[ILUG] OT: Of Tesco Trolleys and Linux (was: anti-spam thing...)

[Dave Airlie]

reminds me of when some ULers wrote an app to "mind their PC", with a big
on screen this PC is being used for Network testing by ITD (the UL IT
dept)....

even the lab supervisors who worked for said department believed it ...

Dave.


On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, John P. Looney wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 10:55:22PM -0000, Matthew French mentioned:
> > This example reminds me of one of my early lessons in IT humility: a long
> > long time ago, I was doing tech support for a University and we had this one
> > machine with two 5.25 floppy drives. For some reason people kept on putting
> > their floppies between the drives, instead of into the top one.
>
>  Someone that didn't like effort would have solved this with some duck
> tape.
>
>  When I was in DCU, we had a lab full of (illegal) Linux machines, with
> one of them setup as a server (it did NFS & NIS). So, seeing as ten or
> twenty people could be using linux at any one time, it was important to
> make sure that people didn't sit down at the linux server, see a "login: "
> prompt, and get confused, and try and reboot it. (Most machines ran DOS 6
> back then).
>
>  So, we put a little sign on the keyboard saying "Linux server, used for
> projects. Do not use, do not reboot". That stopped about 20% of people.
> The other 80% when for "ctrl-alt-reboot". So, we took away the keyboard.
>
>  This worked for about 25% of people. The other 45% of people reached for
> the power switch, before looking for the keyboard. So, we removed the
> monitor also. All that was left was the pc (bolted to the bench) and the
> sign. This worked on nearly everyone. But there were still people that
> would come up, power off & on the machine, sit down, and then realise that
> there wasn't a keyboard/monitor, just before they were set upon by ten
> geeks that just lost some project work.
>
>  Moral of the story; the forces of expectation are stronger than people's
> forces of observation.
>
> Kate
>
>

-- 
David Airlie, Software Engineer
http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied / airlied at skynet.ie
pam_smb / Linux DecStation / Linux VAX / ILUG person