Don't recall an email

I am always surprised at the stupidity of people who, presumably using Outlook, send a message to everyone in their address books (which can include things like mailing lists or people who don't care,) and let them know that they're out of the office, or they're having a bake sale this weekend, or they're no longer with the company. Those initial mis-sent emails are annoying enough.

But then, invariably, a few minutes later the person realizes how dumb they were, and sees that Outlook lets them recall the message! Success! They can unwind their dumb mistake, and no one will know they're an idiot.

Wrong again!

For people who aren't using their Outlook/Exchange setup, we get this kind, polite message:

Albert Eddie Contractor AFRPA/ESS would like to recall the message, "Moving phone service this weekend".

So, instead of getting one message I never cared about, I get two! Brilliant!

File permissions

We're migrating from an old, dying file server to our new shiney NAS/SAN file servers. All of our departmental offices use that file server for their business files. The shared folder is a large, nasty collection of years of file creep and no good organization. They're working on fixing that, but decided to migrate it to the new server first and then clean it up.

I guess during the move last night, one of the admins made some recursive command that changed the file permissions/ownerships/something down through the mess of nested, nested, nested directories - each properly tweaked when they were setup with who can access what. Now, no one could access anything. Oops.

So, I've been doing restores for them all day of gigs of data, so they can look at how it was set, and set it back. I just heard that it was done (after a few hours of permission changing after the restores finally finished.)

I'm glad it wasn't me, and I could restore the data!

MAC address in decimal instead of hex

A user submitted a networking request today, and bothered to convert their ethernet MAC address from hexidecimal into decimal.

NOTHING USES IT IN DECIMAL. NOTHING. It's like asking someone's age in hexidecimal -- you just don't. (BTW, I'm only 0x1A years old.)

First post!

I can't believe I just made a blogger blog.