1

OK fellow IT persons I could not resist this year. I had to get my boss for April Fools. Every time my boss takes a day off something just happens to break down, wether it be a downed server, router, phone system. Whatever it be. So for the curse that he has laid upon me and my other two co-workers I had to play a good April Fools joke on him. He took this whole week off and of course something went wrong.

Just before I was about to enact my revenge he remoted in and sent my co-worker and I an email that a virus made it through the spam/AV filter and wanted us to check on it and have the spam filter vendor add it to their database. Well even though that email was real he didn’t know that it set him up perfectly for what I was just about to do.

I emailed him back stating that other goofy things were happening. A bunch of users were calling stating either they could not login or their outlook would not open but I was going to check on it and get back to him.

Then I waited about 5 minutes and ran a batch file I had been creating. I have a program that I can use to send out email and make that email look like it was coming from anyone I feel like. So I made that batch file create 5 emails and sent them to the entire IT department all at once. The others in IT were in on it.

email 1: comes from our administrator account on the domain controller:

A FATAL ERROR 9365 has occurred: Active Directory Datastore Deleted on servername.domainname.com by user nOoNtImEhAcKeR@domainname.com

email 2: comes from our administrator account on our exchange server:

A FATAL ERROR 4967 has occurred: Primary Exchange Datastore Deleted on servername.domainname.com by user nOoNtImEhAcKeR@domainname.com

email 3: comes from our administrator account on our core switch:

CRITICAL IOS ERROR 1421: IOS IMAGE CORRUPT; CRITICAL ERROR 1422: IOS SECONDARY IMAGE CORRUPT; HALTING SYSTEM

email 4: comes from our administrator account on our spam/av filter appliance:

CRITICAL STOP ERROR: KERNAL DUMP ERROR 3707 on servername.domainname.com; SYSTEM HALTED

email 5: comes from our what’s up gold network monitoring software:

Your Switch: switchname.domainname.com (IP address) has been unresponsive for at least 20 minutes.Details:Monitors that are down include:

then the list listed ALL ports on the switch…since this was our core switch I thought that would be a nice touch.

then I waited about 1 minute and called him at home in a panic. When he started reading the emails he freaked thinking that someone hacked us and told me to disconnect the internet connection and down the exchange server immediately!!

well that was when I told him it was me…guess I will be in trouble when he gets back next week! He asked where I got the error codes…I made them up! The servername.domainname.com was the real names of our equipment.

HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

So what has been your best April Fools joke??

6 Spice ups
2

Post-its on the bottom of optical mice were the order of the day here! That, and sellotape over the mouthpiece of the phone.

Yup… still not grown up, have I?

3

I was recovering from things that happened on the 31st, so I didn’t have the time to do anything as much as I wanted to. However, we occassionally have raffles where we clean out the miscellaneous junk in the office and give it to employees. A few years ago, my boss put all of the stuff the the raffle in her office and sent and email that said, “if there is anything in my office you want, put a post-it on it with your name.” She then left the office for a while. As she didn’t specify raffle items, I went around to everyone in the office and convinced them to put post-it notes on everything in her office. When she returned, everything in her office had a post-it note on it.