IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith

S2E3 Spooling Out of Control - Enterprise Printing Explained and Why Printing Still Breaks IT

Printing is one of those technologies everyone assumes should have been solved years ago — until someone can't print invoices, shipping labels stop coming out, or 50,000 customer letters suddenly…

S2E2 Sleep Mode in Production - How a Laptop Took Down a Warehouse

Welcome to the story of a perfectly known and visible laptop that somehow became critical production infrastructure inside a warehouse environment — without going through proper validation, testing,…

S2E1 Ransomware Lockdown - What a Real-World Ransomware Attack Looks Like: Incident Response and Recovery

We explore a hypothetical ransomware scenario that mirrors what many organizations could face today. Imagine a normal day where systems suddenly become inaccessible, data is encrypted, and the scope…

S1 Jack's Rants - Floppy Disks at 35000 Feet - Why Boeing 747s Still Use Floppy Disks for Flight Management Systems

The Boeing 747 is often cited online as proof that aviation still runs on floppy disks — but the reality is a bit more nuanced. In this Rant, we take a closer look at how certain older aircraft,…

S1E12 The Failover That Failed Successfully - Lessons from a Successfully Failed Disaster Recovery and Failover Test

Conducted during a busy release weekend, the failover test exposed gaps not in the technology itself, but in coordination and communication. While production ultimately stayed unaffected, the…

S1 Jack's Rants - IT Hiring Chaos – The Strange State of the Tech Job Market

In this short episode, Jack takes a look at the current state of the IT hiring market — where job postings seem plentiful, but actual opportunities often feel strangely elusive. From "entry-level"…

S1E11 Raspberry Mistery - 200 Techs Using A Single Raspberry Pi: The Temporary Server That Failed

A few hundred field engineers. Real humans. With vans. And jobs. All coordinated by a device roughly the size of a coaster and powered by something suspiciously similar to a phone charger. For…

S1 Jack's Rants - Batch Job Blues - Why Mainframes And Banks Still Rule The World

Jack's Rants dives into the world of banking mainframes and the batch jobs that quietly keep everything moving — until one of them doesn't. What starts as a routine overnight run turns into a…

S1 Welcome to IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith

S1E10 Surviving the Anonymous DDOS - How We Survived the Traffic Flood from Anonymous

This episode we unpack what a DDoS attack actually is, using the specter of Anonymous as a cultural touchstone rather than a how-to villain. We talk about why high-profile groups target services,…

S1E9 Shadow IT Reports - Why you should not have a "Quick Sales Tool" in production

We dive into the familiar chaos of Shadow IT created by the sales department — well-intentioned, fast-moving, and completely invisible until something breaks. A "quick tool" turns into a critical…

S1E8 The DevOps Royale With Cheese - When a Data Supplier Breaks Production

In this episode, we return to Finland, where an international burger chain suddenly found itself cut off from the one thing every fast-food operation needs to function: real-time operational data. A…

S1E7 Y2K vs Y2K38 - The Rematch and How the World Avoided a Global IT Disaster (Again)

We revisit the original digital apocalypse — the year 2000 - looking back at what Y2K really was, how an army of COBOL coders saved the world before midnight, and why most people never even noticed.…

S1E6 SAP Happens - The IBM Spinoff That Is Controlling Global Business And Finance

SAP sits quietly at the heart of most global businesses, running everything from payroll to procurement, logistics to finance. It's the system nobody brags about, but everybody depends on. And when…

S1E5 Paris Rooftops - How (Not) To Install A 5G Antenna For An Internet Backup Line

Installing a 5G antenna on a rooftop in downtown Paris sounds simple enough - until reality sets in. In this episode, we walk thru the saga of a project that required not one, not two, but multiple…

S1E4 IT and Global Politics - The Chaos Of Your Sales Team Being Arrested For Industrial Espionage

A pharmaceutical sales team is detained at an international border. On their tablets: standard product brochures that end up in an escalation into allegations of industrial espionage. In this…

S1E3 "Fun" With Domain Names - An Industry Insider Explains All About DNS That You Didn't Knew

We're unpacking the critical steps behind migrating a domain name — a process that can disrupt everything from search engine indexing and referral traffic to email deliverability and authentication.…

S1E2 Crashing Helsinki Airport - Why You Should Not Have Mission Critical Infrastructure In A Random Cloud Container

Join us as we explore the intersection of Nordic tech innovation, modern infrastructure, and the evolving world of DevOps : Finland ! From smart cities to smarter code and crashing airport parking…

S1E1 Our First Data Center Fire - Global Fire Alarm When Your Power Regulator Calls It Quits During The Holidays

What happens when a data center goes up in smoke—literally? In this episode, we sift through the potential ashes of a not-so-great day. Join us as we chat about servers, batteries, paperwork and…