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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.
staking mine and my family's needs in a technical career!
When I worked for a library I noticed a log of files with red ! as their icons. I determined that they must be erorrors or duplicates. So I removed them. Turns out that in windows 95 a red ! means that it is a critical system file.
And the library did not have the system source media anymore so we spend the next day looking for any machines with a similar version of the deleted file and moveing them back by hand.
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?
Never, never, never, never commit to a schedule that is not realistic. If you know it isn't realistic before you get started, imagine what happens when you discover the unknown problems.
No matter how much that guy in marketing wants to meet his roadmap, he will not help you design, code, or test your product. If you are lucky, he will complete the requirements before you are supposed to ship the product.
Thankfully, that's the worst I've done so far.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
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.)
...five minutes later after coming back from getting coffee: D'oh!
I actually did this once... while logged in as root... at the top level in /home... on a production server. Thank baphomet for nightly backups!
Hopefully none of my clients are reading this. :-)
None that I've done come to mind - I tend to make lots of little stupid mistakes rather than occasional huge cock-ups. But I had a client that had a CIO who was actively hostile to the idea of any kind of computer security what-so-ever. Waste of time and money for a made up threat he said.
They were running 13 servers at remote locations (and I mean remote, as in out in the boonies 4 hours from nowhere on back roads) and these servers were unpatched, had out of date or innactive anti-virus and were connected to the net via a combination of satellite and dedicated (always on) dialup. Their communications were secured with nothing more than Windows 2000's built in VPN.
Needless to say, my audit report told them that they had big beefy powerful angels on their side since they hadn't yet had a noticable intrusion. (They had no way of detecting one, but at least the servers weren't hosting porn sites.) I warned them that a virus or worm would come along though and knock the whole thing out. The CIO scoffed at my report, called me an alarmist and said that my opinions were right up there with the Y2K doomsayers.
When Slammer hit, I had described the vulnerabilities and outcome so accurately that this guy actually accused me of writing it myself. Took the whole corporate network down and they couldn't bring it back up until their techs visited each site. It took two teams seven days to get to all the sites. The company lost 6 business days, three customers and a months worth of transaction records.
Needless to say the CIO was demoted (they didn't fire him, which I consider itself a major tech mistake) and had me re-issue my audit report which they then followed to the letter taking every precaution I suggested.
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
I think the articles implication of "the more we learn, the less we think" is wrong.
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
I've lost my machine to cheap power supplies. The first time I thought was just a freak accident (blew the motherboard, CD drives, hard drive), since then I go for the Enermax and not some unbranded power supply.
Archie - CIO-for-hire
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
My mistake was to give the techie "thumbs up" under pressure. I folded to the "We needed this yesterday" argument despite my misgivings about the software. I paid for that mistake for the next year in slavish tech support. We became the software company's test bed as we found bug after bug. The software "worked", but operator efficiency dropped, and uptime was sub-optimal. "Customization" caused problems, etc., etc.
The second mistake I made was to attempt to use VPN over Broadband with Citrix MetaFrame. Although MetaFrame was a pretty secure and slim protocol for remote desktops, the Internet provider on the remote site had horrible latency problems and was run by a group of amatures. I should have stuck with the original Sprint frame relay proposal.
Morals of the story: don't let PHB push you into a solution you don't trust, and when network reliability is important, pay for assured quality of frame relay.
assert(expired(knowledge));
I was a young pup in the Army, during a training exercise. My Commander told me to kill the network, to "simulate" it's loss. We were operating a frequency hopping radio network, which of course is based on time. As the master node, I controlled the time. I pumped my transmitter to full power, and slowly pulled the stations that could recieve my signal out of time. Lowered power, pulled a smaller number of stations even farther out of time. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Commander thought I was brilliant, and so did I. I had fractured our network into at least 10 different domains. No one could talk to anyone, effectively "simulating" an enemy jamming attempt. It would take hours to restore the network, with many mad commo guys having to drive about with Pluggers, early GPS devices, to restore each radio to propper time.
Then a tank flipped. Someone died. No one could call for help. I am so damn smart.
No moon black, At 2 in the morning, in an upside down tank, the gunner figured out how to put his radio in plain text to call for help. It took him almost half an hour.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
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."
Bad plan. Now, the next time you log into a new machine you'll think that rm will be safe and will wipe out an entire directory tree again.
If you want to have a safe alias, use a different name! For example del would be appropriate. If you're not good enough to use rm correctly, then an old DOS command seems appropriate...
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'
(comic book guy voice)
By far, my worst tech mistake was dropping out of college to take a full time job as an outsourced computer admin. Not having my degree has kept me from being competitive for better jobs with larger companies.
I love job now, but I don't have much room to grow, being as I'm the top IT guy in a 70-person company that's family owned (and I'm not in the family). I'm working on finishing my degree now so that when the time comes to move on, I'll be able to find jobs that have room for growth.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
in 2000, a co-worker was migrating a large Catholic Diocese, one of the top ten say, from Novell to Microsoft (I still don't know why) as I had somewhat purposefully(on my part) been asked not to come back for a while (but that's another, dumber story).
Anyway, not having done any such migrations before, after thoroughly RTFM, he set up, almost entirely correctly, the migration service and began moving users. The syncing tool was set to run just before backups, so that the backup would reflect that days migrations and updates.
It was supposed to go like this: copy all files from the Novell directory, nightly, to the new user directories on microsoft shares unless the Microsoft file was newer (hence indicating that user was migrated) and eventually all users, over the course of a week, would be migrated and the sync turned off. everyone transparently suddenly works with microsoft shares and la di da off they go.
It was an excellent plan with the exception of forgetting to check the little box that made sure that newer files were not overwritten with the old ones from the (now defunct) novell servers during syncing. So every night the old files would overwrite then newer ones. People started to complain about the third day that their changes to documents and such weren't "sticking", and on the last day of the migration, we figured out what had happened.
So every night, before backups, the newer files were being overwritten and then backed up. This included the Accounting, Newspaper articles, judgements, spreadsheets, EVERYTHING. For a whole week, 1600 users lost their data and it wasn't backed up on purpose. Oops. Funny thing though, our company kept the account and what remains of that company still works on it to this day!!
What happened to the co-worker? Well we all just kinda laughed it off and that 19 year old kid became the second youngest CCIE up to that point in time, and a year later got his second CCIE in security and is making comfortably north of 120k/yr now.
-- This sig has a cholesterol count of 680... higher is better right?
My best singke mistake was after a long night of re-installing an updated version of solaris on a SparcServer 2, I needed to clear out the /tmp dir sor some stupid reason. So, I did the old: "mkdir newdir ; mv * newdir"
/tmp. I was in /.
/usr/lib/libc.so.0
/usr/sbin/static there are 5 statically compiled binaries: cp, ln, mv, rcp, and tar. /newdir/usr/sbin/static/mv /newdir/* / would have fixed it.
I wasn't in
My next command was 'ls'. It returned: unable to find
AAAAARGH!
I now know how to solve that under solaris. Under
Ever since then, my prompt has had my current directory in it. That experience certainly made me more careful.
Better (or worse) was when a stupid service rep came in to replace a bad CPU on a sun e10000. The idiot shut down the sub-system, and powered off the board correctly. He then managed to pull out the wrong board, despite the blinken lights. Of course it was the peoplesoft domain. Running year end reporting.
AAAAARGH!
Zapman
I work for a telephone directory publisher. A few years back, we were pushing a deadline and the man was not happy with the completeness of zip (postal) code info in the book. I purchased a new zip coding utility, ran it against the listings, and told the production dept to proceed with pagination, thinking that the army of proofreaders we have would notice any errors introduced by the new software.
I mean, what, I'm supposed to proofread the entire phone book by myself?
Anyway, the software used some kind of crazy soundex routine to "fix" addresses that it wasn't able to resolve, and thousands of people ended up with completely incorrect address information. The book went to press, was distributed, and a day later the phones were ringing off the hook. We had to pick up the old books, fix the data, schedule more press time (no easy feat), re-print, and re-distribute.
Total cost to correct was around $1M, got my ass chewed royally, but managed to keep my job anyway.
Must be doing *something* right!
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?".
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.
What the heck are these files doing on E: on this machine? Fsck! Ok... let's delete them...
Sudden realization that it wasn't local after all.. it was our main server for the ISP we ran, 25 miles away!
Hopped in car, had to reinstall, got it back up and running about 2 sweat filled hours later.
Moral: Always be mindful of WHERE the command is running.
--Mike--
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.
Aliasing rm to rm -i will do nothing if you use the -f flag, as you did. -f overrides -i.
.jpg
However, accidentally separating a wildcard from text is an infrequent mistake that can cause much pain. For example, typing rm -rf *
Zsh, by default, will complain at you and ask you if you *really* mean it if you use a bare wildcard with an rm command. Invaluable, and has saved my ass a few times.
May we never see th
'tis true. While in college (1990) I did a similar thing, and another student and I worked frantically to try to kill the fork bombs as fast as possible. Of course, you can't be fast enough to kill a tight enough loop and the machine quickly was unable to run any new processes. We each had a bunch of xterms up, but any command we tried to run we got the old "no more processes message". We thought we were screwed, until our very sharp prof (an engineer from Nortel actually) typed this into one of our xterms:
:-)
exec kill -9 -1
The exec overlays the new process, the -1 kills all of the current users processes. It seems the -1 option is a nice undocumented trick-- I've don't think I've seen it mentioned elsewhere... don't do this as root, BTW
-- I speak only for myself.
rm -rf from the command line? Lucky bastards!
I once added the following to a cronjob
rm -rf $foo/*
My intention was to wipe contents of a directory that I was reusing. Unfortunately "foo" was unset. The cronjob ran overnight with rm -rf traversing every NFS mounted drive in the company. I remember coming in at 10 the next morning and thinking "christ what kind of idiot deleted all of my files?", and then "shit! that idiot deleted everyone's files" and then "shit that idiot is me!".
Ever since then I usually do something like
rm -rf ${foo:?}
mkdir $foo
Later as I recovered my composure I started thinking "Now why can't those idiots set their umask correctly?".
The only positive aspect of what happened was that it revealed a weakness in the backup procedures being following by the IS department.
Personally I count my self lucky to have had the benefit of such a humbling experience w/out loosing my job.
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.
Along the same lines. On a customer's precious and mission-critical machine. Intending to copy filesystems to new volumes I'd created, I started with:
/usr /newusr
/usr/bin and /usr/sbin had moved. Finding any useful commands still functioning to let me assess the damage and fix it was interesting. I needed to do something like this once to learn, deep down, that everything is different when working as root.
mv
I managed to get it stopped, but not before
~~~~~~~
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -Emerson
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
I worked for a fortune-100 company as a UNIX admin/general systems geek.
/usr/bin and /usr/sbin, save su to the admins. You can do things like 'sudo chown' and 'sudo rm'. Psssht.
.' and then the previous command. After some time, I got my prompt back. I did a quick 'df -k .' to check my work and noticed that the filesystem was WELL within acceptable limits. I was so pleased with myself (and shocked by the tens of gigs of rotated logs) that I went to tell my boss that it was taken care of and to state my amazement at the amount of space that was being taken up.
We noticed that one of the filesystems that held the log files for an Oracle Application Server (two machines, shared storage) was filling up.
At this company, the security wannabees gave no one root access, but gave sudo privs to all UNIX admins. No big deal, huh? Well, they gave permission to everything in
Anyhow, my boss asked me to clear out the rotated logs in an attempt to free up some space.
I logged on to one of the two boxes and went to the directory in question. I typed "rm *.*"... Permission denied. Bummer. I guess I'll have to use sudo.
I typed in 'sudo chown [myid]
I got my 'attaboy' and continued working.
After about an hour, we went to lunch (boss went to lunch with me almost daily.) He gets a call on his cell from the PHB (although, to be fair, 'balding head boss' would be more appropriate.) He said that the OAS cluster for the largest app we supported was down.
After about 30 minutes of investigation and head-scratching on the part of my teammates still at the office, my boss got another call. One of my teammates asked him "who is [my id here]?"
My boss asked me if I knew, and my heart nearly exploded. I told him it was me.
I didn't even think to mention the change I made as a possible cause because so much crap happened every day that I forgot about one project about 5 minutes after completing it. I always fess up immediately when I make a mistake, so my boss knew I wasn't trying to hide anything...
Apparently, the server crashed when it had to rotate the log file (too large) and couldn't write to the directory. It wouldn't come back up again (with a completely non-descript error message, of course) after the crash for the same reason.
I'd left the directory permissions set to my user id. D'oh!
What makes this funny (in that sick kinda way) is that this app server crashed constantly, and the higher-ups tried to make themselves look good by being concerned (even though no business loss was actually incurred.) They always wanted a root cause analysis for every crash, and they were all the same - "unknown. vendor support not available because software is past end of life."
The higher-up jumped on this opportunity to make a freaking "oh my God, this guy is so dangerous" case out of it because it gave him something concrete to go to his higher-ups with, after so much "idunno" action.
I was given a written warning (my boss was forced to do so.) He smiled and laughed with me over the stupidity of it.
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)
Anyways: back in my post-college, pre-moving-to-Portland days, I worked at Radio Shack, and had unofficial but responsible assistant manager status after a year or so. Among other things, closing duties included putting a long-play videotape in the VCR attached to the store security cameras. No big deal, it was right by the PC in the back office where you closed everything out, impossible to forget and nothing every happened anyway. Until, of course, the night I forgot to do it, which also happened to be the night I got a call from security around 1 AM, to let me know the alarms had been triggered and I'd have to go down to meet the police and see what had happened. About a $1000 loss in stolen display merchandise, and no evidence. Oops...
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."