Worst design decisions?

Aaron Dewell acd at woods.net
Thu Sep 18 18:01:15 UTC 2003



Even better: the old bay switches had a backdoor password, that you
could always use no matter what.  Great security there.  Grrrr.  I
had to deal with a campus full of them, and since they had of course
forgotten all the passwords, so it was a good thing in that case, I
could actually reconfigure them without calling support.

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Ryan Tucker wrote:
 > Back in the winter of '00, I had the pleasure of working on a friend's old
 > Bay.  He was using it for a home-based ISP, and, well, I believe that it
 > didn't want to do CIDR.  Noone knew the Manager password, either, so much
 > recovery had to occur.  To make matters more interesting, this was in a
 > garage, and the lake effect machine had kicked in.  And I was being an
 > idiot.
 >
 > I don't remember the exact details (who said the human brain doesn't have
 > incredible defense and self-repair mechanisms), but I sent out a narrative
 > regarding the situation to a group of friends, and got the following reply
 > back:
 >
 > """
 > Subject: Re: Fear and Loathing in AN-DIAG
 >
 > hehe...three things a Rochester sysadmin should always remember....
 >
 > 1) Always make a backup,
 > 2) Always try the Manager login,
 > 3) Always count on lake effect.
 > """
 >
 > It's still on my monitor.
 >
 > I did get to send off a PFY to deal with a Cray router, though.  -rt




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