Amazing consulting stories

Replying in another thread gave me this idea. What are some of the craziest things that you have seen or have had happen to you when you were consulting or were just hired into a company. Things that made you say, "Oh WOW" out loud.

Here is one of mine:

One of my hotel clients. They had a linux box set up for VPN that one day stopped working. No one knew the root password and the web interface had long since stopped working, probably never really worked right to begin with. Because the VPN basically worked correctly but the guy didn't know how to set up routing properly, he set up a custom route in each of the Windows XP clients that had to use the VPN. The hotel staff didn't understand what was going on so the business process for using the VPN became using the "special" computers to do the one or two tasks and then going back to their own workstations. They thought they had to keep the custom route PCs IN THE SAME PLACE too. One $700 firewall and an hour of my time would have made almost 5 years of their lives much better.

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Comments

stlsmoore

Would like to hear more of these

UnixGuy

it_consultant wrote: »

No one knew the root password ....

big wow here

NOC-Ninja

LOL to the unknown password.

Lizano

I´ve heard lots of stuff, a telco having a Central Office running of a diesel generator for about a week, not one of those big ones you see in building either, techs had to stop by like twice a day to put some diesel in the darn thing.

Maybe not in this same line, but also funny, I had a T1 down, and Cops pulled the telco out of the manhole because they were causing too much traffic, so they had to stop working on my repair and come back after rush hour.