Backup failed, but the boss didn't slam IT – because his son was to blame

On Call The silly season is close, but not so close that The Register can't find another instalment of On Call, the Friday feature in which Reg readers share tales of tech support triumphs achieved under uncomfortable circumstances.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ray" who told us about his time working as the network admin for a small US-based pharmaceutical concern, at which he and a sysadmin had implemented an automated nightly backup over a high-speed fiber optic link to a remote location.

Ray is a sensible chap, so he also did two clever things. One was implementing a slower cable internet connection from a different ISP to handle the rest of the employer's traffic. The other was configuring the two links to fail over – so that if one died, the other would pick up the load.

Ray knew the cable connection lacked the bandwidth to handle the backups, but was confident data would be safe.

Sadly, his confidence was misplaced.

"All of this had been stable and operating well until first thing one morning when the sysadmin informed me that the backup had failed due to a connectivity problem and asked me to look into it," Ray told On Call.

After firing up his brain with a coffee, he found the router port used for the high-speed optical link had flickered on and off all night and remained unusable.

Ray called his ISP, which didn't answer. He escalated to his sales rep, and received "a terse response that they were aware of the issue and working on it."

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Everything was sorted out later in the day, and the sales rep was courteous enough to call Ray with an explanation.

It turned out that a teenage gamer in the same town as the pharma outfit was beefing with some rivals, who responded with a DDoS attack pointed at his IP address.

That DDoS knocked the ISP out for a few hours, taking the high-speed backup link with it.

When the boss came to ask why the backup had failed, Ray was able to explain that his two-connection rig at least meant the general user population had remained online, and then explained the cause of the outage.

At which point the boss's facial expression changed to one of fear and worry.

"What's wrong?" Ray asked?

"That was my son," the boss replied. "He is 14 and doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut."

And then the boss spun on his heels and walked away.

Has your office tech been taken out by teenage terrors? If so, click here to send On Call an email and we may decide to share your story in the New Year. ®