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TL;DR Dear boss, firstly, you always get someone to review anything important done by a fucking intern.
Secondly, you do not give access to your fucking client's production server to an intern.
Thirdly, you don't ask your fucking intern to test the intern's work that has not been reviewed by anyone directly on your client's fucking production server.

Last week, the boss and one of the lead devs (the only guy with some serious knowledge about systems and networking) decided to give me (an intern who barely has any work experience) the task of fixing or finding an alternate solution to allowing their support team access to their client machines. Currently they used a reverse SSH tunnel and an intermediary VH but for some reason, that was very unreliable in terms of availability. I suggested using OpenVPN and explained how it would work. Seemed to be a far better idea and they accepted. After several days of working through documentations and guides and everything, I figured out how OpenVPN works and managed to deploy a TEST server and successfully test remote access using two VMs. On seeing my tests, the boss told me that he wanted to test it on the client network. I agreed. Today he comes to me and he tells me to prepare testing for tomorrow and that the client technician is going to give me access to one of their boxes. And then he adds, "It's a working prod server. We'll see if we can make it work on that" and left. I gaped at him for a while and asked another dev guy in the room if what I heard was right. He confirmed. Turns out, the lead dev and the boss's son (who also works here) had had a huge argument since morning on the same issue and finally the dev guy had washed it off his hands and declared that if anything goes wrong from testing it on production, it's entirely the boss's own fault. That's when the boss stepped in and approached me. I ran back to his office and began to explain why prod servers don't top the list of things you can fuck around with. But he simply silenced me saying, "What can go wrong?" and added, "You shouldn't stay still. You should keep moving". Okay, like firstly what the fuck and secondly, what the fuck?.
Even though OpenVPN client is not the scariest thing to install, tomorrow's going to be fun.

Comments
  • 3
    Haha keep us updated. Did you talk to the lead dev?
  • 2
    @Caedendi yeah, I did. Things is coz of my luck, he is currently in another site for this week so I texted him. He told me that if I insisted on following him rather than the boss, they could be pissed off and that would affect my grades for the internship when they send the report to the school. He promised that he'll talk to the school if anything of that sort happens but he simply told me to try and knock some sense into them. And he also warned me to keep the installation as simple and easy to reverse as possible. He's a good guy.
  • 2
    You know man, just go for it and stop giving a fuck. If you've done your research and Test properly then there is nothing to worry about.

    Also make sure to clearly document everything you do/did while installing the client on the test/live box.

    Good luck
  • 0
    It’s make or break time boys
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