IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith

By Jack Smith

Listen to a podcast, please open Podcast Republic app. Available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Image by Jack Smith

Category: Technology

Open in Apple Podcasts


Open RSS feed


Open Website


Rate for this podcast

Subscribers: 0
Reviews: 0
Episodes: 38

Description

IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith tells real stories from the world of IT: outages, failed migrations, broken infrastructure, cybersecurity incidents, software failures, networking disasters, cloud problems, Shadow IT, and the occasional decision that seemed like a good idea at the time. Jack Smith talks with the people who were there about what happened, how they got out of it, and what others can learn from the incident. Stories are anonymized where needed, and the focus is on technology, processes, and organizations rather than blaming individuals. New episodes weekly, with Jack's Rants in between. You are one of us.

Episode Date
Jack's Rants - PHP, Panic, and Technical Debt - PHP2Shell: Critical PHP Flaws, Emergency Patching, and Technical Debt
Oct 26, 2026
Wrong Person, Right Skills : Technical Hiring Failures and Why Companies Mismanage IT Talent
Oct 19, 2026
Cleared for Disaster : Air Traffic Control Technology: Outages, Failures, and Recovery
Oct 12, 2026
Jack's Rants - Meshcore : Off-Grid Messaging, LoRa, Privacy, and Decentralised Networks
Oct 05, 2026
Cultural Differences in IT : When Global Teams Don't Work the Same Way
Sep 28, 2026
When UNPK Broke – Diagnosing an IBM Mainframe Hardware Failure
Sep 21, 2026
Pinball as IoT : When Arcade Machines Go Online
Sep 14, 2026
The Three Envelopes: Blame, Reorganize, Repeat
Sep 07, 2026
Jack's Rants - Why You Need to Reboot : Why Rebooting Your Computer Actually Fixes Problems
Aug 31, 2026
Testing Software Properly : Software Testing Done Right – Where, When and What Should You Test?
Aug 24, 2026
Microcode Mayhem : How a Mainframe Timer Bug Slowed an Entire Development Team
Aug 17, 2026
Jack's Rants - AI Is The New Shadow IT : Why Employees Are Quietly Building the Next IT Risk
Aug 10, 2026
Melbourne Cup Meltdown : How a Betting System Crashed at the Worst Possible Moment
Aug 03, 2026
Jack's Rants - The Missing Five Minutes : Why scambaiting videos leave security professionals with more questions than answers
Jul 27, 2026
One Network to Rule Them All : How a Missing VLAN Strategy Turned Smart City Infrastructure into a Cybersecurity Nightmare
Jul 20, 2026
Jack's Rants - Can I Keep Your ID? : Privacy, Identity Theft, Data Minimization, and Why Your Driver's License Is Not a Bar Tab Deposit
Jul 13, 2026
Cardboard Confidential : A Cybersecurity Incident, a Golf Course Conversation, and Why No Industry Is Too Boring to Be Targeted
Jul 06, 2026
Jack's Rants - The New Change Management : ITIL Change Control, Organizational Change, and Why Project Managers Suddenly Need Psychology Degrees
Jun 22, 2026
GDPR Enters the Chat : The Day a Hiring Exercise Became an Information Security Incident
Jun 15, 2026
Spooling Out of Control : Enterprise Printing Explained and Why Printing Still Breaks IT
Jun 01, 2026
Sleep Mode in Production : How a Laptop Took Down a Warehouse
May 18, 2026
Ransomware Lockdown : What a Real-World Ransomware Attack Looks Like, Incident Response and Recovery
May 04, 2026
Jack's Rants - Floppy Disks at 35000 Feet : Why Boeing 747s Still Use Floppy Disks for Flight Management Systems
Apr 20, 2026
The Failover That Failed Successfully : Lessons from a Successfully Failed Disaster Recovery and Failover Test
Apr 06, 2026
Jack's Rants - IT Hiring Chaos : The Strange State of the Tech Job Market
Mar 12, 2026
Raspberry Mistery : 200 Techs Using A Single Raspberry Pi: The Temporary Server That Failed
Mar 02, 2026
Jack's Rants - Batch Job Blues : Why Mainframes And Banks Still Rule The World
Feb 10, 2026
Welcome to IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith
Feb 09, 2026
Surviving the Anonymous DDOS : How We Survived the Traffic Flood from Anonymous
Feb 02, 2026
Shadow IT Reports : Why you should not have a "Quick Sales Tool" in production
Jan 07, 2026
The DevOps Royale With Cheese : When a Data Supplier Breaks Production
Dec 01, 2025
Y2K vs Y2K38 : The Rematch and How the World Avoided a Global IT Disaster (Again)
Nov 03, 2025
SAP Happens : The IBM Spinoff That Is Controlling Global Business And Finance
Oct 06, 2025
Paris Rooftops : How (Not) To Install A 5G Antenna For An Internet Backup Line
Aug 31, 2025
IT and Global Politics : The Chaos Of Your Sales Team Being Arrested For Industrial Espionage
Aug 04, 2025
"Fun" With Domain Names : An Industry Insider Explains All About DNS That You Didn't Knew
Jul 01, 2025
Crashing Helsinki Airport : Why You Should Not Have Mission Critical Infrastructure In A Random Cloud Container
Jun 02, 2025
Our First Data Center Fire : Global Fire Alarm When Your Power Regulator Calls It Quits During The Holidays
May 06, 2025