We can't send email more than 500 miles (2002)

Vaguely related - this reminded me of a support call I had where similarly the real world apparently merged into the digital world. I was doing IT support for a small Australian company back in '98. A guy called me from a remote office, and after a few pleasantries he explained that the screen saver had fallen off the monitor of his dumb terminal, bounced on one of the keys on his keyboard, and now terminal was locked up. He…

I've had enough years to become wiser, become a fanatic for configuration management, and get over the embarrassment: I'm the consultant that screwed things up. Some background: the Stat department was running a variety of systems besides the Solaris workstations, and there was, within UNC-CH, a separate support organization that was cheaper and more comfortable with Microsoft products where Stat was sending their support dollars. When that organization needed Unix support, they called my employer, Network…

This one comes up ever 3-4 years or so in sysadmin communities, and I read it every single time. because it's worth it. It's one of those things that I highly doubt would have occurred to me to have even checked, or given even a moments thought to, under normal circumstances.

About the same time the 500-mile email problem happened (mid 1990s), I had a difficult to understand issue with my office PC. Every morning, I'd come in, slide my hard drive sled in, and turn the computer on. We had 128 Kbps ISDN internet at the office and I had the same at home, but that was too slow to do much work. So I'd take the drive home so I could work at night, especially in the winter when…