muckefuck | Fun with networking (Reply)

There's this huge international cooperative database that people in my department use for a lot of our work. We've been promised a web version in the near future, but for now we connect by telnet with a clunky old interface. One of the features of this software is that it's easy to produce lots of additional sessions without knowing it. When this happens, and we violate our usual number of subscriptions, stiff price increases apply. Last month, they were through the roof and we're still trying to find out why that is. I'm just happy that I've personally certified that none of my workers can be blamed.

Yesterday, everyone's sessions were sluggish as hell and no one knew why. Not us, not our local IT, not the db's administrators. After a whole day of running around, we'd located the cause: The Campus telecoms office saw the heavy traffic (from all those previously-mentioned phantom sessions), assumed we were engaged in illegal online file swapping (despite the relatively tiny size of the files), and punitively restricted our bandwidth. When I say "the office", I really mean a computer in the office, automatically implementing a recently-imposed "security" measure.

Upon hearing this, one of my co-worker's reactions was, "Someone there should be slapped." My boss said, "A computer did it automatically." He replied, "That doesn't mean someone shouldn't be slapped!"