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What is the Worst Tech Mistake You Ever Made?
"In the interest of full disclosure, this is mine:
I was working at a Fortune 50 bank as a consultant. I was due to go on vacation for a week and the company did not have webmail. I decided that I would try forwarding emails to my corporate account. (I know this was a bad idea, and probably against several corporate policies.) I set it up so that any email that came in would forward to my consulting company's account. My mistake was I also left Delivery Receipt on. This was not Microsoft, it was Lotus Notes. The system began forwarding the incoming mail to my account. But then it would get a Delivery Receipt, which in turn would be forwarded to my account, which would generate another delivery receipt, ad infinitum. When I got back from vacation they claimed I had brought down the email system for 4 hours. This incident caused the bank to stop allowing consultants to set up email rules. What's your story?"
I launched SkyNet, right before my daughter and future husband rushed in to warn me. Boy was my face red!
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Back in the mid 80s I was a jnr op on an old mainframe. Not much disk space so we used to save old audit trails to tape and remove them. Another pertinent fact is the DB starts UDX* and the audit trails start UDXA*
:-( God knows why they kept me around.
I wonder what might have happened if a certain jnr op had not being paying attention and thought he knew it all.
Yep, there goes the audit trails and the database
"What is the biggest technology related mistake you have ever made?"
Statement by Slashdotters after the supoenas start rolling in: "Posting an admission of wrongdoing on a semi-anonymous public forum, whose owners will most likely cooperate with law enforcement when asked about an admission of wrong doing in a semi-anonymous public forum."
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
My biggest mistake was finding this website. I've wasted more time here that could have been spent doing my job and getting actual work done.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
The next day someone powered up the monitor to my old desktop (still at the office) and what did he see?
SQL Query Analyzer maximized with:(I still don't remember doing it.)
When I was first learning linux/unix I installed RH5.something on my computer (cyrix 6x86 133+ iirc), anyway I was having weird issues with several programs so I decided i needed a fresh start, those darn dot files must be currupted. .* ... ... damn I must have a LOT of those dot files. .... *DOH* .. ( I was running as root, It was my personal box what could be the harm)
So I typed:
rm -rf
This disk started churning
about 30 seconds later
the disk is still churning
about a minute later
CTRL-C
Where did all the files go? DAMNIT! I recursively deleted
I learned my lesson very well:
CREATE AND USE USER ACCOUNTS!! DONT RUN AS ROOT IF YOU CAN AVOID IT!
Thoughts on tech, Software Engineering, and stuff
Telling that twerp Bill that he should quit school and try his hand in the computer industry.
I was young (around 8 at the time, can't remember) and I was bored one afternoon. I started fiddling around with the back of the computer, the PSU, to be exact. The red button looked fun to play with.
It was on 220v. I turned the computer on. It worked. Then I tried putting it on 110v and turning it on. Nothing. Then I switched it back to 220v, turned it on, and switched it to 110v while it was on.
Boom.
Moral of the story is, trial and error isn't the best way to learn hardware, and don't throw water on the smoking PSU while it's still live.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Back in 1998, we were working on site deploying a new product to a customer. The product required us to create a new database on MS SQL Server. Well because of the size of this database, it takes over 5 hours to create. We could not continue on with the deployment until this was finished.
Well when it finished, in a rush to get out of there, I accidentally deleted the database and had to restart the process all over again. Many a cow-orker was pissed at me. Had to stay an extra day to complete the deployment.
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
So this wasn't a production machine I screwed up or anything, but I'm still a moron.
I had a Linux workstation that was ultimately adopted by the development group I worked with in the late 90's. Anyway, for some reason I needed to make a boot disk from an image. For some other reason, while typing in my command line, I was thinking fd0 but managed to type hda. So my line was dd if=/wherever/whatever.img of=/dev/hda.
Anyway, before looking at what I had typed, I hit enter. About 2ms later, I glanced up at what was on the screen and exclaimed something along the lines of "holy fscking shit!" and simultaniously hit a ctrl+c. Interestingly enough, the drive still kind of worked. I tried copying the contents of the disk over to another device, but I found that with each command - nay, each disk access, the filesystem would disintegrate further. I was able to save /home -- but I otherwise had to reOS the system.
I guess I've done much more stupid things with production machines -- but these were better machines, with storage on a NetApp NAS, which all had snapshots, so recovery was nearly instantanous.
These are not things that I include on my resume. (So -- anyone want to hire a disaster waiting to happen?) ;)
-Turkey
Oh man. So I was a grad student, right? I was always trying to portray myself as a very serious, dedicated student to my thesis advisor. And he had the fastest computer in the department (a Sparc10!) and he gave me permission to use it for batch runs. So I pretty much kept one of my xterms as a remote terminal to his machine.
Anyhow, one day I found this funny .au (sound) file and wanted to play it for my office mates. So I did a 'cat naked.au > /dev/audio'. Nothing happened. So I turned up the volume and tried it again. Still nothing. Then I screached in horror! I was typing this command in on the xterm I use for my advisor's machine! Sure enough, two seconds later an email comes trickling in from my advisor stating 'Please note that you are logged into my machine so your sound file is coming through my speakers.'
So what was this sound file that I had inadvertently played for my advisor?
Butthead: "Whoa! Naked chicks!"
Beavis (excitedly): "Yeah! Naked chicks! Naked chicks!"
GMD
watch this
Atleast you did it in the wrong dir. I was working on adding another domain to /etc/apache/vhosts/(each domain gets its own file), and all of a sudden I notice the dir is empty. It wasn't empty when I started.. scroll up 4 lines and I see rm * in my buffer. To this day I still have no clue what I was intending to do, but from now on no more working on a server with customers without proper amounts of caffiene.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Not about computers, but: While working for a Physics research lab, I made a laser water jacket without a bulge at the end of the inlet pipe. The water pressure rose at night, the tubing slipped off, and the 2nd floor and part of the first was flooded, including expensive test gear like oscilloscopes.
I did something similar on my beloved C=64.
I borrowed a game from a friend, and wanted to copy it. Of course, it had the classic 'deliberate bad checksum' anti-copy protection, which meant nothing more than loading a disk copying program that would handle it.
About half way through the first phase of copying, it suddenly dawned on me that I was using my disk copying floppy as my destination disk. I immediately pulled it out of the drive, thus ensuring I had neither a copy of the game nor a copy of the software required to try again!
Working as a consultant I turned up at a new customer (moderate sized pharmacy) to see what they needed. Walked in, all confident, the local tech guy met me, and I asked to look at their server room (I always liked seeing the hardware).
Anyway, as we are standing there, I think, well lets see how many users they have, so I ask if I could look at the Name & Address book. Opened up the people view, hit Control-A to see the count at the bottom of the screen of the number of records. Unfortunalty it was a very small compaq keyboard, hit delete as I turned to the local tech..
"I see. The fact that you...`can't explain'.. explains everything."
I was doing phone support for a national bank in Canada. One of the problems we routinely had was a connection would freeze-up on a teller's terminal in one of the 1000s of bank branchs across the country.. We'd have to go into a program running on our AS-400 and reset the connection. On the odd occasion it wasn't just one terminal but serveral at the branch. We'd have to get all the tellers to exit out of their terminals for a second, then, in the program, we'd esentially hit the 'back' button, be up one level so we saw all the connections by bank branch instead of by terminal, hit 'backspace' to send the command to reset the connection and then 'y - enter' to confirm.
I got one of these calls, and I went one level up the tree, got distracted by something, and without thinking hit up-backspace-y-enter, going up two levels in the tree instead of one. This reset all the connections for the whole network, to all the banks, all across Canada.
Every phone in the call center started ringing. Every LED that could flash red did so. Everyone in the call centre looked around frantically. I looked at my terminal and almost died on the spot.
Not only had I reset all the terminal connection, but trying to bring them back online flooded the network so as soon as they tried to come back up they all went offline again. It took several hours to get things stabalized and the banks could start serving customers again.
Fortunatly my boss was a decent guy. He saw it as an accident and something that no one should be able to accidently do. The command to reset the entire network was modified so you had to type in your password to confirm, instead of just 'y-enter'
Last year a friend gave me a pentium 200 mmx that he coundn't get working. Since my parents were in need of a firewall I figured I would drop a couple nics into this box and build one for them.
The first thing I did was plug in a keyboard, monitor, and turn the box's power on to see if it would reach the POST.
Smoke started coming from the box, and soon open flame. For a brief moment I just stood there looking at it thinking, "That's interesting. First time I've seen a computer catch fire." Then I pulled the plug from the wall and the flames soon stopped.
I looked into the case to see what went wrong. It seems that the power supply connector for a floppy drive is roughly the same size as a speaker connector on the sound card. My friend had plugged the power supply into the sound card which seems to have caused the fire when the power was turned on. I suppose I should have checked for something like this instead of just plugging in the machine.
Trying out Kmail was my biggest mistake, because it had a different interpretation of the file OUTBOX than did my previous mailer. My previous mailer stored every email (6 years worth) in OUTBOX. And kmail took OUTBOX to be the file where messages written offline were temporarily stored until next coming online. The first time I fired up Kmail, a indeterminate-time progress bar came up, and it kinda hung. I went to get a coke, giving it time to snap out of its funk. Unbeknownst to me, during that time it re-sent every email I'd ever sent. When I got back and checked my INBOX, I screeched in horror.
Funny thing is, people from my previous job were getting work related emails from me again, and they didn't seem to mind that (1) they were on outdated topics and (2) the company was defunct, they played right along and replied stuff like "yeah what ever happened to that issue?".
Hopefully none of my clients are reading this.
You're known as FunkyRat to them!?
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
Well, this is more of a graphical error than a text error, but it's still amusing. My company developed a technology where you can watch video from mulitple angles. (note: this is going back a few years.) So we were pumping out demos like mad. At one point, we got some stock footage of a horse show or something. It had a horse jumping over a fence, filmed from different angles. I had to insert the words "click here" at the bottom of the video because I was going to make that clickable. If you click there, then you get s'more info about our software.
Back then, we didn't do letterboxing like Media Player does. If the window you play the video in isn't the same as the aspect ratio of the video, then cropping occurs. I did not consider this little fact about our player, rather I got it up on the site as fast as I possibly could. Then, I went to lunch.
When I got back from lunch, I noticed the CEO was looking at the demo. So I poked my head in to say hi. He says "Why is this video telling me to lick it?" Wha? I go up to the screen, look at what he's watching, and... eep. The c in click here was perfectly cropped out of the shot. I mean perfectly. I mean you didn't know it was missing. So here's a horse, reared up on its hind legs, with the words "LICK HERE" just below its.. uh.. tail.
I am so glad that we had the one CEO in our industry that understood what took place.
"Derp de derp."
As a joke, I once set the transporter to low resolution. The Captain was not amused.
I don't see how you can call that a mistake. Thats more like quitting cold turkey.
In Republican America phones tap you.
Boy, do I feel stupid now.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
1. I was working on the development database but my boss needed a quick count of a number of checks so I opened a new window (Query Analyzer for SQL Server) to the production database and gave him his count. I then proceeded to finish what I was doing on development... without switching windows back to the development server.
:)) but beating ourselves in the head.
:)
TRUNCATE TABLE Checks
TRUNCATE isn't a logged option but thankfully Log Explorer Pro from Lumigent can retrieve truncated data if you move fast enough. As well we had a backup that wasn't so very old handy. Out of 1.3 million checks we only lost 34000, but I was so stressed out.
2. Way, way, way back when we had just gotten a new Dell server. I was showing an interviewee the server who I had found out I had known when I was younger. So, joking around I said, "Want to see a hot swap of a drive?" He was like, heh, that'd be cool. So I pulled the drive out of the RAID 5 array. Alarm klaxons started going off from inside the machine, I swear. I stuffed the drive back in but even though the drive officially -was- hot swap we hadn't purchased the high end Dell with an array controller that could dynamically rebuild the data. We'd gotten the cheap version. 8 hours later - with the machine beeping constantly at us - the rebuild was done.
3. This one's not mine but a guy I work with. I had asked him to migrate some databases to a backup server so he set up a DTS job to do the migration. Unfortunately he did two things wrong: the destination was the same server as the source, our primary production machine, and he set the DTS process to execute nightly instead of once. We ended up filling 300Gb of drive space and not having a clue as to what happened to cause it. When we found it we were giggling (it is funny
4. Another one that's not mine. New network administrator was installing Windows NT 4.0 (this was ~6 years back? Roughly?). He was complaining about it taking forever to install and I asked him what he was doing. "Well, shit, NT has like 35 disks man." I asked him why he wasn't installing off the CD and he just hung up on me. He didn't know the NT CD would allow you to do that.
5. On a similar vein my original boss when I started here was I thought a technical God. It's fun to see how that belief fades over time. In my case he was showing me how to install Netware 3.12 and configure it the way he wanted it to be configured. He sent me off on my own the next week to install a new office. The week at home I had burned all the Netware 3.12 files to a CD so I wouldn't have to cart around all those floppies. Apparently the load time off CD blew my boss out of the water because he didn't believe I'd installed the server already when he called to see how things were progressing.
6. I'm walking my COO through hooking up a new modem in our Kansas City office. He's getting mad at me and asking me if I know what I'm doing because we can't get a response from the modem. (I'm working blind over the phone.) I had asked him earlier if he had hooked up all the cables like they were to the old one and he had indicated that he did. Finally I said, "Look, don't take this the wrong way but let's check the cabling. You should have a phone cable to the wall, a power cable to the power, and an interface cable to the computer. These should all be coming from the modem." He had forgotten to hook up the RS-232 cable. To this day I razz him about modems telepathically communicating with machines.
7. My CEO is one of the brightest people I've ever met in my life and has my eternal respect for his intelligence and moral integrity. He called me and indicated he couldn't print. I told him to not get insulted but I was going to start with the basics. "Is the printer plugged in?" "Yes." "Is the power on?" "Thanks Brian, I'll call you if I have any more problems."
8. I had just come off the road from setting up our Texas operations - a 4 mont
My reality check bounced.
The very first fiber run in Phoneix went from one federal building to another. I'm not sure which, but they must have been important.
If you've ever seen an phone cable room underground, you know that the cables are straight, so straight that you can easily follow them across the room and usually clearly labeled. Well some dumbass manager went down into this one cable room underground in Phoenix, and saw this great big looping yellow piece of shit cable run and wanted it fixed pronto!! So he gets some new hire (been on the job less than a month) to go down there and I quote "Fix that Fu**ing thing! I want it to look just like the rest of the cable down there, and I'm gonna get the guy who installed it fired!!" (yes, he does come off as a jackass doesn't he?)
So this poor newbie goes down into the manhole and starts hammering, and tying down, this 'cable' run. He's using pliers, 3 pound mauls (why won't this stuff stay flat?) and whatever else he could do and wouldn't you know it, after 4 hours or so of this, it looks beautiful, just like the rest of the runs and even re-labeled!
Well, when this guy pokes his head out of the manhole, there are like 20 officers from the FBI, State DPS, County sheriff, ATF, and whoever else waiting for him with guns drawn!!!! Poor guy is fired on the spot and questioned for over 2 days, telling them he's not a sabateur and that his boss told him to do this. The boss doesn't fess up until the 3rd day of questioning, at which point HE is fired and the pleeb gets his job back.
The second first fiber run in Phoenix was back up shortly, and the other workers educated about it's "don't take a hammer to this shit" properties.
--
This sig writes better than I do.
Since I am an impatient guy, I wanted to make my external USR Sportster 33.6k modem to dial faster with initialization string parameters.
:(
Well, it was the middle of the night (3 am?) and I was a teenager. I made the modem dial fast, but one of the BBS phone number started out with 914... Well, the modem accidently dialed 911. I didn't have the modem speaker loud enough so I didn't hear 911 operator. Then, a cop came by after a few minutes. My folks weren't happy that day.
DOH!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
We all know how this ended. So I won't bother with the details. Much apologizing ensued on Kenny's part and much "Don't worry about it" on mine. I had backed up the files just before I asked for help. Thank god he didn't do "rm -r*" at / like I thought I saw.
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
Site A was a popular Windows shareware download site (rhymed with CaveDentral.com).
Site B is an even more popular open source download site (rhymes with freshfeet).
I was given the task of upgrading Site A to run on top of the PHP codebase developed for Site B. Nearing completion of this project, I began toying with the automated newsletter update features of the codebase. Unfortunately, since the codebase hadn't been designed with the idea that it would ever be used as an extensible framework, the newsletter posting address was hardcoded in an obscure corner of the include files. Or something like that -- it's been a few years.
Anyway, end result was Site B's subscribers began recieving a multitude of strange emails with the subject 'Testing -- Visit Site A for Windows Shareware!'
Oops!
really? wow... that's reallywow.
While working at HP I did a NET SEND command to get whoever was logged into one of the servers I was using to log out of PCAnywhere. Unfortunately, I missed one of the parameters and sent the message to everyone in the login domain (ie. a few thousand users).
After hitting ENTER, I hear a hundred Windows 'dings', and everyone in cubicle-land starts prairiedogging. I got a few nasty replies asking who I was, and a very nice one saying "Don't worry: once I sent 'I know you don't have any pants on' to most of HP Belgium".
Worst thing was, the guy clogging up the server was my cubicle-mate who'd gone out to get coffee.
Thing failed in less than a year, taking all of my music with it; 5 years of dorky industrial music, recently copied over from a huge stack of ZIP disks. 100 songs.
;)
So in essence you're saying that Maxtor hard drives are bad for maintaining data integrity, but excellent for protecting data quality!
This tidbit from Lars Wirzenius is a part of Linux Lore:
/dev, and wanted to dial up the university computer and debug his terminal emulation code again. So he starts his terminal emulator program and tells it to use /dev/hda. That should have been /dev/ttyS1. Oops. Now his master boot record started with "ATDT" and the university modem pool phone number. I think he implemented permission checking the following day."
"Linus also got some other stuff via mail. For example, a pair of 40 megabyte hard disks. That was really nice, since it meant that Linus was finally able to keep some backups. Not that he did, of course. One of his well-known quotes is: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." He said that even after dialling his hard disk.
"At one point, Linus had implemented device files in
I once did something similar -- I was going to back up my MBR to a floppy. Using the 'dd' utility. I got the command line options backwards, and overwrote the first 1.44MB of the hard drive with the contents of a blank floppy disk. Required a low-level format of the hard drive to reuse the sucker. Thankfully, it had no critical or irreplaceable data on it.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
rm hose... ;)
Sage advice if you don't want to spawn children
Running components above their rated voltages can be fun and exciting... I've had two instances of that. First time, I was building a voltage doubler for 35 VAC to 70 VDC. I used generic electrolytic caps rated at 50 VDC. I turned it on and it worked for about 5 seconds before exploding in a plume of electrolyte steam and spraying me with bits of capacitor.
The second explosion was even better, though. I was building a 48V 20A power supply from a somewhat limited selection of components. I didn't have an input transformer, so it was running directly from rectified 120V AC (with a hefty, properly rated smoothing capacitor) Rather than have a 48V zener as the reference, I had to use the 12V zener that I happened to have and quadruple the voltage with a 555-based circuit. I built up a test of the voltage reference circuit, and it seemed to work on the 5V input I gave it. So, I plugged in the 12V zener, plugged in the power transistor bank, and fired it up. Quite literally, as it turned out. As the multimeter I had hooked up to the output briefly registered somewhere around 200 V DC, the entire low-power section (reference zener and 555) of the power supply exploded in flame and sparks. Every single component on the board exploded, the electrolyte in all of the capacitors vaporized, the diodes were nowhere to be seen (though I did get shrapneled with bits of them), and there was a nice big black stain on my Radio Shack experimentor's solderless breadboard. I had managed to stick the zener in backwards. With the way it was built, that resulted in delivering the full recitified line voltage (somewhere around 120 V DC) into the input of the very low power circuitry surrounding the 555 timer IC. The quadrupler's drive transistors overloaded and shorted into nice 3-wire jumpers, causing a short to ground through the nearest circuitry - poor 555, never knew what hit it... Thankfully, the (expensive) power transistor assembly survived.
Lessons learned: Check the ratings on the components you're using. Think, then assemble.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
I got an MIS degree instead of a Computer Science degree. No idea why.
When I started my current job I was assigned to testing one of our apps. I was given 2 databases to log into and was told to "exhaustively test" the entire system (adding/deleting records.) So I started adding all sorts of odd stuff (I was going to delete them anyway.) Now I'm not dumb enough to name them dirty things (afterall this was my 2nd week) but I was still typing silly things.
Anyway about an hour into it I got an email that was addressed to the whole department that said
"To whomever is modifying the market database while I'm trying to demo it to one of our most important customers: not funny."