IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith

Someone asked us why we weren't on MeshCore yet. First we had to establish that it wasn't a new kind of thrash metal. Then we discovered an off-grid messaging network built from little radios, antennas, repeaters, and licence-free spectrum.

So we started digging. How does it route messages ? How private is it ? What happens when repeaters disappear ? And haven't we built something suspiciously similar before ? MeshCore turns out to...

IT may run on the same protocols everywhere, but the people operating it certainly don't. Put teams from different countries, companies, and working cultures onto the same project and apparently simple questions about responsibility, communication, deadlines, and escalation can suddenly have very different answers.

This episode looks at what happens when those differences become part of the technical problem. From assumptions that ...

Texas, 1978. Robert was working at a cotton co-op running what may have been one of the world's earliest online auction systems. Farmers received punch cards representing their bales of cotton - occasionally complete with enough stray cotton fibres to jam the card readers - while buyers placed bids remotely using leased IBM 3270 terminals and acoustic coupler modems.

After an upgrade, the mainframe refused to come back properly. An...

A modern pinball machine isn't just flippers, bumpers, lights, and a very large box making expensive noises. It's a connected computer with software updates, online score tracking, player accounts, remote management, and an Internet connection. Evert Brochez from Torius joins Jack to explain how pinball evolved from electromechanical machines into something that looks suspiciously like an IoT device.

But once you connect a pinball ...

The Three Envelopes: Blame, Reorganize, Repeat

There is an old management joke about an outgoing manager leaving three numbered envelopes for their successor. When the first crisis arrives: blame your predecessor. The second: reorganize. And when the third arrives... prepare three envelopes.

We look at why this joke has survived for decades, and why anyone who has worked in corporate IT will recognise far too much of it. From inher...

Jack's Rants - Why You Need to Reboot : Why Rebooting Your Computer Actually Fixes Problems

"Have you tried turning it off and on again ?" became an IT cliché for a reason. Rebooting clears accumulated state, resets resources, and fixes a surprising number of problems.
From Unix uptime bragging rights to mainframe IPLs and Windows servers nobody is allowed to restart, every system has its own relationship with rebooting. Maybe ...

Testing software sounds simple enough. But what exactly should you test, where should those tests happen, and how do you decide which parts of a complex system need the most attention?

Jack talks with Mooly Beeri about software testing from a developer's perspective: identifying the right test points, understanding how different parts of a system interact, and building testing into the development process rather than treating it as...

One day, a busy IBM-compatible mainframe began slowing to a crawl. Hundreds of programmers noticed immediately—some even resorted to banging on the server room window whenever the system became unusable. The problem appeared after a microcode upgrade, but nothing pointed to an obvious cause.

In this episode, Jack Smith talks to Matt about an extraordinary piece of low-level troubleshooting that led deep into the internals of ...

Artificial intelligence didn't invent Shadow IT—it made it invisible. In this Jack's Rant, Jack Smith explores how AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude have fundamentally changed the way employees solve problems. No servers under desks. No rogue software installations. Just a browser tab and a prompt. From confidential data and AI-generated scripts to fragmented workflows and "ChatGPT says..." becoming the new expert opi...

Every year, the Melbourne Cup pushes Australia's betting infrastructure to its limits. In 1991, a known software bug turned one of the busiest days of the year into an IT disaster. As millions of bets poured in, CPU utilisation unexpectedly collapsed and the betting system ground to a halt at the worst possible moment.

Jack Smith is joined by veteran mainframe specialist Neale to revisit the incident, explain why the bug had been a...

Scambaiters like Kitboga, Jim Browning and Pierogi educate millions, waste scammers' time, and undoubtedly prevent people from becoming victims. As a security professional, I genuinely appreciate what they do.

But every time I watch one of these videos, I find myself asking the same question: What happened in the missing five minutes? How does a legitimate remote support session suddenly become full control over the scammer's compu...

Smart cities promise better transportation, connected infrastructure, and improved services—but what happens when everything is connected a little too well? In this episode, our guest shares the story of a security assessment in a major metropolitan smart city where network segmentation had been overlooked, creating unexpected paths between public networks and critical infrastructure. One memorable discovery showed that,...

Opening a tab at a bowling alley shouldn't require handing over your driver's license or national ID card. Yet many businesses still ask customers to leave government-issued identity documents behind as collateral, often storing them in plain sight with little thought for privacy, physical security, or the risks involved. In this Rant, we ask a simple question: just because a practice has existed for years, does that make it accept...

No one expects a cybersecurity incident to begin in the cardboard industry. Yet as our guest Kayne McGladrey explains, cybercriminals don't care what your company manufactures—they care about opportunity. In this episode, Kayne shares how an unexpected conversation with a golf buddy led to a cybersecurity contract, and why one of the most unassuming industries turned out to have a story worth telling.

Together, we explore the...

Once upon a time, Change Management meant raising an RFC, preparing a rollback plan, and surviving the Change Advisory Board. Today, it also means stakeholder engagement, communication plans, adoption metrics, workshops, and apparently having the emotional intelligence of a licensed therapist

Whether you're a project manager, systems engineer, change manager, or simply someone who's ever heard the phrase "we've always done it this ...

It was supposed to be a routine hiring exercise. A candidate receives a technical assignment, reviews the provided material, and prepares a solution. Then someone notices that the "anonymous" dataset isn't anonymous at all. What follows is an uncomfortable discovery involving confidential business information, questions about data handling, and an unexpected conversation with legal.

In this episode of IT Horror Stories with Jack Sm...

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 disappear into a print queue somewhere. In this episode, we take a tour through the strange and surprisingly complex world of printing: from small desktop printers and office multifunction devices to enterprise print servers and indu...

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, or operational review. The system worked, solved an immediate problem, and was quickly integrated into daily operations... right up until the laptop entered sleep mode and warehouse activities ground to a halt.

What followed was a...

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 of the attack starts to unfold in real time. What follows is a race against the clock, with teams trying to understand what's happening while keeping critical operations alive.

More importantly, we focus on the response and recovery: th...