Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving
That box-full-of-old-tech-you-should-probably-have-thrown-out-but-kept-just-in-case got a techie in trouble
WHO, ME? Monday is upon us once again and The Register hopes that when you arrive at your desk, all is well. We offer that sentiment because we use the first day of the working week to bring you a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which you confess to making mistakes, and explain how you survived them.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Teague" who told us he once worked for a local council in the UK.
"Blagging freebies from kit suppliers was an everyday occurrence," he told The Register. And one day he blagged a shiny new ISDN router.
"After fiddling and playing with various configurations, I consigned it to the back of my desk, buried in the pile of IT junk that technicians all over the planet create."
We have a name for that pile: That Box Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case
But we digress: A couple of weeks and several new bits of free kit later, Teague returned to the router.
"I logged into the onboard config interface, and one of the questions was 'Does your organization use DHCP?'"
The council did use DHCP, so Teague responded with an enthusiastically honest "Yes."
Teague was no stranger to the perils of DHCP. But he'd started fiddling with the router late on Friday, just before he was due to take a week off.
So he left the ISDN router connected to the council network and took off.
"On my return, I was summoned to see the Network Manager, who asked one simple question: 'Why did you leave an unauthorized DHCP server running?'"
Teague quickly learned that on the Monday morning of his holiday, thousands of council workers arrived at work and the DHCP server embedded in the ISDN router started handing out IP addresses.
"This IP range the router used was way off normal, and network access was killed," he confessed.
His colleagues spent much of the week fixing up the mess Teague's experiment caused.
"I got a huge bollocking," he admitted, and said he now lives by a simple rule: "Don't put anything like an unattended or unauthorized DHCP server on the network, leave it to the professionals!"
Have you left a mess behind before heading on holiday? If so, take your time thinking about your story and then click here to share it with Who, Me? We would love the chance to tell your story on a future Monday. ®