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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.
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...
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?".
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.