Farm PC 'maintained' by a 14-year-old dumped support chap in a steaming pile of tech mess

Human users can be hard to handle. A few hundred head of cattle and unsupported windows XP can really stink things up

Welcome to another instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register publishes each Friday as a cathartic service for readers who know that dealing with tech support BS can be a cow of a job.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jason" who told us he had helped an agricultural equipment dealer with his computer issues for about 20 years.

"One day this guy called me to ask if I could help at a farm in Yorkshire, where he'd arranged the supply and installation of a fairly substantial system that used a computer to do effectively everything for a few hundred cattle," he told On Call.

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"That meant individually feeding them, measuring milk yields, planning pregnancies, and periodically submitting all the data to the government."

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Jason said other tech support folk had tried, and failed, to fix the system.

"This had somewhat soured the relationship between the agricultural equipment dealer and the farmer," he punned in his email to On Call.

Well punned, Jason.

But we digress.

"Despite not being fond of wading around in cow shit at four in the morning, I agreed to take a look at the system," Jason told us. By this time he had learned that the farm produced many tons of milk each week, so assumed he would find serious industrial-scale tech once he reached the farm.

That assumption was wrong.

"When I arrived, the first thing that I found to worry about was that the whole thing was controlled by proprietary software on a single PC running Windows XP – just after Microsoft ended mainstream support."

The other things to worry about were all acts of omission: the farm had no backups, no spare PC, and nobody on site to maintain the PC.

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Jason asked if anyone was responsible for keeping the computer up to date with the security patches and was told the farmer's 14-year-old grandson had done some computer studies at school, so he got the job.

That lad had either not discovered, or deleted, the many rather racy videos Jason found on the PC.

"When the farmer's wife learned of this, there was what can best be described as a hullabaloo," Jason told On Call.

As he dug into the mess, Jason found that the computer was sending milk production data to Her Majesty's Government. He also found that neither the government, nor the farm management software vendor, had bothered to require installation of a firewall.

Jason says he installed one, made a few other tweaks, and got the system working.

"Everyone seemed pleased, or at least they did until they got my bill," he wrote. "And to be fair, they did pay it promptly."

Jason never heard from the farm again.

"I don't know if that's because it's still working OK, or if they're just too embarrassed to see me again, or they found someone cheaper who could cope with my recommendations," he wrote.

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What's the strangest or dirtiest place you've been asked to deliver tech support? Don't cheese us off by holding back! Click here to send us your story so we can milk it for all it's worth in a future instalment of On Call. ®