Re: Worst design decisions?

[Aaron Dewell <acd () woods net>]

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