I worked on a six-month contract project for a large US retailer; the fact that everybody else I …
I worked on a six-month contract project for a large US retailer; the fact that everybody else I worked with was laid off the second week probably should have told me something was wrong, but they kept paying me so I kept showing up. Anyway, the only task they ever gave me was to build Cisco router ACLs to match existing traffic in the stores; they needed to implement access control but wanted to make sure they weren't blocking anything important. Because many of the stores had been opened years before, there wasn't necessarily a consistent IT stack in the store; there were a lot of one-off solutions so they wanted a universal set of rules with per-store exception lists. So, every week, someone would drop a few terabytes of network logs in an FTP server, separated by store, and I would distill them down to a set of rules; if something was being used in more than X number of stores, it went in the universal rule list, if it wasn't it went in a store exception list. …
Original discussionAsk HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?767 source comments · at import