Drunk confessional two years later failed to impress
Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me?, El Reg ‘s weekly confessional column for readers with technical mishaps weighing on their minds.
This week, we meet “Sam”, who made a rather big error when following what was, in his office, standard procedure.
At the time, back in 1999, Sam was less than a year into his IT career and worked at a college that ran Novell NetWare.
“We had Windows NT 4.0 workstations for the most part, and the user accounts all used roaming profiles,” he said.
The team was in the process of rolling out GroupWise to all 300 or so staff, but Sam said it had been slow going because this was, largely, the first time they’d used email.
A lot of the staff, who had been paper-based for most of their careers, were “fighting the implementation tooth and nail”.
Meanwhile, the college had moved over to NT 4.0 just over 18 months before, and they were seeing stability issues, especially as it related to the Novell login and roaming profiles.
One of the common problems with the roaming profiles was best fixed by deleting them and then letting them be recreated at login.
Since home drives and desktops weren’t a part of the profile, Sam said that all this did was delete the user settings, thus allowing them to recreate them.
“It was a common thing for someone to radio asking for whomever was in the office to delete such and such user’s profile for this very purpose,” said Sam – noting that the team had handheld radios because mobiles were too rare and pricey at the time.
