Bug that wiped customer data saved the day – and a contract

Who, Me? Welcome to another working week, and another installment of "Who, Me?" – a weekly reader-contributed column that unearths your errors and reveals how you rebounded afterwards.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Caleb" who told us of the time he worked for an internet service provider that had problems with one of its biggest clients.

"They constantly complained about their network being slow and their internet access being even slower," Caleb told The Register.

"As this was one of our largest clients at the time, my boss grabbed me and we visited the customer."

The first thing Caleb and his boss saw was a collection of 3Com routers the client used to connect to the ISP and their other offices over IPX.

"I looked at the config and noticed the customer did not have a default route set," Caleb admitted. He wasn't sure if that ...