux partitions as unreadable but there should've been a FAT partition for the bootloader
Dysk 2 looks like they needed to convert a drive from one filesystem to another but they didn't have another drive with enough free space to move files to and did the old partition shuffle but never bothered to re-merge all the partitions.

All on all I guess it was someone trying to do something clever with their computer without really understanding what they were doing
Click to expand...
i'm trying to think what would even cause that to happen. like there's a subjectively reasonable explanation for why they did it that way. were they storing a bunch of ISOs but didn't have iso mgmt software, so they had a bunch of separate partitions labeled G: b/c their computer pointed to G as the CD drive? no, the file sizes make no sense. could they have been trying to do something and made duplicate G folders by accident?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom