My institution has hundreds of PCs so it's perfectly reasonable to expect our tech's to install software and operating systems using disk images prepared once and deployed many times. A stealth problem arose recently as a consequence of the Windows XP image from a few years ago which had been "interfered with" by central tech's responsible for administering our (then new) SharePoint server What a great idea it'd be if PCs could quickly access SharePoint without all that tedious mucking about with DNS? Let's put the name of the server and its IP address in "hosts" -- that'll speed things up for everyone!
So, lo! and behold!, the inevitable happened as Nature intended, and those self-same tech's changed the IP address of the server when the server hardware was upgraded a year or-so later (to ease the changeover). Nothing seemed wrong, since the University's desktop PCs had been upgraded in the interim with a different image to accommodate Office 2007 but quite a few staff laptops slipped through the net. I don't know how many hours my faculty's tech's wasted trying password changes, HTTP header analysis, Novell tweaks and client upgrades because of this blunder (it was tricky as SharePoint was the last server in a line of authentication redirects for external logins), but I'm glad that one of them eventually located the problem in "hosts" amidst the hundreds of out-of-date ad-blocking localhost name resolutions some other bright spark had included ;-)
Moral: Neat ideas need to be tempered with expert knowledge and every man needs to know his limitations!
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