I have some experience with what can happen to a network when someone does something astoundingly stupid.

One place I worked in the mid-90's had just upgraded to Netware 4 and had sent their sysadmin to Salt Lake City for a two week course on it. A perk of taking that course was being sent CDs of beta versions of Novell software, boldly labled DO NOT INSTALL IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. I give you one guess what she did.

The mess I was handed included a normal user account with access rights above and beyond the Administrator account, totally impossible to add or modify user accounts, but they could be deleted- except for the Uber Admin/User account, the automatic backup schedule wouldn't run, it was impossible to create or modify print queues and many more problems. On top of that they'd lost all passwords to the old 3.12 server except for one user. The company even brought in a couple of CNE's from Salt Lake and they couldn't do anything with it. It was the definition of FUBAR.

My suggestion was to take an upcoming 3-day weekend, make absolutely certain there was a good backup of the database then 'nuke and pave' all the workstations with Win95B and both servers with the latest Netware 4.x, then have the people from New York fly out to install the Y2K complaint version of the database software*, which they were going to have to do anyway or watch their system go down in very expensive flames at midnight Jan. 01, 2000.

The response I got from on high was that would be "too expensive". (The company VP was a total ignorant when it came to computers, he *was* literally the Bob the Dinosaur character from Dilbert! Yup, his name really was Bob.) I was thrilled when they "didn't fire me".

*What it was was several multi-megabyte DOS BATCH FILES (somehow ported from antique COBOL programs) that ran various operations on the very large databases of student loan information. The batch files ran on a workstation, moving the data back and forth over 10 Base-T ethernet. The fastest stations were P120's.