Step 1 was to do the ‘scream test’. Some how the enterprise routed the most random traffic through there as we took offline random servers and people’s desktops. Turns out the screaming that happens is at you for making things break instead of a pat on the back for discovering bad networking.
There's Nothing as Permanent as a Temporary Solution™:)
[0] http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234
[1] https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
"Shadow IT" is the official name for circumstances that lead to this and it's the consequence of:
A) Deprioritising "non-urgent" but "important" tasks consistently
and
B) IT being bureaucratic and/or unable to allocate budget
I had a Mac Pro (trashcan) at Ubisoft that was the only way people were able to play our studios live game from within the office. (Ubisoft had a "NO OUTBOUND CONNECTIONS TO INTERNET" policy for Studios)
That same Mac Pro was running our internal slack bot to run Maintenances (and, insult people).
I left Ubisoft 5 years ago, as far as I know that Mac Pro is still plugged in on my former desk chugging along, last time I asked my former manager about it was last year.
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At another company (now owned by Oracle), we had an internal IRC (this was before Slack) and nobody thought about it.
One day it went down, and traceroute had indicated it was in our server room; after checking every single server we could not find it, until someone noticed an ethernet cable that went through a run into the floor but didn't come back out.
After opening the suspended floor we noticed a laptop running Solaris. That was our IRCd and the OS had an uptime of close to 8 years.
Universities seem to install unlimited hurdles to achieving anything. The stuff staff and students do within the network to make shit work is amazing.
> mac mini proxy server
I love that the programmer's solution is more expensive than doing it the right way had OP's request been approved.
But yea, in the early days that mac sat on my desk. It only got moved when I pointed out the issue to our new security team and their jaw hit the floor. =)
Client's IT loved to unplug that thing.
Probably still the case in a lot of startups.
But yea.. same deal with wifi. Its amazing how often the wifi password is posted on something visible. In fact I have found the password in so many public images which means somebody on the street could just connect to the wifi network fomr the street.
Or a case of IT not actually providing needed services. That, too, is more common than it should be.
As the project ramped down they ended up having to buy an iMac off of us. Someone stopped using it and before the case even got cold I had installed a CI build agent on it to run Karma tests. Which ended up being invaluable but also never managed to get replaced with a real piece of hardware. So they just dragged that thing around as the project went into maintenance.
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In our server closet there was a mac mini sitting on another rack mounted server and plugged directly into a switch. IT found it, asked around and nobody knew what it was, so they unpugged it. Immediately the whole of engineering and support were basically offline.
Despite the thing looking suspicious as possible, I had set this thing up as an employee a year before. We were not allowed direct network access to our hosted prod network so as a "stop gap" I setup a SSH tunnel that listened on the mini's IP. At first we used this for access to the support web interface so it could be taken off the internet. At the time my request for a server was rejected. One by one more things got added to the list of things proxied over the device, eventually including basically all internal pages, git access, and about a dozen other random services. I finally got it moved into the server room, but not to real hardware. Once we built a DC we got peered access and the mini finally died.