FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

all types of passion projects and contributions are welcome, including and especially those that aren't programming or engineering in nature
this is an explicitly noncommercial, share-alike space
don't force yourself to do work you don't enjoy, or demand it of others

(logo credit, with modifications by @[email protected])

founded 7 months ago

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Post your IT redundancy tales here (awful.systems)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm in our daily standup and it's turned into exchanging fucked up sysadmin redundancy tales.

One place I worked lost a machine room. They'd fired people so fast that nobody remembered where the boxes were any more.

I knew, but they didn't ask me. Oh well!

The cycle of IT binge and purge is eternal. Post your tales here.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This was before I was made redundant ,which happened for unrelated reasons and was ok.

I worked at a startup. Before I started, the company had an NT server running Exchange, which contained all customer relationship data, emails etc. The box was also a fileserver. One day, space was running out. The "admins" (== developers who only knew Linux) solved the problem by deleting all the "*.log" files cluttering up the filesystem, thereby effectively lobotomizing Exchange.

After some weeks a highly-paid consultant gave up. The company needed a new email server.

The devs decided to use qmail, because "secure". To translate between the [email protected] address to the firstname_lastname directory, a Perl script was inserted between qmail and the mailboxes. As time went by, this Perl script metastized to include email renames and even out of office replies. It grew to ~300 lines and was run on every single email that arrived.

After a while we got acquired by grownups who knew how to manage Exchange. I discovered that if an email was misplet, it wasn't bounced, instead it was forwarded to root's email account, which was a couple of gigs in size.

I swore to never touch email administration again.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I absolutely love and support your use of misplet.