Layer 0/1 Issue

[Nathan England]

On Thursday 26 February 2009 00:52:15 Lisa Kachold wrote:
> I've lost a machine.. literally _lost!
>
> It responds to ping, it works
> completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.
>
> Suggestions?
>
> obnosis.com | wiki.obnosis.com| (503)754-4452
> PLUG HACKFESTS 2nd Saturday Each Month at Noon - 3PM
>
>
>
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This is a true story... 

A company I worked for wanted a new server, so I puchase the server, set it 
all up and we actually left it in the finance office, hidden between a wall and a 
cubicle partition. It really was quite hidden. Anyway, after a few weeks, 
everything was kosher so I decided to "move" it to my server room where it 
would be safe and secure... 

Months later, I am no longer working there and one of the people can no longer 
connect to the machine, so they look over the partition thinking they will 
just REBOOT it as it must be a typical windows machine and need a reboot... 
Needless to say they did not see the machine there and absolutely paniced! 
What makes this even more funny is, being on an Indian Reservation, once they 
called the police department and they learned it contained FINANCIAL DATA they 
were required to notify BIA (Beareau of Indian Affairs) which is then required 
to notify the FBI ...

Since I worked on it, they tracked me down and I show up and first thing I do 
is look at the machine that is no longer able to communicate with it. I tried 
to ping the device and sure enough, it responds! Well, in all honesty I had 
forgotten that I moved it into the server room as well, since it had been 
about 1.5 years prior. So when I saw that it responded to pings, I ssh'd into 
it and restarted samba and some other services and it worked just fine. Turns 
out the power went out and it was long enough that the batteries did not hold 
thru so the finance server came back up before the LDAP server came up which 
also ran DHCP... The desktops came up, but this finance server was content to 
never attempt to restart any services, it just sat there doing nothing.

All was happy, but we didn't know where the machine was. I went to the server 
room and hopped on the terminal, ssh'd in and issued the eject command and LO 
AND BEHOLD the CD-ROM popped out on the machine right next to us!!!

It was quite a riot.

nathan