That works until they run into a second person. In a big corp where people don't recognize each other you can also let the bad guys in, and once they're in nobody thinks twice about it.

or it could be some troy maybe.

late reply but, no, i really needed to hit the button but didn't have valid ID at the time. My driver's license was expired and i couldn't get it renewed because of a outstanding tickets iirc. I was able to talk my way in and had been there many times before so knew my way around and what words to say. I was able to do what i needed before another admin came up and told me that without valid ID they have no choice but to ask me to leave (probably like an insurance thing). I was being a bit dramatic when i said "getting thrown out" the datacenter guys were very nice and almost apologetic about asking me to leave.

There's some computer lore out there about someone tripping a fire alarm by accident or some other event that triggered a gas system used to put out fires without water but isn't exactly compatible with life. The story goes some poor sys admin had to stand there with their finger on like a pause button until the fire department showed up to disarm the system. If they released the button the gas would flood the whole DC.

Essentially yes. They should really divide data centers into zones and only unlock doors inside a zone where smoke is detected.

Don't ask about fire power switch

> To their great dismay, the engineer in Australia could not open the safe because the combination was stored in the now-offline password manager.

Classic.

In my first job I worked on ATM software, and we had a big basement room full of ATMs for test purposes. The part the money is stored in is a modified safe, usually with a traditional dial lock. On the inside of one of them I saw the instructions on how to change the combination. The final instruction was: "Write down the combination and store it safely", then printed in bold: "Not inside the safe!"

> It took an additional hour for the team to realize that the green light on the smart card reader did not, in fact, indicate that the card had been inserted correctly. When the engineers flipped the card over, the service restarted and the outage ended.

awesome !

That's a wonderful read, thanks for that.

It only worked for Wick because he is a man of focus, commitment, and sheer will.

This is the way.

There is a video from the lock pick lawyer where he receives a padlock in the mail with so much tape that it takes him whole minutes to unpack.

Concrete is nice, other options are piles of soil or brick in front of the door. There probably is a sweet spot where enough concrete slows down an excavator and enough bricks mixed in the soil slows down the shovel. Extra points if there is no place nearby to dump the rubble.

my across the street neighbor had some expensive bikes stolen this way. The thieves just cut a hole in the side of their garage from the alley, security cameras were facing the driveway and with nothing on the alley side. We (the neighborhood) think they were targeted specifically for the bikes as nothing else was stolen and your average crack head isn't going to make that level of effort.

I had a summer job at a hospital one year in the data center when an electrician managed to trigger the halon system and we all had to evacuate and wait for the process to finish and the gas to vent. The four firetrucks and station master who shoved up was both annoyed and relieved it was not real.

Not sure if you’re joking but a relatively small datacenter I’m familiar with has reduced oxygen in it to prevent fires. If you were to break in unannounced you would faint or maybe worse (?).

Halon was used back in the day for fire suppression but I thought it was only dangerous at high enough concentrations to suffocate you by displacing oxygen.

No FM200 isn't poisonous.

And lasers come to think of it