this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
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I had a site that was going down multiple days a week for a hour or two. Turns out a employee was unplugging the small rack surge strip to plug in their coffee maker. They also happened to be the person complaining the loudest about how incompetent IT was. For some reason what she did was understandable and not worthy of a write up. But me telling her not to touch anything connected to server rack was going over the line. She was gone within the year having finally made someone with more suction mad.
Hot take; if IT had important gear running on a single power outlet with no UPS where it's easily accessible and any schmuck could pull the power, she made a pretty compelling point about incompetence.
Yes, but it's incompetence of the management who won't approve of putting important IT hardware in a protected space
Working with small businesses is like working in the jungle, anything goes.
There's no budget, 3 working power sockets, the network hardware should be in a museum and there's a beige box in the closet that absolutely can never be turned off for inexplicable reasons. The last "computer person" who touched anything left no notes and has been missing for 3 months. Also, the printer is broken.
You don't often get to choose a racks location in a small office and the UPS only ran the router and switch for a hour. You sound like you have never worked in the field.
I'm over 30 years in the field, thanks
Then you know that what you said is not always possible to achieve in terms of preventing access.
You do not know how long it was taking her to plug that coffee maker into the hidden UPS
Yes, but... There's a reason for locked doors and apcs
What are apcs in this context?
I think he wants to run her over with an armored truck.
Battery backups
A brand that makes rack enclosures for IT gear, typically they come with a key to lock it shut
I would assume APC, a brand of uninterrupted power supply.
Yes.