Fed up with slammed servers, IT changed iTunes backups with a cow of a file
who, me? Greetings, light reader! What a pleasure it’s to see you, as as soon as once more we delve into Who, Me? whereby Reg-reading raconteurs recall rascally rebellions at work.
This week our rapscallion of document is one “Roy” (not his actual title) who as soon as served as IT supervisor for “a well-known environmentally acutely aware worldwide group”. It was the form of place the place many bright-eyed idealistic younger activists labored – full with their disdain for “the person” and any form of company diktat.
This turned a little bit of a sticking level when iPods turned all the fashion. Each hip younger particular person of the age wanted to own the most popular devices. And naturally they then synced them to their company-provided laptops. Which due to Roy’s diligence have been backed as much as company servers. Which had solely a lot house.
This was an environmental org, bear in mind – large quantities of electrical energy and magnetic media being consumed to accommodate hundreds of copies of The Smiths newest album was not precisely on model.
Roy began receiving “awe-inspiring alerts” warning that storage capability would quickly be completely depleted. He issued directions that the corporate laptops weren’t for use for backing up tunes – directions that the prevailing tradition deemed worthy of being unread and disregarded.
Who reads memos from the nerds anyway, proper? That is not cool, man.
Determined instances referred to as for determined measures. A file-system script was devised, which based on Roy would hunt down music recordsdata saved within the backup server (these have been iPod backups, bear in mind, not iPhone backups – so no encryption).
As soon as a music file had been recognized, it could get replaced by a file that had precisely the identical title as the unique and retained different metadata so it could be synced again to the customers’ iPods. The content material, nevertheless, can be altered considerably.
Rather than their authentic many-minutes-long songs, the tree-hugging activists would hear just a few seconds of light mooing. This was most often not Cery entertaining, however took up vastly much less room on the server.
The script ran over a weekend and into Monday morning, when the assorted laptops have been re-synced (in opposition to firm directives) to their iPods – and dozens of wide-eyed idealists have been satisfied their music had been kidnapped by cows.
Ever been mooved to determined motion by an udderly ridiculous state of affairs? Inform us about it in an e-mail to Who, Me? and we’ll milk it for all it is price.
