That's strange, the whitebox is no longer in use. I changed the IP address so no one should be accessing it at all. I RDP to 192.168.2.20 and get a prompt that Martin is already logged in. WTF is he doing in there?! I get up and walk over to his office
Me: Martin, I see you're in an old XP machine. Are you looking for something?
Martin: I saw this hostname in some old documents of Jen's and I was trying to see what this thing did
Me: Well, if you have any questions you can always ask me. Let me see the hostname
VulnScan
That's strange. Did someone setup a machine to do network vunerability scans? If so, where was it. When I switched the XP's IP to 192.168.2.20 I pinged it first to make sure nothing on the network held that IP. I started going through the documentation and it looks like they setup Nessus on a spare machine somewhere. The document shows it was hosted in the actual server room and not the "Restricted" room. I pull out my phone and don't see it in any of the pics I took, I headed into the room and double checked....wasn't there.
I looked in the "Restricted" room and didn't find it there either. I went looking around and found a supply closet filled with old laptops and other hardware in plastic storage bins. Based on the stickers they were mostly older gear that no one wanted to use, single core P4's, old mechanical hard drives and RAM. I scoured the room for about 20 minutes without luck. I stopped into Jeffs office
Me: Hey, do you remember having a machine doing vunerability scans on the network?
Jeff: Yeah, we dropped it a while ago because it wasn't doing what Jen wanted it to do
Me: What did she want it to do?
Jeff: As I understand it, she wanted it to perform windows patch management
Me: That's what WSUS is for
Jeff: I don't know what to tell you
Me: So, is there a chance for the machine to get put back on the network or is it gone for good?
Jeff: I suppose if you wanted it we could dig it out of a storage closet
Me: No, I don't want it. I just want to make sure it's not going to get plugged into the network
Jeff: No. I don't see why anyone would want to plug that thing in
Not really satisfied but not worried about the Nessus box I sent Martin an email asking that he not log into any of the infrastructure gear since his responsibilities are exclusively with the hosting side of things and that if he had any questions to forward them to me. I also unplugged the whitebox and pulled out the PSU. It was a bit overkill but I wanted to make sure it wouldn't beep at me anymore. I decided that I'd leave early today, on my way out I saw Martin outside Liz's office
Martin: Hey, got a sec?
Me: Maybe, what's up?
Martin: Liz here is having a problem and since you're the infrastructure guy maybe you can help
And of course he did "air quotes" for infrastructure guy
Me: Sure. Hey Liz, what's going on?
Liz: it's probably nothing, but I can't get on this website
Oh, shit. Don't say the intranet, don't say the intranet, don't say the intranet
Me: Oh, what site?
Liz: A site my friend sent me www dot I can has cheez.....
As I reevaluated my career choice in life I pondered how many distilleries would go out of business if there was a mass exodus of IT workers.
Me: So what happens when you go to the site?
Liz: My screens crash
Me: What?
Liz: My screens crash
Me: What?
Liz: let me show you
She proceeds to open up IE, goes to the site and her screens crash, actually IE just crashes but she calls anything in the foreground her "screens". I check event viewer and for some reason Java is crashing on her machine. I load IE under my credentials and it works fine. At least it was fairly simple. I clear out her HKCU java keys, clear her java cache, run a repair on Java...still crashes
FSCK!
Ok, I uninstall Java, run ccleaner to clear all temp files, then run it's registry scan to blow away any dead reg keys. Reinstall the latest version of Java, test on javatester.org....It works. Test on icanhascheezburger, works.
Me: You should be all set. Have a good day.
By now Martin had gotten bored of his little retaliation and went back to his office.
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