Who, Me? The world of work can be thankless, which is why The Register tries to brighten up the Monday return to toil by bringing you a fresh installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column where you confess to your IT screw-ups and tell us how you got away with it.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Neil" who told us he maintained a website for a client he suggested we call "Gerald."
"He would send changes, I would do updates, and he would approve it," Neil wrote. "We had years of smooth sailing."
"Until the day Gerald called, furious. The website was wrong, he said. Old content everywhere."
Neil checked and the site was fine. He verified that all recent updates were in place, and told Gerald all was well.
"Gerald told me what I could do with my perfect website," Neil told The Register.
Neil soon figured out what went wrong.
"When I'd migrated his site to a new server, Gerald had reviewed and approved it – from home, like a normal person – and I'd left the old site ticking over on the old server," Neil said. He added that he always does this because it costs nothing to keep an old site alive and it makes sense to preserve data until you're absolutely sure it's not needed.
"What nobody had told me was that Gerald's IT support had hardcoded the old server's IP address into the office's internal DNS," Neil explained. "So for two years, every one of his 40 staff opened a browser at their desk and saw the old website. Completely frozen in time."
But Gerald had never looked at the site from his office during working hours – for two whole years! When he visited the site from home, he bypassed the DNS server and saw the updated site. Once he finally checked it in the office, he saw the old version.
"When I finally worked out what had happened and explained it to Gerald, his IT team were present," Neil told The Register. "There were two of them. They listened to my explanation, looked at each other, and then – with the quiet solidarity of people who have broken something expensive – explained to Gerald that actually, the problem was that I had left an old website running on another server, which had caused the confusion."
Neil says that was technically true, "in the same way that 'the floor was wet' is a technically accurate description of the Titanic's situation."
"Gerald looked at me," Neil recounted. "And I looked at Gerald. There were two of them and one of me, and they had lanyards."
"You should have deleted the old site," Gerald said.
And Neil did.
But not for another four months, just in case.
Has being too cautious got you in trouble? If so, be a little reckless and click here to send us your story. We'd love the chance to feature it on a future Monday. ®
Source: The register