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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!
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?
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.)
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.
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
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
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.
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'
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
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."
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.