[rescue] Re: IOS (more on tli)

[N.Miller]

On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 03:12 PM, Larry Snyder wrote:

> Daniel de Young <daniel at velvetsea.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 14:24, N.Miller wrote:
>>
>>> Anyway, that was probably more history than you wanted to hear. :-)
>>
>> Heck no!  That's what I enjoy about this list!
>
> The Tony Li snippet alone was worth the price of admission!

There was a lot more fun stuff to the story than that...

:-D

Tony was constantly shooting off his mouth on the public
stock list.  Cisco runs a whole slew of internal mailing lists,
usenet newsgroups--it's a very email oriented company.  They
also host *public* mailing lists for employees' clubs, that
sort of stuff.  One of the oldest public lists was the public
stock list.  Basically, anyone with an interest in Cisco stock
could sign up.

Tony made some comment on the list something to the effect of
'upper management was giving the stock holders' a blow job'.
He was asked (I think in email) by the VP of IOS Eng if he
could "tone it down a little".  His response was the nailing
of the ID badge and the DES card to the guy's door.

The next morning was a mad scramble.  Everyone was afraid he
had a backdoor (he'd been there a *long* time--before there
was InfoSec and DES cards).  He answered huge numbers of
customer and technical inquiry questions himself that should
have been directed to customer service, so they couldn't have
his mail bounce.  They had to shut down his ISDN quickly--all
ISDN at this point was, effectively, on the internal company
network (my DSL was active for over 2 months after I quit as
an example of the usual amount of time it takes).

I'd never seen the sys admins and our manager running around
like chickens without heads before. ;-) (I was still in first
line internal support at the time.)  It was clear that a lot
of people were worried about a potential mass exodus of
engineers.

I never got to meet the guy, but he seemed pretty nice when
I dealt with him for support cases.  Though, he didn't accept
bullshit answers.  "Don't tell me the f*cking servers are down,
I know that!  Tell me why the hell you guys can't seem to keep
NFS from causing hangs all over the place!!"  At which point we
explained to him that the SunOS automount process was not multi-
threaded (*grrr* cascading NFS hangs).  At which point he said,
"OK, I can understand that.  You should bitch to Sun and get them
to fix it."

Seems humorous now, but those were the days when I was doing
70 hour weeks because our backup guy couldn't handle the load
in a 20 hour weekend, and I was doing all the tape management
(yes, by hand).  Of course, at this point, I'd do quite a lot
of distasteful things to get a $25/hour contract job.

=Nadine=