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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Also proving yet again that the best way to find out if something is in use is to unplug it and see who complains.

It's an effective way, but generally a very bad one. I used to work in telecoms, and some idiot took down a tunnel between the UK and Germany carrying 1kB/s of RADIUS traffic because someone (the idiot) owned the link it ran on and had failed to record the formal allocation of this tunnel to a production customer-facing public access WiFi service I ran. I on the other had remembered to record his telephone number and his boss's telephone number, and a certain amount of screaming went on. Moral: before doing a scream test, make sure your own documentation is watertight.

So-called "scream test."

Chesterton yelling from miles away "that's my damn fence, you moron!"

There was an article by Microsoft back in November about their scream tests - https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/microsoft-uses-a-...

They have about 8 layers of useless customer service acting as ear muffs to deafen the noise, is the problem I’ve had when screaming at them.

I once took over a decommissioning project of a DMZ set up for a connection to a third party no longer used. Everything documented showed that all connections were no longer active.

Step 1 was to do the ‘scream test’. Some how the enterprise routed the most random traffic through there as we took offline random servers and people’s desktops. Turns out the screaming that happens is at you for making things break instead of a pat on the back for discovering bad networking.

The information technology equivalent of popping pimples.

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