IT Donkey Of The Week Award
In our department at work we have the IS Donkey. It is a small furry version of Eeyore of Winnie The Pooh fame. I think it came from a McDonalds Kids’ meal or similar.
The IS Donkey is passed around the office to the person that makes the dumb mistake, like emailing a user to tell them their account is unlocked etc. Whether it’s because I admit my mistakes or because nobody else in the office makes mistakes I don’t know, but the donkey seems to spen an awful lot of time on my desk. I like honesty and am quite happy for people to have a laugh at my expense.
Well, I certainly deserve to have the IS Donkey on my desk right now as I made the stupidest mistake ever late last week.
I had removed the wallport security from a Cisco switch in one of our buildings so that one of my colleagues could replace some PCs. When he told me he had finished and that I could put the security back on the switch I did so.
When I removed the security I used Cisco Network Assistant (aka CNA – a great little GUI tool) to remove the security. Select all ports (CTRL+A), modify and remove. I then repeated that process to re-enable the security on all the switches. Unfortunately, when re-applying the security I forgot that CTRAL+A would also select the fibre ports that feed the entire building. Applying security to those ports meant that it immediately disabled the fibre port, thereby kicking about 20 users out of the network.
I didn’t realise my mistake until about 20 minutes later when my phone rang to say that all the users in the building had lost their connections. I had to go to the building with a laptop, remove the security and then re-enable the fibre port on three switches just to get the users back up and running.
I am hoping that my boss will take the donkey off me when she admits that this morning she forgot about the BST – GMT change and tried to go to lunch at 11am, forgetting that we hadn’t changed the clock on the phones or on the wall in the office…
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