Cardboard Confidential - A Cybersecurity Incident, a Golf Course Conversation, and Why No Industry Is Too Boring to Be Targeted

July 06, 2026 5:00am 32 min

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...

Jack's Rants - The New Change Management - ITIL Change Control, Organizational Change, and Why Project Managers Suddenly Need Psychology Degrees

June 22, 2026 5:00am 12 min

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,...

GDPR Enters the Chat - The Day a Hiring Exercise Became an Information Security Incident

June 15, 2026 5:00am 14 min

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 a...

Spooling Out of Control - Enterprise Printing Explained and Why Printing Still Breaks IT

June 01, 2026 5:00am 26 min

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 q...

Sleep Mode in Production - How a Laptop Took Down a Warehouse

May 17, 2026 11:00pm 23 min

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...

Ransomware Lockdown - What a Real-World Ransomware Attack Looks Like: Incident Response and Recovery

May 03, 2026 11:00pm 35 min

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 ...

Jack's Rants - Floppy Disks at 35000 Feet - Why Boeing 747s Still Use Floppy Disks for Flight Management Systems

April 19, 2026 11:00pm 10 min

The Boeing 747 is often cited online as proof that aviation still runs on floppy disks — but the reality is a bit more nuanced. In this Rant, we take a closer look at how certain older aircraft, particularly some 747-400...

The Failover That Failed Successfully - Lessons from a Successfully Failed Disaster Recovery and Failover Test

April 06, 2026 4:00am 33 min

Conducted during a busy release weekend, the failover test exposed gaps not in the technology itself, but in coordination and communication. While production ultimately stayed unaffected, the situation quickly escalated ...

Jack's Rants - IT Hiring Chaos – The Strange State of the Tech Job Market

March 12, 2026 1:00pm 11 min

In this short episode, Jack takes a look at the current state of the IT hiring market — where job postings seem plentiful, but actual opportunities often feel strangely elusive. From "entry-level" roles asking for a deca...

Raspberry Mistery - 200 Techs Using A Single Raspberry Pi: The Temporary Server That Failed

March 02, 2026 5:00am 32 min

A few hundred field engineers. Real humans. With vans. And jobs. All coordinated by a device roughly the size of a coaster and powered by something suspiciously similar to a phone charger. For months, it runs slow but f...

Jack's Rants - Batch Job Blues - Why Mainframes And Banks Still Rule The World

February 10, 2026 4:58am 9 min

Jack's Rants dives into the world of banking mainframes and the batch jobs that quietly keep everything moving — until one of them doesn't. What starts as a routine overnight run turns into a multiple transactions on tho...

Welcome to IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith

February 08, 2026 6:37pm 1 min

Surviving the Anonymous DDOS - How We Survived the Traffic Flood from Anonymous

February 02, 2026 5:00am 35 min

This episode we unpack what a DDoS attack actually is, using the specter of Anonymous as a cultural touchstone rather than a how-to villain. We talk about why high-profile groups target services, what it feels like in re...

Shadow IT Reports - Why you should not have a "Quick Sales Tool" in production

January 07, 2026 6:13am 30 min

We dive into the familiar chaos of Shadow IT created by the sales department — well-intentioned, fast-moving, and completely invisible until something breaks. A "quick tool" turns into a critical system overnight, contra...

The DevOps Royale With Cheese - When a Data Supplier Breaks Production

December 01, 2025 1:58am 28 min

In this episode, we return to Finland, where an international burger chain suddenly found itself cut off from the one thing every fast-food operation needs to function: real-time operational data. A third-party data supp...

Y2K vs Y2K38 - The Rematch and How the World Avoided a Global IT Disaster (Again)

November 03, 2025 4:48am 29 min

We revisit the original digital apocalypse — the year 2000 - looking back at what Y2K really was, how an army of COBOL coders saved the world before midnight, and why most people never even noticed. But the clock is tick...

SAP Happens - The IBM Spinoff That Is Controlling Global Business And Finance

October 06, 2025 3:08am 43 min

SAP sits quietly at the heart of most global businesses, running everything from payroll to procurement, logistics to finance. It's the system nobody brags about, but everybody depends on. And when someone says "just che...

Paris Rooftops - How (Not) To Install A 5G Antenna For An Internet Backup Line

August 31, 2025 8:55am 34 min

Installing a 5G antenna on a rooftop in downtown Paris sounds simple enough - until reality sets in. In this episode, we walk thru the saga of a project that required not one, not two, but multiple site visits before the...

IT and Global Politics - The Chaos Of Your Sales Team Being Arrested For Industrial Espionage

August 04, 2025 5:04am 33 min

A pharmaceutical sales team is detained at an international border. On their tablets: standard product brochures that end up in an escalation into allegations of industrial espionage. In this episode, we unpack how a wel...

"Fun" With Domain Names - An Industry Insider Explains All About DNS That You Didn't Knew

July 01, 2025 4:30am 37 min

We're unpacking the critical steps behind migrating a domain name — a process that can disrupt everything from search engine indexing and referral traffic to email deliverability and authentication. Join us together with...