The Register, Monday, September 1st, 2025
I Was A Part-Time Dba. After This Failover Foul-Up, They Hired A Full-Time DBA
At last, enough hours in the day to RTFM
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246 articles · page 3 of 5
The Register, Monday, August 25th, 2025
Techie Fooled A Panicked Daemon And Manipulated Time Itself To Get Servers In Sync
Network Time Protocol sometimes needs help from a temporal cops
more → The Register, Monday, August 25th, 2025
CIO Made A Dangerous Mistake And Ordered His Security Team To Implement It
This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "FireBug," a name that makes sense because the story he sent concerns a firewall he worked on during his time as part of a small team that managed a global company's security and VPN infrastructure.
more → The Register, Friday, August 22nd, 2025
Basic Projector Repair Job Turns Into Armed Encounter At Secret Bunker
Escort's forgotten cap left techie facing rifles and a debrief
more → The Register, Monday, August 18th, 2025
Teen Interns Brute-Forced A Disk Install, With Predictable Results
The real lesson here is how little some companies care about training
more → The Register, Friday, August 15th, 2025
Sysadmin Cured A Medical Mystery By Shifting A Single Cable
Few make it to Friday without some end-of-week blues, which The Register always treats with a fresh dose of On Call - the reader-contributed column that recounts your stories of tech support contusions. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Jake' who told us of the time he worked as the sole sysadmin for an entire hospital.
more → The Register, Monday, August 11th, 2025
Pay Attention, Class: Today You'll Learn The Wrong Way To Turn Things Off
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Steven'. 'One of my first jobs in the 1980s was as a training instructor at the headquarters of CAD CAM company Intergraph,' Steven wrote.
more → The Register, Friday, August 8th, 2025
Tech Support Team Won Pay Rise For Teaching Customers How To RTFM
This week, meet a reader who we'll Regomize as "Marvin," who once held the title "field engineer" at a company that provided outsourced maintenance and repair services for a minicomputer company.
more → The Register, Monday, August 4th, 2025
Tech Bro Denied Dev's Hard-Earned Bonus For Bug That Overcharged A Little Old Lady
Startups aren't good at testing software, or respecting contracts
more → The Register, Friday, August 1st, 2025
Servers Hated Mondays Until Techie Quit Quaffing Coffee In Their Company
Unix boxes needed a hotfix to survive early morning cold boots
more → The Register, Monday, July 28th, 2025
Intern Did Exactly What He Was Told And Turned Off The Wrong Server
And was then blamed for not knowing about inaccurate labels
more → The Register, Friday, July 25th, 2025
Problem PC Had Graybeards Stumped Until Trainee Rummaged Through Trash
Evidence of copious sugar hits hinted at unauthorized usage
more → The Register, Monday, July 21st, 2025
Under-Qualified Sysadmin Crashed Amazon.Com For 3 Hours With A Typo
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ken" who told us that over 20 years ago he scored a job at Amazon.com as a Linux sysadmin, a role for which he admitted he was "completely unqualified."
more → The Register, Thursday, July 10th, 2025
I Nearly Died After Flying Thousands Of Miles To Install A Power Cord For The NSA
This job was a car wreck in more than one way
more → The Register, Thursday, July 10th, 2025
Junior Developer's Code Worked In Tests, Destroyed Data In Production
For the lack of a little documentation, two techies did a lot of accidental damage
more → The Register, Friday, July 11th, 2025
First Came The Dodgy Lawyer, Then The Explosively Angry HR Person, Leaving A Whistleblower Techie To Save His Career
First came the dodgy lawyer, then the explosively angry HR person, leaving a whistleblower techie to save his career
more → The Register, Monday, July 7th, 2025
Yes, I Wrote A Very Expensive Bug. In My Defense I Was Only Seven Years Old At The Time
Years later, deep into a great tech career, your fellow reader remains inspired by the forgiveness received after the error
more → The Register, Monday, July 7th, 2025
'Trained Monkey' From Tech Support Saved Know-It-All Manager's Mistake With A Single Keypress
Righteous mockery entranced execs in ways slideware could not
more → The Register, Monday, June 30th, 2025
Junior Sysadmin's First Lines Of Code Set Off Alarms. His Next Lot Crashed The Company
Sensible CEO wouldn't let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap
more → The Register, Friday, June 27th, 2025
Don't Shoot, I'm Only The System Administrator!
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Nigel" who shared a story from 2004 when the office he worked in found itself in the path of Hurricane Ivan, the superstorm that rampaged its way across the Caribbean and the USA for almost three weeks.
more → The Register, Monday, June 23rd, 2025
Techie Went Home Rather Than Fix Mistake That Caused A Massive Meltdown
And was saved by an even worse meltdown caused by someone else
more → The Register, Friday, June 20th, 2025
Techie Traveled 4 Hours To Fix Software That Worked Perfectly Until A New Hire Used It
Sometimes the 'R' in RTFM stands for 'Remember'
more → The Register, Monday, June 16th, 2025
Techie Exposed Giant Tax Grab, Maybe Made Government Change The Rules
Custom text fields can be a powerful form of protest
more → The Register, Friday, June 13th, 2025
User Demanded A 'Wireless' Computer And Was Outraged When Its Battery Died
Abusive manager had to be told there's no such thing as an atomic laptop
more → The Register, Monday, June 9th, 2025
Field Support Chap Got Married - Which Took Down A Mainframe
If you like it to keep working, don't put a ring on it
more → The Register, Friday, June 6th, 2025
Techie Traced Cables From Basement To Maternity Ward And Onto A Roof, Before A Car Crash Revealed The Problem
Doctor? Why does this hospital network run in such strange places?
more → The Register, Monday, June 2nd, 2025
Admin Brought His Drill To Work, Destroyed Disks And Crashed A Datacenter
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Slim' who told us of his time as head of IT in Asia for a global trading company - the sort of outfit that plays the markets and needs its tech to run 24 x7 without even the briefest glitch that could slow down a client's trades.
more → The Register, Friday, May 30th, 2025
Techie Fixed A 'Brown Monitor' By Closing A Door For A Doctor
After three service calls, user reflected on their utter stupidity
more → The Register, Monday, May 26th, 2025
Techies Thought Outside The Box. Then The Boss Decided To Take The Box Away
Life in a corporate aquarium didn't go swimmingly
more → atera, Sunday, May 25th, 2025
IT Department Humor And Memes
In today's tech-driven world, IT departments often use humor in the form of memes, jokes, and pranks to brighten up the workplace and boost morale among their hardworking IT personnel, who are devoted to keeping our digital networks running smoothly.
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The Register, Friday, May 23rd, 2025
User Unboxed A PC So Badly It 'Broke' And Only A Nail File Could Fix It
For once, the IT department was rewarded for finding the fix, and the perfect-if-unexpected fixer
more → The Register, Monday, May 19th, 2025
Automatic UK-To-US English Converter Produced Amazing Mistakes By The Vanload
Yard of Eden just doesn't have the right ring to it
more → The Register, Friday, May 16th, 2025
Dilettante Dev Wrote Rubbish, Left No Logs, And Had No Idea Why His App Wasn't Working
Self-taught coders who work in HR and have a doctorate in English tend to do that
more → The Register, Monday, May 5th, 2025
People Find Amazing Ways To Break Computers. Cats Are Even More Creative
On Call The unconditional love of a pet is often a solace, and perhaps never more so than at the end of a busy working week. Which is when The Register competes with the animal kingdom for your affection by delivering a new edition of On Call, our Friday column in which we share your stories of scratching out a living delivering tech support.
more → The Register, Monday, May 5th, 2025
Teens Maintained A Mainframe And IT Went About As Well As You'd Imagine
Who, Me? One of the joys of Monday mornings is arriving at work to find messes made over the weekend. The other is reading a new edition of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of somehow recovering from failure.
more → The Register, Friday, May 2nd, 2025
Techie Solved Supposed Software Problem By Waving His Arms In The Air
Used his loaf and found sweet solution for bakery borkage
more → How-To Geek, Wednesday, April 30th, 2025
10 Legendary Pranks That Tech Companies Pulled Off Perfectly
Every year, nearly all tech companies come up with new prank concepts that are fun to experience.
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The Register, Monday, April 28th, 2025
What The **** Did You Put In That Code? The Client Thinks It's A Cyberattack
When your customers work in super-sensitive situations, bad jokes make for bad business
more → The Register, Friday, April 25th, 2025
Techie Diagnosed Hardware Fault By Checking Customer's Coffee
y the time Friday morning rolls around, starting the day with a stimulating beverage feels like a fine idea. And so does delivering a freshly brewed installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which you share tales of tech support triumph and torture.
more → The Register, Monday, April 21st, 2025
Developer Scored Huge Own Goal By Deleting Almost Every Football Fan In Europe
Fiddling with the production database - what could possibly go wrong?
more → The Register, Friday, April 18th, 2025
Need A Linux Admin? Ask A Hair Stylist To Introduce You To A Worried Mother
Lad who 'stays in his bedroom on his computer' emerged ready to deliver brilliant tech support
more → The Register, Monday, April 14th, 2025
Static Electricity Can Be Shockingly Funny, But The Joke's Over When A Rack Goes Dark
If this techie had been older and slower, this never would have happened
more → Search Data Backup, Monday, April 7th, 2025
Users Hated A New App - Maybe So Much They Filed A Fake Support Call
Sysadmin sent on road trip that required a lot of time doing nothing
more → The Register, Thursday, April 10th, 2025
Dev Loudly Complained About Older Colleague, Who Retired Not Long After
The graybeard wasn't doing a great job and morale improved once he left. How would you handle this?
more → How-To Geek, Saturday, April 5th, 2025
The Secret Inside Joke Developers Have Been Hiding In Plain Sight For Decades
For decades, software developers have been slipping jokes into their work.
more → The Register, Friday, April 4th, 2025
How Do You Explain What Magnetic Fields Do To Monitors To People Wearing Bowling Shoes?
Techie demoed the effect in about 3 seconds, as On Call again tries to break tech-support world records
more → How-To Geek, Friday, April 4th, 2025
AI Has A New Obstacle: April Fools' Day
AI is only as "smart" as the information it's given, and we've seen the downsides of the majority of that information being crawled from the internet. But what happens when AI comes across articles that are intentionally fake? Well, more of the same.
more → The Register, Monday, March 31st, 2025
Tech Trainer Taught A Course On Software He'd Never Used And Didn't Own
'I'm glad you asked that question. We'll get to that tomorrow' (After I research the answer)
more → The Register, Friday, March 28th, 2025
Tech Support Session Saved Files, But Probably Ended A Marriage
Self-described 'visionary' made life hell for our hero, then some oily vids returned the favor
more → The Register, Monday, March 24th, 2025
After Three Weeks Of Night Shifts, Very Tired Techie Broke The UK's Phone Network
And got away with it when someone else broke it even more comprehensively
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