Your Best/Worst IT Hacks

[DalekSec]

As per Title,

 

Once needed to make a SFF PC work on the WiFi, stuck in Wireless card but signal was poor due to metal cage of the PC. Ripped out an antenna and the tin foil bits (forgot technical name) , cut a hold in the back of the heat sink to stick cables out and taped the tin foil to the top. Job done! Decent signal.

[Garacesh]

Hell, that was my permanent solution to a technology suite without enough network ports in the room...

 

Stole the wireless cards and antennae out of decommissioned laptops, affixed the adhesive copper bits to the rear of the case, fed the cables in, boom. 6 computers now on Wi-Fi. I left two years later, they were still in use.

[3s-gtech]

Hot, power hungry switches in overly sealed cabinets - hole saw and a PC fan grille siliconed on the inside.

Lenovo E145 - hinges were secured by a nut pressed into the plastic that snapped off, leaving the case flapping at the hinge. Drilled through and bolted.

VMWare ESXI backups done with GhettoVCB - scriptable and meant I didn't have to pay for VEEAM.

Dying ADCs on BenQ monitors (so VGA input fails) - Displayport to DVI converters en-masse.

Built a server rack from a solid old fashioned school table years back. Still using it with a big UPS installed inside - it's very strong!

2016 version of Eclipse.net running on a modern server and within Edge using IE mode - right hash up that is!

Migrated Successmaker between servers by dumping every file (including DLLs) and registry entry until it started working (no install media, but active license). Long since retired that!

Secured Lenovo M58 cases (no screw threads) by winding a fan screw into the Kensington lock (still working to this day!)

 

...there'll be more. I'm a bodger.

[smurfomatic]

Once had to repair an exterior CAT5 cable that ran between two buildings (it had been chewed by a squirrel!) - the only way to splice the ends together with the supplies I had to hand was to fit an RJ45 on one part, and a punchdown wall socket connector on the other, and wrap it all with insulation tape. All this while balancing on top of the highest stepladder - and I don't like heights! Still working as far as I know

[DalekSec]

Once had to repair an exterior CAT5 cable that ran between two buildings (it had been chewed by a squirrel!) - the only way to splice the ends together with the supplies I had to hand was to fit an RJ45 on one part, and a punchdown wall socket connector on the other, and wrap it all with insulation tape. All this while balancing on top of the highest stepladder - and I don't like heights! Still working as far as I know

 

Had to do this one also! But on a flat roof and 2 RJ45 with a female coupler

[dmj]

Running fibre 3ft inside a ceiling I drill a blind hole. Drill bit goes straight through the wall then through the ducting for the fume hoods.

At this point I can crawl into the next section of roofing but can only just feel the hole in the fume hood ducting.

Tech and I rig up a pvc disc and somehow glue it over the fume hood ducting. it pressure tested ok.

 

The school has been demolished since that 'incident'. Nobody died.

Edited December 20, 2022 by dmj

[dmj]

Same school we once used a ferret with a string to get through a 20m cable run that would have been a pain to tear down. That worked out OK.

[elsiegee40]

Advantages of being a female tech… a 99p blusher brush is brilliant for cleaning projector filters

[FN-GM]

I used to use an old decommissioned PC and a foot rest and another as a door stop. Cheaper than ordering something designed for the job! Edited December 20, 2022 by FN-GM

[JRA]

Same school we once used a ferret with a string to get through a 20m cable run that would have been a pain to tear down. That worked out OK.

I mean I just don't think we're beating this one.

 

"I fixed the network with a ferret."

[TechMonkey]

Same school we once used a ferret with a string to get through a 20m cable run that would have been a pain to tear down. That worked out OK.

 

Was it you guys that also tried a beagle? I recall someone either recounting or live posting trying various pets.

[Andrew_C]

Sorta-dorta's laptop had LOTS of extra nuts, bolts & glue inserted to replace woefully inadequate hinge fixings.

[hardtailstar]

My best hack was using a drain pipe between two buildings to run cables between them. Cut through the outside walls. Ran cables and tested everything worked and sealed the ends of drain pipe to the walls. To support it I ran a rope from one building to the other on hooks inside the pipe.

 

Laptops that had foam underneath the hard drive, if the foam was coming apart I'd find bits of plastic about same thickness and tape them together to replace the foam

 

Bodged many audio cables together to make what we needed instead of buying it to save money.

 

Used to bodge a lot!

 

Since working in a company, I don't think I've bodged anything!

[chaplic]

I enjoy keeping the laptops running for the school by any means at my disposal so don't consider that a bodge, but hot glue has been used to keep a twitchy laptop monitor ribbon cable in and i've bough entire faulty laptops off ebay as it was cheaper/ available than a replacement keyboard. Main office PC that runs SIMS etc uses a USB to RJ45 dongle because the nic on the motherboard died. I've even had sucess soldering wobbly power sockets.

 

 

Teachers wanted to try using alexas as an education aid but they wouldn't work thru schools proxy and council wouldn't accept the necessary firewall rules. So, as a test I setup an SSL VPN server in my lab. At the school I then setup a windows 7 VM with a VPN connection to the SSL VPN server via the council proxy. I then setup internet connection sharing, sharing the VPN connection. I put the VM and a dedicated WiFi network was then put in a seperate VLAN.

Alexas would connect to the dedicated wifi, route to the internet out of my labs internet connection via the VPN shared out from the windows7 VM. Worked quite well

But I do have so many which is perhaps even more surprising considering I tend to work for firms with decent budgets..

 

Working for a company who bought a distressed company who hadn't paid their MPLS bill so it was cutoff and not possible to restart it. There was an ADSL line at each site operating, but business was down and had to be back asap. No ability to order kit in a sensible lead time. Stood up a windows server in a VM, on a PC and created a site-to-site VPNs to link all the premises, then configured the VM as the default gateway.

 

 

 

Moving fileservers from one SAN to another, discovered about 30TB of data that was almost certainly safe to delete (it was ancient and no-one had permission to access the files, looks like it was a staging area for a company demerger so the company probably shouldn't even have the data). No-one would sign off deleting the data, so the solution was to spend a few grand on a SOHO NAS, copy the data to it then put the NAS in a comms room, unplugged, with a envelope on it and a letter to someone in the future wondering WTF it is..

 

 

 

 

Was moving an internet gateway from a location in the midlands to a datacentre in the docklands. Just about all done, late on a Sunday. However, we realised where the port for the datacentre internet was too far away for any of our cables to reach.

 

I noticed a skip on the way in, so wandered up to it and found a mesh of discarded cat5. Retrieved that, and as luck would have it I had RJ45 sockets and tools in my car. My skip-dived cable is still in use today (also the network experts I was with looked at me funny when I handed them the cable and told them to wire it up, I had to do it )

 

 

 

Was doing an Office365 to Office 365 for a household name pharma. Due to reasons it was unfeasibly hard to have a server to run my powershell scripts to generate reports and analysis so in the end it was agreed to be run from my dev server in my garage. I finished my engagement with them when the project was almost complete but the scripts ran from there for a further few months..

 

 

Not sure if it counts, but just two days ago I used a Coax network cable I run 25 years ago at my then-girlfriends-parents house (to share a dial up internet connection) to pull though a cat 6 cable from the loft to the living room (for IP CCTV).

[FN-GM]

This isn’t mine. But I thought it would be appropriate to post here! They used a Cat to run a draw line so they can run CAT 6 cable.

 

[southhamster]

One of mine was using cut down plastic milk cartons screwed to the wall next to smart boards to hold the remote controls.

[JRA]

Was it you guys that also tried a beagle? I recall someone either recounting or live posting trying various pets.

 

This isn’t mine. But I thought it would be appropriate to post here! They used a Cat to run a draw line so they can run CAT 6 cable.

 

And today I learned there are people jamming ALL SORTS OF ANIMALS down pipes and crevices in networks all across the world. This thread is real, right? I gotta stop day-drinking...

[p858snake]

Felicia the ferret doing some pipe cleaning