Many of us used to or work now with customers. So it naturally happens that something really funny or weird comes across - stories that need to be told.

What is it for you ?

I used to work as a technical consultant for a Software Company and part of my job was to maintain and troubleshoot rather small companies with not much IT skilled people - most of them engineers.

In one of the companies, I had a customer complaining that the overnight server backups were constantly failing ... so I checked the systems - but I could not find any problem from a technical perspective. But the backups kept failing.

I reinstalled the software several times - but the backups were failing every night. I was rather desperate, because I could not find a reason - so I took the environment with me into my office over the weekend ... and the backups were working fine. So I moved the environment back into their company - next night ... the backups were failing again.

After a few weeks I decided to visit the company again just to watch the systems at the time the backups were supposed to take place - because I really wanted to find a solution for this problem ... so I arrived a few minutes before the employees were leaving ... and had my answer fairly quickly. The last employee was shutting down all computers before he left ... the server with the backup problem was one of them

zxmaus

Heh heh, that's a pretty good one!

I once had to troubleshoot a backup problem on a university network, they were running Legato Networker (aka Solstice Backup) which reads .nsr control files on the system being backed up to handle special cases in certain filesystems.

The system in question was not backing up a particular filesystem even though there was no .nsr file present.

It turned out in the end that someone had written a cron-job to move the .nsr files around shortly before the backup ran then move them back afterwards. Utter madness.

I had a comms failure at approximately 19:15-19:30 on random evenings destroying the evening upload. While staying late yet again with the network monitor alert triggers set to "paranoid", a cleaner walked in and unplugged the modem.

Haha....

I was once with a group a guys were were astonished the entire global network had gone down, staring at the network management console. The entire global network of thousands of customer nodes were red !!

They were not amused when I told them the NMS system (they were freaking out over) was on a bad LAN segment and could not reach any nodes on the network.....

Silly people ....

A good customer from a major client logged a call to say that their daily status reports had stopped some days ago. Noticing that the telephone number on the call was now international I jokingly asked whether he was on holiday?
No, we have moved the office.
When you moved office, did you bring the central stats computer with you?
No.

Not customer related, but weird indeed.

I got a printout of this too somewhere, but the MOTD one night on third shift as a computer operator AIX something.old read simply:

No need to worry about the future, tomorrow you'll be dead.