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What Was Your Worst Computer Accident?
Anonymous Writer writes "I learned years ago to backup regularly and never keep a drink on the same table as a laptop. I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards, ruining the motherboard, CD-ROM, and hard drive. Thousands of dollars and all my data disappeared in a flash. Considering that there are even people out there that intentionally damage hardware, I was wondering what kind of disasters Slashdot readers have experienced."
I'd have to say one of the worst computer accidents I had was ruining my Slashdot ID by attempting a first post.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
mkswap /dev/hda1 /dev/hda3
instead of swapon
hda1 = data
mda3 = swap
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
Buying a Windows machine instead of a Macintosh?
/. post?)
(Would this be considered a generic
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
December 23, 1998 - Before leaving work I tried connect to my home web server to transfer some files. The connection timed out. That seemed odd. I was just on a couple of hours ago.
Got home. The screen's frozen on the computer. Ctl-alt-Del...Nothing. Reboot... the monitor doesn't even come on! Ok, take the cover off, get out the canned air, blow dust off the components, see if anything is loose.
Holy shit! I see a mouse wandering around inside the computer!
I think about getting something to kill it, but don't want to mess up the hardware, so I shake it out. It drops out and neither the cat or dog see it as it scurries under the couch.
After about 30 minutes of sleuthing I find that the Ethernet card is blown. It's got a nice little burn mark on one of the chips where the mouse apparently PEED on it!
Well a quick trip down to Compu USA and everything is back in order. The cat's still sleeping on the couch -- but it's only a matter of time before one of us frag's that mouse!
Lesson: Don't leave any of your slot covers off the back of your computer.
I've mistankely swapped the +5V and +12V inputs in a HD and it exploded big time.. The whole circuit board got into fire.
Once installed windows 98 .... ME .... nooooooo!!!
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I tried using a CPU temperature probe to monitor my overclocking, but due to bad worksmanship (AKA pure shittiness), it fried my $400 P4C 3.0 GHz processor. ;_;
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I did a rm -rf ./* while in the wrong directory. I can't say that I've ever damaged any hardware though.
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
Worst accident for me would be running rm -rf * from / instead of putting in the folder name. As root. Hit ctl-c after seeing some errors in /dev/ pop up. Fellon the floor, and about 5 minutes later got back to up to chekc out the damage. Luckily it had stoppe djust before /home/.
Oh and to make things better, it was my High Schools email server, 3 days before school was to begin, and people were just starting to trust the server and begin to use it.. Needless to say we had to repor tot the school that we had experienced a "hard drive crash" hehe
Hiding cookies in my power suppy never turned out good...
Matt
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
$100 to replace the *melted* keyboard. note to self: never remove nail polish near a computer.
First I wanted a cheap Microdrive for my digicam, but then I fell in love with my new Creative Muvo2. But I dropped it on the floor from 1m height. The drive is broken but I hope for a repair. I wonder how many they get back like this?
I'm generally pretty careful with the machine... but I have been known to ruin a keyboard or two (or a mouse or two...) with cheeto crumbs. And a pair of pants, but that's not really hardware.
My worst: Thinking PQMagic knew what ext2/ext3 was, and how to handle it.
I lost everything on that disk. Every-fucking-thing.
Note to self: It does not know how to handle ext2/ext3. Nor UFS.
"If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
Spider Jerusalem
When I switched my G3 to OS X from OS9, I told my kids that in OS X they each have their own logins and their files weren't visible to each other. What I didn't mention was that the protections didn't apply to anthing on the older OS9 disk. My oldest thought that meant she could delete files that appeared in her login and they would only disappear from her view...
I was able to retrieve some of the files but I was handicapped by not knowing they were deleted until after I had moved things around. I lost some ProTools files that I've never been able to recover, and all I have is a single CD I burned from them.
Worst computing mistake was watercooling. The pump connections broke and shorted out EVERYTHING.
I did a
on my friend's machine, in order to change permission on all of the hidden directories and files. I didn't think that ".." and all of its subdirectories would also be traversed, which coupled with the "-R" changed ownership on every file on her computer.I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
Well, my PurePower-CrapPower PSU decieded to have the fan die just 2 weeks after it's warranty was up. Nasty smoke from burnt innards. Fire alarm. Wonderful experience.
I was moving an old IDE drive from one system to another because the motherboard it was in had died. Well, pulling the IDE cable off took a few of the Pins with it. Did I mention this hard drie had payroll information on it for a small company? Luckily I had a friend who could solder at the fine level of detail needed, and he managed to re-attach the pins for me.
I had once propped the cover to a 1U rack-mount server against a wall while I was working on it. (The cover is essentially a 19" x 30" x 1/8" thick piece of steel.)
.25" chunk out of my leg.
;)
I turned around, bumped the cover with my foot, which proceeded to fall on my shin. Unfortunately, I was wearing shorts and the corner of the cover gouged a 2.5" x
Though, it's a really cool looking scar; I won't tell anyone how I got it.
Hitting reset in the middle of a re-org is a bad idea. Department lost everything, except that it didn't really lose everything. Everything was still in files, but the files were scrambled. They printed out the contents of each file, figured out what file each fragment belonged to, and typed it all back in.
Fortunately, this hard disk was only a megabyte or so.
On an HPUX box:
;-) Instantly numerous processes die, 120 users are booted off the box, and I panic ;-)) Luckily nobody found out - hence the anonymous post here... I hope!
[working away in my home directory, I notice a bunch of files are owned by another user]:
su -
password: xxxxxxxx
chown myUid.myGrp *
chmod 700 *
exit
Spot the mistake
Once, during the 70s, I accidentally spilled Pepsi on the control panel at the Two Mile Island nuclear power plant, and Jimmy Carter came to fix it, and he was irradiated and grew to over 50 feet...
Boy that was embarassing.
I'm fairly clumsy, and in my computing career, I've spilled drinks on a half-dozen keyboards and at least two motherboards. But all of them worked just fine after drying out.
The secret? Drink only water. I can do my computing without dependency on mind-altering drugs like caffeine and alcohol. And why pay for soda when water's free and doesn't expand your waistline or rot your teeth?
I learned the hard way that backing your data up to another hard drive does no good when the power supply freaks out and fries *everything*...including BOTH hard drives.
Luckily, I had bought matching drives for use in another computer (a total of 4 HDs). By removing the controllers from the good drives and carfully placing them on the fried drives, I was able to get everything back.
Word to the wise, backup and keep off box and off site!
Mean to type "dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 count=300"
/dev/fd0 is owned by my user, and I never dd as root anymore :P
Ended up typing "dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=300"
Needless to say the system continued to operate for a week or so, although here were random errors everywhere. Saved most all my data though.
After that day I always made sure
Purchased a Dell.
At first jsut the DVI port didn't work and I used the VGA port with no problems, but the next day the card would crash on entering Windows. I had some Tweakmonster ramsinks attatched to the ram so I coudln't return it to ATI for service unless they came off. I had diluted the AS thermal epoxy but apparenlty not enough, after using the freezer trick to make the epoxy brittle 3/8 of the heatsinks came off no porblem, but the 4rth came off with the memory chip :'(.
Needless to say I jsut have to buy a new video card now, but the whoel episode was highly frustrating and unlike things that usually happen to me. I was doing this all after not so much sleep, but still I shoudl hve been more cautious!
Despite all this, the worst incident to ever happen to me was a few years back when lightning surged thorugh my cable line, frying my cable modem, nic and motherboard. I was not happpy and the cable company denied all while replacing my modem for free). I learnt then a UPS is a sound investment.
A friend of mine stuck a screwdriver in his computers power supply because the fan was "making too much noise"... He used it with the screwdriver blocking the fan for maybe 6 months before the entire thing blew up and fried every single component in the computer...
Then he asked if I could fix it...
During the 90s i went through 4 modems before it occured to me to get a surge protecter on my phone line... summer T-storms in NY-state coupled with archaic landlines don't make for optimal BBS'n conditions.
...I had just bought my brand new 1.6GB hard disk drive, and we were in the process of consolidating data off of my 800MB and 400MB drives onto the new one. Well, it was late after we got all of the equipment working and got the first partition copied (the 800 was two 400MB partitions), and I let my friend copy the others.
Well, he formatted the partitions on the new drive as he went, and he once somehow forgot to copy the data on one of the partitions after creating the new one on the 1.6GB drive. I ended up losing all of my porn (Very Very Important to a fifteen year old) and most of the games that I'd downloaded off of the local BBSes, like Doom shareware. So, I was kind of pissed off. It sucked a lot at the time.
I once had another weird one where the hard disk drive that the OS was installed on for my RAID box (2GB SCSI drive for OS, four 120GB IDE drives for RAID) blew a controller chip. It stank up the computer room something fierce! Anyway, I had a second drive of the same type and model, so I just swapped controller boards and it came back. Still running that way too, about two years later.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Anonymous post, cause no one ever found out.
So my company has a database which records all information about all of our clients, and I maintain it. Contact, Billing, and contract information among other things.
I accidently deleted 3/4 of the tables in the database while migrating from one DB platform to another. for about 15 minutes, I was totally screwed. Then I remembered I exported the database into Access 3 days prior, and restored from that.
Danger averted, and no one ever knew..... but those 15 minutes were definately the most nervewracking moments Ive ever experienced, and taught me some good lessons about mission critical backups, and precautions to take.
I buy and sell used iBooks for a small profit. I was placing a new keyboard into a used G3 iBook 600. The connector on the motherboard is a flimsy piece of brown plastic that sticks out. Well I place the thread into place and the plastic snaps when I push it in. I was absolutely LIVID that such an inexpensive repair that I could do myself would now end up costing me a ridiculous amount of money. It irks me to this day. I can't use my personal iBook without thinking about it.
.deviatefromtheabsolute.
The worst 'accident' I had was letting people know I had a kick ass computer. There is absolutely no data recovery when you computer is stolen and it's not physically there anymore.
--- to swing on the spiral...
Purchasing Windows 98.
After more than 15 years in Unix-land, why did I make *that* move? What was I thinking? I'm so glad that it was about that time that Linux made Unix accessible "for the rest of us".
Once as a network admin I mirrored the data drive on a NetWare server to a new blank disk for redundancy. Except I mirrored them backwards, which NetWare had no problem letting you do. I realized my mistake, and fortunately the changes (not undo-able, I forget why) did not take effect until a reboot, which meant that I had to make a backup of the data NOW while it was still available. I spent the rest of night restoring the data to the new blank drives, and noone was the wiser in morning. Well, except me.
The other time, I came home from vacation to find my main desktop drive seized. Because I do nightly file copies to a spare drive on the same machine, I lost no data.
So, whether planned or unplanned, backups are good!
In highschool I did a project on animal behaviour for a biology class, which entailed imprinting a duckling on myself, and carrying it around everywhere for the duration of the project, and observing. I was working on my computer, with the duckling on the desk in front of me, and it started doing its 'I'm gonna dump walk'...stepping backwards, wings outstreched and ass up. Next thing I knew, the keyboard was hit around the F keys with a wet one, and it gave out almost instantly. I wonder if anyone else has lost hardware to a duck?
I was working on EISA cards (remember those?) in a fancy dual-processor server, and was having trouble with the one ISA card it needed. I pulled one of the expensive network cards, and then turned back and realized the power switch was still on. Oops.
At least the manufacturer was good about replacing the motherboard under warranty, which I had fried, and it was a new server so it didn't need to go back into production right away.
Using metal pliars.. While the computer was on. Actually, no permament damage was done, it just scared the heck outa me. The workstation powered down immediately and would not power on for a few minutes. I assume something over heated and saved the day. Next time i'll cut them one wire at a time :)
In 1988, we lived in a small rented house with old, groundless AC wiring. While trying to interface the once popular Teletype unit to an XT, somehow there was a difference in the ground potential of the XT and the Teletype, and the XT was seriously fried - burnt-traces, blown-up ICs, the works. There wasn't much data to lose, so the real loss was the hardware.
Fast forward to 2000 - a 2 year-old Celeron 300 box with a no-name case and PSU. All by itself, the powersupply went nova, apparently leading to an overvoltage which, similar to 1988, fried most of the electronics, including drive electronics, a $500 multichannel soundcard, and just about everything else.
Thank god for ebay - i was able to find the exact same harddrive, swap it's good electronics into my blown drive, and get all my data back.
Needless to say I only buy top-line PSU's now.
was submitting this and getting publically flogged for it! (Since the comments seem to be gone, turns out it was a loose IDE cable. :P)
...managed to ruin a perfectly good mobo, graphics card, ram, and soundcard instantly.
He didn't using mounting screws. He carefully installed all of his hardware, and leaned the damn motherboard in the case. And then RMA'd all of the stuff, and DID IT AGAIN. He was convinced he was getting dud hardware until me and one of my other friends gave him a generous beating with the cluestick after he asked us for our help.
This was before I had any means of making money to get my own computer.
My family's computer was extremely slow, and was a Packard Bell, which makes it even worse (it was a Pentium 133 in 1999). Ok, my brother's new computer parts he had finally ordered in the mail had finally arrived. After many years of using a computer way out of date, I finally got my brother's slightly out of date, but playable Pentium 200. I could finally play Half-Life, Unreal, and Quake 2 (at greater than 13 fps).
This thing was in a 386 AT case that housed two generations of motherboards before it (486-133 and 386DX-40) and had a power supply that was equally old.
After fiddling around the open case to fix a RAM issue, I powered it on and SPARK! One of the yellow wires on a 12V plug coming from the power supply had come loose and shorted right on the motherboard and burned a big hole through a chip.
Not much humility like having to move all your crap back to the old piece of crap computer (3dfx card, RAM, hard drive) after getting your hopes up to finally play those newfangled games you have been waiting to play for months/years.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
10. breaking off the contact part of a PCI card while trying to extract it. The PCI slot is still unusable to this day. Not that I use that old computer anymore though. 9. Sitting on a brand new Pentium 4 accidentally, bending all the pins 8. Not getting a UPS/surge strip/voltage regulator. Over time, the voltage irregularities caused my power supply to literally catch on fire. 7. Installing Windows. 6. Falling for the "hey, try rm -rf /" trick
5. Dropping a monitor down the stairs
4. Taking over an NT domain accidentally by running samba as a PDC
3. Leaving a P4 laptop running inside a closed, insulated laptop case. Literally everything overheated.
2. "Accidentally" adding DELTREE C:\ /Y to a Windows NT Logon script. Ah, the good old senior pranks.
1. Posting this list on Slashdot.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Finally, I got a call from one of the local computer hardware stores informing me they had just receieved a shipment of these beasts, so I ran down there like a little child at christmas and forked over the cash.
I got home and opened up the packaging, then pryed open my box, I unscrewed one of the PCI blanking plates and tried to remove it, but it was bent and didn't want to budge, so I pulled as hard as I could, it came off and I went flying backwards right into the table beside me, I had a full pint glass of coke on the table which spilt into the case (and also over my keyboard).
Turns out that coke isn't only bad for teeth, its not good for x86 hardware either. Needless to say, I never did get around to playing GLQuake that day :(
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Debian, especially back then, was not a good newby distro. After installing it, I was left at a blank terminal thinking, "Okay, now what."
In my frustration trying to set up X, I decided "to hell with it, I'll install Slackware," and I hastily did a "rm -rf /"
As I listened to my noisy hard drive chug a long, I remembered that I had mounted my Windows partition.
"But surely Linux will know I only wanted to rm the Linux part."
Yeah, I was wrong.
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
over a concrete driveway.
:)
Okay, so it didn't happen to me, but to a customer at a computer store I worked at in the late '90's. He caught his wife chatting online with some strange man and picked up the computer and threw it through the *closed* window. It brought a whole new meaning to computer crash.
When I saw it, it looked like someone hit it with a sledgehammer then dragged it down the highway a bit. He brought it in to see if anything was salvageable, but other than the CPU (which appeared to have all its pins) it looked to be a total loss.
It may have been cheaper to have tossed the wife out the window and left the computer on the desk, but who knows?
When I was maybe 7 years old my parents put a board into one of our computers the wrong way. The smoking mess was left pretty much useless. Since then I have learned from their mistake and avoided such errors.
Unless you count the time I spell a soda into my keyboard, but that is a pretty lame case.
I'm sure I will do something very stupid one of these days (its just a matter of probabilities), its just that I can't afford to make such mistakes right now (no cash to replace things) so I am very careful.
That sucked.
It must've been karma.Way back in the day, when a 486dx/66 was *hot stuff*, I had an interesting day. I started by inserting the CPU backwards. It emitted a large puff of smoke and a horrible squealing sound. Surprizingly enough after correcting the CPU orientation it still worked. Later in the day while fiddling with it, I bumped the tower and it fell out the second story window on to a concrete pad. Since it was not screwed together properly, it took the fall rather well, the only casualty being the case (Bent to hell), and the massive-for-the-day 2gig harddrive, which still worked, albeit at less-than-floppy speeds with a horrible click-clack sound every 10 seconds. Recovering my data took 10 days, with the computer living in a cardboard box. I had this bad habit of heating cans of spaghetti-O's on the CPU, but nothing ever came of it (thankfully).
Being told by my boss to make a tape copy of the only master of an old OS version they had on my first week.
OK you guessed it I wiped the master with the wrong cpio option.
Installing an OS on the real HDD, not in the VMs one...
(Initialize all HDD? Yesss)
My worst computer experience had a price / cost me $699.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Cracked Screen? Of course.
Busted Hard Drive: check.
Broken motherboard: probably.
Cracked Case: That's the least of your worries.
I think the battery will survive, but if not, there's caustic/acidic materials to deal with.
Back in my first year or two of programming full-time, I deleted some LIVE data belonging to a customer, because I forgot the "where" clause. For those not familiar with SQL, you'd say the following to delete only certain rows from a table:
...that will delete all rows from that table. (Actually, I did type the WHERE clause, but I had only part of the statement highlighted, so that's the only part that got executed.)
...Right? :P I've continued to work with SQL databases for the past 7 years, and I literally NEVER execute a DELETE statement without thinking about that fateful day. Never ever, even if it's data that doesn't matter.
"Delete From SomeTable Where SomeTable.SomeField > 500"
However, if simply you type:
"Delete From SomeTable"
What a nightmare. Obviously it was my own stupid fault, but to make matters worse, the IT dudes weren't performing nightly backups as they'd promised, compounding the problem. Recovery of the table from the transaction logs proved impossible for several reasons. It cost our company a few thousand dollars to re-conduct our client's survey and we had to endure a lot of screaming.
I consider myself lucky to have done this early in my career, on a small job that amounted to thousands of dollars instead of 5-, 6-, or 7-figure dollar amounts. I figure it's the sort of thing that everybody does once and never does again.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
I have lost my portable Mac OS X machine when I tried to fix the power connector which seemed to be loose. Using a big soldering iron I overheated the chips next to connector, killing the machine. Replacing this board would cost 300 bucks or more.
Sad part: It was actually the plug from the power cord that was broken and which could be replaced with a 25 ct. headphone plug.
Anonymous yes,
Coward I think not!
Buying motherboards made by PC-Chips. I learned that you can easily crash Linux systems if you have hardware that is crappy enough.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I burnt up a laptop power supply. Along with a big chunk of its motherboard. Just to be annoying, the battery then exploded.
I once savagly attacked a 286 laptop screen with a hammer to get the polarising filter. Couldn't remove that, but two very nice fresnel thingies. Some form of strange lens, I think related to the backlight. I also learnt a lot about LCD construction.
And the worst thing to spill on a laptop is tea. You can turn off the power immediately and dry it for weeks, but the sugar will always be there. It slowly absorbes atmosperic water forming a sludge that crawls over the board, shorting everything in its path.
I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards, ruining the motherboard, CD-ROM, and hard drive.
I spilled Sprite on my Thinkpad X30, down the left side of the keyboard. It stopped booting, and I started to panic but then I washed it in the sink and it worked again (completely true.. washes the crap off of the motherboard. AFIK this works for mechanical things too. You should use distilled water so that minerals don't get deposited)
picture
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Pretty bad to succumb to your own virus.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Personally, I blew up 2 monitors with incorrect X timings, one after another. Took them both back to the store for replacements. Haha.
-- ac at home
Just before I sat down to read this... I moved my cloths from the washer to the dryer. In the wash I found my misplaced USB memory dongle. Nothing to lose so I plugged it in and could read it. Doubt it would have survived the dryer with the polyester, but you never know. I will not be trying the dryer experiment. Never spill when you can immerse
I once was fooling around with my AMD K-6 and forgot to put the fan back on the heatsink.
I was 'babysitting' my friends computer when he was on vacation, I was basically just supposed to shape it up a little. Eveything went fine until I connected it to my network and it started a virus epidemic...
It was a harddrive failure with data corruption beyond any repair. Lost near 18 GB of data. Now I have the learned the meaning of the word BACKUP.
The next morning, I wake up, somewhat hung over, and decide that this directoy was a /stupid/ idea. So, I execute the obvious command:
I then wander off in search of some tylenol, and come back with two term papers irretrievably lost.The obvious moral of this story is, "don't root under the influence." (From my more mature perspective, I would like to suggest that drinking less might also be a good plan.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
When I replaced my fridge and shut off my old fridge I forgot to defrost the the old fridge. When I woke up the next day I went to play a video on my HTPC, unfortunately it showed that the network cable was disconnected. I looked at the network cable saw it was still connected and followed it down to my server room in the basement. When I got there I listened and heard... silence. Not a good thing. All of the lights were also off on the switchs and computers. And they were all wet. WET! All three servers, cable modem, two switches, and UPS system, all dripping wet.
... whilke I had had it running. but, once again, dried off the inside of the case this time and started her back up. And miraculously , the hard drive worked. So amazingly, the only thing Damaged was my UPS system.
Needless to say I freaked. But, after drying everything off with fans and towels the only permanent damage appeared to by my UPS System. So I plugged everything back in and started it up, only My software RAID5 array was showing a missing disk, so I fiddled aroudn with it for a while and finally shut down and opened the case , only to find that one of hte hds was sitting face down in a pool of water
I threw out a perfectly good hard drive (20 GB, 7200 RPM) when I couldn't get the damned thing to work.
I found out the next day that the red stripe on the IDE cable has to be *towards* the power connector. Dammit.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
I was admining an old SCO server years ago (i feel dirty) and the home directory was a shared directory /home/dispatch for a couple hundred users.
I was deleteing a user, and told it to remove the users directory. The shared directory was deleted with it...Lucky an older and wiser Sys-admin had a cron-job backup of the directory (just in case)...
Hardware wise, I've lost multiple monitors to game resolution changes. Nothing like a monitoring changing resolution and pop, sizzle, nothing... Has to be my worse fear about monitors that anytime they could die when changing resolution and refresh rate.
Also, Bought a linksys wireless 802.11b/g router, flashed it, poof, dead. Right after the 30 day return policy. Its still sitting on my shelf as I need to mail it in for repair....
Bought a new DVD/VCR combo, tried to use a wet cloth to pull off the damn sticky advertisement on the front, managed to wipe off some of the paint. Some damn strong sticky glue on electronics, how stupid.
Another one of my big computer mistakes involved an attempt to install Redhat (6 or 7.3 I think, it was Nov 1999). I managed to fatfinger Disk Druid and reformat hda1. Good thing most partition tools only reformat the partition destined for "/" by default now. I lost a few files of sentimental value because of it.
Two years later, I managed to do the same thing with Windows XP (chose a quick convert to NTFS instead of looking into which option would keep my files)
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
through the dishwasher on a dare
So I tried out this program.and I ran it. At the time 1998 I had a beefy system A duel Pentium 200mhz with Linux and a Matrox Millennium II Vedio Card and 128 megs of Ram. It took about 1 second before the computer became unusable. And Linux never booted back after that. I had to do a complete reinstall. And after that the video card never worked that well and it was always flaky.
My theory was that the program filled up the RAM quickly then started swapping to the disk and some how overwritten parts of my file system. And the Duel Processors overtasked my Video card causing something to get a little more juce then though was possible. I have never tried that on a newer version of linux.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
My PHB decided that we didn't need two copies of any given library and made the executive decision to delete all those redundat .so libraries on our main Sun file server. Good times...
I bet many others have done something similiar.... Once trashed my machines config with:
/etc
su - root
cd
emacs (something)
ls
ls *~
*hmm, lotsa backup files*
rm -f * ~
*oops, shit*
ls
*curses*
Make a note of the space between * and ~
Bot Assisted Blogging
i saw this happen at work one time.
our search index software had a sql-like interface. big bossman was sitting at DBA's computer and intending to drop the search index. he alt-tabbed to the wrong window, to the production database interface and issued the drop database command.
goodbye production data, e-commerce site was down for 7 hours. costing the company at least $5.
yeah i've done that, but thankfully this was only with a webpage membership test db, no real accounts were lost.
but i can guess what you went through, i feel for you man
Worst accident has to be accidentally dropping a (still running) webserver powered off a UPS (which I was also carrying). The hardware damage and data loss caused wasn't worth the uptime I was trying to keep :-/
-K
10. breaking off the contact part of a PCI card while trying to extract it. The PCI slot is still unusable to this day. Not that I use that old computer anymore though. /" trick /Y to a Windows NT Logon script. Ah, the good old senior pranks.
9. Sitting on a brand new Pentium 4 accidentally, bending all the pins
8. Not getting a UPS/surge strip/voltage regulator. Over time, the voltage irregularities caused my power supply to literally catch on fire.
7. Installing Windows.
6. Falling for the "hey, try rm -rf
5. Dropping a monitor down the stairs
4. Taking over an NT domain accidentally by running samba as a PDC
3. Leaving a P4 laptop running inside a closed, insulated laptop case. Literally everything overheated.
2. "Accidentally" adding DELTREE C:\
1. Posting this list on Slashdot.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I "accidentally" sort of replaced the GUI for my Win98 machine with nothing at all, and as such had a delightful panic attack followed by feeling like an idiot.
In college I had an XT clone. I was working on my compiler project and was showing my roommate something in my code that was bugging me. Of course I hadn't saved in a while. I was holding the keyboard in one hand (with my hand touching a screw on the bottom) and pointed to the screen to show the line of code in question. As soon as I touched the screen - reboot!!!
:)
This same machine also suffered my wrath one time when it was acting up or something. I kicked the side of the machine (it was standing upright) and it died. Would not boot back up. When I opened the case up, the CPU had popped out of the scoket and was laying on top of the video card.
I was tring to hook two old MFM drives up in another XT box once and didn't get the terminating resistor in the drive correctly. This caused a release of the magic smoke in one of the components on the drive itself.
One other thing that comes to mind...we had just gotten in an 18GB SCSI drive (a few years ago when this was a lot). It was in the anti-static bag. I went to pick the bag up by the open end. As I did, the drive went sliding right out the other open end of the bag (shipped that way even!) Made a nice thud as it hit the thin carpet covering the concrete floor.
And there was the time we were cleaning up and my boss pitched a box that looked like it was just full of packing peanuts. Turns out there were two 128MB sticks of RAM in there. Probably about $800+ at that time.
But other than that - no major "oh craps". Why do I suddenly expect to have something to post later tonight about this
OK, here's how it went: my old case was really bad, and the power button you press on the front broke through something, and the wires were really loose. So I had to tape it up, and sometimes it would sink back into the case, and I'd have to reach inside the case and push it back towards the front. Well, sometimes when I'd do this, I'd get electric shocks. One time the shock was REALLY bad, and it really hurt.
Anyway, those aren't so bad, if you don't think about the consequences of having a nongrounded case. One day I reached down to the motherboard. I still don't remember why I was reaching down to touch it. The computer made a kind of pop, and it wouldn't boot up after that.
Well, I wanted it to die anyway, because it was a crappy Cyrix 166 and I wanted a new computer. So maybe it was partially my fault... but my parents didn't know that ;)
Oh yeah, and another one: Back in the day, we had this old laptop that was like a little rectangular cube with a CGA screen and keyboard that attached to the front. I loved that thing, I would play digdug and stuff on it. Anyway, one time we left it outside all night in the car (We were going on a trip) and my dad brought it in and turned it on. Unluckily his face was right in front of where the power supply was... It emitted a bunch of smoke in his face and, well, it was "smoked"; never booted up again. I'll miss that little machine. *sniff*
I left the room to fetch lunch, and I heard a loud CRACK! I ran back in, and was confronted with the following:
The computer was off. The air smelt of ozone. There was a little stream of smoke rising from the Quantum. There was a large chunk missing from the main controller chip on the Quantum's board. 15 minutes of searching revealed that the chunk had flown 12 feet and landed behind another desk.
I was lucky enough to have a duplicate Quantum on hand whose controlled board I could use, so I swapped it out long enough to finish the transfer. Luckily, the CHS specs were the same, so nothing was lost.
You are not the customer.
The intentional one: Mr. Open, Computer Case meets Mr. Iron Filings. Hilarity Ensues.
The unintentional one: did you know that old Sun Gear will blow a fuse if you plug in a keyboard while the machine's powered? I didn't either 'til one day when the corporate e-mail server's keyboard stopped working... then, after I found a replacement keyboard, the whole damn server stopped working. Whoops.
How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
I was running a RAID5 array on a Promise SX6000 controller using six 80gb drives. In additon to my other data, I was trusting to this array the only copies of 2 dozen short stories and 300 pages worth of a novel (in addition to the development notes for same). The array had always been rock-solid and I had felt no need to back the files up to disc.
Then, chance stepped up to the plate. I had _two_ hard disks die on the same day! What are the chances, right? I fought with that controller and those drives for three straight days, getting almost no sleep... alas, when I finally had to concede defeat, my novel had disappeared into the aether along with almost 400gb of other data.
Not that anything else I have done can compare with the monumental loss I suffered that day, but I've had plenty of accidents in 20 years of computer work. I've dropped a screw onto a running circuit board and seen a pretty blue spark kill it; I've used a BIOS flash from a defunct company and turned my mainboard into a toaster; I've accidentally erased the wrong disk partition; I've tripped over the power cord during a BIOS flash (another toaster); I've tried to patch the NT kernel on a production system (bad patch, permanent blue screen, ouch); I've botched DNS records and made a Web site disappear; and, of course, I've had my run-ins with static electricity and RAM. That's about all I can remember, I guess. Computers are fun. The best way to learn really is to screw up.
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
Keyboards are the very first thing that get the crap beat out of them.
:-(
There was a time when i found this really speedy keyboard i could buy in Escondido for $5.00 I thought "whynot".
Well as you all know i found out real quick what a $5.00 keyboard was.
Sneeze, and a drop of effluvium (snot) got on the board and WHAM!!! no keyboard!
Another $5.00 (and many more)later the same thing happened.
I never burned out a sys with this poor mistake. But as i have been telling my better half lately, be careful about typing with liquids of any sort around keyboards. For thou will be spanked by a drop of soda.
It is embarrassing to admit that I am a tech and because of my greedy nature ($5.00 keyboard)I have subjugated myself through some strange situations because i wanted to save a few bucks.
I loved those cheap keyboards but the kept costing me terribly. Five bucks does add up in the end.
My Vote: Keyboards
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
I tripped over my computer once.
Except it was open.
No case, just motherboard and cards.
Inch gash on my leg from the sound card.
Burned out my Dad's Osborne 1 in maybe 1981 by forgetting to open the heat vent on the top. Scared hell out of me, as I was 10 years old and had just broken me pop's most expensive toy.
this didn't really happen to me, but my firend. i assume a calculator is a computer. she had coffee in a covered styrofoam cup in her backpack apparently on top of a TI-89. and guess what! yes you guessed it. the warm coffee spilled on and into the nice calc. we weren't able to save it. it still smells like coffee.
mine on the other hand... well i learned the hard way to have a surge protector... a really really good one. thunder storm fried my mainboard, power supply, network card, router
, and network cards in two other computers, which had surge protectors.
I was carrying my computer down the steps, and just as I hit the balcony (four steps left to go) I lost my grip on my computer. Flew out of my hands, hit the wall, bounced off the wall and then hit the floor.
Fell a grand total of about six feet.
Surpisingly enough? It still worked afterwords! I was very lucky that day...
Bryan
Windows 9x.
I cannot overstate this: get computer insurance. It's cheap and will more than pay for itself if you have a hardware loss. I use Safeware.com, paying about $120 a year for $11,000 of hardware insurance - this covers loss by fire, theft, water, accidental damage, pretty much everything except earthquake and theft from an unattended vehicle. (I could have opted for a more expensive policy to cover those possibilities, too.) Just last week I dropped my digital camera, killing it. That model (Canon Powershot S30) is no longer available, so the insurance company is paying for a new model (Powershot S50) that costs more than what I originally paid for my digital camera two years ago.
I was configuring an openbsd box, unpacking ports and sources. I cd /usr and tar xzvf ports.tar.gz. I now had /usr/ports and all was well.
/usr/src dir. Instead it proceeded to extract directly to /usr. I quickly noticed and interrupted it. Ah well. I scroll up to find what it extracted before I stopped it, and rm -rf CVS Makefile bin
/usr/bin as well :P
Then I tar xzvf src.tar.gz, but it didn't create a neat
Of course, bin was
Fairly trivial to fix, but with ssh/scp/netcat/everything gone it was quite an annoyance.
Neighboors computer broke, i took it and saw this nice soundblaster. Placed it in my computer, worked unstable, tried tried tried and fried. That was my gigabyte mobo, Now i've a athlon64 system that's much faster (after 2 months of working on 333mhz:S)
Back in 1983 or 1984 when I was in my last year of high school, we used to carry around our 5 1/4" floppies in plastic boxes. Those of us that were quite proficient on the Apple II were assigned as teachers' assistants and had our assignments plus pirated games on these disks.
The problem was, while we were helping other students, some people would steal disks because they were expensive and we had all the coolest games.
One day after my entire box disappearing, I sat in the lab pissed. I wrote an INIT program for the Apple DOS that would ask for a password, two wrong guesses and it would trash the disk and erase itself from RAM. My first attempt was pretty much done, but I had no disks because they were recently stolen. So I saved it on the classroom disk everyone stores their work on. I named it "DO NOT RUN THIS PROGRAM" and left for the day.
The following day, I arrived and the instructor grabbed be by the shirt and shoved me up against the wall and shouted:
"Did you save a program the the class disk called 'do not run this program'? Because some little asshole decided to run it and we lost all the assignments and all of my grades for the semester!"
I did what anyone would do in that situation. I lied my ass off.
Another example:
Flash forward 12 years or so. In the lab at my company. We are trying out control software for relay control on an electrical switches about the size of filing cabinets. There are about 128 relays in each, and the suckers were hooked up on 120VAC. This was our only time to run test software before they got shipped out to the customer the next day.
Started up the software and all seemed ok. An odd smell started and I noticed the room's ambient light was changing... sorta orangish. I turned around and they were glowing hot and smoke was billowing out. I killed power, but it was way too late. 2-3" holes were burned in the PC boards. Later I found out the tech who hooked up the power didn't know what to hook the relays up to, so he wired them straight to ground. That didn't stop me from crapping bricks for the next few hours as the entire company showed up at the lab doors to see what the horrible smell was coming from.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I was running an old 333mhz P2 computer about a year ago. we just bought a wireless router, so I went to plug in a PCI Wireless card. I dont know what I did, but I ended up frying the boot sector of my primary hard drive. I dont know if it was already doomed before I put the card in, or If I bumped the hard drive. I thought... ok dont panic, luckly I backed up my entire hard drive to a secondary hard drive just a few nights ago, so I unplugged the primary, and made the secondary one the master hard drive, I went to boot it up and guess what!, that hard drives boot sector is also fried (a click-click sound kept coming, and the computer didnt even see a hard drive plugged in). thats probably the worst "accident" for me, because I had a lot of important files and documents on those drives, and now they are gone :(
I have a similar story. In college (doesn't every stupid story start this way?), a friend and I decided that it'd be fun to pull a prank using another friend's computer. Knowing how panicky and pissed off (at nobody in particular) he'd get when he experienced a computer problem, we tried to open up a backdoor. The plan was simple; when he was working on something, we'd take control of his computer and scare the hell out of him.
Unfortunately, he walked in before we were finished. Though he didn't see us doing anything (we very quickly stepped away from his terminal), we didn't have a chance to set things up correctly. When he tried to reboot his computer the next day, the backdoor was causing slight problems (by which I mean that the computer refused to boot).
6 hours later, thoroughly pissed off at Dell technical support (who, incidentally, asked if he was running Windows three hours after he first got them on the phone) and at the fact that he had to miss quite a lot of class, he asked why we were sticking around to help him with the problem when we clearly weren't at fault. Oops =).
Back in '01, running an AIX server with a 2-disk OS mirror and 5-disk RAID 5 array. One OS disk died, so I broke the mirror, and decided to plug in a tape drive and take a mksysb before rebooting - just in case. (No, you're not supposed to - but you CAN and I had before..). Plugged the tape device into the array controller, and blew the backplane AND 2 of the RAID drives. Fortunately, the 2 drives were the hotspare and one of the array disks, so no data lost. This was back in my "Bah - I'll back up when I feel like it" days, so it cured me right quick.
I have a rather large home network, that starts from my Breezecom dish (I get wireless ISP service) and radio about 90 feet in the air, to my house, and then branches out to several buildings on our farm. One night, during a large storm, a surge originated between two of the buildings. It went down the Ethernet cable, and was stopped at the far end with an Ethernet surge suppressor. The other end wasn't protected at the time because I thought that "any surge coming from outside would be stopped at the other arrestor". Boy was I wrong. It toasted half the ports on my switch, my router, and my surge arrestor on my wireless equipment (valued at almost $1000 at the time), and about 5 NICs. I was on my computer at the time, and my screen literally "bounced" up and down, and blinked off for a second. The computer didn't reboot, but the NIC toasted instantly. Luckily no data was lost. Now I make sure I spend as much time on Ethernet surge protection as I do on Power.
This story is from the [H]ardOCP Distributed Computing Forum by its moderator, relic.
The Mojo Story.
And so it began.... sitting on my kitchen floor, building a new DC box while indulging in some of the finer versions of ethanol-based liquid refreshment. Halfway through the boxen building, I realized two things....
1. I was out of good scotch.
2. I hadn't started mixing the "mojo" for the party.
Now "mojo" is a particularly vile mixture of pure grain alcohol, Cherry CoolAid powder and chunks of citrus fruits. (Please note the lack of water or any other diluent)
Mojo recipe:
4 gallons (~16 litres if you care) of 97% ethanol.
8 packages of sweetened cherry Cool Aid.
various oranges, limes, lemons, old shoes...cut into large chunks
Mix thoroughly, with bare hand, while chanting "Nothing good can come of this."
Place outside in snow to cool. (keep animals away! This stuff may kill anything smaller than a camel!)
Somewhere around the "mix thoroughly" part, the whisky, which I'd been drinking to aid in building the new DC box, kicked me in the back of the head......Hard. This scattered my data, and made my numbers go all random, causing a nasty chain reaction of stumbling, losing coordination and dumping 4 gallon of noxious red liquid into a brand new tbird.
I don't mean "splashing a little on the box". I mean pouring 4 gallons of mojo directly into an open case, a direct hit on the northbridge. Now, as we all know, cases are not watertight. The mojo started escaping into every corner of the kitchen. I sprang into action in an attempt to contain the dangerous stuff.
Unfortunately "springing into action" isn't very easy to do when you've just polished off a bottle of whisky. So I sort of "stumbled into mayhem" instead. My left foot placed itself directly into the PC case, crunching parts galore, my right foot then decided it wanted no part of this and left for vacation. This had the unfortunate result of leaving me with no means of maintaining my upper body's position above the floor.
Please pause here for a visual reference.
relic, dumbfounded look on his face, stained red to his crotch with mojo, one foot in a PC case, the other slipping radiply away causing an awkward "splits" position...with floor awash in red liquid. I did the only thing I could do. I fell forward, leading with my face, into the ocean of mojo on the floor.
The resulting splash was absolutely amazing.
Bright-red, ethanol-disolved coloring reached the ceiling. Tendrils of mojo snaked past the cabinet doors and coated the clean dishes and food in the pantry. The telephone immediately took on a pastel pink color as the mojo ethched it's way into every surface.
The moral of the story? If you remember nothing else I've said....at least remember this....never build boxen on the kitchen floor.
The KVM serial connection to the Lights Out Manager told me that the kernel had stopped, so I lent down and removed the faulty drive.
It came out easy, but as I went to inspect it, there was a hell of a lot of Rotational Momentum, and I found it hard to twist. Over the hum of the Air Con, I heard it spinning down.
Then my mobile phone rang.. The Office calling.
p.s. You're not even supposed to have mobile phones in that area.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
I was trying to remove one of those damn heatsink clips that come with the Intel PIII heatsinks. The screwdriver slipped and destroyed the memory bus on my $170 mobo.
One day my supervisor calls me and tells me that the server's down. I try to ssh in to fix it, sure enough, it's down.
So I ran (in those days, I ran) down to the school to figure out what the problem was. Sendmail was still running, I could ping other machines on the network, the firewall was configured correctly, I couldn't figure out what was wrong.
I sat there unable to figure out what was happening. I spent a couple hours reading man pages for programs I already understood, hoping to find some piece of information I must have missed. I completely rewrote my firewall rules.
Hours passed...
Eventually I got so frustrated that I decided it was time to re-install the OS altogether.
Luckily, I had a brilliant idea. I looked at the back of the computer, and only one of the ethernet cards was plugged in... the other's cable had come loose.
After 5 hours, the very best part of it was the conversation I had with my supervisor afterwards:
"Okay, it's fixed."
"Awesome, now I just need you to write a report of what you had to do to fix it."
Good times.
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
1. Well this one wasn't me but is still funny. I was working with a friend at one of his clients. Had a computer the owner had assembled but we couldn't get any video. We tried everything, even had the owners wife go and buy another video card. After about an hour of this we finally notice the motherboard was installed with no stand-offs.
2. Back in the mid 1990's I was working on a friends Windows computer and for some reason I thought He wanted to erase his drive so I did a "format c:". I knew from the expression on his that's NOT what he wanted, we still talk about that today.
Realtime control system accidents make the best stories. But you don't hear about them here... nobody wants to talk about the oil-well they blew up or the pipeline they ruptured because they forgot some keay fact about the physical universe.
Catch me at Usenix some time, maybe I'll talk about some of that stuff...
Computers themselves? Well, back in December I talked a guy out of dropping a 7' tall rack full of disk drives in his lap, which would have ruined his day was well as totalling a quarter of a million dollars worth of storage... and I've had to deal with hardware that's come back fron the field with the solid welded steel rack bent into a lozenge shape...
Of course, there's even more fun to be had in other industries and organizations:
I_Lost_My_Job_Today.jpg
I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards
Did the computer fall in love with the girl upstairs? (the one you had your eyes on)? It's been known to happen.
No sig
A few years back before broadband was available in my area, I was sitting in my kitchen surfing the web on my laptop.
Due to the fact that i was on dial-up, there was a phone cable stretched across from the table to the wall.
Heh.
So, about 2 hours into surfing, my dog (who was sitting on the chair next to me at the time) sees a small girl walk by our driveway. This excites him so much, that he bounds over me... right THROUGH the modem cable, pulling my laptop off the table onto the tile floor.
Picking it up, I see that everything is fine, except for about 80% of the screen. I brought it in to TekServ in NYC, and they told me Apple would designate it as "abuse."
I eventually replaced the screen and still use the same Powerbook today, but it was still a very traumatic experience.
1990's momentary lapses of reason:
1. Pulled an IDE cable from an active, powered up
Hdd. Nasty. Managed to recover this Hdd - runs ok on Linux - albeit with reduced capacity.
2. Clicked on a "readme" file without thinking. Laptop wouldn't let me log on or use a boot disk. Virus was TSR type so had to completely power down, remove batteries and let CMOS discharge before getting access to BIOS.
After several attempts, managed to reformat Hdd with a DOS floppy. Reinstalled Toshiba supplied Windows 98, defragged and developed a healthy paranoia. Also found decent AV & FW software.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
I once talked a german coworker over the phone to remove a directory in unix using rm command, not quite understanding my english I told her to look up the commands options.
Yep she wiped the disk clean, she avoided me for a week after.
A masters in mathematics is no protection.
I don't care. I'm going to admit it. I didn't check my pockets. I washed my cell in the laundry.
I mean- don't get me wrong- it was a lot cleaner. Just a lot less useful.
I can't be alone on this...right?
W
PS-- I've read stories from people in similar situations (not involving multiple spin cycles, more like dropped their cell in the sink/toilet) where it actually worked upon drying. But in my case, the fine wires were practically fused together and though the phone turned on, it couldn't find the SIM card. Still was accepted on a trade-in though.
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I once had an encrypted 160 gig lvm (logical volumes) with all sorts of goodies on it. Unfortunately the order of the disks was 4 gig, 4 gig + the bigger disk. When removing the two 4 gig disks the partition info was lost somehow and the lvm didn't come back on.
But Very fortunately when I recreated the partition the data was still there and all intact.
It was more or less a cardiovascular exercise.
I play Iclod.
Once I made a scuff on my case window...
I replaced my Thinkpad 365XD after dumping a cup of coffee on it. It was cheaper to byuy a refurbed unit than to pay IBM for the replacement keyboard and motherboard.
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
Picked up my backpack out of the trunk of my car and slung the brand new $2400 Powerbook onto the pavement. Screen was weird afterwards, lid wouldn't latch but otherwise fine and usable. :)
Called my insurance company and the repair was covered by my homeowner's insurance
This guy is way out there
I was about to JAR up a homework assignment to turn in, which consisted of say: ...
A.java
B.Java
C.java
I typed jar cvf *
Proper usage is jar cvf myjar.jar *
The shell interpreted * to be 'A.java B.java C.java...' and jar overwrote A.java.
no comment
I feel the submitter's pain, nothing is easier to mess up than a laptop. Everything is right there, waiting to be destroyed. My worst was one night I was chatting with friends late at night and didn't put my laptop up on the shelf as I normally do before going to sleep. The next working I heard a nice, $600 crunch. The LCD on these things is entirely too easy to break.
Find childing porn a workman's PC. It's a nightmare I hope none of you have to experience.
AC
The first one was once when I turned my chair a little too fast and managed to knock my knee sideways into the computer standing under my desk. I hear a metallic thud, and then lots of smoke started coming out of the computer. I killed the power right away and cleared the room of smoke.
After the smoke had settled, I discovered that the hard drive cage (which I had unscrewed and never fastened again) had dropped to the "floor" of the big tower cage and shorted the cable to the internal speaker. Thus the large amount of smoke... The speaker cable has almost melted and left some black marks on the floor of the case... Amazingly and luckily nothing else was damaged.
The second mistake was just plain stupid - I decided to reset the BIOS on a brand new motherboard for my PVR, and shorted the pins on the motherboard just like I was supposed to... THe computer was turned off, but I did however forget to turn off the PSU, meaning the mobo was still powered when I cleared the BIOS (that would never had happened pre-ATX boards). The BIOS was fried and the board was turned totally unusable...
Be an elitist - read Slashdot at +4.
Back in my first year or two of programming full-time, I deleted some LIVE data belonging to a customer, because I forgot the "where" clause.
Umm, couldn't you just have said "rollback;" after your mistake? Or did you have auto-commit on?-)
I had meant to remove a subfolder, but removed HKEY\LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE
Needless to say, I was regretting not backing up the registry first.
a re-install of the OS was required.
unfortunately, it was a production database server.
Yup.
.
After all even techs have to keep a job have some laughs too.
Back in the day, I was hacking away with my Commodore 64 while enjoying a tall glass of milk. On the floor next to my desk was a large open disk organizer, containing over a hundred 5 1/4 inch disks. This collection represented years of pirating (who said that!) and at least as much time game writing. Backups? Sure -- all in the same box.
Anyways, an errant elbow movement sends the glass of milk careening into the disk organizer and just about every disk is saturated. I may have actually cried.
But then was the cool part: I could not accept that my life was over, so I decided to fix the disks. Over the course of a week I cut open every disk jacket, took out the actual magnetic diskette, and washed them gently by hand. I then put them back into a clean, freshly cut jacket and tried them out.
All but one disk survived this process. (A commercial copy of Ultima III).
Try that with today's floppies!
Cheers.
More then once in my computer I have either bent/pushed in/broke a pin on an IDE hard drive/cd drive.
I just built myself a new computer, so I'm glad I got Serial ATA hard drives. They are so much easier to plug/unplug. I just wish my DVD Burner was Serial ATA as well.
Installing Windows Me.
I, and about a million other people, crushed the core of a Duron procerssor while clipping the fan on. Not content to be included in such a broad statistic, I crushed the second one too. So then I loosened up the fan clip by bending it, and didn't put any thermal goop on the back of the fan. This time I actually got to the bios screen before the third processor burned up...
word.
Once I tried installing Corel Linux (remember that abomination?) Wiped out my MBR and /home partition and almost fried my monitor with messed up refresh rates.
A long time ago when I was still in middle school my dad bought me a new motherboard. I had a book on how to install computer parts at the time and remembered reading the "how to attach the power cable to the motherboard" very carefully. This was one of the older motherboards that had two power plugs, and repeated several times in the book was the statement that the "black wires should be on the inside when attaching the two plugs".
So I go ahead and install it, and whatd'ya know I attached the plugs backwards. Except I didn't catch it before hearing a zap and seeing sparks fly. I tried attaching it correctly but the computer wouldn't work! Then my stupid middle schooler self felt bad and mindlessly turned the computer on and off out of frustration/anger, which I think messed up my hard drive as it failed a while later. I later got the motherboard replaced.
To be fair, it was my third margarita, so I was somewhat handicapped. I drunkily reached for the top-heavy glass while cheerfully browsing the web in my altered state when.....OOPS! I figured the computer was a complete loss. But, I was surprised to find that it still worked perfectly, except for a sticky keyboard. I called Apple to find out what, if anything, could be done and to their credit, the service rep told me that while it wasn't covered and he wasn't recommending this, that if I simply took out the keyboard and soaked it for ten minutes in tepid water then let it dry thoroughly, all would probably be well. He was right and the iBook works fine to this day...keyboard and all. Well...I did have that anoying display problem, but Apple eventually covered my old (original white dual USB) iBook under their expanded service extension. True story.
A friend of mine did something similar in VB.
He was in his VB class making a program and at the end it would print it's contents. He decided it would be cool to have it ask how many copies you wanted. So he coded it.
It turns out he forgot to define the variable he used, so instead of printing 1 copy, it got stuck in a loop of printing.
As mentioned above this was during a class, which had a laser printer that printed at least 5 sheets a second.
nce in a effort to hide all of my pron from my parents I encrypted it. One day while encrypting a brand new batch i selected the whole drive by mistake. Well I walked away from my machine and come back to find the machine locked up. I restart the machine. And this is when Find out nearly whole drive is encrypted. I then spent the next month copying key files from another machine via lap link because I was having to boot off a floppy. And was unable to use the cd drive because it had broken the pervious week.. After a month i was finally able to boot the machine and unencrypt the drive. Lesson learned never encrypt from inside windows. I got a mac the next week. And have never since had a problem hiding all my pron. Lesson learned never encrypt from inside windows. I got a mac the next week. And have never had a problem hiding all my pron.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I came into work one day, turned my computer on, and got the terrifying message "COULD NOT LOAD OPERATING SYSTEM, INSERT DISK IN DRIVE A AND TRY AGAIN." The computer's main hard drive kept making an audible "click-click, click-click, click-click." The drive was toast.
Fortunately, I regularly backed up all my data to a second hard drive in the machine. I opened up the case, pulled out the backup drive to set the "MASTER" jumper, and booted the computer off of an old MS-DOS floppy disk. All of my data -- years worth of accounting data and a large desktop publishing project -- was still alive!
I disconnected the drive from the computer, and set it on the desk. I was planning to run up to CompUSA, buy a new hard drive, and reinstall the operating system and applications.
As I was rummaging around my desk looking for my car keys, I heard a loud clunk. I had just knocked my backup hard drive onto the concrete floor! I cringed, and this time when I hooked up the drive and booted the MS-DOS floppy, I was not so lucky.
I spent the next month re-entering accounting data and re-creating my project. It was by far the most disheartening way to lose all that data, and all that work.
I use tapes now. Sometimes I knock them off the counter, and they always work afterwards...
I was doing some simple work for a client, they had a fairly large database and it was now taking a while to simply start a new record because the program would search through all the active records, the easy solution was to move old records into folders (1997, 1998, 1999, etc...) So I move around the records and run a batch program to update the tracking records for the database. Well, it turns out the company had been creating their database incorrectly so that some of the info needed to create the track records was missing from the database records, ie. the billing information for about 5 years worth of business. So I figure, no big deal, restore the track records from the backup, have it cross reference all the billing info and then redo the track records again. Oops, their backup system DOESN'T WORK.
Luckily they had hard copies of all the billing info so they could look it up as needed.
So being the nice guy I am I designed a new backup system for them that day, so hopefully that won't be a problem again.
When switching to a full IP network I was about to delete IPX from the interface to the serverpark at the company I'm working for.
With the command "no ipx interface" already in my head I decided to check the configuration of the inteface for reference. Instead of "show ip inteface" I ended up typing "no ip interface". The damn Prominet P550 didn't hesitate to do exactly what it was told. This had the effect of erasing the interface to the serverpark. About 1000 employees suddenly had an extended coffee break.
I'm posting AC because this is just bad... I shouldn't be sharing it, oh well...
Step 1: Buy a discounted laptop. You know, the ones that are on sale because they are yesterdays tech. You always get a great price.
Step 2: Wait 11 months...
Step 3: Connect 24v to a couple of pins on one of the motherboard chips or a capacitor. Don't use 110v AC, it'll burn the board.
Step 4: Return the laptop on warranty. It won't be worth fixing so they'll just replace it. Because they won't stock that old version any more, you'll get a free upgrade.
That's it. I've never tried it personally, but I know of people who have blown chips because they weren't overclockable enough. Also works with DVD players and other forms of electronics that are rapidly changing.
Changing the install location of a game that wanted to install to C:\Sierra\** to C:\Program Files\**
Yes, when I uninstalled it having found it somewhat underwhelming, it deleted my Program Files directory. Had to reinstall everything....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Similar to the poster, my worst effort was spilling 1L of fresh apple juice onto my 2 day old laptop whilst in the presence of a new girlfriend. Not only did i ruin my new toy....but i then proceeded to cry over my sticky/smokey laptop in front of her.
Computer and GF both had to be written-off.
I fail to see why we should be laughing at this. It's no more amusing than automobiles malfunctioning, IMO.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
that would be trustworthycomputing.com, & it's not even an accideNT?
... improvements can and will be made.''
also right up there, along with gnu online dating, is robbIE's fauxking PostBlock censorship devise. again, no accideNT.
stay tuned.
"We have a train wreck that's definitely going to happen,'' Harris said. ``We have conflict of interest, we've taken the checks and balances away, and we know the votes are already being miscounted fairly frequently. This is going to be huge.''
Harris, 52, didn't set out to become a muckraking voting technology expert.
Accustomed to working with manuscripts and authors in suburban Seattle, she preferred doting on her new grandchild to debating politics. She still doesn't vote regularly.
But when Harris was idly surfing the Web during a lunch break two years ago, she became obsessed with an issue essential to democracy, quickly becoming the unlikely center of a movement to ensure integrity in the nation's voting systems.
Critics say Harris, author of ``Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century,'' is a fear-mongering grandstander and a presumptuous conspiracy theorist. The prime target of one investigation -- voting equipment maker Diebold Inc. -- says her antics undermine democracy.
``We must not frighten voters or inadvertently provide any type of disincentive to voting,'' Diebold spokesman David Bear wrote in an e-mail when asked to respond to Harris' claims that the company's software is riggable and insecure. ``While security is an important issue
Others question the motives behind her obsessive investigations of politicians and executives at big voting equipment companies such as Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. and Election Systems & Services Inc.
``She bases her whole theory on a continuous string of untruths,'' said Lou Ann Linehan, chief of staff for Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel. In the 1990s, Hagel headed voting equipment company American Information Systems Inc., which later became ES&S. Hagel maintains investments between $1 million and $6 million in McCarthy Group Inc., a private bank with a large stake in ES&S.
Harris, who dubs Hagel ``poster boy for conflict of interest,'' says the Republican did not disclose the extent of his American Information Systems involvement and questions whether a former executive of a company whose machines count votes in precincts nationwide should run for public office. Hagel's staff insist that his former career doesn't affect his political life.
``I don't know if it's sloppy research or she doesn't care,'' Linehan said. ``I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it because it's all so ridiculous.''
Criticism, as well as legal threats from ES&S, Diebold and other companies, has enervated Harris, whose blond hair turned completely gray last year. But legions of fans -- from New Zealand bloggers to respected computer scientists -- encourage her.
Exploiting the power of the Internet, Harris has created a Web site that documents hundreds of local, county and state elections that have been botched or contested because of flaws with voting software.
She details an incestuous web of voting company executives, politicians and election officials -- people who are often related or have worked for each other.
Her style is brash. She drives her Toyota Corolla and rental cars thousands of miles to ambush registrars in counties where election results didn't match exit polls.
Frustrated that few mainstream journalists have publicized her exploits, Harris once left voice mail for Washington Post star Bob Woodward. When he didn't call back, she trashed him in a Web forum called ``Media Whores Online.''
``It took me a while to recognize that despite her over-the-top personal style, she was doing valuable sleuthing,'' said Douglas Jones, associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa and a member of Iowa's Board of Examiners for e-voting. ``But
And we can go on with things like this for a while:
And so on and so forth. I and commandline interfaces mix a bit so-so these days :)
Going south on I-95 towards Providence from Boston on the fast lane. Entering data on laptop (which I should have done the night before, but booze interfered with that plan). Look up and see the vehicle veering towards the divider. Imagine the rest. No one died (I should have, honestly). Was really fun to tell my wife how the accident happen. The laptop (an old apple powerbook) made it fine too.
I bought by first 386 computer in 1989, a gigantic Northgate with 4 MB RAM (which was a big selling feature...everyone else had 1 MB standard). Along with the PC came the Omnikey 101, one of the greatest keyboards ever invented. Two sets of function keys (on side, like the old XT keyboards which most of us learned on, and the "newer" AT style F-keys on the top), programmable, with the solid mechanical click when you pressed the keys.
By 1996, I had moved that keyboard to it's third computer. While working at my desk one day, I reached up for something on a shelf and accidentially tipped a copy of The Riverside Shakespeare over. The 1927-page 20-pound volume (all of Bill's works in one book) landed corner-first square in the middle of the Omnikey. The crash put a crack in the main board inside the case, rendering it unusable.
I eventually found a replacement Omnikey 102 on the net for about $95. This one didn't have the top row of function keys, but I didn't care. I still have that keyboard, and would love to get another original Omnikey for work, but they're tough to find since Northgate went out of business. There's a clone, the Avant Stellar, but at $189, that's more than some entire computers.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
Well, i bought my laptop from a no name company that went out of business 2 months after i bought it. 4 months after that, my amd 2500+ literally melted to its own destruction thanks to me doing a bunch of video encoding.
Once, I painted my monitor screen blue. That way I didn't have to turn on the computer to run windows.
At my previous company, we retired the IIS machine and I was asked to make a Linux based Apache server. Okay. Hadn't really done much of Linux at that point, but I thought it'd be a piece of cake. More or less, it was. Didn't take very long. Got it up and running. 2 weeks later, the server was down. My boss informed me that a worm hit it. The sysadmin there was going to have to rebuild it. Oops. Guess even Linux need to be patched.
"Derp de derp."
I bought one of the last Amiga 4000 ever to roll out of Commodore's manufacturing facilities. I had only owned it for about a year.
My house was being upgraded from a 20 amp to a 200 amp service and electricians were prowling about all day. I had no power and so I went over to my girlfriend's house to hack about on her new Mac. I wiled away the hours, ate dinner with her and the kids, but had to delay my sojourne back to the island to allow a freak lightning storm to pass.
You can tell where this is going, aye?
I returned home to find that the electricians had failed to rebury the grounding rod and my Amiga motherboard was fried. After many trials and tribulations I found a replacement motherboard and all was well again. For awhile...
Two years later I was visiting a friend at the Jersey shore. During the night an offshore storm flooded the little basin where he lived. Even though I had moved my car to higher ground, the car was swamped. The car was insured. The Amiga in the trunk was not. Ascribe another 1000 for a new PSU and HD and off again...
Two years after the flood and the lightning mia Amiga was caught in a house fire. I had to replace the keyboard, mouse, and joysticks, which were thoroughly melted. The CPU survived but only just barely.
A few months later I added a new Picasso video card and an I/O card to the much abused beast and found that the PSU simply didn't have the ooomph to support the additional hardware. I bought an AT PSU, used, and proceeded to jury-rig the connector. Unfortunately I swapped +12V for -12V with predictable results. Bzzzzzzap! Fried MB.
I think I bought the last used Amiga MB off of Ebay, and had to buy a Video Toaster and Flyer setup with it in order to affect repairs, but spend the money I did. This time I paid a professional to install the new PSU.
All I can say is: the Amiga curse didn't just extend to companies that owned the Amiga technology and patents. It extended to certain careless users as well.
My work "accident" comes from a day where we were having a slow afternoon, and I started work on the list of "things we'll eventually get around to." Apparently this list was pretty old, as the first item on it was a 486 that needed to be picked up from an office, and decommissioned(this was a government office).
Anyhow, I picked it up, noting that for a 486 in storage, the case was relatively clean. I then took it down to our workbench, and after spending half an hour trying to scrounge up an old DOS disk to boot it and reformat it with(we were a Mac shop, this was no easy task), I finally got ready to service it.
So, I plugged a cord in to a power strip, then move to plug the other end in to the power supply, when all of a sudden you hear that familiar zap sound. Sparks started flying from the power supply, and I did the whole "life flashes before my eyes" thing before I managed to pull the cable away, to quite a gruesome sight.
The total list of causalities included the power supply, who's prongs were all charred black, the power cord, the prongs on the cord(also charred black), and a totally fried power strip. Thankfully, my hand came out unscathed, although I don't know why.
Later examination of the now dead 486 showed that it had a power supply from 1982(this ordeal took place in 2002, BTW), so the fact that it was 20 years old probably had something to do with it. How such an old power supply ended up in a machine that couldn't be more than 13 years old I'll never figure out, but there it was.
I then proceeded to rip the hard drive out, and take a hammer to it. It was unorthodox, but I sure felt better afterwords.
The next Opti-UPS has the circuit board installed where the components would not fall on the battery.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Never plug a 12v power brick into a 5v device.
I got a delightful burning smell, and Vonage got $100 out of me for a replacement ATA (analog telephone adapter).
- Neil Wehneman
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
I was mucking about inside the PC and cut myself.
Lesson 1: never buy cheap cases
Lesson 2: never bleed on your TV card
-
December 31, 1999 at 23:59:58
Went to the top floor of my mom's house and instead of watching the New York ball drop, we dropped a Y2k non-compliant computer out the window. Then we walked down to the local high school, walked up to the top of the bleachers, and dropped it again off the back. Then we beat it into little tiny bits with sledge hammers. The old monitor we brought too didn't make as much noise as we thought it would. Then the cops came and we ran. It was fun.
July 3, 2000, went to a gun shop bought a bottle of smokeless gun powder, a 2 foot long fuse, and got a free empty Co2 cartridge. Filled the cartridge with powder, plugged it with the fuse, and epoxy'd the fuse into the opening.
July 4, 2000, sometime at night in an abandoned baseball field:
Took a computer out to the field with the Co2 cartridge in the middle and the fuse out one of the floppy drive bays. Lit the fuse and ran for a 1/4 mile. We still felt the concussion.
Everything that was soldered onto the motherboard fell off. Apparently the heat from the explosion flash melted everything off. A side of the cartridge hit the bottom of the hard drive and buckled the sides and plates inside. It was done in a way that I don't think a vice and sledge hammer could have done. The wimpy cover caught a bit of the cartridge too, but it just got an indentation from it and flattened out (cheap one piece coverall case). All the sides of the case buckled, too. I saved a stick of the ram and the hard drive, but I think they were lost as part of getting married.
Well, SIMM memory math is strange.
I had 2 4M SIMMs (same), 2 8M SIMMs (different) and 1 16M SIMM. I was placing them in random order in a PC, trying to achieve maximum RAM capacity. Conclusions? 4M+4M=1M, 8M+4M+4M=12M, 8M+8M=8M, 8M+16M=20M, 16M+4M+4M=a violent burst of flame from the motherboard.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
...but a very good friend of mine had a 486, where the fan was having trouble, it'd get stuck at times. He decided to get it unstuck with a screwdriver during operation. Fried not only the mobo, but it went through the sound card (fried) and his amp (fried). How the hell he ever managed that, I have no idea.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think my worst experience was back on January 1st, 2000. As the company nerd, I was at work double-checking that all the PC's were OK for the following morning.
Everything went without a hitch, until, after turning on all the PC's in one room, one of the power supplies failed with a loud crack. Right behind me in an empty building.
Not exactly life-threatening, but nearly caused an accident that would have taken several washes to remove the stain...
The worst one that actually involved losing client data, was a laptop I was crushing and reinstalling. I had a tape backup of all the data, but I really should have tested the tape before I relied on it. Oops.
Then there was the time that I was pulling network cable. The network cable was dead, but the phone line adjacent to it was not. A wire slipped, and hit the hot pin of a 115VAC plug that wasn't all the way in. Result: one fried PBX. Oops.
Of course, the one that had me closest to actually defecating in my pants was when I was working on reinstalling the server OS for a client in a professional service industry. Needless to say, his server was home to a metric assload of client files. I didn't have a tape backup (that's one of the reasons why we were going to re-install), but I did have a full backup on another partition on the drive. Then the server install program blew that partition away. Oops. I was able to recover the partition without too much effort, but I was calling on all kinds of deities I don't believe in while I was waiting to see if it would work.
- Adam
Caveat - This was told to me by an old boss of mine, but he's been around the block a few times, so I do I believe him about this.
Anyway, back in the days when hard drives were really big (physically I mean - 8" or 11" across) the drive head had to parked after use if the drive was going to be shutdown - but could also be controlled by writing direct to the disk controller as well. My boss and his friend thought it would be funny to write some assembler to wizz the drive back and forth across the disk as fast as possible. Then they did the same thing with not just one drive, but all the drives in the stack at the same time, making a huge clanging sound. Unknown to them, they managed to hit the resonant frequency of the stack, and the whole thing fell over, breaking several hundred thousand pounds worth of hard drive eqipment - they blamed the cleaner!
I bought myself a nice new 486 DX4/100 chip and went to insert it in the motherboard. Annoyingly, upon insertion I bent one of the pins and it wouldn't work.
I reached out for the nearest pointy thing with which to ever-so-carefully bend the prong back into shape.
It turns out a pencil was not the best thing to use - I rendered to entire motherboard useless via graphite shavings.
All the same, with a new motherboard the chip itself worked fine...
When a co-worker spilled my large cup of coffee into my own Panasonic CF-35 Toughbook laptop, he actually said, "think of it as installing Java." I was not amused. The laptop survived! Of course, I spent much of the following weekend washing each removable piece of the keyboard.
I accidentally ran over my 12" PowerBook G4 with my dad's SUV about a year ago. Believe it or not, other than a crumpled corner (under the hard drive) and a 10 pixel high band of funky colors on the LCD, it survived intact.
So I kept using it.
Then this Spring, I fell down the stairs with it, and that gave me a bunch of funky colors on the screen, rendering the LCD useless (I'm guessing it's just a pinched cable). But I'm still using it, to type this post actually, with an external monitor and keyboard.
---
Open Source Shirts
About 7 months ago, I was backing up and reformatting my girlfriends computer. We're both in college, so you can imagine how important all our files are.
I backed up all her files onto a cd, and just to be sure I burned 2 extra copies of the cd. I reformat the computer and reinstall windows. I install the programs she needs, and I get one of the cd's to copy her work back on.
Nothing. I freak out. The system does not recognize the cd in the drive. I try another one. Same thing. Another. Same. I get really f'in worried, so I start searching online for data recovery. Meanwhile she doesn't know yet.
I put the cd into my linux box, thinking maybe that'll help. Nothing. Something had to have gone wrong during the burn process, and I stupidly didn't check to make sure they burned correctly.
After finding a program I could buy right there on the spot, I ordered it (you don't want to know the price) and started getting as much as I could, which wasn't much.
I ended up telling her, and she was very upset. Pretty much all her work that she didn't have on Zip disks was gone, which included 3d Work she'd done that took her months. I felt really horrible.
To this day she still jokes about it and I still feel bad. She had some awesome work that took her a whole lot of time. She's made a lot back up, and frankly the new stuff is even better.
I still felt like shit though. Now I make sure that all her files are backed up onto my desktop and my server. On top of that, I make a new cd for each quarter of both our work.
And yes, I check and make sure it burns correctly.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
A couple of acquaintances of mine, back in the 486 days, took it upon themselves to install a new sound card in one of their computers. They were all pretty much novices at it, and they couldn't get the card working in DOS no matter what they did... so finally one of them gets a bright idea: the little red switch on the back of the computer! That probably does something! So they flicked it, turned on the computer... and were greeted by a "WHOMPH!" and a stone dead computer.
You see, the little red button was the voltage switch on the PSU. Setting a PSU to expect 110 Volts and then giving it (European standard) 230V is apparently a bad idea...
According to the computer repair shop, the box was black inside.
Worst I did years ago was when I just bought a new much larger drive and was reorganizing the filesystems on my workstation. The workstation had some NFS and samba mounts at the time to the roots of other machines to help shuffle stuff around. I just finished copying everything important out of one partition and did a rm -rf * to clean it and went to get something to drink.
/. It deleted enough on each computer that I had to reinstall each one. Destroyed 3 computers with one command.
Came back and found pages of unable to delete errors on the console from some of the network paths. I apparently forgot to cd into the partition I was clearing and did the rm -rf in
The laptop landed on the PCMCIA WLAN card, this became a embedded wireless card.
The good news is the home insurance paid out.
Dropped a Zenith Laptop down the center of a 2.5 story stair well. It seemed to fall in slow motion untill it hit the bottom and then it blew into many pieces. However, even though the screen was cracked and leaking and half the keys were gone from the keyboard and the case was in shambles we were still able to boot it and transfer all the data (no there were no bakeups) off it on to floppies before the power in it died. It never booted again.
I once worked on a project where we had a handful of priceless prototype hard drives (probably between $3000 and $5000 each, plus weeks of time!) --- we hooked 7 of them up to the prototype scsi controller and powered them with extension cables we pulled from inventory. Unfortunately, those cables were supposed to have been purged from the system as the +5 and +12 volt lines were crossed from one end to the other...... Even after making wind chimes and clocks until I was sick of it, I've still got a stack of disk platters from that disaster....
We set a few power supplies on fire on that same project, but that's another story.....
Or did you have auto-commit on?-)
Nah - that's impossible. Only a true retarded idiot would do something like that with auto-commit on... Oh wait... This is a /.er we're talking about. My bad.
I remember I tried installing linux one time on this computer and I decided to let the installer run on its own, I went to check on the process and the damn thing was shooting text based error messages all over the damn screen. I was freaking out, going "what the hell?!"
:)
:)
Turns out, the genius that I am, I planned to use a 3GB "root" partition, but I inadvertently allocated my 150MB "boot" partition for that instead
Also, I remember using some CD Writing utility in linux and I inadvertently used the root of my windows 98 system as a "temp file storage" and of course there was a "clear all temp files" button and naturally I wiped out anything and everything to do with my Windows installation. Man, did I feel stupid HAHAHAHA
Join the TWIT army now!
Over 20 years ago I had come in on a Sunday to re-cable a bank of hard drives in a main data center of a very large retail chain. After finishing, putting back all the floor tiles and before rebooting the mainframes, I decided to run the I/O checkout utility, something I had done many times before. I noticed that we had a new version of this utility, and after starting it, I noticed that all the ready lites on the hard drive banks were blinking like mad, and all the CRT monitors were were scrolling garbage down their screens and blinking like crazy. "Gee, it's never done that before", I thought. So I opened the new manual to see what was new about it, and step 3 said "WARNING: IF YOU ARE NOT IN MAINTENANCE MODE THIS UTILITY WILL WRITE AND READ THROUGHOUT THE DATA AREAS OF ALL ATTACHED DASD DEVICES. ENSURE YOU ARE IN MAINTENANCE MODE." I took me 30 more minutes to find the section of the manual explaining maintenance mode. By then I was convinced that I had wiped out all the drive packs and ruined the data center. I did not end up deleting anything (the ulitiy was better written than the manual), but I was sick for the next 3 days recovering from the shock of what I thought I had done.
If you are accident prone like me, buy a ThinkPad. My old T21 took three glasses of red wine (twice on airplanes, once at home) poured into the keyboard with almost no ill effect once I tilted it over and drained the results. A couple of the keys got a little sticky for a while but the laptop kept working. If you dissassemble the thing you see why - IBM did a masterful job of building the keyboard in its owne tray - effectively sealing it from the electronics below !
. waterwingz
I turned my back for 5 seconds and next thing I know I'm smelling burnt electronics. We became the the poster boys for ZIF sockets.
Damn. That really, really sucks. My friend lost his engine source for his 3D engine in a reformat, once. That was bad, too.
- Code Dark
Pssh. I bought a Dell with Windows ME on it!
I did too. I didn't know better. It was before Windows ME officially came out. I got it early because I was getting it on an OEM. I thought it was getting a hot deal too.
That machine spent 4 years with ME on it before I got my parents set up with a nice eMac. Now it's running W2k and will soon run MythTV when I can afford a new hard drive. I'm posting from it right now.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Nasty - best way to do a "DELETE ... WHERE" if you're at an SQL console is to do ...
:-)
"SELECT something FROM table WHERE conditions"
then, once you're happy that it's showing you the things to delete, backup the command and remove the "SELECT something" and replace it with "DELETE". Much safer
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
If you spill something on a HD you can almost certainly recover it by buying an identical model of drive and transferring the controller board from the new drive to the "dead" one. The actual platters are pretty well sealed off. If the drive is older try Ebay. You might find an identical laptop being sold as "parts" due to a broken hinge or other problem that will still have a servicable hd controller board.
In the early 90's I administered a Solaris box which served as Internet gateway for my university. The university computer center used VMS as a rule, so this lone Solaris box was a critical gateway to the Internet. Myself and another guy were assigned to administer it, despite limited Unix experience.
/* instead of rm ./* which promptly erased the root partition.
One sunny day I took the whole net connection out for over a week.
Step 1 - Logged in as root, I did an rm
Step 2 - I called my buddy at Sun who then advised me how to rebuild the root partition, not realizing we had used non-standard formatting, so now the root partition was _really_ lost.
Step 3 - Proceeded to try and recover it from backup. At the time, we were using a backup script I had written just before going on vacation a few months earlier. It simply backed up the Sun box across the net to a VMS tape drive. I quickly discovered that the operator assigned to test my backup script had never done so (and I was on vacation), and to make it worse, some sort of timing issue introduced by the network transfer meant the Sun backup was basically unusable.
It took weeks to get another box and get it up and running again. Amazingly nobody gave me a hard time about it.
I just buy a cheap keyboard once or twice a year - even have a favourite make, not sure exactly what that is (generic) but i know it when i see it. Keyboards are gonna get dirty and have things stuck in them i figure its disposable, that way i don't worry too much and sometimes pick it up and smash it against the desk if i get pissed off with windows (its good stress relief). It might add up but in the end you would go through a good keyboard in 5 years and 5 cheap keyboards can easily be the same price.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Tech Support Formatting
We'd been having trouble with our mouse and since I was still fairly new with computers, we'd figured we'd send it into the shop to get fixed.
However, we didn't really want to lose all our data, since the first step that they do at the shop is generally formatting the disc. So I was wanting a secondary HDD that I could claim for myself anyways, so I bought an HDD so we could save all our stuff to that (which would connect as D:).
Great plan, until I discovered I had no clue as to how to format my disc. I thought that you partitioned after you formatted, which caused all sorts of confusion.
So I call tech. support and they walk me through formatting. The last command they give me was format /y... In the root of the C: drive...
Extra Fans
It seemed as though my computer was getting fairly hot, so I bought a couple of case fans. Looking inside my case I could only locate one set of headers for fans spare. So I unplugged my Northbridge fan.
Several months and HDDs later, somebody diagnosed the problem.
Do you see what I did there?
I've spilled coffee on my 17" PowerBook G4 and the coffee just kinda sat on the keys, it didn't reach the innards and wiped up easily and cleanly. Way to go Apple!
This all has happened in my exams time... It was because of power supply (and voltage pitch) that my motherboard, processor, CD-ROM drive, keyboard and video card have been fried up. But this is only the beginning :) After this accident I've decided to test this damned power supply on another MB (on computer I had on my work) - (me was fool!)
It was HP motherboard... Brave HP motherboard. It did not want to die silently... After the experiment it began to squeack at the boottime as it was a memory problem - and of cource, it did not boot.
The only good thing in this story is that MB was replaced by HP because computer was on warranty
My dad had brought home a computer from work, a Zenith all in one computer, some sort of a 8086 machine... Kind of like an iMac only with a blue LCD screen and with two slots for 5 1/4 floppies. My mom left some mail on the ventilation slats. Later on, I decided to boot it up. Unfortunately, the machine started to overheat, giving off that dreaded burning plastic smell. The screen quickly went dark and the computer was history. It was probably a year later when we finally got a 386. Talk about a long year...
-Joe
I remember that my dad got me a utility for my C64 that copies floppies from one disk to another (as if i need to explain how that works here :)
:)
Well, it was a basic run of the mill program where you insert the source disk, format the destination disk and let it write there. I forgot to remove the source disk and it formatted that instead of the new disk.
The ironic part? I was trying to make backup copies of that program which I just nuked.
Join the TWIT army now!
Back in '95 when working for a small, private university, lightning struck and wiped out about half the machines in the building. Only a few that had been switched on at the time (including the server) were unaffected. It took a while to replace all the equipment involved.
Besides that, the worst private accident I suffered was when I absentmindedly deleted a certain unknown partition on my private server with the DOS fdisk utility. Too late, it dawned upon me this this partition had contained multiple volumes, including one containing about five or six years worth of personal financial data and other documents (doh!). Naturally, I didn't have any backups.
Nearly three weeks ago our company staffhouse was broken in to and everything including the back ups were stolen.
Luckily I still had some stuff of >3 months old at home.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I had an old MFN harddrive that I wanted to pull some documents off (20MB) a few years back. Unfortunatly the ISA MFN controller card was an 8bit card and was missing the metal plate used to attach it to the back of the case. I took a guess at rightside up and the motherboard never powered on again.
Followed our on-board computer's advice to reinstall the AE-35 unit and wait for it to fail on our way to Jupiter (or Saturn, depending on whether we're talking the movie or the book)
You won't open the pod bay doors? Well then I'm gon'na open a can o' whoop-ass!
Dave Bowman
This is one of my favorites.
My Worst interaction was when I turned a computer on for the first time ... mmmm Apple II
And to this day I wonder why I love computers.
I've "mistankely" hit a HD with a big hammer.
;-)
One I got the hammer it realy started to look like a big nail.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
http://www.protman.com/p00p/oops.jpg
*I used to be quite irreverent and ignorant. I am probably much smarter now. I seem to realize this every 45 days or so.
There are also lots of databases that do not have transactions, henca no commits or rollbacks.
...oh right! MySQL!
Just let me think of some DB that is actually used somewhere
(If there is transactions in MySQL, I stand corrected, but they must have added the support just recently)
Bot Assisted Blogging
I needed to low level format a drive back in 1996 because it had problems. WD sent me a disk to do a low level format. I actually had two WD drives in my system and needed to format the secondary one. I had also just scanned about 600 images for a website which took a week to do. But when the time came, I mistakenly low level formatted my main drive. Whoops.
I'm sure at least a few of the posts on here are going to be about making a typo while running "rm". It is with that in mind that I offer this piece of timeless advice: with rm, always type your flags last. Period. There are plenty of good examples of why this is a good idea, but I think this one shows it the best:
/somedir/file/" you bump enter while you hit slash (they're right next to each other, remember) resulting in "rm -rf /"
/somedir/file/ -rf") and you make the same mistake, you only end up typing "rm /" which does nothing, instead of a command that will fuck up your entire system.
While typing "rm -rf
If you're in the habit of typing the flags at the end (i.e. "rm
One time, at computer camp, I put a Windows Install CD in my Linux box. :/
I once experienced a collision between a pick and a mac:
http://xpda.com/mac.jpg
was when I spilled a cup of tobacco spit into my keyboard. It never worked right again.
My worst disaster was when I installed Mac OS 7.6 on my Performa 6400. There was a problem with the hard disk driver on that machine with that version of the OS. I lost the contents of the 2.4 GB drive. It took Applea couple of months to issue the 7.6.1 update that included a new hard disk driver.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Anyone would think that when a PSU dies, it should die silently. Not this one. 240V on all the auxilliary connectors - bang go 3 HDDs and a CDROM. The motherboard is apparently OK (which is a relief, since it has 2GB RAM and 2 x 1GHz P3 on it, and you can't buy motherboards to replace it anymore). It turns out that the MB has its PCI system damaged so that the PCI network card won't. (The card is detected, and configured, but sending packets - no way!). Fortunately, I obtained a USB-ethernet adaptor (sitetech - really cute), and it works. This happened to me 2 weeks ago. I'm *really* glad that I had a full backup every night. Moral: buy expensive components. Corollary: where can one buy expensive components? I'd really like to pay a 50% premium for reliability, but none of the manufacturers seem to offer it!
Hard to tell which one was worst, since i had soo many of them
First: i once let a phone fall on the keyboard, and it broke a key (plastic behind was in 2 pieces), so i decided to glue it, with super fast glue, together again, it worked, waited a moment and then pressed the key, it never came out again.
Second: i was installing computers in a little company, which needed a backup of the older data to put back on newer puters. So ok, that backup was being done through the parallel port with an old streamer, something very very slow, took hours. And when i installed the new computer, installed the backup device back on it, it forced me to do a test with the tape to check if it worked, ok it worked. But i don't know what i had in mind.. I HAD to erase the test, clicked everywhere to erase it.. And whole tape got cleaned (while the primary data already was removed from other harddisks..)
I was *white*.... Worst day of my life
Third: Do you know IDE is more or less hotplug? really, it works, done it plenty of times, just umount; hdparm -Y & detach your harddisk,then put it back & remount
Until one day, i plugged the power cord upside down, it didn't fit, but there was enough contact to hear a *PATZ* and the harddisk was dead...
Sigh
Fourth, no data loss in this one luckily, but almost
Sigh
Fifth, recently i saw a harddisk of 200GB getting bad clusters, lost some files with it, ok was in bad mood.. but 3 days later, my main harddisk of 36GB with my linux OS on it crashed totally... Thank you computer world! I was totally pissed...
I have prolly many other stories like that left
I managed to miss out the Where clause on a SQL Update before, changing every single customer in our 25,000 strong database so that they apparently lived in my house. Oops.
1985. Used to use a copy utility called JET. Unlike the DOS copy command, JET would let you copy files across 360kb floppies. With appropriate command line switches, it would even erase a floppy's contents before continuing on a multi-floppy copy task. I accidentally reversed the order of the switches one day. Wiped out 19 megs on a 24 meg HD. This was 17:00 one Friday. No Norton Utilities. Spent the whole weekend restoring the HD from backup floppies. In the end, wound up losing only *one* WordStar file.
Monday mornig, I fessed up to the boss that I'd wiped out one file. Calmly he explained that from now on I should back things up regularly...
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
On a mission critcal HP-UX server containing millions of dollars of financial and payroll data and serving hundreds of users, I once did "rm -fr bin", thinking I was in my /home/root directory when I was actually in "/usr".
/usr/bin. I had a tarred backup on tape, but no "tar" command to retrieve it and no "ftp" command to download a tar binary from another site.
/usr/sbin). Alas I was able to restore the /usr/bin dir in a few minutes.
I could no longer "ls" or "cd" as HP-UX keeps those commands in
Forunately, I had a another backup that was created with HP's fbackup utility and was able to do an frecover (which resides in
The users never noticed.
many accidents happened on my first tech job including dropping a computer off a two story balcony, barely missing our secratary's head only to land on top of a brand new monitor; also there was a time I failed to read the users manual and didn't take some jumpers off about twenty or thirty brand new mother boards and as of such set several of them on fire. It's a wonder they ever kept me around there.
I have never EVER made a mistake that caused major data loss or other catastrophe. Never. Really. I'm not kidding. But I know what I'm doing. I've also never had a single piece of hardware ever die on me. I must lead a charmed life.
But I have been close at hand when major disasters occurred. For example.. I used to work at a computer store, back in mid 1980s Compaq used to sell these huge portables with a plasma screen, you could attach them to a docking station which was damn huge. But there was one major problem with the design, if you pulled the laptop out of the docking station when the power was on, it blew the motherboard of the laptop.
I kept telling the boss that we should not have a demo machine on display with the laptop plugged into the docking station, someday, a customer would pull the laptop out and fry the machine. And of course, one day as I was demoing the machine, before I could stop him, a customer pulled the machine and blew up the laptop. I was furious, this was one of my top selling machines, and I wouldn't be selling any if I couldn't demo it. When the customer realized what he'd done, he started to make motions towards the door, I think he wanted to flee in panic. I told him I'd like him to talk to the owner and tell him what happened. He refused, and said he wasn't going to pay for the damages. I told him I don't expect him to pay for the damages but it wasn't my call, I figured if he talked to the owner, then maybe he could get a supporting statement for insurance purposes. But it wasn't my call. I dumped the customer in the owners office and washed my hands of the situation.
The demo machine got replaced after about a week. This time, the machine was firmly strapped down to the base station so it could not be removed.
I have a reputation in the trade as "Mr. I-told-you-so" because the disasters (like this one) that I warn people against always come true. Why oh WHY don't people ever listen?
the VFAT mounting bug in linux like 8 years or so ago, lost me like 5gb.. thats was one.. I also bought a brand new 52x CDR/RW drive one day and the very same day.. like less than 2 hours later.. when trying to read a brand new ..uh.. I think it was "Leadtek" cdrom I had just burned, the disc exploded into hundreds of splinters and ruined the drive..and yes.. the disc had 52x printed all over it. A couple of days later I read about the discs that could explode if spun at 52x.. think I read that on slashdot actually.. hehe
We had a rack in our network room that had recently been moved so that new cable could be run behind it. No one had informed me that when it was put back into position it hadn't been attached to the floor, wall, ceiling, nothing, and the entire rack was BARELY balanced and standing.
One of the servers on the rack had a CD drive that was somewhat broken, it didn't open when you pushed the button. So, doing what I always did, I sat at the workstation a few feet away and logged in remotely. I gave the command for to eject the CD, and as it did, I watched a very full server rack teeter forward from the weight of the CD tray, and then crash to the floor.
I was very lucky my boss had taken his Zoloft that day.
The worst for me was an EMC disk cabinet - I was responsible for getting it ready to ship, and asked how much to insure it for - and was told "depreciated value, what's going to happen to it?"
Sure enough, the shipper got it to the destination, and then pushed it off the back of the delivery truck - the liftgate wasn't rated for the weight, and the whole thing went crashing to the ground. 3/4 ton of disk equipment, about $750,000 worth in replacement value.
Glad nobody was under the thing.
i didnt it intentionally, i have been more than 3 meters away and wanted him to leave (he was spending the whole evening in our flat , with me and my girlfriend). i spilled my wine but in such aa strange way it reached the computer - display, cpu, rams, motherboard all dead :) it has to be telekinetics or some psi power :)
SHE does throw dice.
For the time I'm interested in computers I always dreamed of possessing a alpha powered computer. Last week a bought a used one, had to change the firmware to install tru64, linux and openvms. Since the update the machine doesn't boot anymore. I can't even rescue the CPU as it is soldered on the board.... ... it really breaks my heard, so close, yet so far away....
matthias
my biggest mistake was installing Win98se, after several hours of crashes/BSODs/ general protection faults, i wiped that POS off my computer and put Linux on and all is well again...
:^)
many thanks go to Linus Torvalds, and the GNU developers around the world, to whom i offer a Laurel & Hardy handshake
once i spilled beer on my laptop. immediately it shutdown. but as i let it dry, it started working again. and by the next day, all the keys were functioning properly.
another time, i was fragging away in some game, open computer case to my right on the floor. in my excitement, i knock my beer off the desk, it falls into the case. luckily it mostly spilled onto the top of a cdrom drive, and nothing was messed up. the system didnt even freeze, and was able to keep on playing.
had a hd fail on me one time, for a router. but the odd thing was the router kept on routing, it just couldnt do and hd read/writes. i wasnt able to log into hte machine. but it kept on working fine as a router.
had capacitors on 3 different mobos [the abit ones that had out of specs caps] go out in 2 weeks.
I was deleting a programs registry and I got distracted...
Next thing I knew I clicked yes to "are you sure you want to delete HKLM"... needless to say windows died that day.
After a few hours, I tried using the computer again, and it worked great! No problems since. Except for a new lesson regarding certain activities, beer, and the proximity to thousands of dollars worth of electronics.
Talk about ruining the mood, though.
We had a fire in our rec room. Brand new home built Athlon system turned to charcoal. It was kind of creepy because all the components were still there, they just looked like charcoal. The 17inch flat screen LCD just kind of melted over. Laptop beside it melted too. HP cp1700 printer was just a power supply and a metal rod of charcoal. That sucked.
running pctools wipe disk and pressed space bar to much so it selected "entire disk" instead of "free space"
First was when a lightning strike hit the building next to mine. Mondo amperage came in through the modem line frying both the modem and motherboard. The modem actually had a wire trace that peeled up off the pcb about 1 cm.
Second was a few years later. I was working on my home machine after having a couple of beers. I bumped the desk accidently and the rather large (22 oz) but empty bottle on the top of the hutch slowly wobbled and tipped over, did one very pretty twirl in slow motion, and bounced off the top of the computer case. The harddrive immediately began to emit an awful whining noise and the machine refused to reboot after this, courtesy of a classical head crash.
So that was my personal realization about the hazards of drinking around computers.
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
My first job was in a small computer store in the late 80s. Back then 286s were still common, and 386s were top of the line. Memory was still installed with individual chips, in banks of 8 or 9 (if parity was used).
I once assembled a PC with a whopping Megabyte of memory, using 8 1Mbit chips. You had to be careful that all the pins were straight and went into their respective sockets instead of bending. When I turned it on the PC beeped furiously. Powered off immediately and opened the case.
There was a funny smell, and one of the chips had a brown/grey spot with a tiny plume of smoke rising. I had put it in backwards! The replacement chip cost about $10. My boss thought it was so funny he didn't take it out of my paycheck... All I can say is, thank God for SIMMs and DIMMs!
Being a lazy bastard I usually jsut leave my case open for cooling and so I can swap out cards and drives without having to remove a side panel. I came home from college a few years ago and stuffed in some new drive I got for xmas and left the case open. I thought nothing of doing what I've always done but sadly I had forgotten one minor detail. A six foot, scaily detail. My iguana is about 15 years old and pretty much senile and does whatever he wants without reason or cause. Somtimes he wonders about the house and gets lost in closets. He also can climb anything known to man so the fact that it was on a desk didn't even come into it. I neglected to concider all this when I left it open. Sure enough I came home one day to find the computer utterly obliterated on the floor with the cards strewn around and mobo and cpu shattered. I have no idea how he didn't get electructed but I even found one of his claws stuck in the cpu heatsink fins. The only thing I can figure is that he thoguht a handy souce of hot air was fucking badass so he wanted to cuddle up close to it and probally got shocked by one of the cards. It sucked but live and learn.
I was on my boat anchored in a nice quiet place in Florida with my laptop nicely perched on the pilot house dash, when some goof comes flying past in a wake boat. His wake slams into my boat sending the laptop flying down the companionway about 20 feet.
Fortunately it was not on at the time so damage was structural. A whole lot of epoxy and duct tape later and it worked again.
Sadly, it did not work for very long, as it wound up in the water in the Bahamas. Salt air and the constant motion of the boat was killing the hard drive anyway so everything was backed up.
Next trip I'll probably use a nice low power Via Mini ITX with daylight viewable screen, all properly shock mounted.
I type ls ./some_directory
:P
I'm tired, it's five in the morning after being up all night coding, under a tignt deadline. I see the directory listing of the files I want to clean up
I type rm -rf *
I realize my mistake quickly, and do a ctrl + c, which stops the deletion. I run to the sys-admin who says "well we did a backup around 10pm last night". Great, that's about when I start working.
Eventualy I find most of my files scattered about the decimated filesystem
I think the *best* thing to do would be to replace rm with something that gzips the files you were trying to delete, and stores them somewhere for rollback.
Later, you can go back and undelete your stuff if you need to.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Once, hastily leaving lunch to get back to work, I put a bottle of coke in the same backpack that I carried my laptop in. Unfortunatly, I didn't completely close the bottle, and unbeknownst to me it leaked onto my computer (which was in sleep mode) during my long walk back to work. The machine still worked, but the screen cut out at times and it died some months after.
My favorite is when I su to to root, exec bash, and habitually source my .bash_profile. About once a year I accidentally source my .bash_history, which of course has dangerous things like "rm tmp/*" The good news is I'm breaking the habit and forcing myself to use sudo instead.
_______
2B1ASK1
The Million Dollar Mistake
...as it lay on the carpet... ..and me with no shoes on..
Having worked in the financial industry for a long time, I recall not-so-fondly some of my mistakes. The largest and most painful was probably the million dollar mistake. This occurred around the first year or so of working at a bank.
One of my tasks was to check out 'federal funds' balance at the federal reserve. We have to transfer money into the federal reserve account to keep it at a certain figure.
Well, reading the figures I thought it said we had over a million dollars of excess. This isn't unbelievable depending on the day or time of month, and I was told that since this balance was so high to transfer it to another institution. Off the money went.
Around 4:30PM or so we got a call from the Federal Reserve. "Do you know what your balance is?" They asked the CFO. Then they told him. Over 1.5 million in the negative. If we didn't have the money there by 5PM, we'd get charged $25,000.
This is about the time I get that oh-shit-I'm-gonna-be-sick feeling that happens each time I make a huge mistake.
We had to call another bank and beg them to reopen their wire transfer department so we could get the funds in there. I think they arrived at the fed somewhere in the 4:55PM range. Free screaming/chewing out for me that day!
The Car Accident
Not exactly computer related, but I did wreck the company car once. Ouch.
Oh, and did I mention I was probably the worst courier ever? I would burn through a set of tires, brand new Michelins, in about two months. They stopped asking me to courier after that.
Not after some more free screaming/chewing however.
The Video Card Zap
I once bought a Riva TNT 16MB back when they first came out. Around $300+ dollars so I could run Unreal with all the goodies on. And it was hot stuff. I was so proud of that damn video card.
So when I transferred it to a different PC just a few days after showing off, I bent over to pick it up...
And I saw the small blue spark jumt from my finger just as I was a half inch away. "Zzzt!" came the popping noise.
Can you say "Fuh-ried?" I know I could. Oh, the tears I wept for that one.
Permissions? What Permissions?
I once tried to implement a group-based permissions scheme on a little Win2k Server box. So when I right clicked on the C: drive, telling it to remove all permissions (as I thought I would simply assign them later), I thought it was odd to see the little pop-up box showing me each file as it removed all the permissions before it.
This is about the time that oh-so-sick feeling came over me. This was a box that the company relied on for big transactions and loans.
I tried to stop it, but it disappeared just as I realized what I had done. The permissions were gone for every user, and I mean everyone. I couldn't even SEE the permissions any longer. I didn't have permission to open any programs. IE. Explorer. I couldn't even see anything on the Start Button but "Shut Down".
Then the calls started coming in from users.
The boss said I looked like Casper.
Thank god for backups.
I watched porn on my parents computer. And then my mom and dad entered the room. HELLO!
Me and hardware just don't mix ;) During my not too long days of playing with hardware, this is what has been led to it's demise by the hands of my clumsiness:
- 3 motherboards: two by static discharge, one by screwdriver)
- 1 CPU: core meltdown
- 2 harddrives: one died spontaneously (crappy hitachi), the other one was probably moved around too much and got internal damage
- 1 CD-ROM drive: destroyed lens. i inserted a copy-protected disc without thinking twice :(
hmm.. that's probably all. my dad once fried a monitor, too, by plugging it into a ~300V outage, thinking it was the standard ~230V. the smoke was quite abundant.
"I have been known to ruin a keyboard with cheeto crumbs. And a pair of pants"
I undertand the part about Cheetos.
But how were the *pants* involved in ruining the keyboard?
Hmmm . . . never mind . . . I think I'd rather not know, after all . . .
So, one day the hard drive on the main file server (unRAIDed) goes down. I go in thinking that it's a simple matter of putting in a new drive and restoring the backup.
I was wrong.
As it turned out, the tape drive head was misaligned, resulting in unsuitable backups. The tapes had to be sent to a data recovery firm, and a new tape drive had to be purchased. Total cost? $15000. A week after the data got back, I was fired :(.
The lesson? Not only make backups, but MAKE SURE THE BACKUPS CAN BE RESTORED!
I remember that as soon as Microsoft released Windows 98, we went out and bought it. I was so sick of 95's flakyness, I couldn't wait any longer. I took the disc out, and put it in the drive, and let it go. About half way through the install, it stopped on an error, saying that it couldn't read some sectors on the disc. I got mad, and pressing retry about 10 times didn't do any good. Rebooting was out of the question, since the system was now Windows 98, using 95 DLLs. Whoops. After more anger, I looked at the Windows98 CD, wondering why it was unreadable. THE CD WAS WARPED! We took it back to Best Buy, and they were a little reluctant to give us another box. After finally convincing them the bent disc was no good, I got back home and tried the new disc. It too, was warped, and got half the distance the first one did. After my parents finish freaking out again, we go back to Best Buy, and demand to find a CD that isn't warped. The BestBuy service guy we got this time didn't seem at all surprised at our request for a non-warped CD. We had to go through 6 different boxes before we found a good one. We took it home, and all was well. Looks like the CD Pressers weren't the only ones rushed to get Windows98 out the door. Strange how I never heard anyone else had that problem...
Heh. I was doing an upgrade for one of the computers at my Dad's office (he's a self-employed businessman). It was a cheapie clone thing, and I was carrying it from his office to my car when I tripped down the steps. I landed on it....and I'm not exactly your small guy. The 75% plastic 25% metal case (yes, plastic case - hey, this was like 1996) popped open and parts scattered everywhere. It turned from a hard drive upgrade and new ethernet card to a new computer. It was actually a good turnout, I think. I ensured he didn't buy another of the same kind ;)
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
hmmm time to clean out that tmp folder
c:\>dir c:\tmp
ok its full of junk
c:\del *.*
"are you sure y/n?"... YES I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING, MAN THIS GETS SO OLD, TELL YOU WHAT DOS, I GIVE THE COMMANDS YOU OBEY
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
i think i've done this on unix too doh!
I was hooking up my 3 hard drives 120MB, 320MB and 420MB to my brand spaniking new 1.2 gigabye drive..(circa mid-1995. A steal at $340) I had to buy a new motherboard just to recognize the huge beasty. Anyway my critical files were backed up between the 3 drives.. I couldnt forsee a hardware failure on 3 drives.. Anyway I grabbed 3 power splitters 2 IDE cables and from my kitchen. don't ask. Hooked all 4 drives up to the new MOBO. Turned on the pc.. The hard drive were all pouring out smoke.. The powersupply had a red-yellow mis-wiring. It was to the root splitter to my drives. I was making under $6/hour with an unhealthy hardware obsession. It was pretty bad. I saved up enough cash to get an Identical 340MB drive to get my data back. But I was a wreck there for a while. On the up side.. It did manage to break my obsessive level of hardware lust to something a bit more managable.. no more fasting for hardware.
Couple of years ago, I worked for a company that constantly shipped machines between the LA and Germany offices. Needless to say, nobody ever checked the PSU settings before plugging in a machine (Germany runs on 220VAC) - not a problem for the LA guys because a 220V PSU that gets only 110V will simply not do very much, but we on the German side had lots of blown fuses and burnt-out PSUs to deal with.
:p
Usual procedure was to set up the machines in the lab/training room to check the configuration before moving them to active duty (which had the added benefit that the occasional blown fuse would only affect the training room where usually nobody was working).
The real fun started when one day I set up a machine in the server room without checking the PSU setting. Of course, everythig in the server room is connected to a UPS, and the UPS kept supplying power to the poor PSU without even thinking about blowing a fuse...and supplying...and supplying...I noticed something was very wrong when the room started filling with blue smoke and molten plastic dripped from the machine's case. Always made sure to check every single PSU after that
frotz grue
Backup?
What is this backup thing of which you speak?
No matter where you go... there you are.
A long time back I was trying to upgrade something in my Atari 260ST. I don't remember exactly if it was the operating system ROM or memory - there weren't any fancy DIMMs or stuff like that back then, expanding memory consisted of backpack soldering more memory chips on top of the old ones.
Anyway, I did, and when I turned the computer on, there was nothing. No booting. No image on the screen. I looked over the board to find out what was wrong, when I heard a noticeable crackle from one of the chips I had added. I could watch a thin crack appear slowly along the plastic housing. Then suddenly, a small smoke cloud that looked exactly like a miniature version of a nuclear explosion appeared with an audible 'poof' sound.
I hadn't paid as much attention as I should have, and soldered that one chip in facing the wrong way, turned by 180 degrees.
I still have the box...
Do it Yourself Power
A startup company I worked for had set up offices quickly and used a friend-of-a-friend to do their electrical. We had various strange problems with equipment, and many of our circuits were overloaded with far more workstations than had been planned.
At one point, a desktop UPS warning went off and then started smoking. I ran to unplug the UPS, but in a nod to "The Money Pit" I yanked the wrong cords, saving the pencil sharpener while the UPS stayed up long enough to billow out smoke. A 'surge protector' connected to the problem line welded itself together inside and blew a shower of sparks in celebration. I was under the desk where the fireworks were going off.
Beware of PowerBooks bearing bare wires
After being thrown off my motorcycle on the way home from a client, I not only broke my arm, but smashed the powerbook in my backpack, busting off one of the hinges. The screen still worked, just no backlighting. I disassembled the screen, pulled out the slack in the severed backlighting wires and tied them back together. I managed to first allow the two wires to short out (UNBELIEVABLE SHOWER OF SPARKS - THINK ROMAN CANDLE) then later on (since I left the wires exposed out the back) managed to electrocute myself shorting them through my hand.
I was a grad student working in an aerospace engineering lab in 1986. We had what I believe were HP 1000 computers (not sure of the model number) for data collection. These were non-DOS or Unix, proprietaty OS. For some reason the copy command for this OS was actually a "copy and replace" command, so that when I attempted to copy a floppy disk to the hard drive, in fact I replaced the entire contents of the hard drive with the contents of the floppy. Research, software, files...all lost. Hmmm come to think of it, I never DID graduate from that program - maybe now I know why!
We have a famous electrian that doesn't know anything about electricity.
The first incendent involved wiring a 30amp 120volt plug. After a Cowork plugged in the UPS and an arc the size of a lighting bolt jumped out we traced the conduit back to a 440volt panel. He wired it to one hot thus giving us 277 volts.
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
... so far was when that guy with the caterpillar slaughtered some 150 metres of german telecom glassfiber backbone, effectively offlinig everything in the nothern half of germany. internet, telephones, ATM, WAN... you name it, it went down.
another good one: a water pipe in the cellar of a bank burst over the weekend... in the room with the comms racks and such.
for personal experiences, except from the occasional dying hardware due to weardown, nothing so far (/me knocks on wood)
oh, and another good one. I'll extend this one, for the enjoyment of the readers.
One day in '98 i was sitting at my desk in the NOC of a big german bank in frankfurt when suddenly the network went down. and when i say down i mean down. as in 'totally'. everything was unreachable, up to the smallest branch in whatwasthenameofthattownbehindthewoods. At that time, the so-called NOC was me and another guy, and NO special equipment network-wise, no sniffers, no diagnosis tools, nothing (the NOC had just been created...).
Finally i managed to get sources for ethereal thru gcc on my sparc, and started sniffing the net. then i saw that there was NO fault. just heavy traffic, all coming from one server. I contacted the server guys and told them, they looked at that server and told me it was perfectly healthy. when they told me the JOB of that server, which was broadcasting stock exchange rate updates to the stock traders, i grabbed my laptop, dialled out via cellphone, and went to the yahoo finance pages... and 'lo and behold, the DAX (think german NASDAQ index) had crashed, from happy 6000 to unfriendly 3000... the webcam on the german stock exchange was fun that day, tho... like someone had set fire to an anthill...
bye,
[L]
Apparently the Solaris version of 'killall' works differently than the GNU version. I remotely killed all the processes on a client's production E450 server. They had to reboot it. I was so embarrased.
;-)
This probably wasn't the worst accident with a computer. I just thought it might be a nice break from all the "rm -rf"'s and the "spilled ____ on my laptop."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Not really an accident since no computers were harmed...
I had an old AMD K6-2 that was having some stability issues. During troubleshooting I had removed the CPU fan for a few seconds as I was swapping in a known good CPU. At some point I had the fan off but had the machine powered on for about a minute because I got distracted. When I realized my error I immediately pulled the plug. A few minutes passed as I did something else. Then I needed to put back in the original CPU. So I shifted the lever, popped the CPU then put it face down into my palm. It took about 1/2 second before I realized how hot the thing still was but it was too late. A square patch of skin was burned away right at the base of my thumb.
And here's one that didn't happen to me...
One of the employees I'd trained had gone solo, covering three medium sized buildings. Everything went well for close to a year. Then he gave me a call: "Help, the fileservers are down and I've never had to rebuild from scratch." You have backups? "Of course." Whew, no problem then. I make the 100 mile drive and meet him in the server room. Disk is hosed so we rebuild. It takes a while but everything is going smoothly. The OS is in place so I ask him for the data backups. He hands me the tapes. Pop them in but can't retrieve any data. Eh? Don't panic. Check the logs. Backups went successful for the better part of a year. We decide it's probably the tape drive since he mentioned that he'd seen some errors "once or twice". We drive 30 miles to another facility to retrieve a drive and maybe shoot the data across the net. But the same problem at the other facility. OK, keep calm. Backups are showing successful for close to a year. It warns if the tape is bad. It warns if for some reason it can't complete a backup. Crap. Check what's being backed up... Three log files. That's it. For a year he's been backing up three log files, maybe 20K worth in each of them. Data? Nope, not listed in the things that get backed up. But the backup was successful because it was never instructed to do anything else but those three log files...
Back in 1998 I was at my first trainee day at the CS dept on the same college I attended...their whole data center caught in fire 24 h before, it was not a big room, had about 5 or 6 midsize servers among IBM (including a dual Pentium 90) and some "frankstein" desktops acting as servers.
After some investigation, they found that a power surge failed to normalize the electric input, it happens that the college is close to a heavy industrial area where the electricity provided isn't always that good. So the power surge just went totally passive, leaving a huge electric current go into one of those computer cases. It started the fire and started burning everything or at least melting it.
The cabling in the whole building gone shit, the computers that weren't burned and were kept in the neighbor rooms looked like coal and had to be cleaned, some of them did not work anymore.
Conclusions:
1) Never leave the backup tapes over the server case...
2) Buy hardware from IBM, their hardware has right aside from a desktop frankstein (tawainese crap) and while the asian counterpart melted into some sort of alien matter, the IBM server stills running (the old dual p90 w/ a Novell filesystem)
3) Beware of personal data. We were authorized to dig into the whole network data to recover what was possible. In the meantime we found a bunch gay pics from the library dude...disgusting.
4) Spend some cash and provide appropriate power to your server farm.
Several years ago, shortly after I'd been promoted from tech support to sys admin, and was still feeling nervous about it, I was editing the DNS zone file for the main domain at my work. I use vi, and I use ":x" to write/quit. Turns out, ":X" encrypts the file. Before I'd realized what I'd done, the file was encrypted with some random key composed of characters from whatever commands I was about to run, plus backspaces when I realized I was still in the file.
I had to reconstruct the file nearly from scratch (well, actually, just the comments, since we still had the slave zones - but the comments were very important), when it turned out the backups hadn't been working properly, either (a whole other can of worms, and my first major fix-it job as an admin). There were several old versions of the file lying around, which helped, too. The worst part was that I was the goddamn admin. I learned about not always typing at maximum speed that day.
Then, a friend/co-worker of mine deleted the public/private SSH key pair we used at the time to connect to all of our servers from our central admin box, trumping the Hell out of my mistake.
That one I had backed up, though.
It took you weeks to get a router back up ? I understand you're not proud.
I always got a kick out of Dell's advertising about dropping stuff a few feet to test durability, etc
We got a brand new Dell 1750 Dual Xeon 1U server which was going to be our Novell R/W Replica & Login box. I put the versa rails in the rack, about 5ft off the ground. Now anybody who works with Dell's knows the new servers have these nubs on the sides which sit into slots on the extended rails - in other words instead of sliding the server INTO the rails like most servers, you have the rails already extended and set the server down ONTO the rails, into those slots. Then you slide everything into place.
Well, it was late - everybody was gone. But it was a 1U box - not TOO heavy (but heavy enough) So I hoisted it up and gently set the nubs into the slots - or so I thought. The right rear nub was not seated and it slipped out. The unit pivoted and our brand new 1750 went crashing into the floor below corner first!!!!! I can still picture it in slow motion as it hit the ground corner first, banged off the rack, and then slammed onto the floor.
Man talk about getting a sinking feeling in your stomach. The right rear corner was totally crumpled. In a panick I opened the case expecting to see a motherboard is a shattered corner.
Nope - the motherboard was fine. The power supplies had come out of their connectors - and slid right back in. The drives had come unseated due to the shock and had to be reseated. A couple hours later with pliers, ballpeen hammer, and other assorted tools, I managed to get the case corner bent back into what was close to normal. All the internals looked ok.
I booted up the system - nada. The 'Processor mismatch' LED was lit on the board. Ugh. Figured I'd cracked a CPU or worse. Then I noticed one of the heatsinks was ever so slightly higher than the other. I unhooked the retainers and found one of the processors had come OUT of the ZIF socket and was being held on top of the socket by the retaining clip. I could only imagine what the CPU had done to itself with its pins making intermittent contact with the socket below while power was on.
Well, after gently getting the CPU off the heatsink without cracking it (it was stuck to it by the heat paste), I reinserted the CPU, applied new paste, and reinstalled the heatsink.
Damn thing booted right up and has run without issue ever since - going on 6 months now. All diags, hard drives included, passed with flying colors.
Talk about dodging a bullet! Built Dell Tough!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I was working very late on Christmas day to get a site released on time. The CMS we were using (a homegrown ASP monstrosity) was being temperamental, and I needed to fix a heading.... so I fired up PgAdmin (PostgreSQL rocks!) and typed "UPDATE content SET title='quilting' - minus the all important "WHERE contentid=X". Every single article in the database (around 900) suddenly gained the title 'quilting'. Thank heaven for a good restore procedure!
I still haven't lived that one down.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
In about '97 while working for a small computer service company I was servicing a clients PC and for reasons that i can't remember i had to take 2 hard drives back to out shop. While walking out of the clients office one of the hard drives slipped out of my hand. I almost caught it, but instead managed to send it flying through the air. Completely destroyed the drive. Had to send it to a data recovery place the takes the drives apart to get the data... cost me $750 out of my own pocket!
I expect Apple will anounce liquid cooling for powerbooks RSN.
Cig? No, thank you.
Just after getting a brand new ThinkPad, I accidentally emptied a full pint of Guinness over the keyboard. After removing the battery, I dried all I could with a towel. I thought it had gone POOF! I was already thinking of how to explain the incident to my new employer.
Twenty minutes later I put the battery in and to my surprise it worked perfectly, apparently the IBM engineers placed a metal plate to protect the internals from this type of hazard.
The only side effect was a strange sound when tapping some keys; I think some amount of dry beer is still inside there.
Ohh...and I once overwrote the only copy of a friend's thesis. He was using a single floppy and I needed a boot disk.
i was making a bootdisk.. and typed this:
dd if=floppy1.img of=/dev/hda
it sucked
what is nailchipper?
Back in the early 90s I was upgrading to a new hard drive and was off by a pin on the IDE cable and didn't know it. I put everything back together and flipped on the computer. The hard drive light just stayed on and nothing seemed to be happening, the screen remained blank. Suddenly, smoke started pouring out of the computer. Of course this made me too paranoid to try it again so I took it into a local shop. They told me they'd have to ship the motherboard out to the manufacturer to have it checked. Of course, right after they shipped it out, UPS went on strike and I was stuck without a computer for 6 months. Talk about computer/internet addiction withdrawl. :-P
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Working in California, go back home to Canada for Christmas. On return, carry gift bottle of excellent Iniskillin icewine in laptop bag (safe there, right, because of the padding?). With my wife's business machine. Everything is OK until the cab drops us in front of our condo. She gets out to open the door. I go to the back of the cab to get the luggage. Driver comes around and helps, pulling the laptop bag out, sitting it on TOP of another bag, so it promptly falls, upside down, breaking the wine bottle. Panicking, I pick up the laptop bag, making sure that most of the wine puddles in the bottom, with assured total immersion of the backplane of the laptop.
We let it dry, and it does not work. Not even a little. I buy distilled water, cuetips, and TOTALLY disassemble the machine, soak various parts, carefully air-dry. Result: Everything worked except the floppy drive. She traded the unit back in on her next trip to head office, and we said nothing... Now we carry wine double-wrapped in plastic and nowhere near the laptop.
It fried the modem of the laptop and also the modem and motherboard of the PC that were both connected. Fortunately, insurance covered the repair costs, and the disks of both were ok.
Great Windows SFTP Server!
My worst accident was just recently. I had upgraded my wife's machine and redid her partitioning. I backed up all her important files to my machine. After it was all working I was slowly copying files back as she needed them. Then I had a problem with my Windows install and decided to wipe it as there was nothing important in there anyway. Well that was mostly true except for all the digital photos we had taken over the last few years and the last years tax records (my 3 yr old had already destroyed the paper copy).
I was able to recover most of the photos from our web server although not in the high resolution. The tax records though were never recovered and we had to paper file for state taxes.
Sig is on vacation
I fried my video card and motherboard by putting one of those new 3.0 or so volt AGP cards into a 1.5 volt slot. It fried my video card and motherboard.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Remember to take off your ring when tooling around indside your computer. I was checking out a fan problem with the machine on and must have touched something because there was a big shock, but I don't remember much! Luckily it was just the power supply. Not as bad as in college though when I got really drunk one night and passed out in my bed. My bed was by my machine on the floor. I woke up and found traces of a Milwaukee Beast visit all over my computer. It went through the vents and did some damage. But once again I don't really remember much from that one either.
One time I had set up a test Windows PC and gave it a netbios name of test. I put together a program that was supposed to exploit and do damage with using what I thought to be a remote windows vulnerability. This was an honest attempt to try and test the vulnerability on my own computers so I could make a bug report. At first I thought it had failed completley, but it didn't give me a bad exit code. Next thing I know my internet connection is dead on my entire network. I looked at my logs to see what happened and the name "test" had resolved to an IP outside of my subnet. I called tech support and they said the entire region was down due to a server having an unexpected failure. Later after they got it up and running again, I confirmed that my ISP had moved a windows server into production and left the name test on it. I've never felt so stupid.
But most CDRs wouldn't have a problem with this, I'd think.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Years ago, I worked for a company that ended up laying everyone off and filing for bankruptcy. The president of the company and I were doing our best to pull it out of bankruptcy. One day we took a computer and monitor over to someone's office to do a demonstration of our software and capabilities. They guy we did the demonstration for was the former chairman of the board for the biggest employer in the major city in which the company was located. To get to his office, we had to take an escalator to the second floor and than an elevator up to his office. When we were leaving, I was carrying the monitor and the president of the company was pushing a dolly loaded with the computer. At the escalator, we decided that I'd go down, set the monitor down, and go back up to help with the computer. A few feet from the bottom of the escalator, I heard a loud thump, thump, thump behind me. At the bottom, I stepped to the side just in time to see the computer go past me. The president of the company had decided not to wait and started down the escalator with the dolly in front of him. Within a few feet, the computer had come off the front of the dolly and took off down the escalator on its own. The strange thing was that the computer worked fine in spite of a big hole in the case. I suspect that if I'd put a plastic cover over the hole, it might have been classified as a case mod.
My power supply decided to just crap out one day and set itself on fire.... This really happened. Let me tell you, I don't like the smell of burning computer plastic in the morning. Luckily nothing else was phased.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I was in a combat communications squadron in the Air Force (still in, but work elsewhere). This happaned a couple years ago:
Most of the servers, routers, etc. are rack mounted in ruggedized platic carrying cases so we can move them, stack them, and set them up quickly. A coworker and I were picking up a Proliant server (the box was about 4x3x4 feet). These things could slide forward if you needed to pull the server out and the only thing keeping it fastened in place was a strap. Yeah, it wasn't fastened that time, so when we picked the box up, the weight shifted and the server flew out the front. The thing was actually airborne for a split second before hitting the ground. The best part is that the big thing didn't break. Our first reaction wasn't to go "Oh my god!" Instead we laughed quite hard because we couldn't have cared less about those old servers.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I was helping out my professor at the laboratory.
He commited the old mistake of installing Windows XP after installing Linux on his computer.Since he couldnt boot his linux partition where his research final paper was,he asked for my help. i tried to install lilo, grub, partition magic...you name it.. i dont know what excactly how i did it, but when i finished, he couldnt access none of the partitions, and the boot manager got damaged!! =(
it isnt necessary to say that I lost my scholarship at the lab. =P
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
I use this (open source) program to bidirectionally sync/replicate my laptop and my desktop machines. As long as I modify different parts of both replicas, it'll move changes bidirectionally. If I modify the same part of both replicas, I can use the GUI to examine the conflicts and resolve it manually. The GUI also shows a summary of the changes the program wishes to make. It even runs under windows and can sync windows directories with unix directories!
It makes my desktop and laptop machines virtually indistinguishable from each other. This means I can and do interchangably use as many as 4 different machines. At the next sync, whatever I was working on gets moved to the other machines. (Unison only supports pairwise syncs, so I sync pairs A&B, A&C, A&D.) One of these machines is in a seperate building.
Since I sync machines with each other regularily, as a byproduct, each is an hours to days old backup of the others. A great freebie offered by a valuable program. I don't worry about dataloss nearly as much as I used to.
Anyone who uses more than one machine regularily should look into this program.
I did a similar thing in a makefile in my last year of school - the clean target had rm -f /path/to/files/$(OBJ_DIR)/*
Yes, you guessed it, a typo caused $(OBJ_DIR) to be empty, so a bunch of code went bye-bye.
Fortunately most of what I acidentally nuked was under CVS (and somewhat recently comitted), but it still cost me a night's sleep...
All these stories about people dding over their hard drives. Set the securelevel! you can't dd over memory or mounted drives that way.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I've been using one of those rubber-like, roll-up "indestructible" keyboards for about 3 years now.. Almost all the letters have rubbed off the rubber/plastic like substance, but hey, i can touch type.
Drives my friends nuts though.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I was working on my best friends computer, looking to install a new OS on his system (I think it might have been NT Pro; God what were we thinking?). It was an old Pentium 60 I think, and he had two hard drives in the machine. He had had this computer since college, and had collected a wide variety of software on it: Master of Magic cheats and save files, WAV files of Simpsons quotes, a text file of the script on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. You know, the really important stuff. Anyway, the plan was to copy everything to D:, fdisk/format/reinstall the OS to C and there you go. I go about doing this, with my friend watching over my shoulder very nervously, as this was back in the days when installing OS's from scratch was a new and exciting world for us. So I copy everying over, change to D to ensure it got there OK, and run Fdisk.
On the D drive.
The amazing thing is that despite all of FDisks built-in precautions meant to prevent you from wiping the wrong disk, I still managed to do it. Needless to say my friend was not happy. I still hear about it to this day everytime I'm doing computer work for him.
Well, it wasn't an accident, but I have this program which continually subjects me to the worst trolls in the world.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
I did this on a nearly fully configured Oracle RAC cluster that I was building. I was just trying to mirror my rootdisk.
During my final day in the DSP lab at my university where I had finished my thesis, I wrote everything to CD on the only windows box (called jack) in the lab. I'd transferred all my files to a samba mount on the machine, mounted under my ~/mnt/jack directory.
:-((
I started writing the CD without first creating an image, and then cleared my home dir with rm -rvf * while the CD was being written to.
The CD seemed have have all of my files on it, but unfortunately, many just had zeroes in them, as the FAT/whatever table had already been written before the files were erased. I did not have a spare hardcopy of the thesis, so basically I don't have a copy of it anymore, as thesis.ps was just full of 0s!
I was playing Nethack and eating chocolate when I accidentally nudged
the choco tin wrapping inside the open PC case. It flew under the
hard drive and killed the drive immediately. No backups taken for
several months and everything lost. I still remember the empty moment
of realizing what had just happened.
The 'worst' accident came from a pretty stupid mistake, but the overall effect was relatively mild.
I had just built a new Athlon 64 machine, and I tried turning it on. Nothing happened. The system powered up, but I wouldn't even get a POST. I was afraid that something was damaged and that I'd need to hunt it down to replace it.
I took the thing apart to check all of the connectors and discovered that I'd forgotten to plug in the auxillary power cable from the power supply to the mainboard. Popping that in resulted in a proper POST, and all was well -- except that I still had to put the machine back together.
As I was putting it together, I managed to shove the IDE cable into a 120GB Linux drive the wrong way, bending a pin to the point where I could find no way whatsoever to pull it back into position (in addition to being bent, it was also pushed back into the cable). Fortunately, I was using SATA drives for my Windows XP installation, and so I still had a somewhat usable machine, even if it did mean that I was primarily running Windows.
I happen to have a friend who is very good with computer hardware, and I sent the drive to him. He was able to juryrig a quick IDE connection between the drive and his computer, archive all of the data, split it into 700MB encrypted archives, burn it all to CD and send it to me. Thus, I was able to restore all of the data onto a nice 160GB SATA drive, once I got the kernel drivers straightened out. I did lose all of my file timestamps, though, which is somewhat annoying.
That's the worst disaster I've ever had. I've never permanently destroyed any other hardware. I did once break the CD power connector cable from a Sony Playstation when installing a modchip, but I was able to solder it back on without incident.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Yes, some years ago i decided to install my home desktop into a software RAID-0(stripeset), harddisks were slow and my data useless ya know...
It lasted until some months ago, when one of the drives went *clack*clack*clack*.
Fortunately it only did that on write operations, so i could read the contents perfectly, but since i'm a cheapstake i tried to "mark" the badblocks...
After a few unsuccesful badblocks attempts the stripeset stopped being recognized by the kernel (don't ask me why)
And since the last time i messed with RAID stuff was a looong time ago, i panicked...
couldn't find a fix until the next day...
The day i found raid0run in the rescue CD and backed up all the data promptly.
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
... when someone dialed into my computer and asked if I wanted to play a game of thermonuclear war.
But nothing worse than that.
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
was using rm * and del *.* in the wrong directory/folder. And undeleting was not possible. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I was at a computer show in the late 80's trying to help someone add a second 20 megabyte drive to their system.
Unfortunately, as a drive installer I had the keystrokes to low level format drive C: so ingrained in my head that I selected the wrong drive and nuked their entire backup-less computer.
Needless to say, I learned the hard way that you should always do backups and disconnect drives that have valuable data.
My worst accident was in trying out a new motherboard laying on top of some cardboard. A stumble sent it flying, and the keyboard port (a AT style -- DIN6?) ripped itself free of the motherboard.
It was a small jump (486 to 486DX, back when Intel had just announced the Pentium 3) but for me, that sucked.
** ** **
The first Linux Accident, otherwise known as Understand Your Market's Thoughts And Desires.
Back when Linux was gaining steam, I mean when Linux was about to breakthrough to have the user and application and system support at good capability... An executive, at a small recently incorporated company was getting fed-up with Microsoft Windows 95 being unstable. Of'course, they used Dial-up 56 Kbps internet access, Outlook Express, Microsoft Office 97 Standard, and Internet Explorer; the typical primary applications you expect a Mom'n'Pop shop to run as they were referred from Radio Shack's Tandy computers and Fry's Electronics' used-car-salespeople. At their words of favor for my advice, I installed RedHat 5.2 Linux on an executive's computer thinking they will benefit from it. I showed the programs to use for the internet access, then a verry good graphical word-processor, and the eMail client packages. They just didn't want to use it. It seemed too foreign from their typical use of Microsoft Windows 95. RedHat 5.2 defaulted with the Feeble Virtual Window Manager (FVWM) and with certain themes it looked near duplicate to Microsoft Windows 95, but that isn't the point; stability and retained application features was the desire. It was no longer to their advantage as they didn't want to re-learn computing on a Linux-based platform. They purchase and I presumed command to install Microsoft Windows 98. For the time being, Microsoft Windows 98 improved the stability to a certain ammount of computer usage, and sufficed with still undesirable computer stability until purchasing Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. After MS W 98 SE, they didn't upgrade for 4 years at the advent of Microsoft Windows XP. I must admit, Linux back in the year 1997 was verry good in all ways with exception to the Microsoft Windows users that wanted to translate to another platform; they just can't do it, Linux-based OSs simply don't have the comfort to "baby" them; they want Microsoft Windows, but not from Microsoft. Now today is a different world; Linux-based OSs are superior in every way to Microsoft with exception to proprietary hardware driver developers not providing drivers for Linux.
** ** **
The second Accident, otherwise known as Remember To Close All Motherboard Rear-Access Expansion Bays With Metal Plates.
I note a couple other administrators had the same problem. Rodents may look large, but that is mainly due to their fur making them look larger. I didn't close all the expansion bays on the rear of the computer and a rodent, a verry young mouse, climbed inside the chassis of the computer tower. It was an onsight typical computer job. The company closed its doors that day and the next day returned to a non-responsive computer. I looked inside and found the usual dead flies and crickets, then looked and saw a small spot on the PC66 SDRAM DIMM module. I noticed the spot because it had small lint hairs clinging to it, obviously because it was an adhesive liquid. It was a mouse's urine. Now, I carry no less than 30 spare computer metal plates and face plates so that any computer I approach to administer will have all its bays closed; this prevents all flies, larger crickets, and even the smallest of mice from entering.
This may be too far along in the thread but I thought that I would share:
HP used to make an external parallel CD-R and the connection between the power supply and the burner was through a neat little PS2 connector. I had just started my first job in high school for a medium sized business and the computer that harnessed this beautiful 2x burner needed some simple adjustments made to it. At the time, it was the nicest machine in the building. I thought I was too important to look at what I was doing, so when it came time to plug everything back in I noticed that there were two PS2 plugs and 2 PS2 sockets in the back of the computer. I plugged them both in thinking that I knew what was going on. Unfortunately, I plugged the PS2 power supply into the Keyboard socket. The motherboard was useless after that.
I had my Dell laptop for 31 days. Paid 1500 for it at the time. I kept it in a backpack because I hadn't bought a computer case for it yet. I was about to travel with my friend in his car somewhere when he diecides he wants to put washer fluid into his car. I put my bag down on the side of the car and was helping him. The person who had parked next to my friend decide to go somewhere too, so she got into her car and drove off. The only problem was that under her tire went my bag, and in my bag went my laptop. Checking the laptop showed that only the screen was broken, everything else worked fine. I called Dell customer service and since I dind't buy the protection plan it would have cost me $700 to have it replaced. Basically I used it as a horrible desktop for a year.
It was 1985 or 1986. We ran BSD 4.1 on
Vax 11/780 with 4M of ram and a single
256M disk that took up the space of a
washing machine.
We had 15-25 graduate students on the machine
doing "distance education". It had never been
backed up in the 6 months we had been running it.
I decided, that prior to performing the first
backup, I would hack the kernel to add in support
for VMI's CP/M-80 Unibus co-processor card.
Numerous builds later, no joy. I decide to
rebuild the kernel one more time, and then have
the operators do the first backup [actually,
change the tapes].
Somehow I fubar'ed the last kernel and when I
rebooted it wiped the directory table. The inode
table was still good but fsck wasn't going to be
able to recover.
I spent 74 hours straight without sleep trying to
recover from that. I never did. It's a wonder
I didn't lose my job right then and there.
I bet they still have that disk pack lying around
waiting for someone to write a recovery program.
I'm sure the disk drive is long gone!
Too bad the command line interfaces for so called "enterprise" databases Oracle and Sybase don't support readline or the like, making this an error-prone cut-and-paste operation.
The free ones of course provide a reasonable interface.
I got a call from a friend/consultant one weekend. Someone had a system that would not boot. It turned out to be a digital unix system with the company's inventory and financial data. Their backup had not worked for three months. The data partition had overfilled crashing the system. In trying to recover the idiot manager had corrupted the boot partition. The entire company of several hundred people had been shut down for a week before I got there.
/etc files onto the working set of /etc files causing me to have to repeat a days worth of restoration.
Well I got the system to boot, and even got so far as to recover one file out of 1,000 by Sunday night.
The people their were extremely stressed, and while I could deal with the technical problems, the people were getting on my nerves, causing me to make some mistakes of my own.
1. I calmly explained to them that I could probably get a working system out of the mess, but by the time I finished they would be bankrupt. They did not take this very well.
2. I told the idiot manager that he was wrong about the contents of some file, and the poor sod they were all blaming for the mess was correct if only about this one point. He went off an a yelling fit that would make a psychiatric emergency room look calm.
3. I copied a broken set of
4. I wrote a backup script to copy files to an NFS server. I got the arguments backwords, which I realized while driving home that night. If the script ever ran it would have wiped out everything (again).
4. I did not charge them enough.
Strangly, it is only the last point that I regret.
My very first bought brand spanking new box. mac 6400 minitower. I loved that thing. Anyway, one day we took a direct lightning hit on the power line coming in. This was weird because it was well after a storm had passed and I thought it safe to plug it back in and reboot it. duh on me, the technology gods were having a funny I guess, some rogue lightning hit it. I had it running through a fairly decent surge protector, but still it was too much. It just POPPED off line instantly and went blank screen. Rats! A little while later I opened it up, crispy critters inside, all burnt looking, smelt bad, etc. I took it outside and cleaned it out best I could. Went back in, hooked it back up and the dang thing booted! It was running pretty rank though, but I used it for another week until I could fix an old quadra (gf's machine)we had and use that to get online with. If you would have seen the thing, all fried, I mean *nasty* looking, and still see it struggling to work and almost suceeding, well, that's why apple got a good rep for building stout stuff I guess.
Dumbass ME though, had never sent in the warranty on the surge protector, if I had, could have gotten another new machine.
I scrapped it the next week, kept a few things off of it and the case with the speakers, and the drives, although I have never tried the harddrive out yet come to think of it. Hmm, need to find something that can possibly read it.
I had the same thing happen to my cable modem two weeks ago! Killed a TV, VCR, Cable Modem, Wireles Router, KVM, Camera Base/Printer, 2 Motherboards, 1 PS, and every NIC connected over ethernet (I think I remembered everything).
Only the machines that were on the wireless network, and miraclously one on ethernet, were spared. My poor BP6 was running in its motherboard box (because it was having problems grounding pins it shouldn't), it didn't fare well completely ungrounded. When I looked at the coax closest to the wall, there was no center pin, it had been vaoprized, and the inside was charred black. The inside of the wireless router was equally charred black, and the back of the upstream port was literally blown off!
Everything was on UPS's, even the TV and VCR on their own UPS (low rated, just for the clocks), but UPS's won't do you a lick of good if the surge doesn't come from the power lines. I learned that a surge protecter w/ coax or an in line DC blocker are a _MUST_ for cable modems! Trust me, watching god knows how many amps/volts tear across your network and destroy nearly everything in less than a second really sucks!
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So one day I was told to build a couple of PC's at a client work site. I got these big speciality cases for servers but the only thing was that the power supply was not hooked up directly to the power switch. With 4 attachments and electricity I was kinda of reluctant to guess what I was supposed to do. So I called back to the office, and was basically told, "figure it out for yourself."
So I hooked the connections up and turned the power on and *BOOM*. I guess the circuit blew up because of all power in that part of the room went out. Luckily it was after hours and the client was gone so I just went home. I got to the client site early the next day and pointed out innocently, "hey there is no power here, what is going on?"
They said, thanks for catching that! Needless to say I never mentioned it at work ever.
Ever connected all the cords to a computer in a dark room, accidentally flipping the red power setting switch?
Boom.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Stop with the whining about Windows.
A typo on my linux server that resulted in me typing rm -rf /*
:\
I've forgotten what I meant to type that resulted in that typo, but I am more careful when I use rm -rf anymore, for sure.
Seriously. Those things were crapola.
Also, with that same computer, running DOS 5, I had accidentally deleted a game file. I wanted it back, and I knew there was a way to undo deletes, but instead of the 'obvious' undelete, I typed "recover".
Pardon the review but its for those who are clueless about old IBM systems. Early days of MVS on an IBM 145. I was responsible for JES2 - the input/output system. All job processing starts and ends with JES2. It is just a job that runs all the time. Thing is - no JES2 system - no input/output processing. So, in my course of work I modified the task itself to reflect some new libraries. So we ran like this for a week or so. Like a lotta computers, data modified on disk is NOT reflected in the running system. I changed the JES2 JCL but the changes wont be reflected until an IPL or so.
We ran for over 2 weeks, great system. THis was a state government data center so we ran 24/7. Also, our backups covered about 2 weeks back ( you may see where this is going). One day, we take a hit and have to reboot MVS. But my JES2 changes had a JCL error ( ie typo). So JES2 wont come up. So system is dead. Just so happens we were in our AFDC ( welfare) cycle so we had to get our subsidy checks out quick. But system is kaput. No problem - we go to backup tapes. But our oldest backup also had job error. WE have no system. We miss our window on getting payroll/welfarechecks/ out to our finacial people to process. The data center manager starts getting phone calls from department heads about late processing. Soon, the governors office calls about a rumor of late welfare check processing. NOw its pucker time.
Fortunately we had an old SVS system pack lying around ( in an old store room). We got system back. Needless to say our backup system was changed, we modified our change control processes, I learned a hard-learned lesson - "There is no such thing as too many backups".
Back in the day I was making a "luggable" and used one of those old hospital tv monitors as the display. However, the connector on the back was some kludged together jackobson connector that included both the antenna AND the power. I guessed wrong and the power supply was a motorcycle battery (I did say luggable) so the result was this little 10 inch high mushroom cloud escaping out of the top of the box.
;)
In retrospect I'm surprised it was able to keep its form and not be disrupted by the vents in the metal case, though it did dissapate before it got to the ceiling.
Since I figured it was toast and I had the wrong two connectors, I didn't think there was any harm in trying the other two. This was rewarded with the appearance of a second mushroom cloud! It turned out that the first pair was + and antenna ground and the second pair was - and antenna.
After all of this, I found a small choke whose guts were spilled out of the now split housing. I pushed them back inside and they made good enough contact that the monitor worked as well as it ever did, which wasn't that great.
Two decades later, when I smoked a real monitor by setting the XF86Config file incorrectly the result was not nearly as dramatic and was much smellier. These days, you have to work pretty hard to do that, though I'm sure some of you are up to the task
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
but a co-worker was going to empty the database logfile of really critical Progress database because the filesystem was almost full and we needed a few more hours than we had to be able to expand the filesystem.. The logfile is called "pas.lg" and is in the same dir as the database file "pas.db".. I think you've all guessed by now that instead of ">pas.lg" he wrote ">pas.db" and saw it the same millisecond he pressed enter, but too late.. His face turned white and I had to take him out to have a cigarette to make him not faint while telling the other co-workers to immediatly restore the almost 24h old backup. We lost a customer on that one.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
clicking on the "CmdrTaco" link from mandrake's website about 6 years ago, which then led me to a link to something called "Slashdot" My life has been a living hell ever since... this is like, my 6th account.
The More Laws, the less Justice --Marcus Tullius Cicero
buying one in the first place.
I was running out the door (late for an appointment) when I realized I had forgotten the car keys in the house, so I placed my notebook on top of the car, ran inside, grabbed my keys... drove off wondering if I was forgetting something...
:(
While driving into town and taking a sharp curve I heard light crashing sound, and brushed it off as something from a passing car. However once I got into town and reached for my notebook I realized what I had done... and OHHH THE PAIN!!!
I raced back to where I heard the crashing sound (figuring that must have been where it fell off) I found a few scattered pieces (corner of the LCD, esc key, pcmcia cover etc). Someone must have picked up the bulk of it cuz, I never found it... I was hoping to recover the HD but to no avail
I used to have a giant CRT monitor that generated losts of heat. My cat loved to lie on top of it because it was so nice and toasty. One day when I was out of the room, she vomited up a hairball into it and destroyed it. Luckily it was in power-save mode at the time, so she didn't get fried herself. Six or seven hundred bucks down the tubes. Nowadays I have a great LCD monitor, and she still goes up to it with the obvious intent of jumping on top, only to realize that there's no room. I now know what disappointment looks like in a cat.
Yeah, I once deleted the user database for a large online game's auth server that we were hosting. One of the few times in my life I've considered fleeing to mexico. Lesson learned? When you have multiple db windows open, make sure you are on the right one when doing a "Delete from users" (Posted anonymous so you don't figure out what game it is :P)
I was left to work the weekend installing some new computers and migrating applications in a small financial advisor's office. I'd burned way too many hours in troubleshooting some heinous video driver and Jaz drive problems with Windows 95 and was getting tired.
So moving on to the next project, I consolidated applications from two old clunkers to one new machine and reformatted the two old clunkers for other users. Monday morning, we find that I had mixed up the two old machines and restored an old backup of this person's main application, losing nearly two years of data.
Okay, nobody panicks yet because there are weekly backups on a stack of Iomega M/O disks. Unfortunately the drive had died some time ago and Colorado Backup didn't see fit to tell anyone that it wasn't able to write to the disks anymore...
I hauled those Iomegas around to about five print shops making sure that they were unreadable in any Iomega drive, then we had the wiped drive sent to one of those recovery shops, but none of it worked; the poor client ended up having to call all her clients in and try to reconstruct everything from paper records. Sucky.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I had an XT computer that my dad brought home from work. I could run Dos 3.3 on it, run a 14.4 ISA modem, and surf local BBSes. I was in teenager hacker heaven.
Then I got my hands on a 386. I could finally run windows 3.11. However, I needed to get some data from the XT to the 386. I forget the exact cable setup I had to do, but the cables weren't long enough, so I had to have both computers with the cases off, and tilt the 30 lbs. steel XT towards the naked 386.
Of course I dropped the XT into the 386 and both fell off the table with a spark! Luckily, the machine booted up alright. Upon further inspection, I found that I had fried my 14.4 modem! The computer was practically worthless to me at that point, and I didn't have $100 for a new modem. I called Microcenter, and fortunately, my warranty on the 14.4 modem was still good (1 year) , and it got me a brand new 28.8!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Someone donated about a hundred computers to my high school about 2 years ago. They work fine for the most part, however I was told that all but 2 had to have new power supplies put in them becuase they came from a bad batch at the factory. I was replacing a hard drive in one of them. turned it on, everything was fine, then when it hit the windows boot screen, a huge spark came from the power supply which ignited a large clump of dust which in turn produced a large flame, which took off my eyebrows. All but 1 of those computers had a bad power supply.
I once had a fuse blow in my power supply. I didn't have any fuses, so I thought, 'Hey, I'll just solder a wire around the fuse!' Needless to say there were lots of sparks and smoke. I suppose the "NO USER SERVICABLE PARTS INSIDE" is directed at idiots like me :D
Who do you think you are, Michael Moore?
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
I had a decent 386 laptop in High School. One day while playing DOOM I got upset and threw a pen at the screen. Bad idea. It blew out a few pixels, which then glowed a bright orange. After a few days I realized that the spot was actually spreading. After about a year it had covered almost half the screen, leaving it pretty much useless. Every time I had to use it and saw the damage I had caused, it was kind of a reminder as to what happens when I allow my temper to get the best of me...
Back in the late '80s, when Novell ruled the world, things were different (and men were MEN dammit!). Anyway, we needed to add a second hard drive. Bought one from our Novell VAR. Stuck it in.
Now, before I go any further, you should know that our Corporate IT folks had not yet acquired a backup tape system. In fact, it had arrived the day before, but had not yet been installed on the network. Also, the old Novell system chose which drive to boot on based on the name of the volume. If the name was "SYSTEM", it was the boot drive.
Well, our VAR had *already* formatted our drive and installed Novell on it. No particular reason, just thinking he would help out.
So, when we started the format, it formatted our old drive. The one with 6 months of development source on it.
It took us 3 months to recover. I thought I should have been fired.
The Moral: When working on a server, step 1 is *always* do a backup.
Granted no one likes my posts, and granted there's over 300 of such stories already... Plenty of stories include critters pissing on hardware, but I actually had a roomate in college that stooped that low. On his iMac too... Kid constantly talked about how great his wonderful iMac was, until he got drunk one evening, and used it for a toilet in the middle of the night. Not only did i refuse to try and fix it for him, as I had an aversion to draining his piss out of the system, but I made fun of him for months. :-)
Of all the targets to hit late at night... it had to be the iToilet! OS X marks the spot!
I was fiddling around with robotics, and created my beta robot. I decided to let it go in the 'wild', as it were. I figured, hey it's so obviously a robot, nobody could possible take it seriously.
Then it went on to rule the US... Stupid CheneyBot.
[rimshot]
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When I was about about 14/15 years old I was messing about writing an encryption algorithm (nothing secure:) in Turbo Pascal on my Dads work PC.
I was trying to get it to recurse over a given directory structure and enrypt every file. I tested the recursion for the first time and it seemed to be taking a very long time for my few test files. I ctrl-C'd out with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I then tried to shell to DOS and I got an error message about command.com being corrupt.
Yes I'd made the classic error and passed the program the wrong slash encrypting from c:/ up including command.com.
Put me off programming for nearly 2 days.
This may not count as a true "disaster" since I was able to frantically get things cleaned up before any real damage was done, but...
My worst experience was in about 1984 or 1985 when I spilled a chocolate milkshake in to the top of a commercial grade high volume Xerox laser printer. This was a machine that was roughly 10 feet long, 4 feet high, and four feet deep. And cost approximately one million dollars. I *immediately* halted the job it was printing and frantically started stripping the rollers out of the machine in order to clean up the milkshake before any of it reached the polished and mirrored main belt, which would have been $100,000 US to replace. Fortunately for my ass and my job and a lifetime of bank accounts, all that was ruined was three $10 rollers.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
i once had a server box running with almost 1 year uptime (350 days i think), my first one that got that far. i had "focus follows mouse" on my workstation enabled and wanted to shut down the workstation. just before i typed "shutdown" and hit enter, i must have moved the mouse a bit and the cursor got over the terminal window where i was still logged into said server as root.
i prefer click-to-focus now.
I'd been having intermittent graphics faults (i.e PC crashing hard whenever an OpenGL app was running) for the past few weeks, and being a normal techie I assumed that it was the graphics card. So I make arrangements to get a new one.
Apparently, it wasn't the graphics card, it was the motherboard, which in the middle of a new fucking Gentoo install blew, taking the processor with it. Graphics card still works, mind you.
I hate my computer. This was on Saturday by the way, at about 5AM. It sucks.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Considering the fact that most of the university allegedly used VMS, I'd guess this was a long time ago, when routers were not cheap, plentiful or easy to use.
Better do it. I lost a whole lot of data by using parted then messing with the data on the partitions without rebooting first.
Besides that, the worst I've done is break keyboards by spilling things on them.
If only I had never used Redhat, where I got the habit of always using the f switch to rm...
A few years ago I had an AMD K6II-400 processor that I figured would be fun to overclock. Unfortunately, when overclocking, I interpreted part of the motherboard manual upside-down and fried the processor. Thankfully, the store I bought it from had a nice warranty on it and I got a K6III-400 the next week (AMD had quit manufacturing K6II's at that point, if I remember correctly).
The worst thing I've done was in my first week-long job doing some web design.
I had just finished the job, and all I needed to do was to remove some backup files I had strewn all over the place. So I did
Whoooops... That asterisk wasn't supposed to be there... Fortunately, it was almost the first thing I did that morning, so I got it restored from backup without any loss. But it was very embarrasing...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I had this website up and running after a few weeks of development. It was this e-store that had only one manager. He had spent a lot of time in making the product images, sizing them and what not.
I had a testing directory set up so he could make changes and see them live, but in order to save space, I made the images folder into a symlink. After all testing was complete, I think to myself "No point in keeping that test dir" so I issue a "rm -rf test".
Naturally, it followed the symlink and erased all the images.
THANK GOD FOR BROWSER CACHE!
[nt]
I was late to work & was trying to get dressed & review code at the same time. The laptop was on top of the dresser. I put the mouse in my pocket to tie my necktie. Then I turned around to get my shoes. The mouse was still in my pocket.
Amazingly, the only damage was a crack around one of the hinges. When I turned in the laptop, of course I said, "it was like that when I got it."
instead of
Interrupted that really quick, but it took me 3 weeks to find out and restore all (most?) of the binaries starting with letters a to m
So several years ago, back when 54 gigs of storage was a lot, I was proving my point of how RAID arrays work when talking with a co-worker, and pulled one of the drives from the array. The array did exactly as it was supposed to and handled the missing drive perfectly.
Of course, I stuck it back in, and it began the process of rebuilding the array. Unfortunately, that night, one of the drives RIGHT NEXT to the drive I yanked failed, killing the server.
Oh Joy.
that's it :(
Back in my first year or two of programming full-time, I deleted some LIVE data belonging to a customer, because I forgot the "where" clause. For those not familiar with SQL
Yeah, I've done that one a few times - though I'd always had backups 24 hours old. I've gotten into the habit if typing "begin transaction;" first!
EG:
Begin transaction; DELETE FROM table WHERE condition;
Then hit enter, see how many records were nuked (basic sanity check, if I see 217,000 records deleted I can be pretty sure the next statement would be "rollback;"
If all's well, THEN I type "commit;";
Can't do this on MySQL 3, however, but that's rare since I develop primarily on PostgreSQL.
Another good habit, if you're doing much work, is to write a cron script that dumps all your database stuff to your own home directory, if you have the room.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I was taking a heatsink off of a board that...at the time, was one of the best. Well, stupid me snapped off the pieces of plastic on the socket that hold the heatsink on.
I agree...but almost MORE of a problem is the same thing with UPDATE. e.g. 'UPDATE foo set bar = 1' will set all table foo's rows' 'bar' values to 1.
Why is this more annoying? Well, sometimes it's not so obvious as a delete. The rows are all still there. Also, if you use foreign keys against the target table, an overly destructive delete may just carp at you. But a blanket UPDATE to a table may very well keep referential integrity, or otherwise only affect a field that doesn't crop up in public scrutiny frequently. So if you execute such a destructive UPDATE...it may be weeks before someone notices, and you may not be sure exactly when to recover to, or if it's really recoverable at all.
I have been lucky to only have done that once, my first year (working in Access) and in a none-too-critical database--and noticed it immediately, but about ten years later I'm still paranoid and run most my modifying statements thru a gauntlet of tests on shadow/test servers. Oh, and yes, turning off auto-commit helps, although I like doing the testing anyway. :-)
I didn't do this one... it happened to a colleauge, who actually managed to hang onto his job despite what he did.
Will pulling cable through the cieling of a computer room (you know the type with the magnetic locks, halon gas fire suppression system, massive airconditioning and racks of equipment with blinking lights), my colleauge found that the place where the cables entered the room up was next to a row of equipment that ended right where he wanted to pull the cables back out... so, he walked across the top of the machines to get to the other side rather than climb down the ladder and move it to the other side. What he didn't know was that five of the washing machine sized boxes in the middle of the row were hard drives (the old removable platter kind). The sysop came running into the room to se why all five hard drives had crashed only to see the technician walking back across to his ladder.
All five drives had multiple head crashes causing physical loss of data and dammage to the media. I don't know if the heads were damaged or not.
Strangely enough, later that summer, in the same room, I was pulling some cable under the floor and we were very concerned that some of the fire sensors were dangerously close to where the cable was going. The cable got stuck, so I pulled a little harder, it gave way and the fire alarm went off! I was terrified and was out of there so fast that we beat most of the office staff to the mustering area.
It just turned out to be a co-incidence. A different fire alarm had been set off by a careless welder in a nearby hallway and it wasn't my fault at all. The fact that the halon system didn't trigger might have been a hint, but we were out of there so fast we wouldn't have known if it did.
Heat sensors in the floor always seemed like a strange idea, but I guess with all those wires running under there it makes sense... and there were smoke detectors on the ceiling too.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
My favorites were always the accidental damages to laptops I had to repair years ago when I did bench repair. You know it's always going to be a good story when the counter person gives you the paperwork and says that the customer would like to speak with the tech when their checking in for repair.
Problem on paperwork states: "Unit ran over by vehicle. Needs estimate for repair."
Customer set his laptop bag beside his vehicle at the airport parking lot and a vehicle flew into the parking spot next to where he was parked, thumping over the laptop in the process. Multiple parts were held together by only shattered plastic. When I asked the customer why he thought this even could be repaired, he finally consented to a letter for his insurance company stating the unit was unrepairable.
Problem on paperwork: Suspect vomited in laptop. Need estimate for repair.
Ok, now this was one you had to just talk to the customer about. A policeman claimed that a suspect had managed to vomit into his laptop when he was taken into custody. Considering that the suspect would have had to projectile vomit through the security barrier from the back seat to hit the laptop mounted in the front seat compartment, the officer in charge of getting the unit repaired was a bit unconvinced. Needless to say and not taking a chance, I let someone else take over that repair and if I'm not mistaken it was determined not cost effective to repair.
Oh yeah, can't forget the ancient days of the first Canon bubblejet printers brought in for warranty repair. Cockroaches, a baby tooth from someone who didn't have or know any kids and dog hair.
I installed Doom2 on my Aunty's brand new PC (same day they got it!). Unfortunately I had neglected to read the section of the Windows 3.1 manual that says 'dont try and run anything intensive on a PC with drvspace.sys installed'. Result, after a few hopeless scandisks, it was back to the shop again the next day. :(
You know, while reading the stories here, I realize that I have been quite fortunate over the-
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Oops. oooh. Oh yeah. . . That.
Whew. I'd actually blocked that one from memory. .
Okay. .
So way back when a 486 was something special, I was young and didn't have a cool computer of my own. Upstairs where the adults lived, (I slept in the basement, would you believe?), my father had just such a gleaming-cool 486 with many bells and whistles, the most significant being a sweeeeet laser printer he'd just wrangled out of his job.
We're talking a top-of-the-line Hewlet Packard beast. This was back in the day when HP made good printers rather than the cruddy consumer-level, guaranteed to break within three years junk boxes they sell today. It was a very nice machine and my father was pink with pride about it.
I was working on an art-project at the time, which involved animation cell-painting onto clear sheets of acetate. I'd been running heat-resistant acetate sheets through printers and photo-copiers for a while, outputting line-work for painting on later, so I was all knowledgeable about this. Cocky, even.
But that evening, I'd just used up my last sheet of acetate right in the middle of a job I was really enthusiastic about. I didn't want to wait a whole night just to go out and buy more, so I dug around and actually found a stray sheet. Only problem was, I didn't know where I'd gotten it from, and I didn't know if it was treated for high temperatures or not. .
Can you see where this is going?
Erg. My palms are sweating at the memory. .
So there I was, with this rogue sheet of clear plastic poised over the paper intake of that HP thinking, "Come on! I'm sure it's heat treated. Why would it not be? And anyway, even if it isn't, how bad could things get? Probably at worst, it'd just go a bit warped, right? Just put it through and quit worrying so much, you dork!" So I put it in.
It didn't come out again.
In its place issued a series of interesting sounds and smells. Panic.
My father was in the next room half an hour into watching some hour-long television drama. I remember, clearly, because I can still see in my mind the clock dial telling me that I had exactly 32 minutes to smuggle tools up from the basement, casually walk past the television and into the back room where I was silently, desperately dis-assembling a damned printer.
Have you ever tried to take apart a thirty pound computer appliance on a hardwood floor in total silence as fast as you can? It's difficult! I mean, you drop a single screw and it will bounce off that hardwood with the loudest, "TACK!" you ever heard. And my dad is the suspicious sort who perks his ears up to any unexpected noise. --He spent most of my childhood convinced that his son was a dangerous klutz who could burn down the backyard fence playing with fireworks if given half the chance. (That was a LONG time ago!)
Anyway, my point is that nothing, nothing adds stress to a situation in quite the same way a father does.
While in the process of cutting free a mess of baked-on crusty plastic from the innards of that HP beast, I managed to gouge out big wads of pink rubber stuff from one of the rollers which was certainly not designed to be gouged. That's what you get for rushing. Take the job slowly; you'll only regret it later if you don't. It doesn't matter that you're going to DIE in. . . 14 minutes and counting.
"How's it going in there, Son?"
"Hmm. . ?" Panic. Fear. Adrenaline. Please, please, please, don't come in! Just keep your gnarly head turned toward that flickering TV screen, old man, because I have your fucking printer in pieces all over the floor and crumbs of pink rubber stuff on my guilty fingers. "Oh, just doing some work in Corel Draw, Dad."
"Oh, Corel Draw? Do you need a hand with that? I upgraded to
Back in 1995 or so I had a Metheus full-size VL bus video card with 4 megs of RAM. (That was really hot back then - I could actually have 24-bit color on a fairly high-res display! And I had a 17" monitor too, back when they still cost $500.) Well the computer was sitting around open most of the time due to frequent upgrade attempts, and I had this window air conditioner that had a tendency to leak water all over sometimes. The video card was the bottom one in the tower case so one day it got dripped on. I just figured I was lucky the short didn't fry anything else in that computer.
I tried to build a RAID once, with 5 SCSI drives, 4 gigs each, but it got too hot and a couple drives quit working. I said to heck with it and sold the survivors on ebay.
My laptop is a Toughbook, and it has survived an actual drop about 4' onto concrete and still works fine. Supposedly can survive the coffee-in-the-keyboard-thing too but I haven't tested that. I just wouldn't spend "several thousand dollars" on a laptop unless I was really rich - it's just asking for trouble.
My single biggest mistake involved using rsync to try and backup a remote machine, before replacing the live RedHat install with a Debian one.
I was very careful that I got the source and the destination the right way round, but I didn't think about the actual copy itself carefully enough.
Trying to rscync the remote '/' to the local machine I didn't remember to ommit the /proc, or /dev directories.
Part way through the backup the remote machine just hung solid - probably trying to read some strange device under /dev, or similar.
That sucked badly.
(I've also removed live webpages by accident and had to pull them from the google cache, but since that's pretty common I won't mention it!)
While installing 3 Dell power edge 2650's in a relay rack the lag bolts ripped out of the ply wood floor (I had asked for 3 layers of 3/4 inch plywood subfloor I got one) and the rack toppled over on to me. The cost, for my boss it was the three servers (under warrenty), for me it was a broken shin and ankle. Only time I have had a computer send me to ther emergency room, the whole time I was cursing out my boss.
If anyone has a spare gmail invite send it my way, (robert (at) alien (dash) tongue (dot) com)
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
# su nobody $ rm -rf / Sounded safe at the time... shame I didn't realise that Mandrake 10 likes to automagically mount Windows partitions with full access permission :-/
Oh yeah, and the time I plugged a power connector into a Superdisk/LS-120 drive the wrong way. That made a nice sound :-) Pity it never worked again...
re win98
> I'm so glad that it was about that time that Linux made Unix accessible "for the rest of us".
I got in late 93, back when everyone else ran win3.1 (or an early 95 beta or dos or a few os/2)
Lost a little bit of data in each. All "accidents" are related to hard drive malfunction.
1. I had this 2.5 inch seagate hard drive with a proprietary connector. Once you disconnect the connector there's no indication as to how to reconnect it properly. No "missing pin", no "red dot", NOTHING. So I disconnected it, and reconnected it the wrong way. Bam! Hard drive is dead.
2. Bought a Western Digital Caviar drive. After a couple of months it died. Never bought WDC drives since.
3. Bought a Quantum Fireball drive. A couple of months later it died. Never bought Quantum drives since.
So right now there are two companies that I think I can rely on as far as hard drives are concerned. They're Hitachi and Seagate (3.5" drives only).
By far my worst computer accident was a simple one.
I was trying to fix something in Windows 95 really, really late one night. So late that I was in a sleepy stupor far beyond what should be allowed when using a computer. Finally, in frustration, I typed "del *.*" in the wrong directory and managed to waste years worth of stories that I'd written since I was 13. In the blink of eye, 9 years worth of writing was gone.
That was before the days of undelete...
College, senior project, a total of 5 of us, all of us with read/write priviledges in the folder containing our project. Action: rm * Was supposed to be: rm *.dat No prompt mode. I always use my right hand for the Shift key, and also my right hand for the *, so the same hand was doing the Shift as was doing the *. As my hand rotated upwards, my pinky (depressing the Shift) touched the ENTER key). Just AFTER I had hit the *. Oops. Luckily, we only lost changes in one file as all the other files that had been changed were still in an Emacs buffer, and the non-changed files had been backed up the night before. My access rights were immediately removed by the project captain. :)
my biggest blunder would have to be the time i let slip a single badly executed command line in the root directory conatining a sudo rm and a badly placed *, end result, accidentally wiped out some crucial system files (to this day i don't know what) and was able to boot my mac anymore without it asking my to register again and again (getting nowhere):-( Firewire to the rescue and i was able to backup my crucial files before clean installing the OS, however just to make it worse a few seconds before the last transfer was finished the ibook i was transferring the files to ran out of battery life and the connection was improperly terminated which somehow made the first mac's disk unreadable when i tried to boot or as a target disk over firewire
Posting a story to slashdot, which of course had a link from my usename to my website, which of course had a link to my mp3s and movies, which of course was accessed by dozens of people, which of course killed my 256k upload.
Another mistake was typing "apt-get remove libc6", and typing "Yes, I really want to do this".
Nasty - best way to do a "DELETE ... WHERE" if you're at an SQL console is to do ...
"SELECT something FROM table WHERE conditions"
then, once you're happy that it's showing you the things to delete, backup the command and remove the "SELECT something" and replace it with "DELETE". Much safer :-)
:D
Oh, hell yes. That's what I've been doing in all the years since.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Then a few days ago I was moving some files to a subdirectory as root. By accident I was in the / directory and I did a "mv * /somedir". I moved (almost) my whole filesystem to /somedir, so suddenly no programs could be found. It's hard to undo a move when the mv command is missing. When I tried to use /somedir/bin/mv to correct the problem some libraries could not be linked. Luckily I had Knoppix available so I was able to fix it all within a few minutes
I had 4 PCs plugged into a power strip, which was in turn plugged into the wall. They were all running, and in various states of repair (One was coming up from a fresh reinstall, one had just been assembled and was in burn-in, one had a bad graphics card and the fourth was my personal machine). Lightning hit. The power strip failed and ALL FOUR PCs got fried.
I had to replace all the equipment. Fortunately the power strip I was using had a $10,000 guarantee, so I didn't have to PAY for any of it. (Incidentally that surge also toasted the outlet, but new sockets are only $5 at Home Depot...)
I got a brand-spanking-new machine and so did my customers. One of them joked "You should fry stuff more often!" because he wound up with a better system than he gave me.
Last day at work, made a good impression, everyone is very happy with me. A few hours to go and I decide to start playing around on a misson critical Unix box, write a few perl scripts to test out some ideas on inter process communication. Put the pipe in the wrong place. Kick them off. Nothing seems to happen. 'ps -ef' shows a few hundred spawned processes all under my login. Ten seconds later, 'ps -ef' shows a few thousand. My God, how quickly can you type 'kill -9'? Luckily, nobody noticed. Just as well it was a friday.
I actually did it on / , not .. - we had a loaner machine that we needed to return to the vendor, so I had to clean up the files anyway. Might as well have some fun with it. I was logged in on the serial port console (this _was_ the late 80s, after all.) Fairly quickly, "ls" went away, but "echo *" worked fine. The /bin directory was still there, since /bin/sh was running, but it was mostly empty. There was no /proc back then, so "ps" also went away, but I'd stopped most processes first. There was some network daemon running that kept /etc from disappearing, but most other things vanished.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As mentioned above this was during a class, which had a laser printer that printed at least 5 sheets a second.
Oooooh, I want one!
putting my hot laptop on top of a chocolate bar and chewing gum... the chocolate melted and the gum stuck to it.. spent hours scraping it off... and don't ask why i did it.
Investing forum
A few years back, while working at Telewest, my boss made this program that was supposed to signal to the Cable TV switch, to turn off all accounts that were no longer subscribed. The Icoms system, was supposed to do this, but , for whatever reason, there were abiguities between what the Icoms system thought, and what the switch settings were. There was this incy wincy little bug, that, somehow creaped in there between testing and running live, (I presume he did test it, ....!) Every Telewest Cable TV account was switched off within a few seconds, and this was at 4:30 pm, prime time started only 1/2 hour away. Then the phone calls started... You know that tikker board that they have in call centers, well that went from 5 mins wait time , to 5 hours almost straight away. Turning off an account is easy, but turning on an account it much more difficult, as every subscriber has a different package. So, we fixed it the manual way.... we stayed there until 8 that night, with the development team manually forcing a refresh of each and every account.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I remember I was an intern at SGI and was playing around with a parallel ray-tracer on one of the computational chemistry machines some of the engineers had. I had a root2 account because I had been helping out the admin. It was a 32 proc macine which, for that time some years ago was huge.
/blah/blah" /blah/blah2"
:)
I still don't understand what happened then but I was deleting my program and source from one of the shared drives and then realized I was in the wrong directory. So ^D'd the command and thought I was done.
But then I kept getting things like
"Cannot delete
"Cannot delete
Didn't know what was going on! Scared the bejeezus out of me. Thought I had some kind of run-away rm or something. Still don't know what happened.
The other one was when I was trying to get a Segate Cheetah 10k SCSI something drive out of a casing to put it in another machine and back it up. It was jammed in there pretty well and when I finally got it out I noticed a small transistor on the ground. Duh!! No more need to back that up!
But anyway, in about 1992 I had to look at one of the more expensive laser printers on campus (thousands of dollars?) because it was acting flaky. It was pretty heavy and sat on a small shelf about 4 feet off the ground. I inched it toward me so I could unplug and check the connections in back and make sure everything was set up OK.
Suddenly I look down because the printer is falling to the ground. I swear, I saw it falling in slow motion (I was a film minor). I must have pushed it just too far...
Now, this is all happening in plain sight of one of my supervisors in a moderately well populated computer lab. In those brief moments, I could see my job ending pretty quick.
But then right as it's about to hit the floor...it just stops!
Security cable caught it in the nick of time. I think maybe a tray fell out, but no harm was done.
I looked at a supervisor and sheepishly placed the printer back on the shelf.
I never knew if it was related, but they transferred me to software support from hardware support the next year.
Last August, the server of one of my clients had become a little crashy and unstable. I was normally there all day, one day per week. This particular day when I was on-site, the server was especially temperamental, needing a couple reboots before noon. I decided to stay a little late that evening and really give the server a good once-over.
Unfortunately, at 4:30pm that afternoon (about 35 minutes before my maintenance shakedown was to commence), the server went down of its own accord and stayed down-- managing to completely corrupt the attached external FireWire RAID-5 with all 150+GB of the design group's data on it in the process.
I ended up staying overnight, nuking the server down to bedrock and rebuilding it. That only took about 1.5 to 2 hours. Restoring all their data to the freshly-formatted RAID from a large stack of AIT-2 backup tapes took for-ev-er-- and I spent the entire time worrying if the server had been corrupting the data on the RAID before the day it finally crashed and burned. After I put the final tape in to have its data restored, I did manage to steal an hour of sleep on the server room floor.
When the dust settled the next morning, it turned out that only the jobs that had been worked on that week were iffy, and most of the people in the design group had local copies of those still sitting on their workstations-- very little data was actually lost and had to be recreated from scratch.
In the end, I came out of it smelling like a rose, but I have learned my lesson about when it's not a good time to put off maintenance.
I dropped my cell phone into a glass of beer next to my laptop, and the beer glass (full) tipped onto the laptop keyboard. I immediately flipped the laptop keyboard down on a carpet, removed everything that could be removed from the back and towelled it out, then flipped it over to vacuum any remaining beer from under the keys. The vacuum sucked the keys right off into a full dust bag. Sliced open the dustbag and spread it all out. Found all but one key, never to be seen again. But.... The laptop lived, and amazingly, so did the cell phone! Now getting the keys back on was not a picnic.
Back when I was a newbie, I had a file named "*" show up in my directory. So I removed it. And realized how dumb I had just been. Fortunately, this was back in the days of timesharing, so the machine actually had an administrator, and I was pleased to discover that they did nightly backups.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I keep my case cover off and have hdds hanging out. I saw a bottle cap under a hdd and reached a couple fingers in to pull it out. It must have touched the bottom of the hdd and caused a short because the power supply exploded. The hdd was fine, thank goodness, but I had to replace the power supply.
Phillip
One day before my final was due the keyboard stops working on key letters such as e,r,s,t, and other random stuff. I buy a new "word enhanced" keyboard and as I load the software for it I get the blue screen of death. I restart and it says "operating system not found." Ok, corrupted boot sector. I fix that, with the windows disk. It starts to load normally. Then, blue screen of death. To make a long story short. At the instant I started to install the keyboard sofware the system crashed upon itself taking everything with it. Including my paper. So I take my back up floppy to school and try to work on it there. I get this message. "media not formatted for operating system" or something along those lines. At this point the paper is due one hour from then and I am in panic mode. The 20 page rough draft is all marked up and there had been ten additional pages added since that printing that had yet to be printed. The professor gave me an 8 hour extension. What a mess. After a fresh install and reformat the keyboard and computer all worked fine. Got to love windows. viva la linux! openoffice too.
My worst computer accident was when I dropped my PowerBook at school. I had a presentation that day, with the PPT slideshow on my PowerBook, and when take it out of the case, I was surprised to find it off, but I still plugged it into the projector, and turned it on. And I get the Happy Mac, followed by... a blinking question mark on a disk. Never a good sign. It turned out I had killed my hard drive and needed to buy a new one. It was a bit disturbing seeing the question mark of doom projected up onto where my slideshow should've been.
Thankfully, I had backed up my slideshow, and lost nothing of it, and my teacher let me present it later, with no penalty.
Setting aside some software related mishappens I've had in the past, I have to say the absolutely worst computer accident I have ever had was havindg spilled one litre of milk inside an open case, working computer.
:(
:P
I immediately turned it off, but because I was under heavy pressure of university exams, I had to put it on a corner and let it sit there, milked, for five days.
Five days up -- I inspect the inside and think to myself: I'm frobbed.
A hard and thin crust of milk was all over the motherboard, the graphic card, the CPU cooler, and there were a lot of splaters all over any other component, case wall or wire, no exeception. The crust was _so_ hard, that I couldn't scrape it with my nail from the PCBs's varnish and ICs's resin coat.
A solution occurred to me -- I stripped any paper stickers from all the components, showered them with scalding water for half an hour, and let them sit on a basin full of water for five hours. Let it air dry for the night.
This _didn't_ remove the milk crust, so I had to repeat the sequence, throwing some Ajax to the mix -- at this point, I was being very careful with its reaction with the PCB varnish and other materials.
This also didn't remove most of the crud
Well, that computer (my current workstation/desktop) was reassembled
and thank Dog, it still works ^_^ -- better than ever, might I add.
Components affected:
motherboard - ECS k7s5a 3.1
graphic card- ASUS V6800 Deluxe
CPU cooler
PSU's case
Computer Case
Hard disk's shell
two ethernet NICs
My heart
Since then I've (not) learned the lesson about eating and drinking away from the nominated places and keep spilling and messing things up.
Moderators: Don't agree? pray tell why.
Back in the mid '90s I was an IT lacky at Microprose. We did games like Civilization, Tetris, and Falcon (the flight sim).
/r
There were at least 3 large development teams working away in the building; Falcon 4, Star Trek Generations, Tornado, etc. I was in the server room, making some notes about backup tapes, sitting, legs crossed. I was swinging my foot back and forth a little listening to the tunes in the server room over the loud hum of about 15 servers. And all of sudden, click, my foot gently tapped the power switch on the main UPS, the room fell silent, severe lashing ensued. ack!
I wanted to make some space on my development box at work for my linux partition, so I used PQMagic to resize the NTFS partition with all my source code on my second HD...
As can be expected I ignored all 'did you backup your data' dialogs and had PQMagic crash in the middle of resizing.
I spent the rest of the day finding/trying every single commercial NTFS recovery tool I could lay my hands on to get my data back, without success. :)
At that point I was certain that I lost a lot of stuff that I didn't sync with my network drive, and in a last futile attempt, I ran NT's own chkdsk on the partition. That little sucker fixed my partition in 30 seconds flat. You cannot imagine the joy of that moment
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
O.k. Here's one.
A Friend's truck had a bug in the ABS controller. There was a possibility for a sensor to get dirty. If the sensor got dirty, the controller would assume that, at low speeds, the truck was in a skid (or stopped?), and turn on the ABS - disabling the brakes! Yep, you heard me, the breaks failed OFF!
Of course, this caused him to have a low speed accident with some minor hood damage. He wasn't amused.
How's that for a "computer accident"?
Jason Pollock
I don't think any data was lost or any hardware (other than the pencil) was damaged, though, for what it's worth.
Except that you still have to make sure you select the whole delete command to execute. The original poster had typed the right delete, but messed up highlighting it with the mouse.
===
TI 990. Installing a new drive, the old got wiped. No problem, we had a backup. Tape broke. Now I always make two. (the old backup was scotch taped back together, used a special hacked up program to skip the bad block on the tape. After 40 continuous hours due to the poor performance of the hack, all data restored, only skipped some system files easily restored from distribution media.)
===
Installing a new process controler for an assembly line, the driver dropped it off the back of the truck when it got away from him on the four wheeled dolly. Completely trashed, as it dropped into the loading dock well, which was 3' deep in rainwater at the time...
===
Working in the oil patch, a new computer was sent to an off shore drilling rig. The crane operator thought it would be funny to drop the pansy a$$ed techie types into the ocean. Loss of 1 techie type (quit), a $150,000 computer system, and one crane operator (fired). I think they were more upset about the guy quitting than the ruined computer.
===
Put in new UPSs. Site was told to change the wiring for power to them, but they had not done so. No one checked. End result was 105 volts floating on the 5 volt buss. No major damage, since the 100 volts was floating, but it did act rather strange.... (The computer was a redundant hand built system in 5 7' relay racks.) It did cause a production hour outage, which made the customer really, really mad...
===
AIX has a volume manager for the disks. When you add a bit of space here, and a bit there, after a while you can get an improvement in performance if you do a sysback, blow away all the disks, and do a restore - booting from tape. During a weekend of doing that, a tape got all balled up in the drive and broke. After obtaining a replacement tape drive (all hail 24x7 4 hour response hardware support contracts!) used the second tape (always made because of the first story from 23 years ago) to complete the process.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
The mishap meant that I could no longer access my term papers, let alone the programs I'd developed. No one had a C64 anymore, so I was out of luck. For the rest of grades 11 and 12, I had to write papers by hand. BY HAND! And I stopped programming, since I had no outlet for my computer interests. Programming gave way to history, English, drama and other arts courses. At the end of grade 12, I convinced my parents that my graduation gift should be a contribution toward a Smith-Corona wordprocessor. The wordprocessor would at least allow me to save papers, and it was about 1/3 the price of an IBM. That Smith-Corona served me through 3rd year university, when I took 2 terms off and worked, so I could save enough for school, accommodation, and, thank goodness, a Packard Hell. But I'll never forget my Commodore and the infamous Paperclip wordprocessing program...or how losing the C64 led me to major in English, not comp sci. :)
-- SYS 64738 --
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/hda
/dev/fd0)
(should have been
This one is really bad... not to long ago I purchased some hard drives for my computer. It has a True-460w PSU. I added the hard drives, instantly frying the 2 new ones, and my 120gb drive filled with all my precious data. I went back to the store and got them returned thankfully and got 2 new ones, which was then the technition proceeded to figure out what the problem was. He added one, worked fine, added the second - and blam those 2 drives also fried. (Capacitor shot off the circuit board on the drive and smoked like crazy each time.) This also eliminated all case lights, except for the HD one. :)
LESSON: IF YOUR CASE HAS SLOTS FOR STUFF - IT DOESNT MEAN YOU CAN FILL EVERY SINGLE ONE!! (Apparently 6 case fans, 6 pci cards, 9800XT, 5 hard drives, cathode light, cd-rw, dvd-rw was too much. Lesson learned.)
PS - This is what part of the alphabet would look like if the letters Q and R were removed. ~Mitch Hedberg (1968-2005)
My first really 'nooo' accident was when installing a new mainboard. I had my case on it's side, with the new board mounted in place, and all the cables and drives in. I stopped for a moment to anwser the phone, and when I was done, I turned my chair back around, bumping my desk and sending a glass of root beer over, right on to my board and drives.
I cleaned everything as best I could, but I was never able to get the board to post (the drives miraculously survived). The store I bought it from replaced the board at no cost, no questions asked, and keeping the original warranty; I'm indebted to Crystal for that.
Which was an XT clone with an 8Mhz bus and an NEC V20 processor.
I was so excited to get home and "upgrade" from my C64 that I took a corner too fast and due to melting snow lost traction and went into oncoming traffic. Another car swerved to avoid me and wrecked the magnesium rims on his wheels going over a curb.
I couldn't afford to pay for the rims and was afraid of what making a claim would to my insurance so I had to take the computer back to pay for the damage.
It was 5 months before I could afford to buy a new computer. Luckily in those 5 months the priced had dropped enough that I got a 35MB HD rather than a 20MB (RLL instead of MFM) and a printer (Epson FX-85) too.
-- "Most people prefer a popular myth to an unpopular truth"
(If there is transactions in MySQL, I stand corrected, but they must have added the support just recently)
I guess it debends on your definition of "recent", transaction-supporting InnoDB has been there for two years or so. Default type is still transactionless, though.
About 6 years ago, I was working in a microfilm department and the keyboard on the computer that we used to scan barcodes wouldn't work. I insisted that I take a look at it instead of calling the help, powered it down, and unplugged everything. I then hooked it all back up and noticed that the computer wouldn't even turn on. I sat there saying "Stupid computer, what the hell?"... and then nearly had a heart attack when I started smelling burning. I quickly powered down and unhooked everything again and almost shit my pants when I realized what I had done. The connector to an unused power supply under the desk was the exact same DIN connector used by the keyboard, and I'd plugged it in to the keyboard port. When I called the help desk and told them what I'd done they burst into laughter and said that nothing like that had ever happened there before. Probably one of my most embarrassing workplace moments yet.
My departmental minicomputer job in those days was an IBM System 34 at a small steel company. It had a 13MB Winchester and 48KB of semiconductor RAM (woo-who!.) The clerk had spent 6 hours typing in all the steel bars for a project, and some guy out in the shop needed to find the circuit breaker for his welder, and got ours first. The file system on those wasn't very bright - when you closed a file, it wrote down where everything was. Fortunately, the clerk had typed in an hour's worth of steel bars the day before, so it knew where the _beginning_ of the file was, and I spent about 5 hours on the phone with IBM doing the equivalent of "ed /dev/hda1" while we found all the pieces and told the machine where the end of the file was.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Lets see amazing moments of stupidty in computers.
I remember the high school I went to had the maintenance people secure all the puters and monitors with bolts and cables... using 1/2 inch drills drilled through the apple 2s to secure em.
I remember the time a fridge sized puter was being moved and the door it was going through was just a bit too small... they forced it....
I remember the time some dim bulbs were moving all puter stuff to secure it for the summmer... I told them not to touch the monitor as it was being repaired and had its case off.... They ignored me and did it after I left.... never ever touch the face of a monitor and certain bits on the backside internals... BZZZZZZZZZZZZT!!!!!!!
I saw a group of people moving some puters on a wheeled table... and watched said table doing about 80 before it entered traffic.
I remember some my dad talked about such as the old 24 inch multi disk platter disk packs and idiots opening the drive while they were spinning... BOOM! Or shoving a new pack in and pushing the load button without seatung it right... messy.
But the funnest one was the 2.5 million computer in a 300k building with a 150 ac unit and the fire marchall being an idiot inisting they put in sprinklers in the puter room. My dad explained to him exactrly what kind of a total twit he realy was and then explained to the builders exactly why a cheap ac unit for such a puter was a horrid mistake....
Well he got his way on the sprinkers but the ac was a no go...
What made that worse was the puter room was locked from the OUTSIDE during work hours. He refused to work in the puter room and forced them to set up a terminal so he could work outside it.
A general or some other was pissed about that but some months later while standing in said locked room he saw the light when the power went out and in 10 seconds the room hit 250 degrees.
So I'm sitting at a console connected to the Kerberos server of a 2x6 machine AIX HACMP cluster. Connected to that is this way cool 4x2m "Enterprise" style display. I'm supposed to install the newest version of our software, and via phone our admin tells me to "shut down the subsystems" So I fire up smitty, asking "all the subsystems" and getting an Answer I reason to be affirmative. "Shutdown all subsystems." "Are you sure you want to shutdown *ALL* subsystems?" "Yes, I'm alway sure..." And the large-ass screen goes "Ziiiing" as is shutdown the german telecoms network management cluster. Needless to say, all the telecomicans around me go "WTF?!" and a sweating, shaking me takes the cluster back up in about an hour. Moral: _Think_ before beeing sure as always.
Everyone loves pizza. I mean, who doesn't?
I was working for my neighbor (he's only got a few million), and we had a Comcast guy come over to install their business line. My neighbor being who he is, he handed me his (unsigned) business credit card, told me, "Pay the comcast guy, order pizza." He leaves (like goes on vacation for a few days), me with the credit card.
So I did just that.
The pizza arrives, the tech is still installing (brick sucks to drill through). I offer him some pizza, and he declines. "I had a partner once who had some, installed a NIC, and then toasted the computer. Maybe after." So I thought okay, cool, ate some pizza.
Went later to work on the new server. Dual 2200+, liquid cooled, 14 fans, full-size case (customized key), 4GB of DDR in 1GB modules, RAID5, the works.
Just for the record, Iriony is a cruel, sadistic, b***h.
...keep Windows XP on my newest computer.
Purchasing Windows 98.
As long as you didn't install it.
I love C++
Forget this piddily workstation and home PCs crap. Real men (& women) destroy servers!
Here's my tail:
One of my clients had a beautiful setup with 5 racks of server and 4 KVM stations setup. One afternoon whilst I was cleaning up a production SQL Server I needed to delete a file in the c:\winnt\system32 directory (for those non-windows people this is Microsofts' dumping ground for all of the important files). As is my habit I hold down the SHIFT key prior to pressing delete. This causes all the files to be really deleted and not just dumped to the recycle bin. I quickly answer 'yes' to confirm and sit back to watch as Windows begans to delete the entire System32 directory... AHHH!!!
I managed to stop it midway and, after a 15 second panic attack, leapt into action. I quickly connected to another running SQL server (we had 15) and copied over the sys32 directory. Phew... Close one...
Years later I mentioned this incident to the CTO (a friend) of the company. He was not amused...
Ah, and just to show you my humble beggings.
In the bad old days of pc repair I was running a virus check with FProt on a user's system. Actually a Bank VP's system to be exact. Being bored with the scan I started to play with her stress ball. I was squeezing it and having a grand old time (yea, I need a hobby) when three things happened simultaneously. The scan finished (no viruses), The VP returned to her office and, of course, the stress ball exploded spewing sand all over the keyboard (I think this might have been a dilbert cartoon years later). I looked down, looked up, looked down again and tried to disappear. Thank God I didn't keep my money in that bank...
rpm -qa | xargs rpm -e
I swear there was supposed to be a 'grep gcc | ' in the middle
B
--Britt
haven't heard anyone mention one of those yet!
.2 seconds to see what's wrong.
was a student at a big public university, and i admin'd 12 or 15 websites at the time, all hosted on an SGI Indy (woot! irix!)
one day i'm in class and i get a page that a site is down. and then another, and another. cruise over to my office, and it takes about
the ceiling has leaked onto the sgi + 20" monitor. the system is still on, something smells like smoke, and i can hear what sounds like crackling. the case is sitting in a puddle....
got a broomstick, got some rubber gloves, used broomstick to unplug system from UPS, and then unplug UPS from wall. system spun down and i called SGI support. hours later only the keyboard and monitor had died -- the cpu and all drives lived on (with about 4 hours of paper towels and hair dryers)
the system never seemed exactly right after that, but it was still running 2 years later when i graduated!
Interesting how many of these are command line based, I think the phrase I am looking for is "With great power comes great responsibility"
In Soviet Russia Slashdot cliches use you
Some years ago I made a mistake with connecting an old AT power supply. So when I plugged the plug in the socket it banged. But I had not only blown up the fuse of my classroom (it was at school), I had blown up the fuse of the whole financial administration AND the one of the directors office etc. (propably they had misconnected something there, like i did :P)
Let me tell you, spaghetti sauce and laptop keyboards are not a good mix.
I was working on the couch in the rec room on my laptop when I got the bright idea to bring my dinner there and continue working. I accidentally tipped the plate towards the couch where my laptop was sitting and everything landed right on the keyboard. To make it worse: the sauce was a little watery. Good bye laptop.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
--pete
When we bought an Atari 800, I used the joysticks from the console system to play games. After much plugging and unplugging of the controllers, the plastic plugs became work out and the joysticks started failing. Since the connectors had nine pins, it seemed simple enough to replace these with a standard 9 pin RS-232 connector. This was easily done and the joysticks worked perfectly again.
All went well for several weeks, until I was working on a project and needed to plug in a controller. Unfortunately, the metal case of the connector hit the pins of the Atari 800 and formed a circuit with the earth the +5V pins. This consequently forced the Atari 800 to coldstart. After that, I always made sure the joysticks were plugged in before switching the computer on.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
My track record with hardware hasn't exactly been great. I guess it was a mistake to buy a PC Chips motherboard ;) -- it burnt out two processors before I decided enough was enough.
... nothing! No beeps, no output on the display.. tried various components in other machines and basically everything had died, including the graphics card and scsi card, the hard disk (!), and the motherboard and processor. The only survivors were the CD drive and strangely enough, the RAM. Very strange.
A few years later I decided to upgrade my RAM. I booted up, changed a couple of BIOS settings, and rebooted, and
I wanted to set up a 2.5" disk for my Libretto by using an adapter and plugging it into one of my regular PCs. I had done it before on another machine, so no big deal... I got complacent.
:-(
Most of my machines have removable 5.25" drive bays, so it was a plug-n-play affair. I opened that drive in Windows explorer, put a bunch of stuff on it, and dropped it back in the Libretto... everything was fine.
However, upon going back to that particular PC, which was my VCR box at the time, I noticed that my "Video" drive content was exactly the same as what I placed on the Libretto's 2.5" drive. It was then that I realized that the 2.5" drive insisted on being Master, and although things "magically" worked, they worked by writing to both "master" drives.
I still haven't been able to find the Adult Swim Halloween special Scooby Doo again.
So I wandered aimlessly the next couple of days, as the people that I support gradually told me what meetings they had planned for me. And Fry's had a sale on Palm Pilots.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
He thrown the ball in my direction, I ducked and the ball hit the glass of champagne. It spilled in the Speccy and it crashed instantly; I managed to unplug it from the wall, and rushed after my brother. I catched him in some sand banks half a mile from home, and kicked his butt. Actually I dragged him back home and kicked his butt...
The good thing: I disassembled the Speccy, and after a hair-dryer session it worked again. That was a stylish liquid-spill-related crash, with Champagne, not an ordinary beverage!
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
my worst accident was..... uhmmm really stupid: I had a new Duron700 running on a new motherboard but as i couldnt buy a cooler for it, i installed an old one, one that was supposed to cool a P233 Ok, after a few days i had my Computer opened and i was in shorts (freaking summer) so i started to hear a weird noise and next i noticed was a freaking little explossion and my leg hurting like hell! It was one of the capacitors or however they are called. Those little round towers that are all over the motherboard. One got too hot and exploded so the metal protector ended up almost sticked in my leg. fu computer shops that dont have coolers! yeh, fuck ya'll
My worst accident was breaking the motherboard of a BBC Micro Model B in half whilst attempting to insert a ROM chip. The worst software accident was typing 'halt' at the wrong prompt, and shutting down a roomful of drilling engineers who were designing oil wells at the time. They were pretty mad.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Back when I was in high school, for health class I had to write a 15-page paper (longest paper I'd ever written, at the time). My father had a computer (286? 386? I don't remember) with DOS and probably Word Perfect on it... so I was typing the paper on that, my notes and books spread around me.
I got around 9-10 pages done, working all day Sunday... and hadn't bothered to save to a floppy yet. Then my little sister stopped by to see how I was doing -- and, standing next to the desk, bumped the power strip with her foot. Poof. The monitor went black. All gone. I sent her upstairs (NOW!) while I jumped around and kicked things. Of course it was my own damned fault for not saving, which only made it worse.
I can still remember that feeling vividly, more than 10 years later. My wife is working on a novel, and I back it up frequently -- to a server hundreds of miles away.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Funniest joke ever on Slashdot!
It got stuck. I had to visit the ER.
OK, this will date me a little.
I was doing maintenance on a client-server network used by students and faculty at my university (where I was an undergraduate), in 1979. The network consisted of a home-designed ethernet-like net with hubs connected to 30 MB 'dishwasher' disk packs, controlled by a PDP-11/15. It was runing RT-11 with an external time-slicing layer I wrote to share between RT-11 and the network management.
While 'cleaning up' a bunch of the disk driver code, to make it more portable, I slipped and turned off the writing of the appropriate zero-padding required for short blocks being sent to disk. It didn't get noticed for about a day, when a large number of students started reporting strangely corrupted files. At this point, I figured out what I had done, and fixed the code. I then had to spend the next few days, every waking hour, hand-locating bits and pieces of the files scattered around the disk, since there was also significant directory damage.
but I remember this stupid fuck I used to work with, we sent him into the network closet to move a cable from one subnet to another. This was a mixed solaris/irix/windows site, but we kept the machines on different subnets, w/ different servers for various services ( like DHCP, NIS, etc. ) due to incompatibilities.
This dumb shit gets it into his head that he'll re-organize the network closet. Because, after all, it's a lot neater when you line all the cables up and consolidate the switches. Hey, look, we got a free switches, and look at how neat it is! And, yes, he was an MCSE. And our network engineer believed in job security through obscurity, so it took our department almost a day to straighten everything out.
Mine would probably be frying a motherboard while trying to reset the BIOS, while drunk.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
You understand the ways of economics and bussiness. So allow me to enlighten you:
Insurance is a for profit bussiness, at least in the US. The make more money than they pay out. That means, on average, insurance will NOT pay for itself. You will pay them more than they give you back. They set their premiums as such, otherwise, it just could not work.
So why have insurance? Well you have it for things you can't afford to replace, or those required by law. Like health insurance. I pay in $25, and my employer $260, to give me comprehensive health insurance. It covers everything that might go wrong with me, at almost no additonal cost.
Well, if you do the math, that's $3400 per year paid for it. I have never, not even when I got in a car accident and went to the hospital, spent that much on healthcare in a year. I would be much better off financially if I took that money and put it in an intrest bearing account, and used it only for health care needs.
So why don't I do that (pretending for this example that my employer would give me their portion of the payin)? Well because my health is important to me, and repairs to my body could easily exceed my financial means. If I got seriously hurt, or a chronic disease or something, the cost could shoot above $100,000, well over anything I could pay even if I saved the $3400/year for a number fo years.
In all likelyhood, the insurance company will make money on me. However I am willing to allow them to do that for the promise that, if something should go severly wrong, they will loose money on me to try and keep me alive and healthy.
Well, my computer isn't the same. Supposing the whole thing blew up, I'd need to spend about $2000 to replace it. A financial difficulty for sure, but something I could afford. What's more, it's not critical like my health. If I were without a computer for some time I'd be sad (and end up hanging out in my office to play on the Internet at night) but it wouldn't harm me at all.
Insurance like this is only worth it if:
1) The hardware is critical to you for some reason. If, for example, your bussiness relies on it then yes, you want to be covered since the money you loose due to it being gone could be ruinous.
2) It would be financially extremely difficult or impossible to replace the hardware yourself.
If you don't meet those two conditions, you should probably not waste your money on insurance. Instead put that $120/year away, and you'll find that you probably can pay for any failures AND have enough left over to get better hardware.
As many of you can probably sympathize with, when I was younger and more naive I liked to think that I was more talented with computers than I was. Common arrogant tendency of any of us that work with computers, of course - but with disastrous results.
So I was 19, with my first higher-powered desktop. Brand-spanking-new, only about a month old. It had been crashing a lot (courtesy of Windows ME - Thanks, Gateway!), so I was exploring options on how I could fix it on my own. I had already sent the tower back to Gateway multiple times and was just sick of them not actually getting it fixed. So, I thought maybe I'd buy some more memory and see if that helped.
Well, to this day I don't know what exactly went wrong. It might have been that I purchased the wrong size/shape/brand of memory, or it might be that I put it into the slot incorrectly. But as I booted up my system and saw the Windows ME splash screen come up, I heard a loud, thin whining sound. Then I smelled smoke. In a panic I whipped off the outer door of my casing only to see that the memory cards were smoking.
What's more, the pentium III chip was white hot. It was literally too bright to look at. The only reason it soon became okay to look at was because it caught fire. Yes, my motherboard caught fire. Then, as further evidence of my dumbass-ity, I realized that the system was still plugged in and making things worse. So I yanked the cord and watched as my memory and processor simmered down like a dead match.
Needless to say, the delusion I had held about myself being a computer genius was thoroughly shot. If there's ever a way to knock down a techie's ego, it's to have something catch fire and it be his fault entirely.
...there was the time a door fell on it. A solid wood door. See, the frame I mounted it on wasn't sturdy enough to support it, so one day it just came crashing down.
The really funny thing is that it landed right on top of the Quantum Fireball hdd that was the box's hda at the time. When I turned it back on, one of the chips on the hdd got a really small ("quantum") white-hot point of light ("fireball") which devoured the whole chip. Fun to watch, but I'll miss that box...
My biggest mistake was questioning the extremely outdated practice of bottom posting on UseNet and got a flameup worse than Jacko's hair on the Pepsi commercial.
Very very glad to see people are still listening to the Fingers !!
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
A friend of mine had a more dramatic but overall better experience with an IBM mainframe. There were two devices (I forget if these were washing-machine size or refrigerator size), and the machines arrived on a Saturday so she went in to have it delivered and signed for. They opened the truck ramp onto the loading dock, and she escorted one of the drivers to the lab with one of the computers. They got back and found that the other driver had moved the truck, in spite of the fact that the ramp had had the other computer sitting on it, so it had fallen three feet down onto concrete. Needless to say, she was concerned, and when the truckers wanted her to sign for the equipment, she refused, and she ended up talking to a sales VP at IBM, which is not a bad trick for a Saturday. He told her to accept it and mark it as damaged, and they'd take care of it (which, being IBM, they did.) The driver indicated "damaged in shipment" on the forms - she crossed it out and wrote "Dropped off loading dock".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One day my CD-ROM drive exploded a CD - like shot the face plate out and exploded the CD into a bunch of shards. Thinking that this was really weird I cleaned all the shards out of the drive and put it back in. A month later, it explodes another CD, injuring my cousin in the process. So I clean this out and sit down and try and figure out wtf was happening. Turns out that putting one of the top case fans blowing in and the other blowing out isn't a good idea, especially if your CD-ROM drive is on top. I guess what happened was no air was circulating and the CD was getting too hot and BOOM. Oh well.
My friend worked as a 3D animator on a game that recently came out (I'll keep from sharing further details ;)) His main responsibility was character animation of all the characters in the FPS game.
The night before April 1, as his April Fool's joke, he replaced all the 'idle' animations of the figures in the game with an animation of them unzipping their pants and starting to "wax the purple helmet". This way, whenever the player or an enemy was doing nothing, they'd start getting busy with themselves on the spot. A hilarious sight, as you can imagine.
Anyway, April 1st came, and my friend went to his job, waiting for the reactions of his colleagues.
A few hours later, he spent a long while explaining and apologizing to the programmers, the boss and the other animators. They wanted to know why he changed the animations right before the day the game was sent out to the client for beta testing. Luckily, *someone* decided to view if the burned discs were working correctly before shipping them off.
Unfortunately, they did not leave the animations in as an easter egg afterwards :(
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
my worst accident was:
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/hda
when I meant to type
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0
And of course I was logged in as root because only root had raw access to the floppy.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I accidentily mistoke my primary hard drive for my secondary. I took the wrong hard drive out of the computer and reformated the one with the data I needed on it.
So I swung by Radio Shack to get some 5 1/4" floppies, brought the thing home and start playing around with DOS 4.x which was installed on it. Wasn't long before I had formatted the hard drive and wiped out everything on it.
Being a total n00b, I innocently walked into Radio Shack again holding three floppies in my hand. I explained what had happened, and asked the clerk if he wouldn't mind making a copy of DOS for me. He stood slack jawed for a few seconds, looked at the other clerk who just chuckled, then took pity on my sorry ass and bootlegged me a copy of DOS 5.0, which had just come out that week.
Wee!
...was back in 2001, here in Norway. Here's a quote:
"The operational disruptions at EDB Fellesdata
On Thursday, 2 August, at 5.40 pm, all operations at EDB Fellesdata came to a halt. The loss of service caused serious problems in relation to ATMs, balance checking, internet banking, account information, telebanking and company terminals.
The clearing and settlement system for a number of small and medium-sized savings banks was also down. 114 savings banks and an estimated one million users were affected. It was over a week after the problem arose before all systems were back in normal operation on Friday, 10 August."
This was all because they were finally getting full live mirroring in addition to tape backups. So they installed a brand new rack of close to 300 HDDs right next to the current live one. The tech was supposed to clear out the back-up rack to do RAID1 - instead he cleared the LIVE rack. One push of a button. I sure wouldn't want to be that guy...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
- Spilled and entire cup of coffee into a Sparc 20 which was tipped on it's side, the coffee ran into the vents nicely - and back out when I immediately flipped it over. Amazingly, the thing still ran, but smelled like burned coffee forever more. This was about 7 years ago when a 20 was a pretty expensive piece of equipment yet.
/dev/ directory on a live server. This is particularly memorable, and the reason I don't use the "!" operator anymore.
- While trouble-shooting a Hewlett Packard 386, I unplugged the keyboard and plugged it back in while the thing was powered up. This apparently fried the motherboard.
- Accidentally nuked the
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Worst accedent... Well, I just should have known better... /., using my own server, running windows. /. effect and how someones server must be cooked, well, It's true I tells yah it's true.
Posting a story to
Not pretty I tell you. You all joke about the
flinging poop since 1969
It's all in here: UNIX Haters Handbook
I love C++
It was my first full-time job, and I was asked to install a desktop scanner on the Mac in the lab room. Easy enough, right? Just like plugging in a keyboard, hook the thing up and start installing software.... ...except that this was back when Macs still used SCSI and serial ports, and while you could plug-and-play serial hardware, SCSI was another matter. I didn't know until it was explained to me, afterward, that connecting or disconnecting SCSI peripherals while the computer is turned on could fry the motherboard. Which it did. Which had to be replaced, thankfully not at my expense.
Live (or be allowed to continue to live) and learn, I guess.
wow, that sucks. I used to put the last line in fellow employee's autoexec.bat (9x) as:
/s >nul
echo "Please stand by while I format your hard drive..."
dir \
echo "Your computer is now trashed. Thank you."
pause >nul
which just does a directory of their entire hard drive recursivly, and routes it to null, but makes a lot of hard drive noise, and scares the shit out of them. Obviously, there is no risk of damage to anything.
I also used TheDraw to make fake blue screens by turning an ansi screen into a *.com file, and placing it last in autoexec.bat. Say stuff like "Windows Exception Error! Windows had detected a dumbass behind the keyboard. Please turn off the computer and use a pen and paper instead." They would usually tell me before they read it, which allowed me to have the joy of asking them to read it to me over the intercom.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I was at a friends, he had is 520-ST partially disassembled (enclosure unscrewed).
I was peeking inside, with it off, lifting out the keyboard, which is attached to the mainboard, more or less. I set this down, by accident near the back of the machine, where the exposed AC power supply was.
One quick snap and a flash, and that was a dead ST.
Steve: I still owe you an ST, and I haven't forgotten.
Microsoft's plain evil. But certainly not evil enough to code a program like Win95 on purpose.
I love C++
That this question is being asked today. A junior db at my job apparantly really screwed us up on friday by dropping a critical database. fortunatly a develeper was working last night and caught it before tommorrow (its the vaction industry...the offices will be open tommorrow). he called me at like 10 this morning and gave me the bad news. i just spent my july forth restoring it from backups.
the person responsible for this will most certainly be pounding careerbuilder.com on tuesday. i begged my boss earlier to let me call her and fire her today but he said no.
In 1996 I was backing up my home directory to
/mnt/hd/home.tar.gz /home
/home directory, confident that they sat safe on my backup disk...then I accdently deleted an important folder and told myself "No worries, I'll just restore it from the backup..."
/mnt/hd/home.tar.gz /home/important-dir
...some time passes...more time than one would expect...then my eyes scan the comand line..."OH F*CK!...!!!!"...note the -c instead of -x.
free up some space:
tar -czvf
Afterwards I begean deleting files and directories from my
tar -czf
Hit CTRL-C but it was too late.
On the last day of school last term, I was drinking. A lot. For my 110 lb frame, I drank about a litre of Bacardi Limón rum, and was completely sloshed. I logged onto AIM, and started talking to my long-distance girlfriend. According to her, I made many witty remarks, such as "the walls are melting" and "whoa the chair... floooooooooooor." Anyway, I found myself needing to relieve certain pressure deep within my stomach, and vomited into a plastic trashbag. I went back to chat on AIM, and I noticed there was barf all over my pants... and the keyboard! Suddenly, the screen went dead. I went to bed, not knowing if I was falling asleep, passing out, or dying. I was literally like, repenting for my sins as I passed out. I woke up the next morning hoping it was just a terrible nightmare, but no- I went to turn on my laptop and it stayed off! I had fried the motherboard totally as chunks leaked down between the keys and on to it. Luckily I had insurance on it, and was able to replace it the next day. I told the insurance company that "something got spilled on the keyboard." Hey- accurate statement... mostly.
When I was building my last computer I accidently dropped the Tesla Coil I was using as a light source on top of my exposed motherboard. To make matters worse the fucking thing fell out of the boat while I was trying to get it out. Oy vey.
I was coding a disk checking utility in asm on my 386. I meant to call int 13 function 02 "read disk sector" rather than int 13 function 03 for "write disk sector." I lost my whole hard drive. But I was adorky kid and didn't do backups.
The funny part is that I didn't realize what happened until I couldn't save the file I was working on. I went to a DOS shell to figure it out, and it dawned on me as I saw the prompt "Cannot locate COMMAND.COM. Please enter location (C:\COMMAND.COM)>" It was that wave of fear that slowly envelopes you when you stare at a pretty stalactite hanging from the cave mouth and realize that it's a tooth to the monster about to eat you.
Oh yeah, and my Dad told me that when I was 5 years old I erase the server at Cavalier Realty Corp. It must have been a sad system if it prompted the user "Delete everything vital on the system? Y/N:" or something similar.
At the college where I work, every student receives a laptop from the school. During the 2 hour instructional workshop on how to care for/use the notebook (as well as set up p.w.s etc.) that I was teaching I said, "It is very important to keep all liquids away from you laptop. This includes soda, water, beer, and hard liquor." Literally as I said this, someone threw up right on their keyboard and their computer fried. Without missing a beat, I said, "It is also inadvisable to spill recycled soda, water, beer or hard liquor on your computer as this young lady demonstrated."
I was a hw tech, a few years ago, and I had to replace a mother board on a Pentium 166MMX. I replaced it, but I didn't know the clock of the CPU, 'coz the fan and the heat sink were stuck on it, so I looked at it, figured it was a 200MMX, and set the mobo jumpers accordingly. When I started the PC, the IDE controller chipsets for some unknown reason exploded, and that was the end of that motherboard....
Back in the early 1980's, we took delivery of our first UNIX machine - a 68000 based box with a bunch of dumb terminals.
I had used UNIX quite a bit in college - so I knew the basics but I'd never been a sysadmin.
When the machine was delivered and installed, the field tech guy who dropped it off was in a bit of a hurry so he set the system up - left me to play with it and said he be back the next day to show us how to start it up and shut it down cleanly...but told us NOT to reboot it that night because we didn't know the shutdown procedures.
So later that night, I was dinking with the system - I had all of the dumb terminals logged in and did a 'ps -ef'. There seemed to be a lot of processes running that I didn't recognise. Well, I was a complete newbie - but brimming with overconfidence because I was the only one in the company who 'knew UNIX'.
I knew that keeping a sharp eye out for 'rogue processes' was the sysadmin's job. So I killed off the ones I didn't recognise. Then, deciding that I'd had enough, I logged off, intending to head home. I was suprised to find that I didn't get a new login prompt. So I went over to one of the other terminals and tried logging out of that...same thing - no 'login:' prompt. (At this point, you'll realise that I'd killed off the 'init' task).
I was getting frantic - I didn't know how to deal with this and I was down to only one remaining logged in terminal which I didn't dare to log out of. I didn't want to look a complete idiot in front of the field tech guy and my co-workers the following day - and I didn't know how to properly reboot the system.
In the end, I flipped off the circuit breaker to that room and went home.
Fortunately (and perhaps unsuprisingly), nothing actually went wrong - but I was scared and shaking when the system was coming back up and went into a protracted disk startup check.
www.sjbaker.org
Hint: Don't try this at home, it could cost you a computer :P
:D
Back at my parent's house, we were juste done painting so the plastic plaques over the electric outlets were removed. Wanting to print something, I realized that the printer was unplugged. Not really looking at what I was doing, I aimed the printer's plug in the general direction of the outlet... and touched both little screws with the ground pin.
The end result was an inch-wide hole in the printer board, paper that caught fire, a sound very much like pop-corn coming from the computer case, and a completely ruined 486. When I opened it, There weren't many chips still welded to the motherboard. The CPU was stuck somewhere between the hard drive and the floppy, RAM was loose, some cards were welded in place. The last thing to blow was the power supply's fuse, though I can't say I would expect designers to think some wacko would send 120 volts through the parallel port
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
Walking into work one day from the parking lot, I was carrying my laptop in its padded case. The sidewalk was slippery and I was trying to avoid the worst of the ice by staying on the grassy verge but that disappeared at one spot where black rock butted right up beside the sidewalk.
You can guess what happened next: I slipped on the icy sidewalk, the laptop case went flying into the rock face and the LCD screen was history. $1000 and a month later (this happened two days before Christmas holidays), I had my computer back.
I've grown disenchanted with laptops and now will use a thumb drive and PDA to do my mobile computing. Those are much cheaper options for repair/replacement.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
#3: .-files and -dirs from user a to user b as root, and then did the following:
/home/b .*
/etc (bad UPS), making logins impossible. Luckily, there was a root session left on the console. /etc of a nearly identical second machine. So I logged into that one, and proceeded to clean up the editor backups to make comparing easier. I typed
/etc
As a newbie admin, late at night, I copied some
cd
chown -R b:users
When that didn't come back after 5 seconds I realized what I had done and canceled it. Luckily, someone in the first 50 or so users had like a million files in their home, so cleaning up the mess took just three hours.
#2:
After a brownout we discovered that one of the production machines crapped all over its
Some 30 minutes later we had what we believed to be the complete set of files back from lost+found, but I wanted to make sure by comparing them to the
cd
rm * ~
and got the reply
rm: cannot remove `~': No such file or directory
I literally smashed the keyboard. I still have a scar on my right palm from that one.
#1:
Since we had reason not to trust our mains power, we moved a cluster of server machines from the company's basement to a hired data center. This was fully redundant hardware, down to the doubled independent power supplies. The data center provided four separate mains circuits to the racks, UPS, diesel generator, the works. A week after the move, one of the servers died when one of the mains circuits went down for repairs.
It turned out that someone had managed to plug both power supplies into the same circuit.
once upon a time, i learned it was a bad idea to unplug a ps/2 mouse with power on especially when working on your boss' computer.
I found out the hard way when I -- *ahem* -- managed to jerk off on the keyboard of my newest laptop. The keyboard died instantly (although fortunately, no other components were damaged). I even blogged about it at the time (with some other blogs adding to the discussion).
I still haven't gotten it repaired. I'm currently typing on an external keyboard.
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
Recently a friend was trying to get a game working, and during the troubleshooting process I made his PC a dimilitarized zone on his gateway, to see if it was just gateway configuration that was making life difficult. :-)
Big mistake.
The idiot "technician" who had come around to set up his new PC didn't think to set up windows update. My friend was oblivious, and it turned out his entire network was using unpatched Windows XP installs.
The problem was, I was using Remote Assistance to do all this, and the moment I opened his PC to the internet, it melted into a fetid pile of propogating viruses and spam relays. His connection wasn't stable enough to support remote assistance any more.
Even with an up to date virus scanner, it was 3 hours before his computer was virus free...
The moral of the story if not to assume that a Windows computer set up by someone who charges large sums for that very job is any more secure than one set up by someone's nephew.
I suppose some might say the moral is not to use Windows XP
Oh yeah, and this one time, at band camp... I threw a shoe at my computer, and the shoe hit my computer, and my hard drive clicked loudly, and my hard drive died, and I had to get a new hard drive, and a new shoe...
I used to work for a laptop oem and spilled a cup of coffee on one of our prototype units.
Quickly unplugged power and turned it upside down and let it sit there for 24 hours. Next day, disassembled it, dried everything.
Damn thing ran faster than ever! And smelled like a coffee maker.
...heh.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Once I wrote an important not to myself about something that I really needed to do. I saved the file but later that day I deleted it by mistake!!
Really I'm not making it up. Boy, was I sick.
Great post, mods please tack on a "+1, Funny"
I won't talk about rm -rf
/dev/hda "thanks gpart"
/tmp :-|
Or echo if=/dev/urandom | xargs dd of=/dev/hda when I thought i don't have write access to
or erasing a 1.5 GB data at work while I was supposed to backup them, Why aren't the users copying their data to the LAN server for the automated backup ?
I'm not gonna say that I tried connecting my floppy drive to the power cable using pins cause I broke the power pins on the floppy drive itself.
But really the thing that is pissing me off, Is that I like to keep my important work in
Reboot debian, And it's lost
This wasn't a disaster, but it was rather stupid which is why I'm posting this as a bashful, anonymous coward. I have a bunch of Macs (blue G3s and gray G4s and G5s) and have them on KVMs. With most Macs, you have to use the OS/GUI to eject CDs and cannot simply push the button on the drive. One day I couldn't get a CD-R to appear on the desktop ('My Computer' for PC users), nor could I eject it because it's done from the GUI. After a few restarts, I got frustrated and I pried off the drive's face with a very large screwdriver. As soon as it popped off and before it hit the floor, I remembered I had put the CD-R into a different colored Mac, and I was just watching the wrong one on the KVM. ... Crazy Glue worked very well here.
Did you sccidentally hit your new laptop monitor with a cigarette ? ;-)
When I was about 9 or 10, and just starting to use our (possibly at the time, and certainly to me) snazzy Acorn computer (it ran RISC OS 3, I believe), I managed to delete my home directory.
I had discovered that you could copy a directory onto the desktop, and it would give you access to your files from there. For some reason, I thought that hiding my files on the desktop would be a great idea, and so deleted the folder that wasn't on the desktop.
Then I try to view my files from the desktop and get errors. I can safely say that I haven't made that mistake again.
Somewhat more recently, I was fiddling about with a phpBB forum. Due to a busted conversion script to move posts from ezBoard to phpBB, I had a bunch of excess posts.
Rather than deleting them the normal way, I decided that as the conversion had only got halfway through, I couldn't be sure that it would work the way it was expected to. This was because I think the script added posts before linking them to a topic.
So, I decided to write my own quick PHP script to delete everything in forum X. To do this, I process the list of posts, making a list of those which are in forum X. Then the idea is that those topics are deleted. (Note: I couldn't just delete the posts in forum X as one query, as phpBB stores posts in two tables - one for the post info and one for the post text)
Unfortunately, halfway through, I switch from selecting everything that ISN'T something to selecting everything that IS something else. I wasn't thinking that hard about the original implementation. However, I forget to switch a crucial piece of code to compensate for this.
End result: every single post NOT in forum X got deleted.
Thankfully, the forums were just a few days old, so not much was lost. However, I have learnt my lesson, and will always back up the database before fiddling with the SQL myself.
Self-referential sigs do not a humourous poster make.
Ah, yes sorry. :/
Didn't even remember about different table types in it. Always using the default MyISAM
Bot Assisted Blogging
When studying electronics at college, I used to listen to music on my Walkman whilst building circuits and working on the 6502 system boards we used. So one day I found that the plugs on the ends of the short power cables we used were almost exactly the same length as an AA battery and that if you put pushed two, one facing each way into the batter compartment, the battery springs would hold them in place. That meant I could hook my walkman up to my regulated power supply providing a steady 3V DC.
This particular day I had just finished up on a system and plugged my Walkman in but unfortunately forgot to alter the power down from 12V to the 3V my stereo was expecting. The tape spun at a tremendoust rate, smoke started pouring from the case before I realised what was happening and ripped the wires out. The stereo still worked but it had made it managed to wind about three tracks in around four seconds on play!
Powered by onion juice.
I accidentally dragged an Atari Portfolio (old super-portable) behind my car for 40 miles. The trunk had opened, the duffle bag was sticking out, and dragging on the ground. The Portfolio was at the bottom of the dragged part.
It abraded the dragging corner, but the sucker still worked. In fact, by remaining in the duffle and not falling it, it also prevented me from losing any other items in the luggage.
Man those suckers were tough.
A.
I run hardware standards for a major UK financial company... We use IBM Thinkpads, it takes a lot of argument to spend the extra cash, but every so-offen we pay off... Two stories:
1) The other guy at work who does hardware standards has a Thinkpad T40, he managed to spill a pint of JD and Coke into his laptop keyboard, it drained out of the machine (by design), he took out the keyboard, washed it in warm water, put it in the airing cupboard overnight to dry it out and hey-presto, his laptop still works fine!
2) I use an X31, it is so light that I forgot it was in my bag one night when I came home from work, I chucked the bag across the room to where it lives and I am typing that message on the same laptop, which has nothing to show it was ever mal treated in any way.
Moral of the stories: Pay the extra cash (if you can possibly afford it) for better equipment!!
oh yeah and backup and keep a copy of the backup offsite!
1. Giving my wife my 12" iBook 600 MHZ when I moved up to a Titanium Powerbook. About two days later she left the kid watching a DVD, he took a full can of coke and poured it into the keyboard. The motherboard was fried but everything else was pretty much pristine, so I chopped it off for parts and sold everything on eBay.
2. Did a fresh install of SQL Server while the server was online, so it got infected with Slammer. Two days later our colo host calls to tell us we are saturating the network. The short story: close to $9000 bandwidth penalty bill that month (as far as I can tell the lawyers are still arguing it).
3. Lightning fried my Viewsonic 17" monitor and my Abit BX-6 motherboard, but did not trip the piece of shit power strip.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
OK, it didn't actually melt it, but it did fry everything inside.
:-)
:-)
:-)
I'm glad this actually happened to my friend's machine, not mine, too
He'd really gone out of his way to build a reliable machine. Top-quality components throughout, software RAID 1, and even was using a UPS, although the power in Japan is so reliable that I went without one for eight-years and the only time I ever had a power-related outage is because I overloaded the circuit my computers were on and tripped the breaker
Being so careful and using that UPS was his downfall. One day, it shorted out in spectacular fashion, dumping the whole battery load into the computer in an instant. Lots of white smoke escaped, and of course, without the white smoke inside, nothing would work.
The motherboard, memory, CPU, both disk drives, video card, NIC, everything was fried. It was utterly ruined.
This teaches us once again the value of offline backups. You can be super careful and do everything right. Mirroring. UPS. The best components. But a sufficiently large disaster will overcome all those things.
How often do I back up? Not often enough
I think I was running like a 300mhz at the time, but my power supply blew out, and my friend was coming over to play Warcraft 2 with my brother and myself. So I quickly grabbed a different case, and rather than bothering with that switching them thing, I just put them open faced together and switched the power cords to run the componets on the system without the PS. Started playing the game, and it kept going really really slow, then it would crash. Did it like three times before I realized I forgot to plug in the power for the CPU Fan. Thank goodness it was before the heat got as crazy as it is today, would have blown my chip.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Geeks do not dare approach a washing machine! And laundromats are an abomination to Alan Cox and Richard Stallman; they are an abomination to me, as well!
Sorry for the repost but:
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/hda
instead of
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
MS Software isn't that bad.... Especially when you 'use a friend's disks'.
As Windows XP Pro prices approach those of Linux it's quality and usability increase dramatically. I still only use it on one PC, and run Linux for real work, but as a game machine 'Open-XP', as I like to call it, isn't a bad OS.
Argh, I better go feed my parrot.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Back in my days (last month) as a enthusiastic new debian user, I decided to set up a network at home using an old PC as a gateway. I put two old ethernet cards into it and turned it on and tried to boot a debian CD et voila; it didn't work.
So frustrated-old-me opened up the case and poked around to see if I cud figure anything out. Looked here, looked there - and then I saw this little switch. In a split-second, I decided that nothing else worked so might as well try this...
BOOOM! The PSU exploded on my head, temporarily blinding AND deafening me.
Offsite backup.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Installed redhat 3.0
Mounted the windows partition
Decided not happy with linux : rm -rf /
My music studio computer and quake III machine was located in my cement bomb shelter.water wicked through the concrete ceiling after days of torrential rains to drip through in one place:directly over the top of my open computer case and onto my new NVidia card.I lost the video card and motherboard but salvaged the rest.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
A friend, who knew I also owned an Apple ][+, asked for help installing a second disk drive.
Sure, no problem. Except cables didn't have that handy pin-one color coding. And pin-one was not conveniently labelled on the drive controller or on the drive.
Plugged, in. Powered up. Smoke generator and small capacitor explosion on.
"Um, looks like the dealer sold you a bad controller card. I'd go back and ask for a refund."
Fortunately, he did get the refund...
Mark Edwards
My first experience with the innards of a computer.
I was asked to help a guy down the street upgrade his computer to windows 95. Since the hard drive was almost full, it would need a format. My friend, who lived in another state, said he could low level format it. I just needed to remove it from the computer and send it to him.
So my neighbor and I tear the computer apart. We unhooked EVERYTHING. Finally found the hard drive. It wasn't that it was hard to find, but that I had never seen one before. Anyways, I take the hard drive, ship it, it comes back. So now we have to put the computer back together. Ha! I just plugged in cables here and there. Turned on the power and 'poof'. Nothing. The lights flickered.
We spent an hour trying and then gave up. Another guy on the street knew computers well, and he diagnosed a blown power supply. The motherboard wasn't blown, though it should have. I never touched that computer again.
And the guy that fixed it wouldn't tell me how bad I had messed the computer. But apparently that system was 'never quite the same'.
dd if=BootFloppy.img of=/dev/hda
Stupid stupid stupid. 1.4 MB written to the start of my hard drive. Of course the system still worked until the next reboot, and I was able to reconstruct the MBR after much tearing of hair. Miraculously an fsck managed to fix the inode table on hda1. I now have several backups of my MBR.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I've been pretty lucky so far that I haven't totally destroyed any computer. But I have caused quite a few short-circuits.
When I was younger I tried cleaning out my dad's keyboard... while the computer was still on! The screwdriver accidentally slipped, touching the exposed circuit board, and the keyboard would no longer work after that.
When I put together my first PC and tried starting it, the thing started pouring out smoke. After some examination I discovered there was a short in the case speaker (from the manufacturer). After replacing that, everything was fine.
I had a similar problem with my third PC--burning wires due to a short in the case speaker. Again, only the speaker needed replacing; everything else was fine.
One time my dad was upgrading his motherboard and we accidentally plugged in the CPU 90 degrees in the wrong direction. (This was shortly before CPU's were keyed.) It started smoking. IIRC, the CPU had to be replaced, but the motherboard worked fine after that.
I used to work at a company that had several 2.5" hard drives attached to VME equipment using adapter boards that converted the drives' HD connectors to standard 50-pin SCSI connectors. There was no socket surrounding the pins, so it was too easy to misalign the cable, and when you did that both the cable and the traces on the adapter board would burn up. I think I personally fried two of those boards, but I wasn't the first or the last person at the company to do so.
I've gotten to the point where whenever I put together or upgrade a system, I first power it on with the case open, my finger on the power supply cutoff switch, and my nose sniffing around the wires for the first sign of trouble.
Wasn't me honest. I call a call to a local justice court in AZ to fix a number of clerks PC's. Got there only to find out that an electrician wiring a new 220vac curcuit and somehow crossed it up with an existing dedicated 110vac used by all the computers.
KABOOOOM.
You know how hard it is to find parts for a 286 based Banyan Fileserver?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Reporter: Is it true that the president is a hundred feet tall?
Ross Denton: That's nonsense! Of course not!
Reporter: Is it true that he's ninety feet tall?
Denton: No comment.
i have to laugh and agree with this one. a screwed update can cause problems that take way more time to diagnose. with a delete, it's obvious. with an update, it's not so apparent. these are the things that make us paranoid. i see dilbert spec'ing a db in mauve with it's own tin-foil hat.
I cavalierly installed a hercules and vga card in the same linux machine, thinking I would have dual head.
I'm not really qualified to guess, but I think what happened was that they fought for memory space-- the result was a hard drive that lost all of its data.
But-- maybe it was just a big coincidence.
Well, at first I left my IBM notebook on the roof of my car. I only found out the next day, when I called my office to check if my notebook was there or with some customer.. nope, it wasn't, so the car roof was the only option left. Bad thing of course, but it got worse.
:)
I got a new notebook. Brand new. And a brand new lease car. First ride, I park the car in the back of a cement truck, with 50 km/s and my brand new IBM notebook out of the bag, on the seat next to me....after all dust had settled and my bloodpressure was back to normal, I retrieved part of the casing with the Logo. The notebook had left the car through the windshield and flew some 10 metres before finding its end in the dirt....
Good that we had this so called millennium problem, so that guys like me still had some change in persuing this marvelous career in IT
well, I finally got a laptop after many years of wanting one. I remember thinking at the time how convenient it was that I could compute anywhere. So after playing with it for a few hours I set it down. I live alone so I didn't figure putting on the floor would matter. I never knew that the sound of cracking glass could be so loud. laptops are not good floormats. It cost me a lot to figure that one out.
True story: The *very first* time I touched a computer, I was 4 years old. My parents were visiting college friends of theirs, and had brought me along. So I sat down in front of some (now-ancient) DOS machine at the prompt, assuming I couldn't do anything to a machine except just bang in letters on the keyboard.
Unfortunately, I was a somewhat bright kid.
>help
>help format
>format c:
>y
So I have the dubious pride of telling people that the first time I ever touched a computer, I formatted it's hard drive.
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
I had run out of space on my compressed hard drive and I need a place to overflow onto. Returned it the next day, but not before it had eaten the only copy of the first few issues of an on-line magazine I'd been working on.
Yes, and "Open-XP" costs only a third compared to average linux distributions - one burned cd versus three burned cds!
I had a SCSI CD writer which I recently retired after 4 years of use. Actually I killed it. It had been playing up for a while, I go pissed with it and I snapped the tray clean off. I will not be beaten by a computer.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
This was over twenty years ago, but I was a student in a county vocational-technical center over the summer, taking a class in "data processing fundamentals". IBM Model 29 punch card machines, COBOL, etc. The data center had an IBM System 370 mainframe that we could use to run our programs. They had these big red "EMERGENCY STOP" buttons on the wall, cool -- but I digress. This same machine was used by the county to run paychecks, among other things.
We weren't supposed to touch the system console, but they gave us a lot of latitude to try things out. I was messing with it on a Friday, near the end of the day, and I had taken the 8" control floppy out of the console's floppy drawer to look at it. Someone else came into the room so I quickly put it back. Backwards. It apparently wasn't noticed by anyone else either. I found out the following week that the system crashed when it tried to access the floppy, and it set back the payroll processing by several days. It was a really big deal -- some people got into trouble over it, and the rules came down that we were not allowed near the computer room for the rest of the program.
I'm pretty sure no one knew it was me, but I've always felt kind of bad about it. It was a long time ago though.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
In Spring 2003 I started a new job. I'm a programmer but this job had a 10-15% of technical stuff to it (creating users, verifying backups and other easy stuff). The hard stuff was handled by an outside guy.
One day he comes and installs a new tape backup drive with a new software. So I set the tape backup software to backup every night. The next morning I find out that the backup didn't perform as it should, only 20% was backed up. So I notified the outside tech, we tells me to try a thing or two, but still no complete backup the next morning. So I tell him and he says he'll come check later that week.
BEFORE he could come, we lost the brand new Western Digital 120GB HD he installed a month before, which was holding the code to the most important software of this company. With no good backup for more than a week, I was feeling really bad and almost cost 6 figures of salaries to rewrite everything.
Luckily, the tech was able to recover data using a low-level data-recovery software, but it took about 12-15 hours and only got 90% back.
I don't nedd to tell you I'll never take a job that has technical type of work involved !
1. I sliced my right pinky finger open when attempting to pry a floppy cover off a new InWin case (they don't bevel the edges). Some thirteen stitches and an hour wasted, I still got the new PC built. Oddly enough, there was no blood in the case, although there was plenty everywhere else.
2. After achieving 45 days uptime on an XP box I shut the thing down (on my birthday, no less) and proceeded to vacuum out the case. Silly me. It never powered up again. Had to buy a new motherboard.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Anyway, at some point, my dad had downloaded a 'joke' from a BBS. It acted like you had 'won' a free format of your computer, and it started acting like it was doing so. I panicked and shut down. I booted off a floppy and ran Dr. Watson, which MS used as an antivirus back then. Being new to computers, I wasn't particularly sure of what I was doing. When Dr. Watson reported that some file had changed, it asked what I wanted to do. Of course, I told it to Wipe the file clean of viruses.
What I didn't realize was that Wipe actually meant it was zeroing the file.
Goodbye, win.ini. Goodbye, system.ini.
I learned how to format and re-install from scratch that weekend.
A few years back I was working at a lab for the summer (we'll just call it PNNL), and I was going to go get some lunch. I had my prized Nomad Jukebox with me, which at the time was the only MP3 player out that had a hard drive.
Anyways, when I went to unlock my car, I set my papers, books, nomad, etc on the roof of the car and forgot. I then (in true 16 year old fashion) took off from the parking lot at 30 miles an hour, speeding around a corner and out onto the road. As I made the turn, however, the Nomad did not. I slammed on the brakes and went to go pick up the pieces.
Suprisingly enougth, except for some nasty road rash, the Nomad survived! To think that people freak out about the safety of devices with hard drives in them....
... Some digital archeologist will unearth that site and be very dissapointed in trying to recreate all the lovely standards mentioned in the pictures.
~G
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
Well, I was about to make a clean install but for some odd reason the system had labeled my d: partition as c: so instead of wiping the windows partition I wiped everything else! I couldn't unformat but I was lucky enough to have access to tiramisu (I think that was what it was called back then) and managed to rescue every important file.. The rest, well, the programs could simply be re-installed. Had I not been able to recover them I would have lost all the poetry and fanfiction I had written in a couple of years not to mention the painstakingly romanized Japanese lyrics for more than 100 songs.. Now I have backups of the most important stuff.
I used to use a cheap laptop to type up my schoolwork when I was in high school. To print out documents I had to hook it up to a Macintosh through the keyboard port, and it would print out the file on-screen. Well, one day I was typing up an assignment that was due that day, so I had to use the classroom's Mac to print it. The assignment printed fine, and all I had to do was unplug the laptop. That's where I goofed.
I reached along the back of the machine, which was still on, and pulled out....... the power cord. The computer failed to boot up after that. It just sat there with that blinking ? icon that means you broke the OS.
I made up some excuse to the instructor, but I don't think he bought it.
I was logged in as root on the NFS server, trying to remove some hidden files in /home ... Long story short, I accidentally put a space between the . and the * resulting in ...
rm -rf . *
or something to that effect.
Bad times.
OK.. This isn't really serious and didn't cost me $$$ but freaked me at the time. I had just taken ownership of a new Dell laptop when I managed to spill a small portion of coke on the keyboard. Not knowing how easy it was to remove the keys and wanting to get the coke out ASAP, I scanned the room looking for something to use. I spotted a VACUUM CLEANER. So I put the vacuum cleaner on maximum suck and aimed it at the coke affected area. It sucked the coke out and then, much to my horror, it sucked the capslock key right off ! After the immediate shock, I turned off the vacuum cleaner and managed to find the bits inside the bag - undamaged - and put it back together. Moral of the story: Vacuum cleaners and laptop keyboard DO NOT mix !
First, me and a couple other Marines were working on a brief on the Captains laptop. Spilled beer on it. By some miracle, that only made the keys stick a little. he never noticed.
More serious, while engaged in "recreational chemistry", I spilled the ammonia onto my expensive ergonomic keyboard, frying out half the traces and destroying the keyboard completely.
Back in college, circa 1985-1989, I had a little computer graphics/interactive media studio that helped pay for tuition. My partner and I mostly made graphics that ended up on cheezy local car commercials for a few hundred bucks a pop. We used Amigas, and we actually did OK.
So, one day, this guy asks us to make a touch screen kiosk kind of thing that he had seen at the mall. We did all the scripting, he loved it - and then we needed a touch screen. At the time, they were crazy, crazy expensive. But, you could just buy a kit that fit on a standard Amiga monitor for a whole lot less. It did, however, involve opening up your Amiga 1084 monitor and installing a secondary power supply.
So, never having worked on such a thing before, I disassembled my monitor, unplugged it, got to work. When it was installed, I absolutely had to hook up an Amiga and try it out, while guts of the monitor where still exposed.
It tested well, but I was tired. So tired that as I reached for a screwdriver, my bare arm made contact with two hefty capicitors sticking out of the monitor guts.
It was then that I learned about high volts. My arm, involuntarily, swung back so violently that it lifted me out of my chair backwards. I ended up on the floor, on my back, seeing a purple and orange haze, and having no feeling at all in my arm.
The haze went away. My arm stopped tingling about an hour later. The client never paid for his touch screen kiosk.
Jonathan
When I was new in the consulting business. There was a company that was a regular customer to us. They ran a file server Novell Netware 4.11 (if i remember correctly) on a noname homebuilt pc. And they had performance issues. After some investigation it turned out that the SCSI disk was running on a SCSI controller connected thru the ISA bus which is far to slow for any fast disk action.
So next step was to install a PCI based SCSI controller. So one was required and time to do the exchange of SCSI controllers was set to a lunch since the people on the company was reluctant to work during the evening.
So we agreed to do this on their lunch break. That would give us a solid hour to shut down, exchange the SCSI controller and reboot the server.
We shut down the server. We changed the controller and rebooted it. For those of you that has worked with Netware back in those days know that it booted regular DOS first and after that it starts to boot Netware.
Well in this case it booted DOS fine, it started booting Netware and then it tried to mount the disk volumes and it reported:
"The Netware volume is corrupted, repairing!". And without any question or anything it started repairing and writing like mad to the disk. 87000!!! errors later it reported:
"Finished, rebooting"
And when it reached the same stage again it reported the volume corrupt and started repairing and 55000 errors later it rebooted etc.
Not even NSA would have been able to find any useful data on that disk after that.
Turns out that the new SCSI card and the old disk didn't really get along. But they got along enough so that DOS could boot from it. Thanks for that!!!
Needles to say, no one at that office could do any real work during that afternoon.
We had made sure that we had a good backup from the night before so we could restore the data. But it turned out that since our version of Netware on this server was an upgraded version of 4.11 and the NDS partition wasn't named the same when you did a fresh install, we couldn't restore any user logins or printer queues etc.
Luckily the company wasn't that big so one of us sat down and added all accounts by hand while the other of us had to run around to all clients and update the network config.
We were finished round 0530 in the morning.
Home to sleep for one hour take a shower and back to check that the users could work and then of to another customer that I was supposed to see that day.
Moral of the story is that NEVER, EVER touch hardware of critical servers during daytime. No matter how eager or persuasive customers/bosses can be. Plan when you are going to do something and always make sure that you have a lot of hours available if something goes wrong.
My old boss (tech guy, really no PHB) had a bunch of remote terminals open, all running root (of course) .. then he (obviously) typed a shutdown command in the wrong window.
That shutdown an applicance in a powerplant, and suddently loosing this connection, everything triggered the way it was supposed to: The plant was shutdown with the emergency signal.
It takes serveral hours to bring a powerplant back online.
A short time later, the shutdown command was re-fitted to ask for the password - which throughout the site was changed to contain the name of the server.
Putting my fist through a laptop in sheer fury.
Note to self, it's not worth it.
I hate computers.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
I could tell horror stories of computer tech's I have worked with over the years but that's not fair. But I will say some thing I haven't seen posted yet. Thus up north in Canada one feels that +10C is just excellent in a tee shirt as the snow is melting as the sun is truely starting to show it's colours. Ah the all to short summer is coming!! I fiqured it was time to clean some extra hardware with my electrical spray clean stuff. On this note I decided that I would try it on my extra keyboard as I knew that it wasn't for plastic but pulled dirt of any thing without residue and never damaged plastic. I went outside on the walkway where the snow was clear and put down the parts to be cleaned. I started with my keyboard and quickly discovered that it's to cold for the spray to evaporate and became a strange thick clear gel like glue that cracked when touched but still stuck to skin really good. Thus I dragged everything back inside with the keyboard in hand and thus it began to heat up and stink. Out the door it went and never have I cleaned hardware in the cold again.
The immature mind measures.
That was so damn funny.. I just spewed beer all over my PowerBook. Dammit...
1) Shorted a 110V to chassis during a change of a power supply - sparks and another trip to Fry's.
:-)
2) Deleted a NetWare volume while trying to mirror it - mirroring was an attempt to create a backup solution but ended in the worst -case scenario. The volume contained source code and the mirroring was an attemnpot at cloning the server. Wrote a low-level disk accessing program (Turbo Pascal) to read the deleted volume 4K block by 4K block, seek out source code-looking words like "begin" and "end;", and then save those chunks of disk to another, then went through those recovered blocks and stiched my project back together. Hoopha! That's one of those nights you end of napping under your desk
My server has an Antec power supply, with an external molex power connector. I decided I would rig up some case fans (120mm ones) to pull cool air through the window and blow out hot air near the top (my room gets to be 100 or so during the summer and I'm not home.) Anyways, I had to splice in more wire to get it to reach. I wired one of the lines incorrectly along the way, and when I leaned behind my server and tried to plug it in, it instantly arced and the server shut off.
I unplugged the power connector and opened the case, inspecting for damage. I couldn't find any, so I assumed that the power supply's internal fuse had blown (a lot of them use metal strip type fuses that complete the circuit again after a cool down) so I plugged the PS back in and hit the power switch on the front of the server. Green light came on, fans came on.. but nothing on the screen. And then I start to hear clickclickclickclick... clickclickclickclick.. from all four of my server's IDE drives.
In the long run, it ended up frying my video card (an S3 ViRGE, good riddance,) one of my 3Com gigabit NICs, all four hard drives, and my motherboard. It cost me $1000 to get the data retrieved from the backup drive (which were Western Digitals, by the way. My main system drives were IBMs, and they were damaged way beyond what the WDs were.)
Anyhow, I thought that was a pretty good one. I'll never "hot plug" molex connections in anymore, nor will I try to make my own cabling. Hah.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
for my Programming Languages class we had to write a program in perl that output files to a temp dir and when it was done, delete the files we created, well 80% of the class managed to unlink their home directories on their school unix account. The schools' IT dept. was mad as hell. They removed Perl from the servers and told us to learn programming theory using another language.
I've always used a pair of flatnose pliers to attach and detach CPU fans. You know, grab onto that little metal ear that sticks out and bend/push. Never had a problem.
///Leif
Then I watched a friend install a cpu fan, and noticed that he was using a flathead screwdriver. Great, I thought!
So next time, when installing new 80mm cpu fans + heatsinks on my Dual Athlon MP 2000 system, I used a flathead screwdriver.
I slipped. Not once, not twice, but three times. Still, I didn't see a mark, so I figured maybe it was fine.
When powering up the system, i heard a crackling sound, and one of the CPUs burned.
I removed it, and the system ran fine on one cpu. I figured maybe I had crushed the CPU core, so I ordered another Athlon MP 2000 off ebay.
I got it, installed it, and the same thing happened. Crackling sound, and the smell of burning electronics.
I then realized it might be the motherboard. So, I went back to the store (realizing that for once I had paid for the replacement warranty!).
I had them test it there. They didn't have Athlon MP cpu's in stock anymore, so they tested with an XP 2000 instead. Worked fine, in both sockets!
I figured, maybe it's not so bad then.
When I came home, when installing my MP CPU, I slipped again, and stabbed the board for the fourth time.
This time, it wouldn't power up right. It made beeping sounds, like when the memory isn't seated right.
I figured, ah well, I'll just use the second CPU socket, that might work.
So I moved the CPU (without slipping) to the second socket, and powered up.
Crackling sound. Smell of burnt electronics.
So, my beautiful Tyan Tiger board, and THREE Athlon MP 2000 cpus were dead.
I damn near cried. It was one of those moments where it would have been awesome to have someone else to blame.
Anyway, I drove right back to the store, and actually got warranty credit for the board (since they don't carry it anymore) and bought a P4 2.6 with HT, an ASUS board, and DDR memory... $500 bucks later, lesson learned. Use pliers!
I was moving from Sacramento, CA to Walnut Creek, CA (About 80 miles) so I took the Sparc 5 out of the rack, very carefully untangled the UPS, put them both in the truck and drove like hell to the new location.
I made it to my location and up several flights of stairs.. plugging the UPS in with very little time left.
Later that night, some drunk asshole creamed a power pole and cut out power to the entire neighborhood for 5 hours.
The UPS just didn't last...
I was in the SQL database for the student facebook at college. It's basically just a student directory for student use, with additional info like dating status, personal hobbies or interests, copies of unix plans and projects, etc...
And I decided to update my interests while I was in there... without thinking, I left out the where clause... and suddenly all two thousand students have the same interests. My interests. Normally this would be a good thing, but sadly, I felt the need to find backups...
long time ago, in my very first nerd job, the very first IBM PC (8088 pre-hard-drive) was specially imported from the USA for our development work, and put on my desk in London UK, together with a power lead and a shiny new square-pin power plug.
1) attach plug to lead
2) insert plug in receptacle
3) BANG
oops
When I was very young and thought I knew everything there was to know about computers I went with my stepdad to work one day. He worked, at the time in a heating and cooling distributor company where they sell parts and services to places like McDonalds and Taco Bell. Well the place was huge and the warehouse was a playhouse to someone of my age. I ran around jumping off things and generally being annoying. Until I found the door to the basement. In the basement was one of them absolutly huge mainframe systems and for some reason I thought pushing buttons on the control panel was a good idea. The thing started making weird noises and I thought "I know I will save the day by unplugging the system!" So I yanked on the giant power supply and the system went off. I went back upstairs and continued playing in the warehouse, using bits of pipes and stuff to build robots. Well apparently the entire company intranet had died that day. All parts and inventory were lost and they could no longer conduct business that day so everyone went home. Later that week I heard my stepdad talking about the incident saying something like "The main computer crashed and took almost everything with it. We called out the tech guy and he was able to save most of it but we are really set back a good coupla $K" I never told.
rm -rf xxx * or its relatives must be most common - two years ago over crappy modem line in production system - somehow the space got there and you know the rest.. System backup saved me in 30 seconds BUT the absolutely "don't delete" audit files for last 10 minutes were gone.
One from my old days ( 370 / MVS ) when we moved from mountable disks to fixed. ZAP ( patch ) the VTOC ( directory in other languages ) - always ! always remember to give the keylength, done it XXX number of times before but.. Of course Monday night was scheduled for new IPL ( boot ) and the rest is history - unusable system, fixed disks, only had one disk prepared.. Nice to be able to IPL from console - painful but that is one feature most systems are missing today.
Actually - it was a lesson to do something. I wrote a mini VM to boot from tape or cards(!) that was able to mount any disks and if necessary to fix VTOC, write the boot records and even write a stripped system in real emergency - much like these (mini) bootable CDs today like Knoppix, etc. they are great. This system was later on used by our HW guys to load and run disk tests without loading the big OSs - great time saver.
i had overclocked my 486 dx2 to 66mhz(originally 33) just for something to do, it worked VERY stably for about 8 months then it started smoking, a LOT and then all it would do is give me "non system disk or disk error" and fill the screen with numbers and then freeze, i openened it up and an area of about 6 inches around the CPU was burned black. needless to say i lost EVERYTHING and i couldn't afford a new computer for 3 years. STUPID me
All users of mysql will someday suffer this fate, but you can't say this is a user fault. That's a really terrible interface that allow you to destroy your data with a common command. You just need to be a little tired to make it. That's why I always put the following option in my .my.cnf file:
[mysql]
safe-updates
Where I live (in Europe) we use 220V AC. So the old power supplies all came with a red switch on the back of it labelled '110V' and '220V'. One day my two younger brothers played NHL 90.something on my 486, and the younger of the two - being bored since he had to wait for his turn - decided to crawl under the table and check out the computer from behind. According to the elder one his last words (before the computer died) were "Now watch how that game will be fast after I switch to TURBO!"....
Got one sitting at work - rack ear is munged up, but with a little "work" I think that I can get it in.
Those rails are pretty evil. heh.
I had already set-up four of the stations, and I was hard at work testing stuff on them, but in the few minutes while each computer was running tests or booting up or whatever I would switch to the task of trying to assemble another test station. So I stick some RAM in to this one system, boot it up, and then roll back over to one of the test staions to check something. I then roll over to my actual desktop, which was on the other end of the cubicle, and as I'm entering some data I catch a whiff of smoke. I check behind me, but I don't see anything, and I figure it's someone else's fault.
Two minutes later some random guy walks in to my cubicle and says, "hey didja know your computer is on fire?" I turn around and discover that there is in fact a large amount of smoke coming out of the computer. So I race over, yank the power cord out, grab the nearest piece of paper to use as an oven mitt, and attempt to extract the burning RAM. After a couple failed attempts I manage to remove it ... in peices.
So now this whole section of a giant building smells like burning ozone, I have charred peices of RAM lying on the table as my "smoking gun," and some guy I've never met just had to inform me that I had nearly caused a major fire. I was absolutely convinced I was going to be fired, and since a family member and helped to get me the job I was convinced he was going to be screwed by association.
My one saving grace was that, because I was just a temporary intern and they didn't care about making me walk a lot, they placed my cubicle in the same building as my workgroup, but not in the same area. So no one in the immediate vicinity (the one's who got to inhale the stench of ozone for the rest of the afternoon) actually knew me, and because the engineers in that area were forgiving people, or maybe just apathetic, no one ever told my boss about it. Amazingly, it turned out the only thing that was actually damaged (besides my pride) was the RAM itself, which I had suspected was bad anyway, and which I happened to have enough extra of that I could assemble all the systems without the charred DIMM.
So my summer internship lasted until the end of summer, and I later helped save the company's huge exhibit at SIGRAPH (you'd think the people that organized the exhibit would check before they decide to replace 50+ monitors for the exhibit, but no they just assumed all products made by their company would magically work together out of the box). So since I saved the thousands of dollars that would have been required to acquire, pack, and ship 50+ monitors overnight, the cost of the RAM I burnt was kind of made up, and ultimately it was a good thing the company never fired me.
But sitting in my office that afternoon, with the stench of ozone everywhere, expecting that my boss would walk in any minute and tell me to pack my things, I learned the valuable lesson that one should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWYAS CHECK TO MAKE SURE RAM IS SEATED PROPERLY BEFORE TURNING A COMPUTER ON.
"My loft fell on my laptop."
The poor little laptop came in to the desk in its own plastic body bag. The onsite warranty rep was crying by the time all the paperwork was done.
Yes. But for Windows end-users...
/mbr". (or whatever)
There's a desktop, pretty pictures, and the same old apps.
We're talking, an end-user, accidentally opening the command prompt (or "running DOS" as they know it) and happening to choose to type "fdisk
Incidentally, I added Linux to a multiboot system. It renumbered my partitions so that when I put back NTs loader, it wouldn't go. Man it was pretty simple to fix (I think I just edited boot.ini in the end with the new numbers), but very hard to pinpoint! Grrr.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
I heard the best way to clean your keyboard was with a vacuum cleaner, but I only had an upright Hover. So I lifted it up above my keyboard and gently moved it back and fore.
:)
Unfortunately, it was a bit heavier than I thought, and it dropped down onto the keyboard.
It was at this point I realised what the term "Beats as it sweeps as it cleans" meant. The cleaner beat my keyboard to death.
Well I was young.....
Some 15 to 20 years ago, I just finished typing in an incredible long listing of some game, off a game magazine, into my wonderful Atari 800XL. It took me some 24 hours of typing (not so fast, back then). Of course, first thing: save the program to tape. First mistake: I always saved on the same tape, so I overwrote the latest save of the listing. So, while it was saving, making those usual noises (it took about 5 minutes), I got up to stretch my legs and relax, feeling happy about finishing. So I grabbed a tennis ball, and started throwing it at the wall, it relaxed me... at the 4th or 5th throw, the ball hits the tip of a wall light, shoots right down, hits the plug of the power strip which is inserted into the wall, which immediatly unplugs from the wall, and powers down the computer and recorder. I remember gazing at the black screen for a minute or 2, I just couldn't believe it.
I have personally lost more keyboards to gravy than most.
It had just come out, and my stepfather bought it. Eager to try it out on my computer, I installed it, and looking to maximize my HDD space, I installed DoubleSpace.
DoubleSpace was a disk compression tool, as many will remember had a lot of problems. Of course, I didn't know this at the time.
There was an option to change the compression ratio. I believe the default was 2:1. I set it to 16:1 (I was probably 13 or 14 at the time).
A couple of months of use and poof. One dead MFM controller. I'm still trying to figure out if it was EOL for the controller or if doublespace simply gave it more of a work out than it could handle.
Nasty - best way to do a "DELETE ... WHERE" if you're at an SQL console is to do ...
...a check that there is a DB backup first!
My worst and probably most distressing to this very day... has got to be the demise of my beloved Commodore VIC-20.
I loved that VIC-20, some people love chocolate, sports cars, pornography... nothing compares to just how much I loved that computer.
I was a young lad of meager means, but I had what I felt at the time, was a sweet rig. Had my own black and white Emerson TV as a monitor, had my ultra-ghetto joystick and Kawala artpad... data cassette drive, Oki Data printer. As much nerdy crap a pre-teen could ever hope for....
To match this ultra ghetto rig, I had an ultra ghetto desk. Particle board 'computer desk' with contact paper wood grain. It did the job, but it was very wobbly.... which lends to just how it died.
My older Sister was doing some science project for school involving brime shrimp: Sea Monkeys. They sat on top of the computer desks shelf, came into the room where the VIC-20 slept and slammed the door.
Down came the sea monkeys and the cascade of murky water they lived in. Larger ones flopping around on the keys.
As you can guess, it was trashed.
I felt sick to my stomach about it, I still do just recalling this tale. I think I'll go take a hot bath and cry for a while...
Somehow a mouse managed to crawl into my old Apple IIe disk drive when I was a child of about 7 or 8. I was trying to write a game in BASIC using ProDOS and even had the sense to have a backup of the game.
;-)
It was a simple 3 player ship on the water firing up and down at a flying saucer and submarine. It was slow and I'd just gotten the graphics for the ship to fire working and had started on some collision detection. I was very proud of my efforts which at that age and with no outside guidance had taken me a very long time to get working properly.
Unfortunately the result of having mouse droppings in the disk drive was that it wiped every disk put in it (including my backup) and wouldn't read back from it. I lost the game, and it put me off programming for a few years seeing my effort wasted even though I'd done the right things. I did eventually get the mouse droppings out of the drive and get it working properly again.
I've been working as a consultant and developer for a good 10 years now and no other loss has been as personally devastating to me as that one. I now have multiple "paranoia" backups of most of my work or important documents. So that's one GOOD thing that came out of it all.
So yeah that's my story of how a little mouse shit stunted my growth as a developer
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
In 1983 when I was a junior, I was an aid for the high school math teacher, who was the only one at the school who controlled the computer (a TRS-80 Model III). It was a cool class and easy credit, because all we did was type in huge BASIC programs from SoftSide magazine and play games.
He'd been typing in this program for most of the day, then I showed up and continued typing. For some reason I thought it would be funny to add a few lines at the beginning:
1 cls
2 print "TRS-80 Model III Basic"
3 print "Copyright (c)1981, 1982 Tandy Corporation"
4 print "Ready"
5 print ">";
6 line input a$;
7 goto 5
I ran it and waited for him to see it. He did, typed LIST and it came back with a prompt. He cursed (that was rare) and yelled at another student. I was rushing over to tell him it was a joke when he hit the reset button.
I didn't dare tell him the truth. I saw my life flash in front of me, though.
it got a virus. It died. I bought a Mac, then another Mac, then another...
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
I've seen similar things happen at several places that I've worked at. A computer or other piece of equipment needs to be excessed. It gets stripped for desirable parts and then it gets loaded up with all the broken and obsolete parts that are sitting around the shop/office. The property office insists that the PC have a video card, hard disk, etc. They didn't say that they had to work or be the original parts.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I'm not sure about Sybase, but in sqlplus for Oracle you just type 'ed' at the SQL> prompt and it throws your most recent statement into vi.
When I use postgres at home, I do the same thing, even though the readline interface is there. Go figure.
He did all his work on one of those very weird Lisp machines that existed back then. This was the only such machine we had and the IT folk were there to show that they were absolutely ignorant of how to deal with it. Every evening, one of them passed by the box with a backup tape and dutifully inserted it. Every morning, yesterday's tape was stored with all other backups they made of the machines that did have clue about. All is well for several years. But then the hard disk in this Lisp machine crashes. Imagine the horror scene when all tapes were revealed to be empty... It turned out that the IT guys had no clue that they actually had to type in a command to start the backup and never checked afterwards either because they didn't know how to.
Poor Ivo ended up retyping everything from memory.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Mod down if you dont get the joke.
I run WinXP (yeah, shut up) and wanted to give Lindows (shut up, I said) a shot, since I had come across a link where I could get it for free.
I ran it for a bit. It was awkward to figure out, and a lot of what I wanted to use was either impossible to get to, I'd have to pay a bunch of money for, or it was broken. The only thing of any use on it was SIPphone, which you can get for Windows anyhow.
So, anyhow, Lindows has some sort of OS selection menu system set up when you first boot, even though it's on the secondary partition. I don't know if this is standard or not, but I disliked the "hijacking" of my primary drive.
I was in Windows, working on a couple of things, when I decided I'd toast my Lindows partition, since I wasn't using it anymore. So I toasted the partition. Still working in the foreground while the partition erased in the background.
Then all of a sudden, the partition program decided it needed an immediate reboot, without giving me a chance to save what I was doing, or giving me a chance to double-check on that startup menu.
So the computer reboots. And hangs. I imagine it was looking for the menu on the now-nonexistent partition.
After a few days, my final resort was to install a second copy of WinXP on my primary partition. It got the computer working again, although everything was fscked up.
Eventually I got everything back up to snuff except video. It worked, but really poorly. A friend eventually traced the problem to a missing AGP driver. So I've been running problem-free for a couple of months now.
Soylens viridis homines es
I did this just last week.
Laptop open and running and I spilt a glass of water over it (after tripping over a power cable in a dark room).
I called IBM (I have a thinkpad) and was told to take off the keyboard and dry it with a hair dryer. Works fine. I was a bit worried though, particularly when I saw the water pooling around the processor.
meh
Boy, was I in trouble :(
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
if you really want corporate-class reliability, buy Seagate SCSI.
I was about 10 or 11 at the time. We got an old 486 computer from my uncle. He didnt reformat the drive, he just left all his bank acounts and tons of information on it. I decided to delete stuff to make room for comander keen 3 (best game in the world) i was happily deleating files left and right. I was so impresed that i was making so much room. i rebooted the computer, *BEEP, BEEP* autoexec.bat not found. needless to say my parents were not to happy.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCS d-- s+:+ a18 C++ L++ P+ E--- W+++ N+ o K- w--- O---- M+ V-- PS PE Y+
I used to own a business where we'd build the occasional computer. I decided to see what would happen if I tried taking apart a computer with the power on...
The short answer is nothing. Well, it didn't break anything.
We'd pull the ram with the power on and it would throw the system into a safe-mode where the screen would go black and the motherboard would cut power to everything. I looked into it and discovered that on a 72 pin SIMM, pin 1 connects to pin 72 to indicate that it has a good connection. Pull the SIMM and it will essentially switch off the power supply to protect all the system components. Same thing with the processor and any PCI/AGP/ISA cards.
It was kinda disappointing, actually.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I have to say that I do a lot of stupid stuff when it comes to computer hardware. Not that I'm abusive or even meant to drop that new 200 gig HD, but we all have our 'oops' moments, and mine tend to be a bit more dramatic. I was all giddy about installing a new motherboard as that in turn would mean the future installation of a new processor to overclock and tinker with (it was a XP 2500+ this time around). After strapping everything into place, I juiced up the motherboard to the PSU and pulled the bundle of cables to the side and rested them on a hook that I had mounted for my last setup. Unfortunately, I failed to physically check (other than just eyeballing) that the plug was totally locked in place. Everything worked fine for a while, but I later left the room for coffe and came back to a BSoD and the smell of burnt plastic. As might have been guessed, the tension from the hook pulled the plug loose just enough that the current began to arc between the separated tines and melted the socket entirely. That, my friends and snickering enemies, was the end of a good $95 motherboard, as very little could be done to repair the damage done to some of the nearby critical elements.
In these days, bleeps and bloops mean something more
No, REALLY! It was a friend of mine. He was working as a tech in a computer store when the Pentium II first came out. He was troubleshooting a computer with PII processor. He had it booted into Windows and decided the next step was to swap out the processor. He had a brain-fart and didn't think to shut down the computer first, he just pulled out the processor. The computer froze, but the Windows screen stayed up. Noticing his error, he decided that if any damage occurred, it was already done, so he plugged the processor right back in again. It picked up right where he left off.
Another time the same guy somehow managed to get a Pentium 100 processor inserted into the socket rotated to the wrong position. Don't ask me how, what with the missing pin/hole in one corner, but he managed it. He turned on the PC and had sparks shooting out the side of the processor.
By the way, he's not a technician any longer.
But why is the rum gone?
First thing i did in college right after ordering my laptop was stop by a State Farm agent. for about $60 per year i got a Personal Articles Policy that covers even self-inflicted accidental damage. This came to help me a few months later when I tripped on the power cord and pulled my laptop off the kitchen table. State Farm sent me a check, and didnt give me grief about it :)
Now this wont save your data, were you to loose it somehow, but nowadays CDRs and DVDRs are so cheap that its your own fault for not having a backup scheme going at least once a week...
Quick disclaimer: i dont work for state farm, i dont even get free stuff from them. Im sure a bunch of other insurance carriers rovide the same service, ive just never used them.
Picture the scene: Sitting in my office working on our e-commerce server (for our e-commerce business). We had just sent out a mailing to our customers telling them to check out the new version and they should start hitting the new site soon. It is about 11pm and I get sick and tired of using ssh to transfer files and decide I want to mount the remotely hosted server as a local hard drive. Well I decide in the interest of security I should make sure I don't open up the nfs port to the general public and decide to set a firewall rule to let my machine and only my machine connect to that port on that server in our data center. Sooo..... I type the command, hit enter and suddenly realize that the computer is unresponsive. You see when you accidentally firewall all incoming tcp traffic, you limit your remote administrative options. I call the datacenter's emergency # and they inform me all their linux people are on vacation and that I would have to come in in the moring to fix it. Needless to say, I showed up right when they opened. That was a sinking feeling. I'm just glad I didn't get fired.
Once, while in my PC Support class in HS, we got ahold of a "new" cyrix machine with a 133mhz prosc. Well, for some reason, the prosc wasnt mounted inside, it was in a bag. So, I took it out, and stuck it in the socket..... the wrong way. A black peice of metal near the prosc shot out a stream of white smoke and the machine shut down, only to continue to stream smoke. Pretty damned stupid, i should have RTFM
I once had a PC case into which I was installing an old Iomega Jaz drive.
It was cheap and the type where you punch out the 5/14 plastic drive bay cover from behind, but before you do that you have to remove a metal plate that needs to be removed by bending it back and forth until the metal fatigues. and snaps.
I decided that the best way to do this at the time was to insert my arm inside the case and wiggle the metal plate until it broke, from which position I could then punch out the plastic cover from the inside. The plastic cover was pretty flush with the case meaning I couldnt just jam a screwdriver in there from the front.
I underestimated just how sharp the interiors of cheap cases can be, and after pushing the metal plate at the bottom forward so it bent, my fingers slipped through the gap as the metal bent back, which then sprung back cutting into my fingers. My left arm was stuck in the case, (and naturally I am the type of guy who screws in the little screws on cables). There was no way I could get my arm out of the damn thing without removing the metal plate, and I couldn't get any leverage on it form inside without seriously cutting my fingers open. To make it worse I could feel the thing slicing deeping into my fingers which was starting to really hurt.
I had the thing stuck on my arm for about 10 minutes before the pain got so bad that I *had* to do something to get the thing off - I couldnt move very far due to the cables all being connected and routed through my desk, and the only thing I had to hand was a large screw driver. I started bashing the plastic front with the screw driver but couldnt get the damn thing off or get any purchase on it to prise it off. By this point blood is starting to drip from the bottom of the case and I'm thinking there is *no way* I'm going to be found having bled to death like this, and if I could get the cables off, I could picture myself embarrassed as hell in the emergency room with a computer stuck to my arm.
In the end I had to grit my teeth and force my hand further through to punch out the plastic meaning I could get my other hand in there to bend the metal away. Cut myself more in the process but it was wotth it.
Lessons learned from this are: 1. never screw in cables 2. push from the *top* as your fingers bend down not up 3. cheap cases can also cost you an arm or a leg, just not figuratively speaking.
Back in my Amiga days I had an A500, with a Fat Agnus chip, 1/2 meg of 'Fast' RAM (expansion card), and 1/2 meg of 'Chip' RAM (onboard). There was a hack you could do where the 'Fast' ram in the expansion bay could be recognized as 'Chip' ram (the kind that's directly tied to the custom chips as opposed to 'Fast' ram which is directly to the CPU.) This gives you a total of 1 meg of 'Chip' ram if you have the right variety of Agnus chip ('Fat' or 'Fatter'). This allows more graphics/sound data to be loaded. I did this after I got an external HD that came with an expandable memory bus, adding 2 megs of 'Fast' ram to the system, so I could afford to convert the 1/2 meg in the underside slot. So anyhow, you had to desolder a couple of traces on the expansion card, and short something; and open something and short something else on the motherboard. To do the expansion card I had to remove it, so that part wound up being done safely and sanely. I popped that back in, and turned on the machine, just to see what would happen with the hack only half-done. Memory error, well duh. Ok, well I was curious, gimme a break. Further curiosity killed my Amiga. I decided (no accident, I *decided*) to see what it would look like if I did the motherboard hack with the system still running. I was working very close to the CPU, and managed to bump it with my flux tool, shorting at least 2 pins, and *bzzzzzzt*! My monitor went from its warm yellow 'memory error' screen colour to a disconcerting black. I still don't know what possessed me to try that, but I have not repeated that experiment on any other machine since. :)
(after replacing the CPU, the hack worked fine btw)
Har har, no, really, the biggest mistake was installing that OS and allowing it to convert my filesystem to NTFS. The filesystem that also happened to hold a lot of data my father wanted to keep.
"If I don't like it, I'll just convert it back to FAT... no biggie".
Imagine my surprise >:(
Namaste
"We don't need this stinkin' libc.so file. Sounds gay anyway."
Guess what happened? Well, we were able to get everything working again by reinstalling the OS, but man, we learned our lesson.
I went out of town for 3 weeks on vacation, some field mice got into our house while we were out. They found a nice warm place to set up a nest.... in my Polaroid SprintScan 4000 film scanner, which was pretty new and damn expensive at the time.
The SS4000 has a nice opening on the back where you can get in and out, and a nice warm area for building a small rodent residence... above the hole for the optical lens...
The SS4000 was thoroughly screwed up by this, and was filled with mouse poop to boot.
Had recently upgraded my Athlon processor, had a bear of a time installing the heatsink, decided to get a new one. Now, wisdom would suggest I wait until I replace the proc befor eremoving the troublesome heatsink but noooo....
There was some trouble removing the old heatsink but the new one went in like a breeze. Fired up the system, ran for almost a minute, then crashed. After that, deadsville. At first I thought the new heatsink hadn't made good contact, till I looked closely, and noticed the core was missing a noticibly large chunk of one corner. I still keep the CPU- visibly crushed center on one side, nice burn mark on the bottom - as a reminder to be as careful removing the heatsink as I am installing it.
Them: "Come home, your computer's on fire".
Me: "Yeah, whatever.
Them: "The fire department is here, we're serious". Now convinced this insn't actually a prank, I run downstairs, hop in my truck and speed across town. As I pull onto my street I see the fire trucks outside with their lights flashing and firefighters tromping in and out of the house. Definitely not a prank.
Get inside, find my computer has now been extinguished, and the entire house smells like burning plastic and ozone. After ripping the computer to pieces (ahh.. there went my 300+ day uptime) I figured out what had happened.
Through some fluke of circumstance my vintage SB16 card had decided it had had enough, and complained. By somehow reversing the polarity on the one of the caps, causing it to shoot off the board with extreme predjudice. It then blasted a hole through my beloved 3c509, continued on its merry way up another few inches putting a large dent in my video card.
Meanwhile, the random bits of 3c509 had decided to cause a complete short between the ethernet card and the sound card, causing the fire, burning plastic and smoke which was rapidly starting to fill the house.
I still have that ethernet card with the hole punched through it in a box somewhere. I really should take a picture of it.
I'm not sure if it was something incredibly stupid I caused, but it was definitely a computer weirdness happening to me.
defective RAM, that was fun
lost my system volume, reinstalled everything and after two weeks the same thing happened again
Deleting a LUN on a storage array that was hosting an LVM with live Oracle data in the middle of the day. Backups were no joy either since there was a recent change in LVM devices and the backup job was backing up the old LVM device, not the new one. Even worse was the fact that the backup had been running for about three or four days like this. So even though the old LVM was still around it was four days old. Fortunately, that data could be rebuilt from the middle tier application's transaction logs. It took two days though. :( Amazingly, I still have my job. This would have been a fireable offense at 99% of the workplaces out there. These days I'm EXTRA paranoid about working with storage arrays and I rely on /etc/fstab 100% now instead of directly passing a device in a mount command.
This incident still gives me nightmares... I used to be a 'cocky' sys admin for a UK bank, at a site where all the prog development went on (and that bank spent a fortune on these kind of projects). Most of the code and development was then stored on Compaq servers running Netware - which also had 2Gb Archive Python DAT backup units attached to them for what I presumed was backup. The time came to re-organised the partitions, and increase the amount of available space to the project - easy!! Just: 1 backup for 9 hrs 2 nuke the RAID5 array, 3 add disk and create a larger array, 4 restore! Ha -if only. Steps 1-3: piece of cake (feeling smug) Only hiccup - Half way into a restore using ArcServe (Noooooooo!)... It starts going on about bad blocks on the tape. Remember - I've nuked the array. The only data available now, is on tape... Damn DAT tapes... feeling panicky now... - not so smug Put a cleaning tape in the DAT unit, Clean drive Restore Should be simple eh? Not quite... All alone - on a Saturday morning - and time is ticking... So after about 10 attempted drive cleanings - the tape is bad - it must be... So I go back to the previous days tape... Same problem, double the panic! So I go back 14 days worth of *backups*. Nothing. Nada zip. I grab another DAT unit from another server Same problem - time is ticking... and it looks like I have lost the data and code data for the whole project... 12 hours later and combos of 14 tapes with 5 drives, and I'm a snivelling mess... I finally make the call to my boss ... He listens carefully and comes in to assist (aka *supervise* and more panic to the whole situation).
Sunday night, and we make the call. The tapes have been fragged by the faulty backup unit. We make a call to OnTrack data recovery. The guys drive up on Monday - grab the tapes, read them into their recovery unit, and overnight spit out all the data except for 100Mb out of 2Gb...
From that day onwards, I am paranoid about DAT units, and I verify EVERY backup I make (as well as copy the data to HD)...
Thank goodness you can now expand an array just by adding a disk, and telling the HD to re-stripe. :'-(
Ed
When I first used Linux several years ago, I was low on hard disk space. I was looking for a way to free up some more space. I went to user management and saw all these entries for "/" and the owner was "nobody". I thought,"Hey. I can free up space by wiping out these 63,000+ entries. I deleted it and then the system froze. I tried to reboot and just saw three asterisks. By that time, I had realized that I just deleted the mounting point for the root partition. Oops.
Another time, I was changing a CMOS battery on a computer and pulled the metal clip that held the battery up a little too far. I put a new battery in and the piece broke off. CMOS couldn't be saved. Oops.
The most recent thing that happened was at school earlier this year. As part of our Capstone project we had several OS's including Windows 2000 with domain controllers. One of the disks containing a DC wouldn't work. Like the other hard drives, it was in a drive bay. I decided to take it out and hook it up directly to the IDE controller on a motherboard. Other machines in the room were having problems, so I took the disk to another room. A member of my group went with me. I hooked it up and spark! The disk caught on fire! He said,"Shit we got a fire!". I held the power button in and the system shut down and the fire was contained. Needless to say, I had lost part of the project. The workstation wasn't damaged, fortunately. But I'll never use a Seagates hard drive again. And to add insult to injury, someone stole our hard drive that had Linux on it and I already had Windows 2000 Server DC's, IIS, Novell 6, Windows 2000 workstations, and Linux with Samba already talking to each other! Doh! The icing on the cake was the instructor saying we had the smoothest OS install he's seen. Everything worked first time around!
I was writing a gigantic research paper and on page 37, my laptop fell off of my bed. The back (where the power chord is) hit the floor, and the plastic snapped in half near the power outlet. Silly me, I tried to turn my laptop on again (yah, whoops) and I shorted out the entire motherboard. Hah... but the nice people at Dell repaired everything for me at no charge and despite the fact that I had to mail my laptop to Texas, I had it back in a 3 day turnaround.... the night before my paper was due. Nice!
jen0r all your base are belong to... me
In high school, a bunch of us nerds were going around helping teachers set up their computers. My friend got a request to help one teacher hook up an HP inkjet to a Mac. Easy -- take the printer out of the box, plug in the power cable, connect the parallel cable, and it's done, right? Well, as soon as he plugged in the parallel cable, there was a final whirr from the computer, and it shut off. The motherboard was fried.
Looking more closely, he saw that the school had ordered a PC printer. And he had shoved the DB25 connector on the parallel cable into the only matching connector on the back of the Mac: the SCSI port! (In those days, all Macs had DB25 SCSI ports and mini-DIN parallel ports.)
Years after graduation, I happened to run into that friend again. This time, he was a salesman at CompUSA, and he was chatting with a customer who was thinking about buying a computer. The customer expressed concerns that he might not be able to figure out how to plug everything together. "It's foolproof," my salesman friend assured him, "there's only one way that all these connectors will fit together." I could have reminded him of the SCSI printer incident from a few years ago, but I was nice and didn't want to ruin his sale.
This things do happen. Maybe it had been driven too hard (it was syncing fine and well within the documented specs though). My wife and I were about to go to the movies when we heard that weird sound in the office room. We got in and nearly choked. The monitor was in flame. It was a cheap 15" KTX brand. I pulled the plug and my wife grabbed a comforter (thick blanket) to wrap around the monitor and stop the fire. The wall was black, some papers were lost and the smoke incredibly toxic, but the rest of the computer was fine and most importantly nothing else caught fire.
Had it happened only 15 minutes later the whole house would have been up in flame for sure.
It took a lot of scrubbing to get the wall to a more normal colour. We still have the blanket (with a big hole in the middle that was later patched by my mum), we use it as a picnic rug now. It has suffered lots of further abuse at the hand of my daughter (crayons left to melt on it in the sun, various drinks poured on it, etc), but it is a well-loved piece of family heirloom now! I still use the PC case and power supply, but the innards have been changed years ago, and I got a nice expensive Sony 17" screen as a replacement (they don't make those anymore).
That was in 1998. I've never bought KTX since and I always turn the screens off by hand when I leave the house or go to bed. Do the same!
At my work we have a guy in a motorized wheelchair. One of his duties is to archive our files to CDs and DVDs, so his computer was the one equipped with the Superdrive (DVD-R, CD-R, etc). Now at this time there was only the one Macintosh that came with that thing. Also, we keep our computers on the floor to save on desk space. Well, the drive was open, and he went to move his wheelchair to get a new CD and caught the open drive tray and pulled the whole thing right out, tearing up all the plastic gears on the inside. We gave him and external firewire drive on his desk after that. Afternote: I did manage to open the drive back up and glue the gears back together and re-insert the tray and the drive is still working.
Stupid Cheap Guitars
The first was when lightning hit my kvm switch and fried two motherboards. The second was when I plugged in my new case I recieved for Christmas and it killed 3 hard drives.
It seems all you guys do not know what a REAL computer accident looks like. 2 Years ago, a friend of mine was doing some shopping in the financial district. As he was happily and peacefully wandering along the streets, paying attention to various mundane items displayed by the stores he stopped to admire a new music instrument he BADLY wanted. 2 Seconds later, a 19 inch screen and its 40 pounds crashed right next to him, dropped by 2 stupid movers who had set it on an inclined conveyor belt that was going to the 2nd floor. He had half of his right leg filled with shards from the screen and still has the scars of the cuts to this day.
I had a heap of "dotfiles" owned by root in my home directory...
I can hear the experienced sysadmins chuckling already... but for those less experienced...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Back when I swung a screwdriver with a vengeance, I was called out late one night to fix a problem at a very large customer site. They were running a VAXCluster, with RP06 disk drives. RP06's were large washing machine sized disks.
I told the lead operator to shutdown, remove their disk pack from the system drive, and insert the test pack that I handed to him.
When done, I asked if he had done as I asked - yes he confirmed - I didn't want to write diagnostic data across their production disk.
So I fired up the diagnostic program on my "scratch pack". Needless to say, the diag program works the drive hard, and in those days. that meant that the drive would almost start to move across the floor.
All of a sudden, a resounding thud, heard from the other end of the computer room. We wnet to investigate. The operator, had removed their pack, installed mine, and sat their pack on the "top" of the drive. The top of the drive, on this was a narrow area, that angled back at about 5 degrees. With the Vigorous testing, their system pack, had vibrated off the top of the drive and onto the floor. A Visual check showed a number of platters in contact with each other....
Fortunately, they had run their weekly backup of that drive only a few hours before....
Q
I deleted a temp folder I thought wasn't in use. It turns out it was the temporary holding folder for the nightly autodial xmit/receive to a couple hundred clients. Also, my software (yeah, the software was my fault, too) didn't throw a catastrophic error when it couldn't find the file, so the incoming file from every client went *POOF*. Spent the next whole day calling clients, helping them restore the pre-transmission backups & resending the data. That was a LONG day! The next day I modified the software to check for stuff like that and stop everything if all wasn't right. Live and learn!
ON DELETE CASCADE
For future reference, not saying it was even around or could have helped out. But maybe next time
At one point, when I had just moved my home page URL from .../~achurch/ to .../ (HTTP root directory), I had created a symlink ~achurch -> . in my HTML directory for compatibility's sake.
So, when I'm cleaning up my homedir a few years later, I notice this link and say "hey, I don't need this anymore", and:
Fortunately, I had neglected to use -f, and that particular file was near the top of my home directory, so I managed to get out of that situation with little damage (except to my nerves).
Since then, I put an empty file ..norm-r with mode 000 in important directories, and rename files as needed to get it to the top of the directory list, just in case. (For those who don't know, ls -U lists files in directory entry order, and at least on ext2, renaming a file to a longer name will usually free up the file's position in the directory.)
Also, in sqlplus you can do:
> select count(*) from foo where 1+1=2;
COUNT
-----
42424
> c/select count(*)/delete
delete from foo where 1+1=2
> r
42424 rows deleted
Ages ago, when I was in Junior High, I was helping a friend of mine upgrade MS-DOS to version 4-something on his parents' IBM XT.
To this day, I'm not totally certain where things went sour, but I ended up corrupting the computer's FAT tables in a nasty way. Upon doing a directory listing, and getting back nothing but a screen full of garbage ASCII, my friend started to sweat profusely.
As it turns out, his dad was doing his company's payroll on that machine. That was a bad night.
Oh, and not two weeks later, I did it AGAIN, fux0ring the family computer of another friend of mine.
Frankly, I'm amazed that I have any friends left.
-iname => -name (no need to be case insensitive here
| -> use -exec instead
awk -> Why not just echo ?
find -name '.*' -exec echo chown root:root {} ";"
Just remove the "echo" to actually run it...
Other problem : it changes all regular files that start with a "." in the hierarchy instead of all files / directories starting with a "." in the current directory.
I learned that it's not a good idea to check the airflow on a high-power 120mm Delta fan in an open case if said fan does not have a fan grille on it.
Yeah, that really bled. And hurt. All my fans have grilles on them now.
I had to clean up a mess of a netadm's after he made a similar mistake with recursive chmod. For whatever reason while working on his own files in his own home directory he elected to su to root to recursively change permissions. He ran chmod 640 -R .* from his home dir. Reading through root's bash history I see from his subsequent commands that he never even realized he fscked up. Since it didn't run all the way through /home and beyond I can decude that he ctrl-c'd it. He then removed the period, ran it again, and went on about his personal business as root of course. While that jacked up chmod command was running it recursively changed the permissions on 371 customers' home directories. This caused all their websites to give 403 errors (world can't read the files or execute on the pertinent directories). Procmail got REALLY pissy about the permissions on the contents of ~/mail/. SquirrelMail also had numerous failing functions but I forget what exactly they were. It took me a good many hours to write a couple of scripts to identify and change permissions on the files and directories that needed it from the list of affected home dirs. That day I oh so wanted to change root's passwd and only allow it to be issued to those that had a valid reason to need it. I was livid. He never noticed he screwed up. No one heard about it until a customer happened to mention it to a family member of mine the next day (the school's website wouldn't load). They called me and I looked into it. I was pissed when I figured out what happened. I graphically explained to those that wouldn't otherwise know j ust exactly what his beginner mistake could have caused had it not been canceled. I also explained what his beginner mistake would have done had he used a slightly different permission setting. Oh was I ever pissed. I'm not so pissed that he did it because we all make mistake, even stupid ones years after we should know better. It's the fact that he didn't realize he made the mistake that pisses me off to no ends. Grrrr.......
I once worked on an older PC, a 386 I believe. This particular beast did not, for some reason, have a notched CPU (meaning it was symmetrical all the way around).
I had to remove the CPU for some reason, and when I was putting it back I realized I had no not to orient it. Not surprisingly, it freaked out on initial bootup. I then discovered that a piece of tape on the edge matched a sticky part on the mobo, reoriented the CPU, and it worked fine for quite awhile after that.
One thing I've noticed... plugs etc have become more idiot-proof, but people find ways to become stupider (hot-swapping PCI cards anyone). I doubt that current components could survive the abuse that their predessors did anyhow.
I'd been working at Apple for a couple of years and had occasion to take apart a few of the old SE-SE30 models. The guy who trained me told me--first thing--"be CAREFUL" when you take the video card off the CRT; pull it straight out or you'll bust the yoke and ruin the CRT.
Well, my then-wife's boss needed a new hard drive in her home machine. She lived in Oakland, a little over an hour's drive away from the south bay. I got my Torx wrench, jammed over there, got the thing open and, in my nervousness snatched the video card off the yoke.
SNICK!
That cold, sick feeling in your gut when you know you've just screwed the pooch...
I told the woman that her machine needed a new part that I didn't have. I scuttled back to Menlo Park, took apart my OWN SE30, harvested the CRT, put it in, finished the rest of the work and drove another hour back. For this, I got $100 for four hours work (should have taken an hour). It took weeks to replace my own CRT.
2. "Accidentally" adding DELTREE C:\ /Y to a Windows NT Logon script. Ah, the good old senior pranks.
That's a bit cruel. I've always preferred adding an "iexplore www.somepornosite.com."
When we had VAX accounts, it was a fun trick to add a "logoff" command to the login script for people that left their terminals open.
And of course, there was a kid who messed with my personal computer and set the IE start page to goatse. I did the same thing to him, except exported the registry entry, made a batch script that re-imported it, and set that in the registry under HKLM...currentversion/run so that it reset itself on every bootup.
Oh, and another fun thing is that certain versions of windows recognise any drive with an 'autorun' feature as autorunnable. I discovered that with a network drive on... 95 I think it was... it would exec the autorun script upon mounting as if it were mounting a CD-ROM (might work for other windows versions too).
While using my desktop machine as an inpromtu router for our cable-modem, I was playing around with linux-from-scratch and did del /dev/* instead of del dev/*. Firstly tried to stick the Redhat CD in to reinstall the dev RPM, no /dev/cdrom arrgghhh!!!. Then downloaded the RPM from the redhat site and installed it. My roommate meantime is still playing CS online and didn't even notice that anything happened. Try that under Windows !!! ;-)
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
There was a no-questions-asked auto re-install partition on one of my Dell boxes. One day I unknowing thought, "Wonder what this vfat partition contains?" and watched in horror as it proceeded without even a dialog to mkfs the partitions on my workstation. I managed to stop it part way through, but fsck didn't salvage much - luckily I had backups of most of it on another box... however I had just spent a week setting up a fresh install on this box :-(
The Solaris hostname command is also different from the GNU version. On Solaris, hostname -f sets the hostname to -f instead of returning the fully qualified domain name. How useful!
Our main webserver bought it and I had to recover from a backup tar.gz file. The only other box I could expand it on was another production web server. I 'cd' into a temp directory and expanded the tar in that directory. At least that is what I meant to do. Tar expanded it from the absolute path in the tar file which was '/'. Well, a few seconds later, I had another dead production box.
What the audience doesn' know, that moments before, I told the other administrator to expand the same tar file on the database server that supported our now dead websites. About a minute later, I get a call to the server room phone line. It was the administrator and she reported that we had some type of 'problem.' Naturally, I knew what that was.
I'm not sure if the server room was sound proof, but anybody who was still at work that day (on all ten floors) probably heard the next few words that came out of my mouth...
Ahhh, the dot com days... Unfortunately, I didn't work at a dot com. I worked at a major publishing company.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
A big, potential client was coming to visit us on Monday and I was tasked with cleaning our datacenter to make it look spotless. Did I mention that management decided to tell me at 4 PM on Friday? The only mess really was all of the small wires and plaster on the floor from where we installed the racks. So, being in a rush, I plugged the vacuum (the kind with the big headlight) into the wall and started walking down the rows of racks. A moment later the vacuum dies. While I'm fretting over how I can clean the rest of our datacenter in half-an-hour, the other programmers and client services runs into the computer room. Turns out I accidentally plugged the vacuum into the UPS and not a regular wall socket. Oops, blew a fuse and took out our entire datacenter. :-) Hehehe, management decided to let someone else be in charge of cleaning the datacenter before clients visit. To this day, I still get shit from my co-workers everytime someone starts talking about our old datacenter!
i like @echo off cls echo "Please stand by while I format your hard drive..." dir \ /s >nul
echo "Your computer is now trashed. Thank you."
pause >nul
better because it looks less like a batch file when running
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I never made the DETELE FROM table mistake, but I may as well have. I did a UPDATE table SET field = value without a where clause. A few hours of begging and groveling for my job later (oh and I had mysqlhotcopy running hourly) and all was ok.
bash: rtfm: command not found
I use a single floppy disk to install Debain. What kind of weird distro are you using?
I do tech support for an internet cafe one day I came in to find the owner had reached behind one of the Pc's to "switch it off" and switched the psu from 230V to 110V.
...
The 2nd incident happened at a sewage works; these places are run by PLC's and this one was in the process of getting new panels and controls.
Part of the process in processing sewage involves blowing air through the sewage to remove suspended particles in what is known as a grit basin, these are roughly the size of a swimming pool and about 4 stories deep; each has a gate at each end which is driven shut by the plc and will raise when the plc removes the signal (or power fails). Any way one of these basins had been shut off and emptied and scaffolding errected inside while some servicing work was going on.
well I had new code for the plc controlling the basins and I knew that putting the PLC in program mode would remove the signal driving the gates shut; (basically it would take 30 secs to upload and restart). I mentioned this to a fellow engineer asking him if the gates were isolated and locked off (standard procedure you would think). He said yes so i connected up my laptop got online with the plc and switched to program mode; when i heard a yell coming from the vicinity of the grit basins, so i quickly switched it back to run.
Turns out the gates were not isolated, and when the 12volt signal driving the gate shut was removed the gates started opening; which was kinda unlucky for the guy stood on the scaffolding at the time
Incidently sewage deoxygenates the water (which kills fish) and blowing air reoxygenates it before it goes into the river...
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Back in the late 80's I was carting a sewing machine case portable Compaq '286 around on the job in an armpit of the universe place called Baluchistan. I needed a built in EPROM burner for programming this nice little tracking system. In PDP11 and FORTRAN. We were hurtling down the road one night, and camer around the corner to see a young camel doing the 'deer in the headlights' thing. We went into the ditch, the Compaq went into the front seat, I went into the dashboard. Had to rewire the whole damn thing with leftover 30 gauge wiring and a butane soldering iron (thank god for Jensen tools).
Not mine. Talking to a tech friend of mine. He told me how he got a call from an old lady wanting to bring back her computer under warranty. He asked, why whats wrong with it. "Well", she said, "I was using the cd drive to hold my coffee when I knocked it and spilt coffee everywhere... and the computer didn't work again after I put it in the sink and washed it". My friend replied, "Sorry, our warranty doesn't cover stupidity" and hung up! ~~~ I was working at a university on their helpdesk and had to call back one of our external clients. I miss read my own note and asked if I could please speak to Fiona Elsley please. I got a short silence, then the reply... "No, sorry.... she's dead." In horror I re-read my note and relised I was wanting to speak to John AT the FIONA ELSLEY CANCER INSTITUTE!! woops. My supervisor who overheard my conversation was wetting herself on the floor when I hund up.
iSnack 2.0 - Download it now to your iToast 9.0
In the process, I determined that one drive was bad, so I went to test the other. So then I plugged it in, then I realized after a pop that I still had my computer on.
Calling atheism and agnosticism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
My worst experience was really my wife's. She was my girlfriend at the time and didn't have a computer of her own, so I let her use mine once when I was gone.
I gave her a bit of introduction, and finished with, "And if you get stuck or confused, just let it stand the way it is and I'll help when I get back." I didn't show her opening/closing/saving of files, she just wanted to type. The WP had an autosave function, so even if the power went off, everything would be fine.
The only thing that could possibly screw her was the "revert to saved" function. I thought about telling her about it and saying, "Don't!" But then I realized she might later not remember if it was do or don't. What she didn't know couldn't hurt her.
So, she types in this whole paper and decides to go back and do a bit of editing. She gets some text highlighted, then realizes it isn't what she wanted to edit. She can't figure out how to get the highlighting off. Very determined girl, my then-girlfriend. She picks up the dead-tree manual off the shelf and starts leafing through.
Guess who found "revert to saved" on her own? It sounded like just what she needed... only she had never actually saved. So it ate her paper, i.e. reverted to the beginning.
When I got home, she had already retyped it a second time and was gone. I asked my roomate if she had seen her. He said yes, and she was stomping around the room and kicking my bed. It wasn't until later that I learned the whole story.
Just goes to show, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
In a brand new data center, I was performing a regular bypass test on a somewhat large ($75K) APC UPS system. As I recall, I was switching the unit into bypass mode to prepare for a normal maintenance task. (Bypass mode is basically removing the unit from inline service. Instead of street->UPS->racks, you change it to street->racks.)
I followed the APC directions EXACTLY. Problem was, they left out one step. There was a large cradle switch that you pulled down to disengage the fuses before certain steps. Well, the documentation did NOT refer to a small metal plate that had apparently been added to later versions of this unit. I *think* the metal plate was suppossed to prevent an accidental disengagement of the fuses. In practice however, it did allow for a partial disengagement.
So, I pull the rocker switch down to what I think is disengaged, when in fact, it was only barely disengaged. I proceeded to the next steps...
BANG! POW! BANG! Followed by that charred electric smoke smell well known to most /.ers -though very strong in this case.
No fires, no blown batteries, but definately a charred distribution board and intelligence board(s). Fortunately, the entire unit was covered by APC support.
Two lessons learned: One, no matter how good the documentation is or isn't, experience with a specific device goes a long way. Two, always, always maintain support on expensive equipment.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
While helping a client upgrade his Palm software, I managed to delete about 1600 contacts.
What contacts? Well, seeing as he was the chief foreign correspondant to a major international newspaper, the names and numbers of just about every congressperson, chief of staff, cabinet member, and high-ranking government officer in D.C., as well as more than a few Chechen rebels, Afghani freedom fighters and Taliban contacts.
Of course he didnt have a backup, did you have to ask?
"Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines."
My worst incident was when I put a free stick of ram in my box, which resulted in frying my $500 graphics card, 220gb worth of hard disks, motherboard, modem and network card. Basically every part of my box was replaced except the cpu and the case.
All I could possibly put it down to was lack of a static strap, and thick carpet..
I remember my worst accident when I was 11 or 12, and my best friend's dad had decided to upgrade his machine.
... nothing happens. I click the power on/off a couple more times, but it is completely silent. After about 30 seconds, I realize what I had done.
He purchased a brand new motherboard, a 486/25 processor, and a video card. It was at least $400-500 worth of upgrades. Because they had spent so much money on the thing, they decided to ask me to come hook it all up, because I (supposedly) knew what I was doing.
I pulled out all the old hardware, and wired up the new board. My friend was watching intently as I plugged in the monitor, and said "ok lets power up this thing..."
*flicks the power switch on the power supply*
*sees a really bright white flash on the monitor*
On a completely unrelated note, does anyone else remember when the power supply cables that ran into the motherboard were rectangular (instead of curved on one side), and you could plug the cables into either slot?
Yeah.
Blowing up $500 is a big thing when you're twelve.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
Hmmmm... no real drama's. I discovered once that someone spilt madori in my keyboard when i got sick of the sticking keys and had a look. It didnt cause any damage, but i prolly would have it the drink was spilt in the old Amiga i use to have.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
It does not deserve a +5 funny as it is stupid and lame. Just because its about computers does not make it worthy of +5 funny, idiots.
When I wanted to learn programming (ages ago) I had a choice - either Java or Visual Basic.
...
.. I was a temp helping out this system administrator. I rarely knew a thing but bluffed my way. Anyway he had an important meeting and left me in the server room. With so many terminals about and one unlocked - I logged into chat what else? .. Anyway, I don't know if it was some exploit, but after arguing with some punk-kid in a IRC channel, the machine froze. fine ... well not really - seconds after that I could hear a crescendo orchestra of people screaming around the entire building as if it was being attacked by zombie. Happens that everyone was freaking out - they all got cut off from the lan and many had lost their entire work that afternoon.
I settled for VB - I regret ever since.
Dunno if the above count for an accident but here are a few
I had a friend living with me, and I was complaining how I was getting pretty addicted to "chat". He hinted I should "strong" and "resolved" and needed to take some strong action. Fine. I got a club and whacked my PC in many pieces (this story is true). When he came back home he couldn't believe his eyes. He never told me he was writing a 500 page novel using my PC! - I don't think he has forgiven me till this day.
Another
Tips:
1) Never run commands in auto-commit mode. (Keep in mind the rollback segment is only for data modifications. Can't rollback alteration of tables, procs, triggers, constraints, etc)
2) Always verify if the result is what you intended before commit.
3) Run commands from a script (tested beforehand on a sandbox) before trying it live on customer's data.
4) Keep those scripts preciously and log in the database at execution.
5) Always be careful with production environments!
My worst computer accident took only seconds to cause and hours to fix. I upgraded my BIOS with a similarly numbered BIOS version, but the incorrect version. After spending a few hours worrying about what I was going to do (buy a new motherboard, etc.) I ran across a forum posting that suggested I might be able to boot up with a good BIOS, hot swap the bad BIOS chip with the good one, and burn the correct BIOS onto the bad chip. It seemed like it had a chance to work, and sure enough it did.
I didn't mean that I ruined the keyboard with the pants. I ruined the pants with the cheetos... but you probably knew that. At any rate, cheeto dust seems to have great power to wreak havoc upon all forms of valuable things. And by the looks of it, it's probably radioactive, too.
"double is_computer_on_fire(void)
Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value."
is that manual for real?!
and if it is, how does the caller distinguish between an on_fire value and "some other value"?
The worst thing i've done so far, is install a floppy drive in a computer (not mine) and hooked the cheap un-notched floppy cable upside down.... assuming i always do things right the first time (bad idea) i put in the 1st floppy for the OS install (original, not backed up, not mine) as soon as i turned the power on,,, I knew what had happened... the floppy drive light was on non stop, and I got an A drive failure from the bios. I swapped the cable around... but it was too late, it was horribly corrupt :(, Whenever i feel i've never been so stupid, I always look back to this moment...
Reece,
In the mid-80's a friend of mine was the chief hardware repair person for the IT department of a large department store. Noting that he was short of a particular type of thick, heavy gauge cable, he used the companies on-line supply ordering system to (attempt) to order 500 feet of said cable. About two weeks later, someone from the deliveries/loading dock area called him to tell him that there were 2 semi-trailers parked outside, all loaded with a delivery for him, and where did he want it stored?
Turns out the actual order submitted went through as 500 1000-foot spools of this cable -- each wooden spool being about the size of a large coffee table...
Lightning hit. When I worked for a consultant, one of the clients got hit by lightning. 20 of 25 computers, file server, almost every printer, two hubs and a UPS, were all toast. And most were on surge protectors. Those last five failed at some point in the next 12 months and when we opene them we found the scorch marks on components that were missed the first time.
Worst part of it was their insurance company said it was not covered, even as an act of god because not every computer had a surge protector. They changed their insurance fast.
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
Dawn of Jaguar and Norton Disk Doctor Kevorkian.
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
I've worked as a programmer for quite a while, and one of the places was a mid-sized company still not wanting to migrate to a SQL back-end database platform, even though they had 400+ users, all sharing the same index files on the database...
Not a recipe for success...but it gets worse...and nature's fault, plus the AC maintenance company that was contracted to do the work on the central AC.
I am coding away, with the screen set at a resolution that made my boss uncomfortable at the time...132 col by 50. And, he is back in the server room, investigating an outage on a box that seemed to go down, or create an error message.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that the man is uncomfortable, and getting frantic by the second.
By then, it really get's my attension, and he looks dead at me, and screams "somebody get me some fsck__g paper towels!".
I bolt up, noticing a nice shower in the server room, and bust the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom to get the roll out. (Better to break a $50 dispenser than have several $10k in the server room burn up from water getting into it.)
Still did have to replace a couple production servers, though.
The bad sealing job--on the roof--let the water leak around the AC unit, when the rain came. All the more reason to include the building facilities people on IT change management records.
I had just driven 200 miles out to a plant out in the middle of nowhere, seems they were have an overtemp condition on their HP3000 series 70 computer which ran the plant. These things are about 10ft long 3ft wide and 4ft high.
Maria, the secretary, had taken the covers off the computer in order to improve the airflow and get the temp down. (This is NOT how you get the temp down on a server with 16 fans.) She did NOT tell me she had done this.
Being a pretty latina with a flair for fashion and a killer walk she had dressed in a silk blouse and skirt that day. I came around the corner and caught her walking down this narrow aisle next to the computer with it's covers off.
She was demonstrating that killer walk for all it was worth and I turned white.
After she was safely passed the computer I told Maria to freeze and very carefully gather her skirts up and DON'T MOVE.
I then placed the covers back on and escorted her back to the door. Next I took a few of the covers back off and walked back to her.
I pointed out the breaker box on the wall that said 440 volts, three phase to her and said it powered that computer. Next I pointed out the buss bar inside the computer and told her that it carried ALL that power. Finally I pointed out to her that between her silk skirt and her killer walk she almost electrocuted herself.
It was then her turn to turn white.
At that point I held a prayer meeting with her. I preached on the dangers of touching equipment she did not understand and she prayed I wouldn't tell the plant Health & Safety Officer.
Working as a data provisioner for a large Canadian National telco, I once wanted to optimize the way our core network was configured by changing the spanning tree root bridge priority from one core switch to another. After checking with the senior layer 2 provisioner in the company & getting the OK from Cisco to proceed with the change, I executed a 1 liner command on a core cisco switch which caused every dependant switch in our network (read various cities & about 100,000 + customers, including various ISPs, banks, credit unions, government networks, school boards, you name it, they went down) to get into a spanning tree propogation loop that flooded the entire network and took it offline for 3 hours.
The problem was that my optimization scheme did not take into account spanning tree's inability to incorporate the concept of in-between-cisco-devices to have non-Cisco ATM network devices (marconi).
It took 8 engineers in a conference call from one end of Canada to the next + Cisco in the USA + I forget how many managers & company directors, to after 3 hours of downtime to resolve the problem.
Oh did I mention the Telco lost a lot of credibility and had to issue over $20,000 worth of credits to various customers due to the massive downtime? So much for 5x9's reliability (99.999% uptime = 5 minutes per year)... I think I scored enough dowtime for about a century or so! hahaha
In my defence, let me just say that I witnessed fellow co-workers make even larger mistakes, like crashing a series of 5ESS switches & OC192 sonet boxes... Oh the joys & power of working for a telco! hehe.
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
I've actually been pretty fortunate as far as computer accidents are concerned, in that it honest to goodness is rarely actually my fault when something goes horribly wrong. Really. Albeit in something of a "pleading ignorance" way. How was I supposed to know the installation routine for X and X program was going to do what it did? That sort of thing. Even when I do cause things to go horrible wrong, it's generally worked out in the end (I once attempted to flash a friend's DVD drive firmware, only to discover that his computer had neglected to inform me he was using an OEM drive unlisted by rpc1.org. By all rights his drive should've been hosed, but it accepted being flashed back to its previous state). Nice.
An exception:
When I first became aware of computers, it was in an almost-entirely school focused setting, and my school (like almost every other in the late 80s/early 90s) had Apples and Macs. I remember being blown away when we finally internally "upgraded" and started getting Macs in the elementary school. They were so much fun to toy around with (something which, incidentally, I feel has been lost in recent OS revisions, but I digress). Somewhat surprisingly, I don't recall any major melt-downs occuring on any of the Macs.
Unfortunately, this protection did not extend to the legacy Apple IIEs we had lying around. My friends' Macs used to "greet" them on boot-up, and programs usually had some mentioning of to whom they belonged, etc. Still do. My ten-year-old mind thought this was exquisite, and I wondered if Apple IIE programs could do the same thing.
At the time, the primary word-processing program we were using was...maybe AppleWrite, or something? I can't remember the name. But I wanted it to remember mine--I was the "admin" of my fifth-grade class, see--so I set about trying to find that option, which I was positive existed.
And then I found it...or so I thought. "Initialize disc!" Surely that meant put my initials on it, right?
So I ran that option. On all 10 copies of the program we had. Without checking to see whether it had "worked" on the previous copies.
Needless to say, I felt very, very stupid afterwards. A hard lesson learned.
Too bad you weren't working on a system that had the ability to back off transactions from the transaction log. I've done this innumerable times, but the RDBMS has always been able to recover from my momentary lapses, or I've been fortunate enough to work in an environment where autocommit is NOT on. Makes no sense in a development environment.
Recently upgraded to a new OS to go with my new hard drive (120 GB Western Digital, $40...gotta love rebates :-)) Forgot I needed to reinstall the software for my digital camera. Plugged it in a corrupted the memory stick...had to reformat it and I lost a couple dozen photos :-(
Twenties Retirement
But a blanket UPDATE to a table may very well keep referential integrity, or otherwise only affect a field that doesn't crop up in public scrutiny frequently
At the telco where I work someone did that to our customer database, renaming everyones phone number to one particular number (not on the actual phone switch, just on the billing system). I was taking calls in the call centre and I noticed that several callers in a row all had the same phone number. I alerted a supervisor, they alerted the IT dept (they already knew - someone else had alerted them) and for the rest of the day we couldn't run work-orders until the tables were fixed. All because of one missing "where" clause.
BTW call centre staff don't use SQL - we have a fancy gui app to access the customer database.
I deleted a bunch of client data for my client once.
Fortunately I had a nightly backup...
Ooops.. I guess the nightly backup wasn't working.
Fortunately I logged all UPDATE statements in a log4j log. So I just edited the log, and replayed it.
Phew.. that was close.
The worst accident I have ever had is the time where I plugged a floppy cable into an onboard DVI connector (which had the same shape). Upon firing up the PC, a bright orange glow came from the cable, along with a room full of smoke. Fried the cable pretty good, and I chucked the drive in the trash. I swore that there was supposed to be a unified convention on motherboard connectors, but it doesn't help that the floppy connector was beside the DVI connector, and wasn't labelled.
Worst part was loosing all that data on the hard disk (I can still remember seeing a large burn mark on the HDD controler chip)
Not to mention the big expense to get it repaired
The even more unfortunate thing is that I had just got a new CD burner and (had the data loss not happened) would have backed up all my stuff.
Needless to say, I now have 20-30 backup CDs filled with all the important (and even the not-so-important) stuff.
I've done plenty of stupid things growing up while tinkering in computers. There was the time when I accidentally turned my thumb into a power switch for an AT power supply. There was also the time that I tried stopping the CPU fan and instead broke the fan. How can I forget the time when I blew up a 50x CD-ROM drive with a cracked Red Hat CD. The list goes on with other random power failures and making things like memory short out. The best story I can think of is when my friend came crying to me with her computer after letting her "tech-savvy" boyfriend put it together. Apparently he didn't understand that the metal stand-offs are for keeping the motherboard from touching the metal case and when they turned it on... bad things happened. I remember opening the case and laughing hysterically as she whimpered. Believe it or not, that machine still works fine after I re-built it. Sure it has Windows XP and tons of spyware but... :)
This wasn't my mistake, but my younger sister's. She spilled a full glass of Kool-Aid on my mom's HP desktop tower.
:) Never underestimate the power of a razor blade!
Later on, the computer seemed to work, but after about an hour, the monitor went black. My mom figured that the monitor got burnt out, since "the kool-aid landed on the monitor cords." I opened the tower to find Kool-Aid all over the motherboard. With a razor blade and some patience, I was able to remove the Kool-Aid from between the motherboard traces. Apparently, dried Kool-Aid is a decent conductor! I powered it back up and viola! The computer works.
A common problem with the open-top Apple IIs was the fact that the di9sk controller's contacts would oxidize and get flaky, and that it would happen faster with heat. I usually left my top loose to keep it from getting too hot, and so it would be easy to do the quick fix, yank the card and plug it back in, which cleaned the contacts enough to work.
For years I did this, all by habit, power off, lid up, pull card, push card (with a bit of wiggle) lid down, power up. Until one day when I forgot the first step and pulled the card with the power on. Nothing dramatic happened. In fact, after that, nothing at all happened. Well, I did some stuff, like yell and jump around, but the Apple never did anything again.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
So why was it that I had been at my new job for a grand total of two days before I dropped a screwdriver onto the exposed electronics of a 15K-rpm SCSI-320 drive, promptly arcing the components into a blackened magic-smokey mess?
I immediately told my new coworked what happened (I didn't want to be branded "stupid" and "liar") and he got permission to order a replacement. God bless my boss and second chances.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I did some travelling repair work for PC's when 486 was king. I had to do some warranty work on, I believe, a Zenith brand PC. I had never seen one before and never saw one again for that matter. The machine in question was at a kindergarten "classroom" in Po-dunk, Kentucky. The classroom consisted of a single, double-wide trailer with 2 teachers and about 20 insane children.
I was there to swap out a HDD and cable. The teachers asked me if the other kids could watch while I did the "repair work". I said sure and all the kids gathered around got ready for a really important life-changing lesson.
I swapped the equipment out, everything was just fine. I noticed when I pulled off the old IDE cable that it had several pins missing. I found it rather odd but the replacement HDD was a Seagate and the original HDD was something I had never heard of. So I figured, hey must be a weird non-standard drive, but the Seagate I felt comfortable with and IDE was IDE, right?
Wrong! As per my usual superstitions about things not working when you pack up your tools before you test the machine, I left the case open when I fired the thing up. Little did I know, I really was FIRING the machine up. The kids were leaning forward strainging to see the fan inside spin around and then this cloud just started to pour out from the innards of the machine! The kids let out a collective scream as the tower just went up like it was made out of newsprint or something. The teachers were gasping, I was stunned, and the kids were crying; it was absolute anarchy! Within what must have only been a few seconds but seemed like an eternity, reality kicked in and I realized that this was an event that was actually occurring. It was also at this point that the sprinkler system apparantly took notice of what was going on. Yes thats right, this double-wide trailer filled with wife-beater t-shirt wearing redheaded step-children not only had enough money for a computer, but also a goddamned sprinkler system!
I already had that infernal device(sorry for the pun) in my hands, the power cord yanked out the back, and was running the three steps to the door when the sprinkler system went off and oh my god those things can put out quite a bit of water! I took the machine, kicked the door open to the place and threw the damned thing outside into, of course, a 2 foot mound of snow no less. The kids all ran out behind me, into the freezing cold, completely soaked from head to toe. The situation went from bad to worse when the sprinkler system wouldn't shut off and no one knew where the water lines were.
The "fire department" arrived pretty quickly but I'm pretty sure HE was drunk or on crystal meth or something because he got out of his pickup truck and ran INTO the trailer without talking to anyone, without any gear. He screamed *something* from inside the trailer, ran back outside, got back in his truck, and literally did a burn-out(sorry for the pun again) as he sped away.
The rest of the story involves me hanging out for a few hours with a crapload of Opie lookalikes stuffed my car trying not to die of exposure and me wondering if I was going to jail and asking myself, "I'm getting paid how much an hour again?"
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
Is this an ev4 system or is it by any chance an ev6 based system with a (Samsung embedded design) UP700 or XP700 (IIRC) motherboard?
I may know someone who can fix it, but I don't know if they'll give it back to you...me!!!
But seriously, scoot your browser over to BadFlash and ask the man there. There are two things he'll need; if possible the extracted BIOS (or you'll need to send the entire motherboard just so Jack can manipulate the BIOS), and you also need to include the BIOS flash image data that you want re-flashed onto the BIOS. Jack is quite skilled and he is not a dull boy; his work all day consists of playing with everyone's BIOSs. This is the same Jack that provided the earliest of upgrades for the Netpliance I-Opener "Internet Appliance" modifications. Don't give up on your Alpha, as it will never give up on you! Alpha hardware is highest quality components and their replacement is trivial when you have access to a source of similar replacement parts and the right extraction tools.
Sincerily,
Alpha Troll (as so I am known at LinuxGames
Seriously, that's what I love with DOS and FAT/FAT32, you cannot screw up a system! Using Norton uneraser/unformat for DOS on a floppy disk: C:\>format c: A:\>unformat c: C:\>diskcopy A: C: won't work C:\>deltree /y .
A:\>uneraser C:\
(have to guess the first letter
of every file but still, it even recognized
deleted directory, the only catch is not overwritting the file entries)
And some people still wonders at work why
I format my Windows XP in FAT32,
because if it screw up, I can undo it!
Seriously, Linux is great,
but with cryptic command name for beginners
like dd, df, rm... it's easy to screw up.
Where's uneraser/unformat for Linux ?!
Some people use backups, that's good sometimes.
What I found useful is people running
mirrors of every directory /etc /home /usr /var /opt
under things like a mounted /.mirrors/
with hourly.1 hourly.2 up to .24,
weekly.1, weekly.2, weekly.3, monthly
and some automatic backups.
That's feasible in an enterprise-scale
linux/solaris/unix server.
But even that the problem is disk space!
You cannot do that with a terrabyte database,
ftp deposit box, flat files or similar really.
Also, tell a linux newbie to do that.
Backups are for wimps! =P
I think it would be better to have
really user proof methods!
Oh and my Windows XP machine crash 2-6 times
a day, while my Windows 98 SE machine crash
6 times a year... my Slackware server?
been up and running for 4 years! =)
[except for the small kernel patch downtime]
OS upgrade went OK, only 13 diskettes. Thought I would go have a beer and a smoke while the tape restored DB files. uh-oh proprietary program with special config files....in the root partition... I only had a tape backup of /u.... "MMM Hello Mr. Smarty pants consultant from St. Louis? Ah yes, got a problem here with one of these systems......" Got off lightly with a "Never come back here again!"
Have you Meta Moderated t
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. -- Jean Luc Picard
i was familiar with standalone dired, not with the emacs mode. i su to root, cd to /tmp and start deleting files. disk-full error messages are streaming away, messing up the dired screen display. at some point, it must must have asked me, "are you sure," and i probably typed yes.
a minute or so later, it types starts complaining about missing a whole bunch of stuff in /bin. what had happened, is that emacs dired listed . and .. as files that i might want to delete, and i asked it to delete them (when the screen was askew from constant disk full system error messages). bsd dired did not have this feature that provided the opportunity to delete . and .., so when i asked to delete /tmp/.. , it went to / and started deleting merrily away, and died after it deleted /bin/rm, which it must have been using to do the actual deletions.
we didn't have the presence of mind to just mount the disk on another machine, i don't remember why, maybe just trauma, but in those days, most workstations had just one disk.
we looked at /bin and saw that we had /bin/sh and /bin/uudecode. (the files in /bin were stored in alphabetical order). /bin/ls was gone (ls before rm), but we got a directory listing with "echo *" which was a shell built-in. we used /bin/sh to type in a shell script with while and read and echo to create an ascii text file that was a uuencoded binary of cat, I think, so we could read from a 5 inch floppy or something.
we eventually brought the system back to life. it was not my finest hour.
I once accidentally ghosted over a customer's production box. I reversed the harddrives.
they had been working on a new site design for 6 months.
then I said, it's ok. give me your backup.
that's when the web developer went out back and puked.
apparently they never backed up, despite our stark warnings.
I found out that was the second time that company had a data disaster.
I said "oops"
hehe
They're using their grammar skills there.
It's actually known as the only Windows operating system that works better when you upgrade it from Windows 98 as opposed to a fresh installation. Apparently, the registry is fubared on a default install.
By the way, they more than made up for it with Windows 2000 and XP, based on the NT kernel--I can't even imagine all these people here who still use Windows 98 in their minds to gauge Windows. Windows hasn't been the same beast since late 1999.
I was going to clear out the temp directory on an NT4 machine at work that was out of hard drive space... Unfortunately i ended up hitting shift-del in c:\windows instead of c:\windows\temp. On the bright side i'm in charge of repairs so i got paid for the reinstallation.
I also spent an hour once wondering why a computer was refusing to boot with a new 10k rpm 50GB SCSI drive (1999) but would work fine with it hooked up externally before i noticed the mounting brackets were shorting the motherboard when screwed into place.
I kicked a beta P4 chip across a conference room while testing it in front of management...
Worst/funniest I've seen was a customer bring in a 4 day old G4 titanium notebook with a 17" screen that he had spilled red wine in then expected me to exchange it for a new one.
Of course I knew that this agency had a public records facility that would copy these applications, but that was a manual process outside of my control. There also was a feature in another system that would allow all of the applicants (and others who may be interested) to download everyone's application. Guess what field's logic wasn't checked -- you guessed it. Nobody thought of this new logic requiring a change in the download application, and suddenly companies bylaws, financial statements, special ownership disclosures, you name it -- all of them were falling into their competitor's hands despite the promise of the federal government to keep this information confidential. In about a day the firestorm was unbelievable.
Ever since then I preach "NO INTELLIGENCE IN PRIMARY KEYS, EVER!" and others don't know why I get why I get nuts about this. I guess they never had to deal with someone whining about a lost opportunity in the billion-dollar range!
Yes, there is a reason for Anonymous Coward. In 1996 I programmed microcode for a network switch that took down a major New York trading floor for six business hours. I still have nightmares.
I once had a computer desk that had a shelf on the top of it where I had put a few potted plants. One day after watering the plants, a couple seconds later I hear an odd dripping noise and that burning electronics smell. I stand up to see that one of the plants that had a tray underneath it so the water could drain had overflown. The water had trailed along the top of the desk, spilling directly into the vents on top of the monitor below the shelf.
Needless to say, I did a mad dash trying to unplug the monitor before all hell broke loose. To no avail as the monitor was fried.
Was doing an assignment in college and had created a bunch of .o and .c files. Once everything was ready and running, I tried to clean everything by doing a "rm -f * .o" - thats right, i mistakenly gave a space between * and . and as they say, I had to work all through the weekend to redo the project. Wasnt funny then !
As I was getting off the bus my iPod's headphone cable caught on the bus' door handle. THe music stopped playing, but I didn't think anything of it (the cable had gotten caught before, and it just generally disconnected the remote from the headphones).
This time, however, apparently the iPod case, with iPod inside (natch) had been pulled off my hip... and under the bus' wheels.
The hard drive was turned to dust, the screen shattered and the metallic part of the case bent in. The front of the case, however seemed fine, and the logic board looks surprisingly intact, as does the battery. I have since replaced the iPod (thank you eBay!) but am too scared to try the old battery on the new iPod, just in case.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
This isn't as much a tragedy as a near tragedy.
Back in the olden 386 days (about 12 years ago), I was doing a for-fee computer upgrade. Can't remember what the upgrade was, but I was getting paid $75, which at that point in life was well worth the effort involved. Whatever the upgrade was, it involved removing lots of power connectors and the like and then reconnecting them. You know how pretty much every 3.5" floppy connector is keyed? Well, this lovely machine didn't have that option.
Maybe I should mention at this point that my "customer" (also my boss at the time) was a lawyer, and a quite computer savvy one at that. She had all her finances on the machine. Turbo Tax records for multiple years, Quicken data, Checkfree eletronic payments... numerous personal documents in Word. I didn't make a backup of the hard drive before proceeding. I mean, I had nothing that could hold the drive's contents (it was a ~60MB MFM drive, one of those full-height 5.25" beasts), though I had plenty of floppies....
So, I simply plugged in all the plugs, figuring that they should be keyed, so polarity won't be a problem, right? Wrong. I got a "pop" and wisp of smoke from the floppy drive as soon as I hit the power switch. I immediately powered down. After assessing the situation, I disconnected the floppy drive, figuring I simply killed the floppy (bad enough, but could be worse). Wrong. The hard drive was unresponsive. At this point I started _really_ feeling the gut churn.
A combination of smarts and luck (and $$$) saved me. A friend and I noticed the drive still spun up, so it was mechanically okay. We theorized that the MFM controller was okay based on the error message we saw on boot. If I could find an identical drive, we may be able to swap out the circuit board with the dead drive. I scoured the local used computer stores and managed to find one that had the exact same drive, used, for $179 + tax. I bought that, and paid I forget how much for a new 3.5" floppy, and returned home. Nervously, my friend and I took out the Torx screwdrivers and removed the drive's circuit board. Swapping the boards did work, the computer booted back up, I got paid my $75 (net loss >$100), and forever have a great computer story to tell everyone to remind them how you can never be too careful with power connector polarity.
Fortunately, the drop in computer hardware costs has made similar tragedies much more bearable. Just last week, I had a screwdriver slip while prying the heat sink tab and killed a brand new motherboard. That 12-year-old stomach ache hit me for quite a while before I reminded myself that while this could've been very bad, it was only a $60 mobo. All the same, it's never fun to accidentally break things.
A repairman from US Worst was in the computer room for the callcenter. This was the callcenter for the United States Postal Service in Denver and we had some Very Heavy Duty equipment in there, like the database of all the 9 digit ZIPs, change of address, the phone system, etc. :)
On the way out after his service call the repairman hit the large red button on the wall next to the door thinking that it would open the door.
It wouldn't.
It would, however, instantly cut all power to the computer room in case of an emergency. That's probably why it was labeled in large red letters "EMERGENCY ELECTRICAL CUTOFF"
hypothesis:
spawning many processes can fry your hardware.
counter:
PEBKAC
comment:
you have got to be fscking kidding me.
This problem was roughly the equivilant of an 'rm -rf *' in ~, but in Windows - and not truly the fault of the user, but more of a design bug.
I set up samba as a PDC on my file server, and added a new account on my win2k machine, as the old one's USER.DAT was getting a bit large and bloated. I set up the new account to be a domain account, and moved all the files I had in my old account into the new one on the workstaiton - probably roughly 40Gb, half of it ripped video from my dvcam, and probably a good 3G of edited video.
I reboot the system, and log into the new account. It takes a while longer than I expected - and then it gives me an error about how a temporary account will be used, as the one on disk (or the server? I don't recall/use windows too often) wasn't available. Uh oh.
Turns out that the combination of not having roaming profiles set up on a samba (or, I assume, windows) PDC in combination with the win2k (winxp? haven't tested) machine's account to be set as a roaming profile results in everything in the roaming profile being axed if the server doesn't have the appriate profile share and configuration. So, Windows thought: hey, there's nothing on the server, all this data in the local profile must be erronous! And deletes it.
I was quite pissed.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
except if a file is corrupted while being altered it is gone, while NTFS can recover the file
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I was adding some workstations to a login script and accidentally entered an invalid command causing the script to break. It wouldnt have been that bad except that it was the night before a large sale and nobody could figure out what was causing the registers to refuse logins until i arrived two hours after opening.
but it won't stand up to a toddler whose managed to get ahold of a phillips screwdriver. Put a nice big chip in the monitor, he did.
I actually split a Mac mouse in two, because I thought that the "left" mouse button and "right" mouse button were fused together, and I tried to separate them. Little did I know that there wasn't a right mouse button on Macs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Something similar happened to me once. I had a (production) web application, with accounts and the like. I hadn't yet programmed a "change password" feature, and I wanted to change mine. Instead of doing the right thing and programming that bloody feature, I ran an SQL query: "UPDATE users SET password=MD5('somepassword')". The whole thing ended with making people get a new password assigned by email, and the official excuse was verifying peoples' email addresses.
I was trying to figure out how to change directories in Linux, and I thought I typed the command to pull up the help feature or "manual". Instead, I accidentally formatted and repartitioned my hard drive, mounted my neighbor's microwave oven via 802.11b, ftp'd my tax returns to the local news journal, subscribed to 6,000 different cable channels via 5 competing cable providers, downloaded all of Google's cache of slashdot articles and indexed a keyword search database, ordered 725 pizzas from Dominos via the repeated and accidental execution of some "command line pizza utility", and somehow sent NASA the plans to create a cost-efficient space vehicle that would allow them to compete in the X Prizes. To this day I still can't figure out what sequence of commands I must have mistyped to do all that. I still can even figure out how to pull up the help for "cd".
beast of a system...386/16sx (my first 'tower')
i was so excited. i finally got my cyrix *cough*upgrade cpu in, it would upgrade my system to a 4x86-40mhz! i opened the case, looked at the instruction book, compared things, grabbed my cpu puller tools and got ready to do the swap.
two things to keep in mind:
1) this was before zif, you had to pull a good amount to pop a cpu out of the motherboard.
2) the cyrix instruction book was in engrish, and the pictures didnt exactly match the captions...
so...i looked at my motherboard, compared it closely to the instruction book, and started pulling. nothing. i pulled harder. nothing. harder. nothing. one last go....CRACK. 15 minutes later, and much swearing, i realized i had been trying to remove the math co-processor from the motherboard (which is soldered on, mind you). it cracked down the center. needless to say, the motherboard was trashed.
the caption in the manual was not 'correct'...it read 'the cpu will look like this' (which applied to the picture before it.) the next pictures caption, which applied to the picture i was following, read 'do not try pulling the math cpu!'
aside from that...
-a stick of pc100 went in backwards once, fried the stick and one of my mem slots
-dog urinated in an open mini-tower case (i keep all my computers covered now)
I used to support a manufacturing company. They had a PC controlling a plasma cutter in the shop. I had left one of the back plates off the card slots; didn't think anything of it. 'Til it got colder...And a REAL mouse climbed inside to keep warm... and... er... uh... FUNCTIONED on the motherboard. Mouse urine does fascinating things to circuit boards. To this day, I've never left a system with a hole larger than 1/8"!
I've got a good one for this.
;-)
A few years ago I had a Powerbook G3 and I was working at a company that made laptops so a few of us (interns) had a habit of taking our laptops apart just for the heck of it. Taking apart the screen was lots of fun, there were like five different layers on the thing and I had it spread all over the table. Then I decided to take apart the main part of the case.
Unfortunately I was in someone else's cube, a hardware hacker (I'm a software hacker) and he hada all the tools there. But his cube was a total mess. So basically I had to do the whole thing in my lap. Which was a bad idea, because usually I spread everything out and put all the little screws in nice rows that corresponded with how everything came out, so that when I put it back together I would know if I missed anything.
This time at the end I was missing one screw. Not good, but it was gone, everything was back together, and I didn't want to do it again because it takes like an hour and there's about a thousand bits in there.
So later on, (like maybe a month later) I noticed my computer had a rattle sometimes. I don't know if I really remembered about the screw or not. I didn't really worry about it. After all I had AppleCare protection, right?
So then, months and months later, I'm in a different country in a friend's office and I pick up my computer and turn it sideways. Suddenly everything goes out like a light. I thought it was static electricity or a bad battery or something but after a few days of trying to turn the damned thing on, no luck.
I used to try to fix everything myself in those days so I wound up swapping out the power board for a new one but no luck. Eventually I just gave it to AppleCare and said "you fix it"
Needless to say, when I got it back, they also had in a little bag a screw they found in it (and they had to replace the motherboard, daughterboard AND power card, worth about $1000). I guess the screw fell into just the wrong place and shorted something else.
My hardware hacking days are pretty much over now
simon
home page
Enermax is another maker of very beefy powersupplies. I've got one and haven't had a problem with it.
My stupid hardware trick happened with just such a beast...
I had just moved to Europe from the US with a fancy 300W model. I was sitting in the kitchen with my friends when we realized that we had no cd player. So, I decided to show them what a 1337 h4X0r I am, and rig a CD-ROM drive to a stand-alone power supply. I'd done it a thousand times, however, this time, I was on 240V. I didn't flip the switch.
The thing goes for a few seconds before erupting in smoke and permanently burning/staining our dorm floor's dinner table. I quickly unplugged it and picked it up--dripping fowl-smelling oil the whole time--and jammed its power cables into the window. So, here it is, hanging outside our fifth-floor window for a couple days by its 5V/12V cables (naturally, I'd forgotten it) when a neighbor decides to air out the kitchen. It falls 50 feet to the sidewalk. Nobody was injured, except myself in pride.
The first one was leaving a scrathed cd in a comp dvd drive for about an hour. When i came back, there was a burnt plastic smell in the room that stayed for about a week. Of course the dvd drive was dead.
:(
The second one was when i wanted to copy the boot sector from my floppy to my hd. i wasnt much experienced at the time so the command i wrote looked like this:
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hdc count=1 bs=512
when i rebooted there was one 1.38mb partition on the hardisk
I stuck slashdot into my bookmark list...
Probably letting my brother near the computer. He has short circuited the monitor and Spilt soft drinks on the computer/disks/mouse and keyboard about 5 times. Oh and he keeps going on porn sites and downloading virus's off them.
The end is the beginning of something new.
One year we had a hurricane hit the city and it took part of the roof off of our old office, followed by about 10" of rain. The roof caved in over three of my servers. I walked into the office to find the ceiling tiles disintegrated and covering all the servers... and they were still running! There was a gaping hold in the roof and a huge waterfall pouring into the room. It was very surreal. That was a long night.
Picture one computer, one toddler (who's noticed the eject button on the cd drive of the computer), and one new pad of post-it notes. After a little determined effort, the entire pad of post-it notes was stuffed nicely into the drive; and, with a little more effort, the drive door is closed...
I spent an entire day writing a PERL script to sort through a bunch of Snort logs for me. It would basically look through all the logfiles in a directory, combine them, process them through snortalog and send the results to a web server. Next, it archived all the logs in another directory and cleaned out the starting directory to await all the new logs for the next night. After a ton of work it was finally ready. I ran it and smiled as it performed flawlessly on all the test logs I put in the directory. My joy turned to horror as I realized I had run the script from within the log directory, and the script deleted itself when it wiped the raw logs. Note to self: ALWAYS backup my scripts in another spot in case of script-suicide.
There are also lots of databases that do not have transactions,
Well, if it has no transactions, it isn't really a database.
Have you read my journal today?
When at school (many a year ago now), I built a computer inside a cardboard box. All of the teachers told me it was a bad idea and it would catch on fire. I didn't believe them... Also, before the 'fire' incident, I managed to cause myself quite a painful electrocution. Sometimes teachers actually do know best.
Why can I not mod a message to crap?!?
One day back in 1998, I got a soundblaster AWE 64 and was installing it in my 486DX2 and I put it in and it didn't work, so I uninstalled all of the software, and reseated the card, and did it about another 2 times, and after about 3 hours of f*cking with it I realized that the reason I could not hear anything was because the speakers weren't plugged in.
alias rm='rm -i'
will restore everything since the last "COMMIT"
To be accurate, it will undo any changes since the last SAVEPOINT. A COMMIT includes an implicit SAVEPOINT.
It is important to note that a ROLLBACK restores nothing, it actually undoes work. This helps explain the hideous ORACLE error of a non-consistent page, on a SELECT!
Anyway, if it actually restored it, all transactions would be undone, and that would be a serious problem.
Have you read my journal today?
Working at the University of Tampa as a part time labtech, we had an old NT domain still running the university. The lab PCs were logged onto this domain. It's a pain ghosting and re-adding machines to the old NT domain. So one day, one of the new full-time guys decides to run Linux...and turn on Samba...and make it a PDC. Needless to say all the labtechs had a long day re-adding all those 200+ machines to the domain in the middle of the school year, in the middle of the day. Moral: don't play with linux if you don't know what you're doing!!!
Wow. Very interesting thought. I know I've been in a couple of these things before, but unlike you, I seem to be better at blocking out the memories.
Anyway that last part made me think of every sitcom where the kids were playing in the living room, broke a lamp and managed, peice by peice to superglue it back together before the parents came home. Only, for laughs, the next day, the lamp would fall apart suddenly and the kids pretend to be as suprised as the parents.
Some years ago, a friend of mine came to visit. I was just working on an important project when he burst in and tripped over the power cable of my PC which was firmly attached right to the wall socket next to the door - I had run out of wall sockets in the proximity of my PC.
He actually managed to rip the wall socket out of the wall. Power went away and I had to install a new socket. Also, I lost some of my work. Needless to say that I now have plenty of free sockets in close proximity of my PC.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
I had coded a graphical calculator, and it had over 5000 LOC, all variables where 3 letter except some local where shorter. No comments nor any documentation. After 6 month brake I spend week trying to fix that. I had windows, my HD mysticly broke and wiped out everything, including games and ALL the things I've programmed that far.[I didn't have CD-drive at that machine, nor made backups]. I was happy because the need for updating the calculator was gone, and I didn't need to see those sources anymore. Needless to say I've learned to put something in readability and documentation after that.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Now, we also were drinking Coca-Cola, and there were a couple of these half-full glasses standing around.
Of course, the combination proved fatal to a keyboard and one of the draft documents in short order. Once the drink hit the keyboard, the word processor program received a dozen or so Rs, and the computer started beeping continually. We unplugged the keyboard, tried plugging in another, but the PC still keept beeping. So it had to be rebooted, and there went our document draft. We had previously turned on the Autosave function since it would take about 30 seconds and tend to strike in the middle of some inspired writing run, cutting it short in the process.
The keyboard was of the kind with foam-supported capacitive switches under the keys. Several attempts were made of cleaning it, in a shower and even a dishwasher, but the keys remained sticky, and the keyboard was given up for dead.
Another coworker had bought a PC in parts, and being adept with cars, he thought he'd be able to assemble a PC as well. He mostly managed it too, except for the cache RAM. This was back in the day when the 486DX motherboards had 32K static RAM cache chips in long skinny 28-pin packages, which fit into their sockets in two ways, one right and one wrong. And since the power and ground pins are at opposite corners of these, the wrong way is very wrong...
Now, he had bought the full complement of 9 such chips for his motherboard, and managed to put them in backwards, as he were about to discover the hard way. On turning on the power, two of them cracked open, two others just melted in the middle region where the silicon was, and these and the others got so hot so as to leave visible marks on the sockets they were in.
He came around and asked me about what had happened, and I could only tell him to go get a new set of memory chips. I actually did test the now-defunct set, and the chips without visible external damage actually still were able to read and write parts of their contents, but they had some memory addresses that were "stuck" at 1 and thus were useless for all practical purposes.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
After you said the prayer, did you threaten to become gay if she wouldn't bend over?
Several years ago, a sysadmin (not me; developers didn't normally have root) decided that my Unix home directory needed to be moved from one file server to another.
I log in the next day, and start noticing problems. Such as most of my project files -- about 6 years' worth of sourcecode, archived email, development notes, documentation, and so on -- are missing. After some digging around I figure out who did it and give them a call to report the trouble.
I'm a bit pissed but not panicking, since ever since they switched from local ad-hoc admins to centralized system administration for those machines, they've been doing nightly backups of the file servers and home directories. So I say to them "well, I can probably remember and reconstruct what I did yesterday, so just pull my stuff off the last backup tape and I'll go from there".
There's a long pause on the other end of the phone. That's when I realized I really should be panicking.
See, it turns out they may have backups, but they've never figured out how to recover from the incrementals. So it might have to be the monthly backup instead.
Then later on they tell me that whoops, that server wasn't being backed up regularly yet.
Then still later they tell me that whoops, they don't seem to have any backups of my files. Ever.
So I got to spend the next several weeks (not like I had much else I could do) writing UFS forensics tools to undelete my own damn home directory off of an image of a "corporately supported" file server drive.
This was definitely the last time I trusted corporate support with my files. I think at one point I had five clones of my home directory on various physical drives and LANs throughout the organization, with regular rsyncs to keep them in sync with the working copy that was on a machine that I had total control over.
Occasionally when I'd do an rsync from my real copy to one of the clones on a "supported" file server I'd find it mysteriously fixing file attributes or repopulating large parts of my directory tree, and I'd know that some corporate sysadmin had fucked it up again somehow.
Worst thing that's happened to me yet: Well, let me just say that you should never wire up a)more than 10 fans in your ATX case AND b)never wire ones that sprin at around 14,000 RPMs. Your computer will become what could only be considered as a hand-munching whirling cuisinart of doom.
Missed a check box for several months, for a directory that we moved 70% of our upper management's home directories too.....the Dell PowerEdge 1650 (some) had a bad resistor that smoked and caused small server fires. Ours decided to burn down before they "issued" a recall for the 1650, in the process the drives went with it. End result, several very unhappy managers/executives, however because they insist on using Exchange as a file storage for most documents, with help from the IT staff, they were able to get 90% or more of their data back. For me as a manger, several pucker up and hope for the best meetings....Great learning experience, details details details...they make your back ups worth a shit!
Just a little confused exactly at the 'approaching' part. Are we saying that the limit of the cost of win xp from now to infinity is zero, since that's the price of gnu/linux?
Oh, I see, 'friend's disk', I get it. Forgot when they put that as allowable in the EULA, hehe ^_^.
--- "To iterate is human, to recurse divine." -- Robert Heller
A friend of mine is kind of paranoid when he travels with a laptop full of important confidential information. When staying in a rented place with his wife, he hid his laptop - not in the safe where a burglar might expect it to be - and went out. He came back to find her cooking and didn't think about it until he smelled burning plastic.
He had hidden the notebook in the broiler of the oven, and she decided to do some baking. IT was at about 400 degrees fahrenheit for 20 minutes or so.
The case was badly melted. Many of the keys had stuck to the screen. The power button on the side had melted, but when he broke the plastic around it and pushed it in, LEDs lit up and it sounded like it was booting.
He got it to a desktop machine and connected an external keyboard and monitor. It worked fine. He copied the data to an external harddrive, but then continued to use that machine.
He told me the story and showed me the machine a few years after the incident, and it was still working fine.
I told him to let Sony use it in advertising!
It was an out of the box dual Pentium II mainboard (from Tyan), I was updating the BIOS and suddenly my worst nightmare come true, power failed and the flashing ended. The BIOS was in an unusable state, no boot. As the mainboard was really expensive and I have no money left I went to a shop where they have lots of defective mainboards with a screwdriver and ask them for their BIOS, I get about eight nice chips, of course none of them was for my board, and none of them was for a dual mainboard.
:-)
I go back home and start trying them. Afer five failed check the sixth works! but of course only one processor detected and nothing I mean nothing! else, so no floppy, no IDE no way to flash it. I try the others but that was the only one to boot. So I recover from the bottom of my pile of OLD hardware, an ISA floppy/IDE/serial controller (I've tried with one PCI and it doesn't work either) and to my surprise although no hard disk was detected the floppy was found!!!! Time to reflash the BIOS, this time it works. The most strange thing is that the chip was from other manufacturer (I don't remember maybe my BIOS was AWARD and the chip was from ASUS? I'm not sure about this).
My next bought was an UPS, and I learned the lesson, THE SCREWDRIVER IS THE WAY
- german
just aver a month ago, i was happily using my notebook HP-Compaq nx9010 at my factory office, it is in a remote location, when a lightning surge hit the power or phone lines. my computer went dead. It was like in slow motion, first the screen slowly turned white....after the complete screen became white it just shut off....so signs of recovery....i took it to HP servce center...they didnt know what went wrong, they gave me the backups in 3 days, they informed me that a mother board and cpu was on way for testing purpose,...it took over a week when i shouted at them...then i got my PC back and working. the entire process took 12 days and those 12 days were the worst. i was virtually handicaped...all my business was effected....
i came to only one conclusion, before buying any important equipment, be sure about their quality of service. For me, no more HP or Compaq after that incident...
Was to give CATS exactly what he wanted:
chown -R CATS ~/base
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Some years ago, one of my friends was living in a predominately male and CS/engeneering dorm in Copenhagen. This was at the time when ethernet gear finally hit the price point where even poor students could afford it, but before such things became standard in dorms.
No sweat. They set up their own, with my buddy's old 386 as the central server. In a star topology. By stringing the ethernet cables outdoors from balcony to balcony.
Now imagine what happens when a thunderstorm comes along, and you have what's basically a giant lightning rod - nay, lightning web - strung all over the face of the tallest building in the neighbourghhood...
Alledgedly the innards of the server were not just fried - they were disintegrated! There was nothing left except a slightly disstorted computer case, with a pile of black dust inside it. He claimed that they could pour the remains of the motherboard and components out of the case through the cooling vents.
One twist developed tho: He got compensated quite handsomely by the insurance company. The computer was built by a company which had contracts with (among others) the Danish military, and therefore they had to stock old machines... at outrageously high prices. Unfortunately for the insurance company, his insurance policy specified that he should be reimbused the replacement cost of the machine :D
You must have lost your mind when you bought that evil OS. :P
I wish I could get a keyboard condom for my laptop, like I have for my desktop. I had to throw away my last laptop due to water spilling on the keyboard.
Mike
Why, thank you for your deeply insightful and offensively ungrammatical pronouncement, Mr. Anonymous Coward. On behalf of all the denizens of Slashdot, let me express gratitude to you for assuaging your deeply imbued sense of self-hatred by taking a few moments out of your boring and pointless lack of a life to make this judgment. The ignorant masses, now enlightened by this amazing post you have made to Slashdot, shall now know that Mr. Jonathan Quince is an idiot and that he probably sucks llama cock, too. And I'm sure that Mr. Quince himself actually gives a flying fuck through a rolling donut what you think, too.
Oh, no. Wait. He probably doesn't care, after all. Never mind.
1) rm * instead of rm *~ in /etc. That was on a slackware box. I took the opportunity to install FreeBSD.
2) a script that finds all files in the current dir, and moves them from their subdir to the current dir itself. I did this on my images directory, and I had to reorganise 22,000 images by looking at each.
3) rm file1 file2 instead of mv file1 file2. I no longer have file1.
The Mech Eng department inherited the old IBM 1401 when the second 360 arrived around 1970. They had a simulation program on the 1401 that was ancient even then - but it worked. It was simpler to take the old 1401 and set up the minimal configuration needed to keep the beast running. This pared down dinosaur was relegated to the most inconvenient back corner of the ops centre.
Now core memory is amazingly reliable. It just doesn't fail. But human judgement certainly does!
Over the years, some clever hack and figured out how to rerun a simulation using the alternate (B) model - it could be set by toggling a single core (bit). A second clever hack actually mapped the bit to the core memory block and lo-and-behold, the bit was on the most nearly exposed core plane! All you had to do was loosen some protective shielding and you could see the magic bit - right there!
Now you could do this from the control panel but there was some odd constraint which meant that you would have to reload the (identical) input dataset for the second run. Needless-to-say, over time, it became almost routine to show off the quaint old box by using a tapered wooden ruler to do the reset.
You had to be careful because each core was only about a millimeter across. And the core modules were not intended to be exposed. But, heh!, the beast was built like a tank and it was only ever used for this one simulation (which meant you never needed to load the program - it just persisted in core indefinitely.) So, the appropriate chassis was typically left with the cover plate off and the magic core was highlighted with whiteout.
The core memory was easier to reach from the side than from the front but as a consequence, you had to stretch while holding the wooden ruler that we used to flip the chronic offender. And this is where the inevitable happened. While trying to pass on this secret technique to a grad student, the two of us were forced into tight quarters. As he leaned past me to get a closer look, he slipped. And as he fell, he grabbed me and pulled me down on top of him. And the wooden ruler you ask? Yes, you guessed it; It ripped a gash through fully half the core plane!
Oh Crap!
Back when I was 15 or so, I once was watering a hanging plant, which was hooked to the ceiling close to my (first) computer. Too much water.
After starting to walk away, I hear a noise and turned around just in time to see the outer pot of the plant that held the excess water slip out of the little clamps that hold it up, and fall down (in extreme slow-motion of course) onto a VCR right next to the computer... Then tip, and at least a full cup of water streams out straight into the ventilation slots on top of my monitor, which was actually turned on at the time.
Immediately turned it off. (maybe not the brightest idea in hindsight, but luckily didn't electrocute myself there)
After unplugging it, I opened up the monitor itself (probably another bad idea) and had a large fan blow straight onto the electronics inside for a day or two to completely dry it out... Screwed everything back together again, and miraculously it actually worked for several more years.
ReiserFS, was without a doubt, the WORST mistake I have ever had in all the years I've used Linux. After about 2 months of being used, I started losing programs out of /usr/local/bin and I lost two of my home directories (luckally, the directories of the people whom I hosted shells and webspace for lasted long enough to backup). I reformatted with ext3 and haven't looked back. I know this isn't an isolated event either. I have a friend who uses Slack on his laptop, whom also used FeiserFS, same thing happened.
Seriously, do *not* touch the stuff. You can't go wrong with ext2 or ext3.
Acetone is great for removing the text markings from your keyboard if you want a leet all white keyboard. As a bonus none of your computer-illiterate family members can fuck about on your computer after that :P
In '84 I was working in London and was visiting our main office. When I walked out the front door a delivery guy was trying to offload a brand new VAX-11 from his truck. This guy obviously had no idea what he was doing and was manhandling it like you would a fridge. Anyway he asked me to help and we got it onto his trolley in the back of the truck - the trolley was a little wooden thing with wheels on the bottom - a toy maybe designed for 100lbs max.
:)
He then pushed the Vax (which was now on the rollable trolley) onto the liftgate on the back of his truck so he could lower it to the ground - it was about 3-4 feet off the ground. When he lowered the liftgate the little trolley started to roll and the Vax headed for the edge! He pressed the stop button but it still kept rolling. Knowing how much the Vax weighed I got out of the way but he jumped in front of it to try and stop it! Somehow he didn't get killed and it landed in the middle of Great Portland Street with an almighty crash.
After looking at it stunned, we tipped it back upright. It was all bent and bashed in and he remarked "its not too bad guv. we can just straighten it up a bit"! He even asked me if I'd sign for it. Needless to say at this point I made a hasty exit
I wrote the first Memory resident program in assembler in DOS and blocked write access to my HDD. ..
FAT data trashed, everything gone.
Well, it was fun anyway.
Stupid accident: There was this guy I knew and took his processor out ( 486 ) and when he put it back in managed to put in the wrong position.
Power ON. Some blue Smoke. No processor.
Bye.
has been using -march to compile my applications and whatnot. After dismembering my morgan cored Duron, I was forced to use a normal, plain old 700Mhz one. Pitty I had to recompile everything again :). At around the same time my harddrive partition table imploded (my fault but I'm not blaming anyone ;P). Lucky I didn't have any backups of anything.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
I've got a couple, one by me and one by my old boss ....
... select the scanner software and click uninstall .... hmmmm .... this is taking a long time ... well not sure what was wrong with the uninstaller but most of c:\windows went away .... I was left with the task of explaining to them that their computer was going to take slightly longer to fix ...
... my ex-boss needed to clear some files out of a directory that were older than a certain date, so a quick find with -mtime and -exec rm switches was his choice of method to clear them ... unfortuantly he didnt notice he was sitting in / and yes the date stamp on most of the OS binaries did mean that they were for the chop .... good thing we had taken a mksysb the day before ... :)
1). I was looking at a compaq box running win95 for a friend of my mum's. They were having problems with their scanner software so we decided to reinstall it. So go to Add/remove programs
2). We had an F50 at work running AIX
t
in the mass of responses, but the story has to be told. Early in my college career, my roommate and I would connect our computers via a null modem cable strung accross the hallway and play network games. His 486 66 MHz would run better and more reliably than my Cyrus 75 MHz pentium equivalent, which would freeze intermittanly. In an attempt to try and figure out what was causing the issue, we opened up the case, removed the heatsink from the CPU and noticed that there was a lot of dust on the chip. After removing the dust, we began to re-attach the heatsink, which clamped to the corners of the chip. The center of the chip was raised enough that you wanted firm pressure on the corners, but not too much pressure... My roommate use his electric screwdriver for the job. Suddently, we heard this sickening "snap," and one corner of the chip broke away. That pretty much put an end to the network games...
IANAL... But I play one on
...of two steps to simulate DOS/Win9x/WinME filesystem security. the second step is, of course:
.*
.VBS files anyways...
chmod -R 777
Now you don't have to worry about all that confusing file ownership and access business like you do in that really hard "lyenucks" system. It all get in the way of running those helpfil
When I worked on the in house IT support team of one of the worlds largest companies I was responsible for organising the repair and replacement of executive IT equipment. One such executive was a 'really good customer' because we saw him regularly! First of all was when he left his several thousand pounds of laptop in his car with the windows open. He couldnt find it later on that day. So we got him a new one. No questions asked. Next was when he had left it in its bag on the driveway behind his car before reversing out. Again, no questions asked. a few weeks later he had evidently been working hard the night before and reported a mysterious fault. the only question asked that time was what sort of red wine he had been drinking, cos it had made a pretty awful mess all over the motheboard! I'd like to come back as an executive - you certainly get to trash a lot of equipment! (By the way, all that happened in about three months! Impressive or what!)
A database stores data. The fact that it has transactions or not does not make something a database. The fact that something stores data is what makes something a database.
Of course. To have a 'useful' database it may be wise that transactions are available. But it is not a necessary feature.
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
In /tmp/, I once wanted to delete all hidden files and tried (as root)
.*
rm -rf
Turned out to be a BAD idea, really bad.
Alex
Heisenberg may have been here
I'd say the flames coming out of the computer's case would a reasonable indicator.
...or so I've been told.
I don't know what you guys do to your Windows machines, honestly. I work on WinXP all day, weeks long with no crashes. The last crash I had was a faulthy update of some critical software. The PC I'm using now currently has a uptime of 17 days (I am asked to reboot now and then for automated software updates, which happen during boot-up). We make and support Windows Software, so that explains the undisputed use of this OS for our machines. In previous work-experiences, I've had uptime of 90 days on W2K, with a power failure wrecking my record-attempt ... (Construction workers cut the cable in the street - they didn't know it was there)
Well here I was one day, messing with my new, super-cool 486/66MHz when my brother came downstairs to bother me. I turned around and knocked into a 6 foot wooden bookshelf, and begun what can only be described as a Rube Goldberg contraption that he himself would have been proud of. The 6 foot bookcase fell forward, knocking off two wall mounted shelves supporting a glass bottle of vinegar, and a rather large HP laserjet printer. The vinegar promptly fell and broke itself over my monitor causing a giant 2 foot+ flame to erupt out of the back, and I could only watch as the printer toppled onto my brother's foot. With a yelp, my brother fell to the floor, grabbing something on his way down to slow the fall. Unfortunately, the something happened to be the cat who growlled/yelped/cried and hopped into my open CPU while knocking over a bottle of goldbond powder into my keyboard. Meanwhile, the vinegar had been seeping into the powersupply of my running camcorder, the powersupply promptly cought fire only to be put out with the goldfish, and his bowl of water, knocked over by the cat jumping out of my CPU, unharmed. At that point, we blew a fuse and the lights went out. Bottom line: Spinny chairs may be fun, but use them with caution (especially around large, free-standing objects.
-kk
The CPU was unharmed, if only a little bit fuzzy.
Pulling it out completely and putting it in another room is a good idea, of course, but IMHO, simply unplugging it will preclude the worst likely hazards, which are, of course, the power supply going apeshit, followed by your inadvertently erasing your HD. Plus, you won't forget where you put it if you leave it in the rack, but unplugged. Finally, you are much more likely to back it up at the scheduled time if you don't have to get up and get it, just plug it in and turn the key.
Of course, this precludes automatic backup, but I have a reminder program set to remind me to start backup 3x a week.
Supplement this with a DVD-R (well, tape if you like to live dangerously) backup set every month and send it somewhere far away you're comfortable about leaving all your data with.
This is, of course, an individual workstation solution, not an enterprise solution. :-)
Tech Public Policy stuff
and my powerr supply just bursted i did thid unintentionally, while trying to reach for an other switch, without looking ...
So one day, when I noticed that my hard disk space was running low, I decided to do some housecleaning. I found a file called COMMAND.COM in my root directory.... mmmm.... wonder what it does - let's run it and see. Ah - all it does it print a stupid Microsoft copyright message.
*clickety* *click*
DEL COMMAND.COM
A few minutes later, wonder why the computer doesn't boot.
I have no idea what other important files I must have deleted due to my overzealousness. To be fair, though, this was just a month or two of a 14-year old having his first experiences with a computer.
(Posting as AC to hide embarrassment)
Hey, nobody reads them EULAs, right? So it *might* be in there...
I had something similar to this, except it was a HP tech created problem.
We had a backplane on a 20 disk RAID array fail on one of our HP 9000 computers, so we had HP come in to do the repair. That night, at about 11:00pm, the HP tech lady shows up, with the new backplane. She removes the old backplane, and sets it down next to the new one and remarks how it's odd that the power and data connectors seem reversed.
Apparently, though, this doesn't phase her, so she puts it in anyways. I'm sitting there thinking "Hey, she's the HP tech", and say nothing. Big mistake.
Plugs everything in, powers on the system -- no lights on any of the drives. No spinning. Nothing.
After about 4 hours, she decides, after numerous calls to other HP tech folks and after I mention it a couple of times, that those connecters were indeed on the board wrong, and she's just fried all 20 of our 18GB disks. And we open for business at 6:00am.
By 7:00am, my boss showed up, as did another HP tech (who actually knew what he was looking at). It's determined that we can run, crippled, for the day off of our development system, which is a nearly identical mirror of our main HP9000. Later that day, the second HP tech returns with 20 brand new disks (free of charge!) and proceeds to ponder how to recover our data.
At this point, I'm pissed. The boss is pissed. The users are beyond pissed. So I tell him to just swap the circuit boards and be done with it. 20 minutes later, we were finally back up and running.
What a pain...
Shut up, Bill.
Back-in-the-day (let's be honest, a month ago -- no, really, back in the day) . . I was a paranoid computer user who's firewall suggested hackers were out to get me (at the time I didn't understand the firewall warnings and that 'pings' didn't imply hackers) . . . one day, late late at night I should say (because even back then I wasn't this stupid, unless sleep deprived), I decided to 'get rid of the trojans on my computer', pressed ctrl+alt+delete.. explorer.exe.. potential trojan??? I decided, YES. Went into my system folder, managed to delete it (even though my system was trying its best to not allow me to), and soon thereafter.. received the blue screen of death.
Result? He failed that class.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
1)Dad got a new 286, I was thrilled, because I got the 8088 for my room. I would play on the computer bbs and such until one day I deleted the command.com file thinking it was useless.
Mom & Dad were due home in an hour and had called ahead letting me know they needed the computer. Suffice it to say, I got a quick education in dos basics that night.
2)Working on a clients computer, I didn't pay attention as I was plugging in the power for a floppy, plugged it in so that one pin was not connected (I'll let you guess which.) Turned the pc on and the floppy spun up and started to smoke. Never worked again, new drive fixed the problem.
3)Bought a Targus laptop backpack, $80, put it was padded all around, except for the top. Put it on a bench at a restaurant one night when out with friends, it fell and my wifi card went into the motherboard and ripped the pcmcia slot clean off the board. PC worked fine though.
4) Was at a clients once working in their office on the machines, the comptroller was asking me why I what my ESD was and why I was wearing it, told him it was to prevent static electricity from jumping from me to the pc and shocking me or frying it.
I went to demonstrate how to use it but was holding the alligator clip by the metal part, a few inches away from the case this blue arc jumped and my arm went limp for a few seconds and stung like a SOB the rest of the day.
5)Another static story, I crawled under a clients desk to plug in their new HP all-in-one, again, an arc, some pain and the USB header was fried. The all-in-one never worked right either, they took it back to staples and got a new one.
6) I had gotten a special preview release of an MSI KT266 mobo, was so excited to test it out, but I was having problems getting my cd-burner seated. Figuring it was the case I smacked it with the palm of my hand and ripped off a capacitor, the board wouldn't boot. Got a new one soldered on the next day.
A few weeks later I was playing with the over-clocking ability and read in the manual about the bios trip to reset it, reading carefully where it said, DO NOT PUT THE JUMPERS ON 1-2 with the power on. Good advice I thought, inadvertently did it anyway and toasted the RTC in the BIOS.
All that being said, it's amazing I still work in this industry huh?
I can't recall completely, but it must have been with Need for Speed.
The site where: "I'm right, as long as you ignore the things that prove me wrong", became a valid method of debate.
nothing happened
Of course, stupid me, I forgot to plug the mains leads inside the case to the switch (back when a switch was a switch dammit! 240 volts live.
So I reached over and grabbed the lead inside the case.
Which was of course, still live after having everything else plugged back in.
I remember the most strange sensation as my lower lip started to oscillate at 50Hz (I am assuming this, since thats the frequency of the power supply here) and a quick shout before somehow I was no longer holding the lead.
ops.
ASSIGN A:=C: ... 3 hours later ...
FORMAT A:
And there went my 10MB RLL drive...
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
After being carped at by "quota" I went to my directory of garbage and did the old rm -rf:
cd ~
cd garbage
rm -rf
except what I actually typed was this:
cd ~
cs garbage
(bash: csgarbage: command not found)
rm -rf *
OOOPS!
Cue one loooong call to the sysadm and much sarcasm about "bloody scientists" while the call went to the offsite storage facility.
24 hours later the data was back, but my quota was still full. So I typed...
cd ~
cs garbage
(bash: csgarbage: command not found)
rm -rf *
You can imagine how much I enjoyed the phone call to the sysadm. And yes, the courier with the backup tapes had just left...
Yep, I now have an alias for "rm -rf"
. In my defence, it was a long time ago and it was dark and my hamster had died and, and... OK There's no excuse. I was a pillock.
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
This was actually pretty recent.
/usr partition. There is a RAID array that is read after boot for the /var partition and all the mailboxes.
A little while ago, our POP server started telling me a tale of woe about errors the boot disk was generating on the
First, I try to fsck the drive while the machine is up, but it won't finish it because of the errors on the drive.
"Okay," I think "I guess I'll need to unmount the drive before fscking, but first I'll have to reboot the machine and do this in its physical presence." All our servers are sitting in hosting space separate from our office you see.
So after work one day (it's worth noting I don't get off work until 9pm) I go downtown, shut down the machine, boot into single user mode, and then do my fsck. I mean: I *try* to do my fsck. It fails. I try to mount the drive again. It fails.
Oh shit.
The story gets much shorter if I just tell you that I had to call my boss so he could grab a new disk somewhere and come downtown, and that I didn't go home until about 4:00 AM when the birds are starting to wake up.
Then there was that time when I logged into our primary DNS server with ssh so that I could telnet to our APC with reasonable security. Unfortunately all the plugins on the APC were unlabelled in the software and I had to recall from memory which one was the server I wanted to reboot. The first one I tried turned out to be the primary DNS server.
Remember that APCs will not allow you to log in a second time, and that the timeout on a telnet session is about 15-20 minutes. All of those plugins are now properly labelled.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I was running Norton Utilities to defrag my (then fairly new) PPC 6100/60 when the power went out. Five minutes later, power was restored, and five hours later, I had about a third of the data back. But it still makes me shudder.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
Last monday I was copying a database from my co-loc server to work at home on it. I used phpmyadmin on both computers. :-(
After a while I realized that I had copied all databases instead of only one. So I started to delete all unnecessary ones. I almost finished when I realized that I had closed the wrong Mozilla window
I stopped the server had to get into the car, bring it home and recover by inode. I'm still doing to figure out which of the recovered 3633 files (only named by inode number) belongs to which database. (recovered 3 or 4 of 30 by now)
Last summer, I decided to upgrade the 32GB HD in my Dell Inspiron 5000e to 40GB. I put both drives in a separate machine, but the 32GB wasn't recognized. I put it back, but it remained dead as a doornail. Plus, the Dell refused to power up with the 40GB drive installed. Fortunately, I had the foresight to do a full backup to a 250GB external firewire drive before attempting this.
To make sure my data wasn't all in just one place, I installed the 40GB drive in my other laptop (a Compaq Presario 1200), and installed W98 on it. I then proceeded to copy the backup data down to it. Everything seemed fine; however, disk compares showed an unusual effect - target directories were LARGER than source; Windows was silently erasing some of the files from the source drive. This would have been fine, except as soon as 32GB had been copied, the Compaq's file system was totally trashed, so I not only lost my second copy, but random parts of my three most recent archival backups (all on the same 250GB drive) as well.
.... like Solaris (looks down on linux bots) politely tell you those two have not been removed while doing all the rest.
.*
I guess that is the same with Linux nowadays, ok lemme see:
me@duende:~/perro/gato$ rm -rf
rm: cannot remove `.' or `..'
rm: cannot remove `.' or `..'
me@duende:~/perro/gato$
there ya go....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A couple of years ago after getting a web site up and running I managed the ongoing development of this busy site, the site requrired registration One morning I opened up a sql script file in quury Analyser, I thought I had opened DailyTask.sql, what I had opened was DropAll.sql, which contained the sql to drop all tables, I ran the sql and sat there looking at the commands and thought "that doesn't look right" I then started to panic, I couldn't even think about what to do, all nueral functions no longer worked, I was able to restore the data from the daily backups but we lost the mornings registrations, funnily enough we never got any phone calls or emails from irate customers.
I once had a very nice SCSI drive, 10.000RPM or something, 4GB, top of the line! Only problem was, it was too noisy and I couldn't concentrate anymore. So I took it out of my computer and sold it via a newspaper. Someone called to buy it, I attached it once again to my SCSI controller to erase the data (forgot to do that before), but didn't mind to actually install the drive in the case. So, of course I tipped the system and the drive fell 2 inches to the floor, cracking the heads into the disks at 10.000 rpm... whew! The drive was 999DM (ancient german currency, about half a dollar) worth!
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
I once had a 40GB Fujitsu drive that decided to fail me. It wouldn't show up at boot. I checked all the cables, nothing. It was my only drive at the time, so I buy a new drive as soon as possible. While being away my computer and the drive cooled a bit, and booting it with the new drive (setting the old as a slave) worked for a while, until things became warm again. I let the computer cool for that night and as soon as I wake up I copy everything from the old drive. I got everything off of it before it died again. Thank god. No data loss, I was happy. But it was close.
Another stupid thing I did was resize a reiserfs partition, ending up trashing my entire hda partition table. I was pretty new to Linux and unix-like systems at the time, but I sat down at my server and read manuals for a few hours. I booted knoppix (which I had burned earlier thank god) and fixed my partition table. No data loss, I was happy. And pretty amazed that I managed it by myself.
Other than that? Well, I've spilled drinks on my keyboard a few times. A couple of sticky keys, but nothing serious. I use a laptop now, so I always keep any drinks about 60cm away to be on the safe side.
we come in peace / shoot to kill
Pulled the plug on a live banking AS/400. To make matter worse I then had to sit there during the veeery long IPL - what is it with AS/400s and long IPL times?
___FutureShoks___
Waaaay back when, I was - amongst other things - selling Olivetti M24s in Cape Town.
Great fun, lovely PCs except for the very dust-sensitive keyboard.
Sold one to a customer who insisted on seeing it work. Hey, no problem. I opened the boxes, hooked everything up, turned on the power - and the power supply burst into flames. Whoops.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Why doesn't someone rewrite the kernel so that it asks for confirmation if you type "rm -rf /" by accident?
I got a PC jr in the mid 80' and typed in thousands of lines of code from PC mag etc. different magazines. I had most of the stuff in one floppy.
I was a schoolboy and didn't have that much money (= 0) so I decided to make my floppies double sided like all my frinds did with their C64 floppies...
It occurred to me about 4 seconds after I had formatted my floppy that pcjr's floppydrive is doublesided and used already both sides of the floppy already.
I newer typed another program.
I can't recall who told me this, but there was this company that used to erase disks with sensitive with a gaussian magnetic field generator. The newbie sysadmin charged with the task has the thing turned on while walking down the corridor of the machine room.. apparently every server within 5m of him went down as he walked about to do his task..
Well... nothing can compete with this - some time ago I was working as sysadmin in Israel's Ministry of Defense. It was a crazy time (10 years ago) when sophomore student with some Linux knowledge could get a job of sysadmin responsible for some mission critical applications running on a variety of Unixes. Well... I knew Linux. I really did. In fact, it turned out I knew Linux too good. I even knew the very helpful killall(1) command, which, as it turned out, does some very different things on Linux and Digital OSF Unix :) I learnt that subtle difference in Linux implementation of killall(1) when Ministry of Defense Oracle server (along with bunch of other mission critical apps) died a very painful, but short death :)
First day on the job as an NT and LAN admin at an important financial institution. For some reason, I was moving my feet under the table - motoric anxiety? - and pushed over my full tower workstation. Guess what happened to the hard disk.
Also, I once wrote a small batch script like this:
and let it run for a while to see how fast the disk would fill up. On a friend's computer with one gibibyte of free space. Forgot about it - much beer! - and left. In a half hour he called and asked for help, he was not able to save his work files anymore. Oh, was he rightfully pissed off.
Well not that this post will even get read because of the huge amount of replies to this thread, but.. spose I should participate ;)
;)
;)
The UPS
I personally have only ever damaged one thing.. we had a brand new APC Symettra UPS thing, which was this huge floor standing thing with enough power to run multiple servers in the event of a failure. We were in the middle of setting it up in our server room and I was pushing the trolley in with a few of the battery cells on the top.. as I pushed the trolley into the room, one of the batterys (still wrapped in plastic bagging) caught on the door handle. I didn't notice until the battery slipped off the trolley and missed by foot by a few inches..
It smashed all the connection up on the back - so we just called Dell and said it was damaged on arrival and they sent a new one
The Cisco Callmanager
These are just rebadged Compaq 1U servers.. we were trying to do some server relocation in one of our racks but couldn't afford to switch the callmanager off. So one of my collegues was holding the server whilst switched on, while we moved the rack kit for it. Problem was he only balanced it on one knee... I mentioned it was a bit risky just as it slipped off his knee and smashed on the floor. All the cabled ripped out of it, and the lid did a clown car effect with it springing open!
We ran it into the office to do some emergency repairs on it (straighten the now bent chassis, recconnect stuff, etc) and it worked right away without any problems. Thank god.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
"that costs more than what I originally paid for my digital camera two years ago"
Liar.
Computer insurance is a waste unless your equipment is used to generate TAXABLE INCOME. Usually. In my opinion. Sometimes I'm wrong.
This one time, I grabbed a bunch of porn off the network my friends set up for the night, then turned off my comp for a while.
Mysteriously, my hard drive never worked again after that.
CTIX-6 is a very old flavour of unix and Uniplex is a not-quite-so old Office Application (ala MS Works) but it's all curses driven so you can run it on old dumb terminals. It wasn't a bad package for its day but it had an interesting "feature", somehow it sidestepped any read permissions set on files or directories. It meant any of the secretaries could navigate their way to a sensitive area like /etc and have a peek at any file they wanted, not to mention each other's documents.
The sys-admin (not me) tried to get around this by placing the users Uniplex directories some twenty levels deep beneath their own home directory. But some of those determined gals just kept right on snooping around the system. In flash of (des)inspiration the sys-admin cd'ed to a users Unixplex directory and soft linked '.' with '..'
The current directory linked to the parent directory, which then became the current directory, etc etc. The drives were making an interesting noise when he dived for the power supply and yanked it out of the back of the machine.
Luckily the filesystem buffers hadn't written themselves out to disk so we were eventually able to recover, still the most spectacular crash I've ever seen.
When removing /etc /bin /sbin backups from /var/backup I had a few stray slashes ;) :-
/etc/ /bin/ /sbin
....
rm -R -f
Then I rebooted
DOH !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Boy was I glad to get XP, and then get more than one hour's up-time.
that reminds me of that hilarious video that went around about hmm... 8 years ago with the fat guy who had his keyboard unplugged and went syko and bashed up the computer
;P
it reminded me of my computing teacher so was worth extra laughs
One time I started using this HUB/Router as my personal hub, all the cat5 connectors in the wall were busy doing laptop installs or something, so I needed a hub.
Should have remember I set up that thing with the same adress (for a demo) as our internet gateway.
It took me half the day to figure out why the hell our routing was messed up.
And one day long before that, I yelled long and harshly at a collegue of mine, for putting in a new win2k server with *DHCP* enabled at this customer site.. I was responsible for. Obviously there already was one there. That one took me an hour to figure out.
I repeat the mistakes other people make..
"/Dread"
This happened 1 month ago: due to a power outage and a subsequantly very high level of electricity, the UPS wasn't able to filter out this shock and the two disks of the RAID-1 were damaged. .ISO of their data (which was far below 4gb) so they could access it from any other computer with a DVD reader.
..now bash# me
One of them was completely gone, the other had a lot of damaged sectors and fsck'ed inodes. The PCI IDE RAID card was giving errors at kernel level, and a reboot was requird every time I tried to access the damaged sectors.
But the worst "luck" was that in the last week the backups weren't working correctly. Let me explain that backup policy:
- a DVD+/-RW writer with 4 DVD-RAMs
one for monday + wednesday
one for tuesday + thursday
one for friday
one for the last friday of the month
so, the accident happened on the last weekend of the month; and the backup was failing because I was just making a plain
Now, the backup failure was due to a file with a VERY long name, more than ISO+Joliet could handle.
It failed for the last week (I wasn't paid to check it every day.. not even to give them assistance) so it spoiled the
- "last friday" backup
- "tue + thu" backup
- "mon + wed" backup
- "friday" backup
basically we had NO backup, and a damaged raid.
Solution? This software helped us a lot:
http://www.stellarinfo.com/download.htm#anchor3
we mounted the less-damaged HD on a windows PC, and ran that software. It recovered everything smoothly.
I tried dd'ing the disk and fsck'ing but I got only a lot of sparse chunks (one per inode) of the recovered files.. and Word could not recover sparse files divided in chunks.
Lessons learned:
1) no matter if you're not paid, check your servers daily or at least set up a quick-and-dirty e-mail alert system
2) tar is your friend
3) a low-cost UPS is a bad choice
4) IDE PCI RAID adaptors don't convince me too much
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Anyway, our high-school had a huge big breaker switch in the corridor outside the computer lab. This was asking for trouble. The obvious happened several times (always save your work, especially when the bell rings!).
What OS does that actually work on?
I was working in Austin, TX, at "Activerse." My buddy, Jeff Bone, apparently stole the power supply from my Power Computing Mac clone; I noticed it gutted when I got into work. I asked him about this, and he assured me that Steve the CEO would go get me a new one, which he did.
Only it wasn't a Power Computing power supply -- but who cares, right?
I attached all the cables to the motherboard, plugged that bad boy into the wall, and turned it on from the keyboard. Immediately, the cord shorted out, fire spewing from it, sparks flying out of the wall, and my office was dark... As was Cassandra's next door.
Upon later retrieving a proper power supply and installing it, the motherboard and my data were fine...
Lesson learned. =)
Steve Klingsporn
ast year I was doing contract work for a componey doing Upgrades to the infrastructure of a Plant they bought out. simple job until it came time to install the Payrole server which infact handled all of the Payrole for this multinational (they moved it form the main office to the new plant because the new plant was in a small town and therefor free of the worry of a terrorist attack and the other BS reasons they listed. the problem was the only way on to the second level whare the server room was required doing threw the production area, so i chuck it on a cart dawn my hard hat Safety glasses and other implaments of mass destruction, and begin to push it threw the production area over to the Pallet elevator to take it up to the second level. Unfourtunitly the elevator was on the second level and the call rope was broken on the first level so i went up stares and sent the lift down and was regarded by a a horrible noise the sound of 5,000$ Sun server being crushed. Apparently while i was walking up stares one of the fork truck operators decided to move my cart out of the way and into the elevator cage.
"Your pants are less valuable than your data"
nuff said?
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
let a drunken room mate use your computer to get on irc... we did.. and woke up from our drunkewn stupors to find
a. mIRC open to FIVE cybersex channels
b. 7 different cyber PM sessions
c. odd streaks on teh monitor
d. puke all over the keyboard that had eaten away the plastic membrane (puke is ACID)
e. roomie lying face down on the keyboard in a puddle of puke with his dick in his hand
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Oh boy did that lead to trouble.
I had the case panel off and was hearing noise from one of the fans. Since I couldn't tell which one it was coming from I reached my hand in where I couldn't see to try and stop one of the fans so I could see if that was one of the ones making the noise. Of course I didn't get my finger onto the hub of the fan; I stuck my finger in it and broke off a fanblade. Now the thing was off balance and buzzing horribly. So I quickly shut down the machine and break off one on the opposing side so it would be balanced, if a little less effecient.
Turn it back on, buzzing a little now, but tolerable and I reach in again to check the other fan and this time I didn't even get the right fan, I hit the first one again and broke off another of its blades, rendering it useless so I had to replace it with an 80mm wired onto the heatsink with twist ties. I later did the same thing with the other CPU fan. Now both are proudly sporting quieter 80mm fans attached by twist ties. So far I've managed to keep my fingers out of those. And even if I didn't I think the much larger blades would survive.
Question everything
This guy didn't have many priviliges on some uber computer with OS/2. In particular he could not reformat his ZIP-disc. So he rebooted into BIOS and used its formatting utility to format the disc. Of course after a while, he realized that the process was taking too long for a small ZIPdisc, and voila all the data and code were lost.
He wrote a program, which was supposed to simulate some ocean currents. Of course, he added backup ability, so that in case of a shutdown, he could restart it from the last backup, losing 24h of work at most. After about a week, he analyzed the backup data and made two conclusions. First, due to a bug in backup subroutine, he would not get any intermediate results properly, so he has to wait till the program finishes to get final results. Second, it would take about 2 months of continuous uptime (not a very big issue since they used unix). He had two options, to fix the bug and restart (losing 1week of computations) or wait for two months and pray. He chose the second, and sure enough computer went down in about a month (don't remember the reason).
The last, but not the least. The guy took part in Soviet expedition, part of big oceanological survey. They sailed from Vladivostok to somewhere near South America. They had some steel rope 2-3km long, which had some expensive devices every 1m or so. They planned to drift for a few months collecting data from these devices placed at different depths. Well, they let the guy operate the crane, he hit a wrong button, creating unbearable tension which tore the rope, thus they lost all the equipment before they even began to collect data. The ship had to return. The expedition cost several $mil (in 1970s).
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Back in the early days when I was on my good old Amiga, we were trying to copy stuff from one harddrive to another. Something went wrong and my harddrive died. Didn't have backups of everything back then and no internet, but my friend had most of the stuff so I didn't loose that much, what a nightmare though... Oh yeah, from that time on we used a parallel cable instead of connecting two harddrives. :(
Also the other time was when I did a bad flash with my A7V133 motherboard and rebooted. I should have flashed the old one back when I got error but unfortunately I didn't. But I ordered a preflashed replacement chip from my country so it didn't turn out that bad or expensive for that matter.
You have been awarded the "Golden Funny Nose & Floppy Shoes" award for Clown of the Year. Your prize will shortly be delivered by 14 guys driving a Fiat Bambino.
About 5 years ago, a friend in College bought a new computer. Not being too technically inclined, he wanted to turn his computer off, other than simply telling Windows to shut down. The guy that sold him the computer told him (over the phone) there should be a main power switch on the back by the power supply. The owner saw it and flicked the the switch... The phone cut out... Turned out that he had actually flicked the voltage select switch from 240V (NZ standard voltage), to 120V. I am pretty sure only the power supply was cooked in the computer, but his cordless phone, and one circuit breaker was cooked. We laughed for weeks about that!
90 days? A record attempt? Jesus is it that bad? Any UNIX worth its salt should be capable of at least a year of uptime in constant usage.
I have seen examples of FreeBSD and BSDI with over 1000 days, and one of my associates boasts about his Linux server that has wrapped the uptime counter 3 times, which means it is over 4 years. For some unixes and VMS apparently 10 years plus isn't out of the question.
90 days, *chortle*
yes, ive started to read slashdot. :/
Well my adventure was not actually a mistake.
:)
I got pissed off and threw the computer tower in to the trash can.
After 2 raining days I changed my mind so I went to the trash can hoping that the garbage truck have not collected it.
it was still there. Some leaves where on the motherboard and hard disk etc. It was quite in a wet dust.
However 2 years since then it still works fine!
borrow my PC for a night whilst his was being fixed, comes back with porn diallers galore tons of spyware and my cache full of the roughest (as in ugly people) possible porn. He managed to get a years worth of crap from the internet in one day he must have been surfing the real arse of the internet.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
This was when i was about 8 or 9 years old and had used one of those very old homecomputers that had TVs as monitors (older than C64), under guidance of my father.
:(
Anyway, he had typed over the sourcecode of a game from some magazine and put it on tape so that we could run it. One day, he wasn't home and I felt I knew what I was doing and could start that game myself. I knew what commands he used, so I typed those in.
Then came the hard part, which buttons did he press on the tapedrive? I thought it was two of those buttons, so I pressed 'em both. And after a long wait I realized it wasn't working.
And then I also started to realize what I did wrong...you guessed it: I had pressed both play and record, not only ruining that game, but also everything else that was on that side of the tape...
Later I did some other horrible stuff, but this is the one I'll alwasy remember
Don't worry, it's all just 1's and 0's anyway...
RIPE wouldn't let us have anymore IP addresses until we'd accounted for the ones we'd got. No problem.. boss gets me to write some code to go through the entire database and spam their automated email system with entries. All looked good, got IP addresses..
Then the spamcop complaints started rolling in.. about spam we never sent. Coming from IP addresses we never had.
Needless to say, a bit of IP range checking would've helped. Why RIPE's system accepted it, I'll never know, but I believe they have fixed this now.
LOL! I just blew coffee out of my nose!
Today was my worst accident ever. I wanted to install a system in a rack. No problem.
Go to put in rails. Hmm.. These rails for a Sun V210 have a bit of extension past where the bolt onto the post at the back for cable management and it wants to touch that power plug. So I trace the lead from the plug to it's destination. Well, What do you know! It's powering the rack next to it. That's slack, so I lift a few floor tiles and I find a close power-point under the floor to power this rack.
I then dutifully ask everyone who has equipment in the rack if I can unplug their gear for a few minutes. "Yeah no problem" they say. The rack I wanted to unplug only had co-workers personal webservers in it, so that's was good. So I power down their boxes and pull the plug on the rack.
Something didn't seem right.
I couldn't pick it right away.
The room was quieter, or something.
I look over at another rack, the one full of expensive kit running important systems. It's off. It must have been the stopping of the constant whine of SMP machines with SCSI disks that alerted me to something not good. I had TRACED THE WRONG CABLE.
So I curse and curse some more. I plug the rack back in and hear a tone from the rack that I have powered off by accident. I see that it's still not on. I see the overload button on the rack has popped out. I curse some more.
I push in the button, machines start booting. I let go of the button, machines go off.
I push in the button, machines start booting. I let go of the button, machines go off.
I push in the button, machines start booting. I let go of the button, machines go off.
I comtemplate for a moment that I will spend the next 20 years holding in this button in quiet shame in the server room.
I am still there. My co-workers bring me slashdot on a laptop. Food sometimes.
No seriously, we lowered the load by switching off some DR and test/staging machines and moving their power around.
Anyway, I still have a red face and feel a bit shit.
In my defence, the cables did look the same and were tangled around each other.
But I am still a fool.
Back in '95, I was in high school, and our school computer room just had MSDOS 3.2, and only a couple of '1337' 386es that ran win 3.1-the rest were already ancient for the day-8086es. We were being taught Turbo Pascal 5.5-and geek that i was, I managed to snitch a second hand manual for it, to try out low level functions. I didn't have a PC at home, so this was where I experimented. One day, during lunch time, I write a memory resident program that sets the keyboard interrupt vector to null after the user presses 'enter' 20 times-and displays a message like 'eBOLa sTRiKeZ!!' Feeling evil, I compiled the code, ran it, verified that it was resident, and started tapping away at enter..nothing. I walk out of the computer room pissed, since I had to go attend a class-and an hour later, when I return-the teacher is screaming blue murder about a new virus. Seems my nasty little program chose to kick in when she was filing away the exam schedule in Wordstar... It was all I could to retain a straight face.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Years back I bought my dad his first CDROM drive. Installing it, I discovered that his machine did not have any free power cords. No problem, cut a power cord from a dead power supply and soldered it into an existing one.
When I switched it on I discovered I had soldered it on BACKWARDS. After the fireworks the CDROM drive was dead and one of the hard drives had a controller chip with half the pins vaporized. Happily it was the OS disk, no data on it.
I am still a bit ashamed about what I did next: I went to the store I had bought the CDROM drive and told them it was a DOA. They swapped it, no questions asked.
- Q
I did the drink into a laptop, but it was done by a friend, not me. he tried to plug into our switch that was on a carrel shelf, next to a nice big Pepsi. He knocked the Pepsi for a half-gainer, right into the laptop. Killed everything, data and all. Half an hour later I cracked and punched through a reinforced-with-wire glass window. It was that or him, and a good thing it wasn't: the doctor said if I had hit him as hard as I hit the wire, it would have killed him.
One of the 187.
chmod 777 . /*
instead of
chmod 777 ./*
as root, ofcourse...
Yeah, free Ipod! He is innocent!
As far as I can tell, the manual is real, but the is_computer_on_fire() function has to be a joke.
.... when doing something dangerous?
I do type rm -rf * here and there, but first I do a pwd, check I am where I want to be, check that the command line has what I want to do, I check again and then finally hit enter.
Not a single mistake during years of working life.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I was working on a PC in class once. We thought that the CPU fan was not working, so I went to move the IDE cables out of the way, and grazed the video card. POOF up comes a cloud of smoke. The worst part was I didn't even feel a shock.....Ummm I suppose that's probably the best part.
I LIKE TOAST!!!
My best effort was a few years ago thank god. /dev/hda1, not the bogus partial drive made by fips. schoolwork gone, essays, jokes, god knows what else. Most likely some porn too.
I had decided to put linux on my boot drive, (all mighty 1Gb of it). I booted to dos, ran fips, split the partition, then after booting the linux install i proceeded to DELETE
It was one hell of a day, as soon as that happened i decided that i had to do what i should have done a lot earlier. Gone to bed.
Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
When I switched my 1-year-old laptop and that nice skweeching noise just ripped out of it's innards. Quite refreshing acctually...
No, No autopr0n jokes... Seriously, I was pitching a monitor away a few weeks ago... It had developed a nasty habbit of randomly getting the shakes and going blury... No big deal, lots of 17" monitors around, just pitch it and get a new one...
.5 sec to realize I was in deep sh1t before I almost went into the dumpster.
I took it out to the dumpster, lifted it up about shoulder level, and heaved it as hard as I could...
Unfortunatly, half way through the release I realized the vga cable was somehow wrapped around my arm and was quickly tightning up...
All this took about
The cable sinched around my wrist, and snapped it so hard that I was unable to even fill in the accident report, had to have a co-worker do the writing for me because it was my right hand.
Of course, he just laughed...
It still hurts now and again, I just make sure not to give it too much stress, and now have a brace for when it starts to flair up.
What, you expected a story about dropping a computer and/or monitor? That is usually on purpose to some extent with user frustration... This was truly, an accident.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
(Posting Anonymously as I'm not sure if I'm allowed to tell this).
Israeli Military. Main computing center of the whole non-AF military intranet. Huge room full of servers for the entire military. Tight security and everything. Well, a group of young programmers (soldiers) had a tour of the facility, which included a tour to the server room. Then, one girl from the tour thought it was a good idea to see what the big red button near the door did. She soon found out that it cut power to all machines in the room (after UPS). Took them several hours-days to put the whole thing up again.
Well, no more tours to server rooms today, and one less programmer in that course...
I was 18, and bored, so i took my Pentium 1 apart. When i tried to put the CPU back in, i forgot to lift up the little lever on the motherboard first... I was wondering why the CPU was finding it really difficult to go in, so i pushed down on it as hard as i could - causing the CPU to slip, and bent almost all of the pins on the CPU at a 90 degree angle. I spent the next few hours carefully straightening them all back with a pair of tweezers! Amazingly, it worked perfectly..
Things that aren't files don't belong in a filesystem.
/mnt/hdb1"
/mnt/hdb7/dev/hda
I once mounted an old linux filesystem from a previous install. To make sure the files were extra-deleted, I used the command "wipe -r
This worked just fine until it got to
A much better solution would be, oh, I dunno, kinda like drive letter type names. e.g. dev:/hda1 or home:/joe/crap.txt, of course at the same time mapping dev:/fd0 to floppy: so that people don't have to worry about accidentally typing the wrong TLA.
This is what I came up with after a very nasty scare at a half-billion dollar company. Turns out, sometimes 2 wrongs do make a right....I was nailing replicated data:
...The only way to delete is to carefully select the correct statement (After testing)
SELECT * FROM Table1
--DELETE Table1
Table1 WHERE Field = 'X'
ah, yes, thank you. I actually did that, but it has been so long since I wrote msdos batch files, i forgot to add that line. alternatively, you could just add the @ in front of each line.
/s >nul /s >nul /s >nul
:) I just love cruel stuff like this, as long as no one gets hurt (much).
if you really want to get fancy, you can add other lines, and do dir of just certain directories, like
@echo "Pornography found, deleting all image files"
@dir \windows
@echo "Now installing silent boot virus
@dir \progra~1
@echo "REM be sure to contact home after installing cc stealing key capture bug"
@dir \
or something to that effect
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Reminds me of a story my old prof told the class once. For all I know, this is one of those stories that gets circulated everywhere. I'll assume it's actually from him.
Anyway, he was around when students needed to submit batch files as stacks of cards for the computer to read. You'd submit your stack at this end, then walk down to the other end of the system, where if all went correctly, your results would print out.
He explained that one day he was in line, and one of his friends submitted his stack, and apparently didn't proof some part of the program correctly. Once it was read by the computer, it got to one section where it just started generating linefeeds. So, that's what the printer did. Unfortunately, it was a line printer. A fast one. Creating a 5- or 6-foot arc of paper until it was shut off. Oops.
Not that long ago. Killed a nice Asus Mobo that way. Now I'm extra carefull doing that and always use a wide enough screwdriver that won't slip.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I had a e740 and luckily I had bought the no matter what replacement warantee but I had it sitting on my dresser and my cat started to tear at the carpet behind my dresser and I grabbed the dresser as I was ready to beat the cat(not really beat the cat...but to care it) and the pda went flying. It never powered on again.
Gorkman
I refute your call (and I've been an electronic tech for 20 years, so I do know a thing or two about electricity). Switchmode power supplies cannot be explained like some high-school science prac with batteries and a light bulb.
"1. Easiest path to ground in that situation would be directly accross the ground pin of the plug."
If the ground pin of the printer isn't connected to ground, it doesn't provide a current path. What was described can quite adequately be explained by reversing the Active and Ground connections at the mains socket (which can easily happen if the plug isn't at the correct angle and attached to the wall). More details later.
"2. The short would have tripped your breaker far before the rather spactacular equipment failure you describe would occour."
Wrong! An earth leakage circuit breaker (ELCB), or safety switch, is the only device in common usage fast enough to trip before major damage is done, but an ELCB will only trip if there is a significant current (>5mA, IIRC) through the ground connection; the neutral can still provide a return path (since neutral is connected to ground at the junction box) which will not trip an ELCB. Clearly, from the description of the damage, either the current was NOT being shunted to ground, or there was no ELCB. Also, since this kind of damage can easily be done by 1 Amp at 110V, and the average mains circuit breaker/fuse doesn't trip close to instantly until around 200% of its rated value (a 20 Amp circuit breaker will carry 20 Amps indefinitely, its trip time will be shorter the higher the current gets) it is quite possible to do that kind of damage without tripping the breakers/fuses at all*. A modern motherboard can be fried with a penlight battery** if its connected in the right place/wrong polarity; remember, AC has no polarity (or rather, it spends equal time in both polarities).
"3. Additionally positive, neutral and ground screws are on opposite sides of the recepticle (although it might be possible to short between positive and box that holds the outlet.)"
You are forgetting that the printer was attached to a computer via a cable which had A GROUND CONNECTION, so considering the resistance of the printer cable (and the possibility of braid breakers which increase the line impedance), just touching the ground to Active could have caused all kinds of weirdness ("easiest path to ground" only applies when you are dealing with massive currents like lightning or really high impedances, otherwise you use Kirchov's Current Law which states that current is shared proportionally according to the impedance of each "earthy" circuit arm). Another important thing to remember here is that switchmode PSUs are not transformer isolated, so reversing the Active and ground can impose AC on many polarity sensitive components, some of which (like power MOSFETs, the switching element) tend to fail as a short circuit and dump energy into everything. In other words, wire up your switchmode PSU backwards, and you can end up with 110V running everywhere, including the ground & data connections to the host computer (which also fried, hint, hint, clue, hint).
So the parent was almost certainly wrong in saying that a short ACROSS the ground pin of the plug caused the problem. But it is fairly clear from the description that 110V was connected to the ground of the printer. Or at least, thats what my years of experience repairing (not just replacing) PSUs tells me...
*Don't believe me? Simple experiment, so you can prove it for yourself: snip the Active and Ground pins off a power cord and connect it to your computer. Next, solder a 5 Watt, 120 Ohm resistor to the active lead of another power cord (strip the cord BEFORE you plug it in). Now touch it to random locations on the motherboard. According to Ohm's Law, less than 1 Amp can flow through the resistor (Current=Voltage/Resistance), yet you will be able to blow ICs & SMDs into tiny fragments and not trip a single circuit breaker or fuse. Note that I said snip t
I'll do the select first, as you suggest, since I learned that lesson at the BASH command prompt with ls vs. rm.
Then once I'm sure that I have the conditions right, I do this:
It's saved me once, and it wouldn't have been a big loss it I hadn't used the transaction, but it drove home the point in my head.
Sometimes I think a transactional filesystem would be a great thing to have if it were implemented correctly.
I have done the same thing. I turned the air blue when I thought I must have ruined the motherboard. It's the one time I ever praised my old blunt-tipped philips screwdriver...
That motherboard is still powering my webserver more than two years later.
As a security consultant, I was responsible for testing the security of a very large ecommerce site. I was only permitted to perform testing between the hours of 1 am and 6 am to minimize any potentially damaging impact of my tests.
I cranked up a very thorough and nasty script at 1 am exactly. The script spidered through the website and submitted various types of input for each web field identified, storing the results to a text file. Seeing as this was a very large site, my script would require several hours to complete its work, so ... I took a nap. When I woke at 3 am, my terminal window was dominated entirely by the message "Server unreachable", literally thousands of times.
Apparently, a particularly nasty part of my script had brought down 30 load-balanced servers, one at a time, over and over again, rendering the site completely unreachable to the universe at large. Every time the servers were rebooted, they would immediately crash again, making it an undoubtedly long and frustrating night for their sysadmin. The next morning, I had a voicemail that said simply, "Whatever you did last night between 1:30 and 3:00 am ... don't ever fucking do that again."
Oops. Still, a good reminder out there to all you software developers to check all input for length and format prior to processing it ....
a decent install of any 32bit MS OS should be just as capable of uptime. the only stuff that brings ours down are security patches that force a reboot: otherwise we've had years of uptime.
I was working on an old DPS 6 machine and we had 6 80meg hard drives. We only needed three to be working at any one time. These drives were the old 6 platter 15 inch removable type. Well, one of my "users" took a crashed disk and figured if it didn't work in one drive, he should just try it in another, and then another and so on until he had destroyed the heads in all six drives. I spent a few days replacing and aligning heads....
Another time I took the only working copy of our OS disk out of the drive, was putting the bottom cover on it and it dropped out of the housing and with a spectacular crash hit the floor. The tape back-ups were of course corrupted, the back up copy didn't work......ahh the joys of bad system overview. We even had off site copies, none of which worked. We spent a month rebuilding the OS pack.
Had another user who spilled coke on a 15 inch tape that we then sent on up the chain.....needless to say the guys who ran the coke tainted tape where no thrilled!!!!!!!!
Had a guy hook up power to a system, only he did it backward. All the fans on the air conditioners ran backwards....LOL
Hurricane Island Outward Bound
OB
Man, 90 days uptime, uh! How can you get that?
One of my Debian servers at work have been up since Sep 2001 thru Feb 2004, when we need to stop it for a disk upgrade. And this is not an exception.
This is a big, big difference to the uptime of most other OSs we had, including any sort of win and various versions of Novell.
Risk a lynching:
Way back in prehistoric times when a BIG machine had 8K of memory and I was between undergrad and grad school, I had a summer job working as a scientific programmer at a large paper mill.
Scientific programming took a back seat to running the mill and I never could get enough machine time. It took over an hour to assemble (compile) a 100 statement assembler program on the IBM 360 Tape Operating System. After a month or so, I convinced the powers-that-be that I should be given access to the machine on the weekend. The big day came, I needed a scratch tape to run the assembler so I grabbed the nearest "blank" tape and spent the day blissfully debugging.
Well it came time to leave. When dismounting the scratch tape I read the label, "MASTER PAYROLL TAPE". I just knew I was going to be fired and potentially lynched!! Thank God, there was a backup, my boss and the operations center folks kept their mouths shut and I was able to move on to a bigger and far more costly accident.
Fry Big Iron:
I was working in the Penn State computer center. A colleague asked me to help him move a 026 keypunch machine into the main computer room. This 60'x60' room was stuffed with multiple IBM 360 machines including a 67, 50, 30, and 20 - so much equipment that you could barely hear over the air conditioning blowers.
Well I lost my balance moving the desk sized keypunch and backed into the unshielded emergency power switch. Total silence, total attention, total embarrassment. Unfortunately when you cut off power, the fans immediately stop, the temperature goes through the roof, and parts get fried.
It took them three hours to put a shield on switch, and three days to get all the machines repaired.
I used to be the lead sysadmin and security manager for a company with a fairly active Internet connection, using around 600Mbps constantly. I was working closely with the network engineer, having had very little Cisco experience prior to the job, and we were implementing some filtering (I believe for Code Red) on the core router.
I wrote up the access list (Cisco filtering rule), the network admin checked it over, and we pasted it into the router's configuration over SSH. Milliseconds after the change was made, we both realized that we had forgotten the "permit ip any any" at the end of the ACL. Cisco's default behavior is to deny any packets that aren't specifically allowed. Sure enough, I hit Return a few times, and our session to the router was dead. About twenty seconds later, all of the phones started ringing.
I have never seen anyone find a spare laptop and serial cable as quickly as we did. Surprisingly, neither of us were reprimanded for the five-minute outage during peak hours. I guess that this was fairly minor, since the company had so many problems in general, but that's another story...
I have reliable witnesses to most of these
... and so on. So far, so bad, but some poor engineer was working on the one at the far end. Fortunately the rack was near enough to a very strong wall. Moral of this story: only move one rack at a time, and make sure ALL the others are secured to the floor and/or wall.
... without properly cleaning the aluminium podwer out of it: he blew it ... literally. (I saw the deceased a couple of days afterwards) I think forensics now use something non-conductive like lycopodium powder.
... from at least 50 feet up.
1) Our previous secretary managed to do the dreaded
FORMAT C: [Enter]
Y [Enter]
Y [Enter]
"Oops!"
at least three times. I had the task of repairing the damage twice. After this I learned my lesson and replaced FORMAT.COM with a batch file to only allow her to destroy one floppy at a time.
2) A tape drive sales rep arrived at our old office with a severely battered tape drive. When asked how it had happened, he explained that he had taken it by air after telling the baggage manglers that it was both fragile and expensive. Apparently they very carefully placed it in the hold, and then threw the rest of the luggage on top of it. Bending 1/8" aluminium sheeting is not easy. Doing so when the case also has internal reinforcement takes a lot of skill. The drive was still working. Great advert for the product. (This is the one I have no reliavle witness for)
3) A computer system in a full height 19" rack, sitting on a pallet, big labels with arrows pointing upwards to other big labels saying "TOP" and "FRAGILE" should have had enough clues that transporting it horizontally would be a BAD IDEA. Nope, not only did it arrive horizontally, it was also 12 hours late because they had managed to lay it down on the shipping address label. Fortunately they only lost the shipping charges: the machine worked.
4) The control systems room at a chemical plant was being upgraded by the addition of several new racks. One fell over, toppling the next
5) Fingerprint powder used to be made of aluminium. Forensics got hold of the stolen machine and duly dusted for prints. PC Plod switched on the machine to see if there were any clues on the drives
6) Insurance claim form framed on the wall at HP in Aberdeen. "Nature of damage: F**ked. Assessor's notes: F**ked!"
When asked about this, the HP engineers pointed to a battered flight case. Opening it revealed a very dead, very expensive former monitor that used to attach directly into an HP mini. The story goes that it was sent out to an oil rig by chopper, and fell out the door onto the helipad
7) It _is_ possible to insert a keyed IDE cable into an IDE drive the wrong way up. The cable in question had the keying hole filled, but did not have the external keying strip.
"Bloody tight, these cables," quoth the luser.
Click.
"Bloody drive doesn't work," quoth the luser.
Examination revealed a pin forced back, stripping its conductive track off the PCB.
"Oops," quoth the luser.
Followed rapidly by "Ouch" when the luser got the bill for a new drive.
No, _he_ broke the drive: I wrote the bill. This was the last time he was allowed to touch anything inside a computer, especially in _my_ workshop.
--
Dynoroddy, PFY
I think you mean: If it has no transactions it's not a relational database
1) Back when I was running Win95, a Thanksgiving day virus wrote German gibberish into my FAT table. The silver lining is that was the day I switched to Linux.
/temp.
:)
2) The standard rm party. I thought I was one directory level higher (in a temp directory) than I was. "rm -rf *" from / instead of from
3) Second day on my new job programming in county I.S. for a truly aweful database called UniVerse (which I had never heard of before).
UniVerse calls directories "files" and calls files "records". I, having referred to files as "files" for so many years, maintaining the industry standard references of files being files (and not directories), that I always got the references confused. All database "records" in UniVerse are stored under "files". To delete a UniVerse "record", you type "delete [UniVerse_file] [UniVerse_record]". That deletes the file from the subdirectory.
UniVerse also has a command called "delete.file", which deletes entire directories (where databases live).
I had lost track of the difference between the two, typed "delete bp [some_record]" (the bp directory is where the jail database lived), and thought I had deleted the database. I immediately told my supervisor that I thought I just deleted the entire jail database. He assured me I didn't, and that we had backups of everything anyway, so I kept working.
Not more than ten seconds later, I type "delete.file bp [some_record]". I once again immediately went to my supervisor, who was talking to the department director, and told him what I had done and that I thought I had deleted the database.
"Yep," he confirmed, "it's gone. It'll take a couple hours to restore from tape."
About a half hour later, he came to my desk and told me he just found out that backups had been failing for the last month. Everything was gone.
I naturally thought it was time to once again start passing out the resumes. Since that was the highest paying job I'd ever had that I didn't hate, and was only my second job out of college, I was devastated at the prospect that I had lost it on only my second day. I could feel the tears welling up, and I could have burst out crying if I'd had just a little less self control.
I forgot to tell you that a brand new county jail was finishing construction, and this software had to go live in the near future (I can't remember the exact timeline).
That's when the director told me a couple things:
1) They had only been writing code for the new system for two days. The changes were modifications to a 3rd party package, so it would only take a couple days to get back on track.
2) Shit happens, don't worry about it.
3) "I bet you'll never make that mistake again." (truer words have never been spoken).
4) You fucked it up, so you fix this part of it (my first major assignment, small as it was, in a system I had never seen before).
The system went online as scheduled, I kept my job, everything worked out. Part of the reason I kept my job was because of my honesty in immediately bringing my mistake to their attention rather than making them hunt down the problem. Apparently my predecessor would always deny everything, even when the evidence of fault was conclusive. Another part is that I worked under one of the coolest department directors ever.
As an aside, I spun the situation into my having done the department a favor. "Without me, you may not have found out about the defective backups until something crucial had been lost. I uncovered the problem early."
Way back when a Commodore 64 was still the Latest and Greatest, a friend of mine bought himself a disk drive for it. While it was not called The Tortoise for its amazing speed, it way way, way better than a tape.
Except that his little brother kept fiddling with it.
So I got him a keyboard lock (circular keys were also a pretty new thing), which he soldered onto the data connection to the disk drive.
Sadly, his soldering skills were not that hot. However, his C64 was, when 230V shot through the data lines from the drive into the computer...
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I'm a techie, but I don't really like cell phones - just something about being reachable at any time that doens't quite appeal to me. That being said, I do have one. It's in my car, to apease my worrying mother. Well, one time I did find that I required a cell phone, so I dug it out of the car and put it in my pocket. Well, it remained there until I retrieved my pants from the washing machine a few days later. Whoops. For three days there was no sign of life at all from the phone, but then all the sudden it worked again, just like new. Rugged phone for sure. But I had learned my lesson...er no. ... no phone. So I head back out in the rain to see if I could find it somewhere and sure enough...there it is...sitting in a puddle in the middle of a busy road, getting rained on and being run over by cars. So I pick up it's pitted remains...look around for the antenna, and put it back in my pocket. Sure enough...no indication of life from the phone and then...yup, you guessed it - three days later, it's as good as new...a few dents and a missing antenna, but relatively undamaged for its adventure.
Not 3 weeks later I again required the services of my telephone, so I placed it in my pocket and went out. Well, we get back to my friend's place, and I reach into my pocket and
I don't take it out anymore.
...no two people are not on fire.
My record on XP is 65 days. Worked like a charm, and alas, the only reason for the restart was a security update as well....
1. Paying $299 for a retail boxed copy of NT workstation back in 1996.
2. Buying any no-name computer components.
3. 'rm -rf *'
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I should have saved that as a reminder to be more careful but it doesn't matter now as I don't do HW anymore.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Much like Polish mathematical notations, I managed to plug the power cord in backwards (I know, HOW did I do that? it was an ambiguous connector and a poor diagram). Needless to say, I crippled my Buster chip, killed the Matay board, and lost Zorro III functionality completely. Zorro II still worked, though. I gave it to a long-time acquaintance of mine who happened to have part of Commodore's old West Chester inventory, and wanted to fix it himself.
On the plus side, Win UAE is the fastest Amiga I have ever owned.
Our small programming group ordered the first minicomputers the company had ever purchased. When the systems arrived (in multiple 19-inch rack heavy-steel, wheeled cabinets), the truck driver announced he drove the truck but didn't load or unload. So, on a hot August afternoon in Memphis TN, we mustered the programming team and rolled the first cabinet to the truck's power lift gate, lowered it to street level, and then rolled it off the gate and onto the very hot asphalt where it immediately sank about 1" to the bottom of the cabinet. The unit weighed a couple of hundred pounds, had no lifting handles, and was slowly making its way deeper and deeper.
We hired an "unloading crew" and let them figure it out.
On a mainframe computer, a new "peripheral" arrived (measuring 8' x 6' x 3' and weighing about 1500 pounds). The delivery crew carefully checked the elevator's limits and seeing that the unit + one person would push it over the limit, they decided to push the unit onto the elevator all by itself, reach in an push the button for the 4th floor, and then meet it there and roll the unit back out. But when the 1500 pound cabinet was rolled in, the elevator suddenly dropped several feet (threatening to remove arms and hands) before realigning itself with the exterior floor. And, upon reaching the 4th floor, the opposite -- a sudden jump upwards -- again threatened but everyone escaped injury. The final obstacle to delivery was the ramp into the computer room. The delivery team opened the door, stood behind the unit and pushed, picking up speed as they approached the ramp and, with a shuddering boom and echoing rumble, the unit made it all the way in and rolled to a safe stop. Unfortunately, the office immediately beneath the computer room entrance was that of a dentist. We never heard exactly what happened but the rumor was that the settlement cost several thousand dollars.
-- Ed Skinner, ed@flat5.net, http://www.flat5.net/
After testing a piece of software I had written, I was left with a lot of generated images in the directory, all starting with my username (same as the web system user name I was writing the software for. So I went to clean them out, so I meant to type "rm -rf myname*" but I accidentally put a space between there, typing "rm -rf myname *". After about 10 seconds I thought "Man, this is taking a long time," I looked at what I had typed. DOH! Deleted a considerable amount of data and required a recovery from tape. The server was down for ~4 hours. >_
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
In an underground nuclear test, sensors are buried along with the device. A computer, located miles away, reads the sensors into core memory and then cuts its own power before the shockwave arrives. Later, technicians power-up the system and dump the data to tape for analysis. This works but has a high cost-per-test factor because of the long sensor cables running across the desert. Needless to say, between the nuclear explosion and the extreme shock suffered by much of the cable, the cables are pretty much "one use only."
An engineer decided they could save money by using much shorter cables, and mounting the computer trailers (think 18-wheelers) on telephone poles, steel cables and large springs near the blast site.
Unfortunately, when the "device" goes off, a wave-like effect ripples outward and the telephone poles were tilted away from each other, and then toward each other, and the trailer was first vaulted up 20' and then down 40' -- but was only 10' off the ground to begin with.
When they pried open the badly dented trailer, the computers inside were just so many "loose parts."
-- Ed Skinner, ed@flat5.net, http://www.flat5.net/
Under captialism men willingly allow themselves to be exploited by men. Under feudalism, communism or any other tyrannical economic system there is no choosing one's exploiter.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Same here. I don't think I've actually had my XP box crash ever. Once it hung for like 10 minutes but I walked away and on return it had finally straightend itself out.
well. one that i remember, i was skipping school and i went to a friend of me with my harddrives in my bag, when i came there my old 30gb maxtor was dead :( talk about a punishment.. :P
ive had several data loss that a lot of code ive written went away, but the big bragger i am i got a lot of it back from my friends:)
at this lan party i went to i was in a hurry so i couldnt put in more than one spacer to get my motherboard in my case, this caused several crashes who fucked up my disk.
oh well, i think thats about it, thinking about all the years it hasnt happened too much bad:)
I wiped my backside with my Palm...
I would have posted this earlier, but due to moderation abuse, I was banned for a whole day.
:( Kickstart 2.0 apparently broke a lot of stuff.
:)
My poor Amiga 1000 suffered a lot of abuse. A friend of mine, who we nicknamed "Hammer Hands", would pound on the A1000 keyboard as he used the computer. He would play Tradewars on it via a BBS, and the BBS was known to freeze up as it ran DoubleDOS or something and the SYSOP was playing Test Drive or something on the other side. Anyway this was an older version of Tradewars that required the "M" key to move a sector. So he would hammer away at the "M" key until it appeared on the screen. Apparently he thought it was the keyboard at fault, and would keep pressing "M" until it showed up on the screen. Finally it did and he had a whole page full of "M"'s. He would repeat this for weeks before I realized what he was doing. It eventually wore out my "M" key and broke part of the keyboard off! I had no money for a new A1000 keyboard and they cost a lot of money for a replacement back then. I couldn't use a PC keyboard, and I was still trying to pay off the A1000 and the warranty had expired. So I took a Christmas tree light socket and rigged it up to work for the "M" key, but it was akward. "Hammer Hands" refused to pay me for a new keyboard and still kept blaming the keyboard for not making the "M"'s so he could play his Tradewars. So I made do with what I had and set the "M" with a macro. Well the structual damage to the keyboard was worse than I thought, but it still worked. Then my brother had to make a phone call and placed a phone book on top of the A1000 monitor. My monitor blew out and I noticed the phone book on top of it, that covered up the heat vents! D'oh! Lucky for me we had a Commodore 128 monitor that worked in composite mode for the A1000, but the screen was fuzzy at 80 columns. By the time I had the money to replace the broken parts, I opted to buy a used 386 Clone instead of a new Amiga.
I did eventually buy a used Amiga 500 and used Amiga monitor, but most of my A1000 software does not work on it.
With a 486 system I bought, I got a deal on a good new monitor from a friend who had a computer store. Only it shorted out. Turned out in Japan, the factory it was made in had a spider problem and the spider laid some eggs in some of the monitor parts before they got assembled. The wamrth of the monitor helped hatch the eggs and the little spiders got electrocuted in th circuits and shorted out the monitor! Good thing it was under warranty.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
This was a trivial accident, but my heart still squeezes every time I think of it...
A couple of months after getting my Commodore64, my parents offered me a Disk Drive to replace my slow, but faithful Dataset.
I then recopied my listings from the magazines and saved them to disk, for quick access to my favorite games.
I soon realized that all these programs (I had at least 12 at that time!) had to be organized, so I decided to rename my diskette from "Programs" to "Games". There was a rename option in the format function that did the job very well...
After I realized that all my games were lost, I got up, turned towards my parents (who were watching TV in the same room) and went to my bedroom, keeping a straight face.
Kids do have problems the size of the Universe... We just don't understand them!
I did a rm -rf of my main storage and backup hard drive... I spent a while trying to fix it, no luck
I have seen examples of FreeBSD and BSDI with over 1000 days, and one of my associates boasts about his Linux server that has wrapped the uptime counter 3 times, which means it is over 4 years. For some unixes and VMS apparently 10 years plus isn't out of the question. 90 days, *chortle*
My personal record with Windows was 49 days, consistently, with Windows 95B. This was in an airport, with custom-written software which didn't run in Windows NT. We never managed to get Windows 98 to stay up that long.
Impressive for Microsoft, but it's still a joke compared to everything else:
$ uptime12:22pm up 305 days, 22:10, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 0.17, 0.22
Most impressive is not the operating system or the ten-year-old hard disk drive still whirring away. Most impressive is Ottawa Hydro's reliability: I don't have a UPS.
(Well, actually, I do have a UPS, but I was waiting for the next reboot to install it. The uptime has now outlasted the UPS's warranty, and the thing is waiting to be plugged in.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The worst was something in my new super duper A3 photo printer breaking off while I was printing my homework (due now). The homework would have involved some scissors-and-glue work, wasn't anything I could've printed at school. Of course everyone knows "computer failure" never works as an excuse.
Not all that bad either, I guess. Yawn.
at college I was learning cobol on a SCO box. The compiler/interpreter was rmcobol and the syntax to compile was something like
:
:)
rmcobol toto.cbl titi.cbl
but instead I did
rm cobol toto.cbl titi.cbl
Took me a good 10 sec to realise why it didn't gave compile error and instead wrote
cobol file not found.
and then I heard my co-worker scream...
There is also that time I rm -rf / on a production machine and realised what I did after 3-4 sec and CTRL+C it. The machine is still in production... everything seem to work fine
Similar thing happened with my cats. They would both sit on top of my monitor and occasionally fight up there. After about a year, so much cat hair had fallen in through the vents, my monitor died in a blaze of glory. Taking with it my just past warranty video card. I now have a LCD, and my cats are just as sad.
Just installed new computer system "SNAP II" on USS New Jersey. Big ass battleship. They take her out for a trial run and decide to have a little gun shoot. 6 16inch gun broadside into the side of a mountain. Get a call, computers not working! Go down to the room - The shockwave from the gun shoot has make every board in the computer jump out of its socket and have crashed the heads on every hard drive.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
And you _still_ don't get it. You don't have to reboot a Linux box for security updates. You just bring down the appropriate device modules via scripts, and then bring them right back up. It took till W2K (TCP/IP) to even come close to this common Linux Feature.
At the young (like, naive young) age of about 6 or 7 I was trying to free some disk space on my computer (I think it was Win 3.1 or something) through dos. I was in /Windows and saw this folder called ..
and I didn't know what it was.
deltree .. (or something similar - I don't know dos commands like I did then ;)) was soon on its way through the computer.
I never have told my dad that. The one advantage was that it led from an upgrade from a Pentium 486 (whatever) to a *gasp* 233mHz
has a uptime of 17 days (I am asked to reboot now and then for automated software updates, which happen during boot-up). We make and support Windows Software, so that explains the undisputed use of this OS for our machines. In previous work-experiences, I've had uptime of 90 days on W2K
17 days? 90 days??? Woo.
I typically get 300-500 days uptime with my linux boxen running thousands of web sites and then I only reboot because I get to feeling guilty.
Try running your windows box on a few hundred web sites with asp and asp.net applications and we'll see what that does to your uptime. From my experience (and that of thousands of other admins) it tends to reduce it to 14 days max and even then you start seeing weird things happen.
Details are a bit sketchy: I didn't have time to take notes! So I'm a little unclear as to just exactly how I painted myself into this corner:
A while back I had to upgrade the OS on a Cisco GSR 12000 (carrier grade router, SOMEWHAT over-specced for our needs...). I go in on a Saturday night for what I figure will be 1/2 hour, tops. The new firmware was just a little too big to fit on the 16 meg bootflash with the bootloader file. So I clear the bootloader off the bootflash. I load the new firmware, change the config and reload.
Only...it don't load. Image corrupt. And it can't find the bootloader from slot0: O.k., must have messed up the boot statement. Connect a terminal- lets get the files off slot0:
wait. Where's slot0:? (PCMCIA card with 64 megs of memory, secondary storage)
This is the part where I cuss out my predecessor: YOU BOUGHT A $150,000 ROUTER AND DIDN'T GET THE FSKING $100 MEMORY OPTION?!?
It was a little appalling, that empty, empty slot.
So what I have is the preboot environment, which does not offer any means of loading a file over the net - no tftp.
I get on the line with Cisco - they tell me I need another chunk of storage - slot0: - and they can't get a part to me until Tuesday. I will be circulating resumes by then. Where can I get a compatible memory module?
In desperation, I go through a three year old telephone directory and find the number of a colleague at another campus who runs the same equipment. This is where the miracle happens: he's home. Only, he's not at his home, he's visiting a former housemate - he hasn't lived at that number for two years and was really confused when I found him. I believe they don't even hang out that much.
He very kindly meets me at his campus (Hi, Sam!), we very, very carefully go over how to put the right files on a pcmcia card he pulls from one of his routers. I zoom back, chicken and egg problem solved, os copied and checked , router loads, though I have to manually configure the interfaces.
Monday I placed an order for a memory module. And a spare.
i once installed M$ Windows on it...
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Booted up windows - some symantec utility I was running kept telling me 'some file attributes corrupted.' No details - finally, just to get it to stop TELLING me, I told it to go ahead and fix it. Which it did - by setting the creation date of every file to 1986.
I probably could have lived with that - but I figured 'I have a tape backup - I will just restore that.' Well, the tape had an error and missed about 10% of the files (after wiping them out). Left an unuseable system that required a complete rebuild.
I remember it was a 3-day weekend, and my wife did not see me the whole time.
That's the last time I ever used tape for backup.
If you means "database" as in the compound word, than you are correct, though it then is no different than a "knowledge base". However, the word "database" is generally taken to mean a specific application. And that includes transactions.
Have you read my journal today?
Remember back when 56k modems were first hitting the markets, and a lot of manufacturers were offering flash-upgrades to their 33.6k modems to make them 56k? Well, I can't remember the exact brand of modem my buddy had, but because said buddy is an idiot, he got tired of waiting for the manufacturer of his modem to release the flash upgrade that they had promised to release on their website, and instead he went to another manufacturer's website and downloaded the flash upgrade for their modem. He then tried to apply it to his own modem.
:-P
I was in the room when he tried to do this, all the while telling him he was just gonna screw up his modem and he'd have to re-flash it with the disc that came with the modem. He hit the Enter key, the flash upgrade process started, and then we both heard an explosion from inside his computer case. When we opened it up, we found that the modem was on fire. You never forget the smell of burning circuit-board.
Said buddy is no longer a buddy, obviously.
gads i remember when i was in uni (96).. we had this absolutely GORGEOUS full colour laser printer in one of the comp labs.. one day we're in the lab, and a REALLY bad burning smell starts flowing.. run around sniffing for the burning plastic.. finally traced it to the printer which was making moribund sounds.. opened it up to find strings of melted plastic EVERYWHERE..
turned out that someone had decided to print some plastic bags in it..
plastic.
bags.
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Worst disaster ever:
I found out why people use those dust-off cans.
The hard way.
I vaccuumed dust out of the case of a machine I had back in 1998. Put it back together, pushed the power switch. The power supply came on, but no post, no nothing. Must have fried every IC on the logic board.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.
Worst accidents ever...
:)
Relatively new case, sitting open on the desk right next to my keyboard, on and running while I was doing installs. Open side facing me, about 1' away from my head. I open up an install program, and as soon as it starts, the PC reboots. I blink, and the PC reboots again. I turn my head to the right, and see the sparks coming from the PC Speaker wire, into the bottom of the case, and the insulator starting to burn, and the dust in the case catching fire, and more cables starting to burn... ah, it was fun. Oddly enough, DC'd the speaker cable after the flames died, checked everything, and plugged it back in... and it's worked fine ever since.
I've also discovered that leaving CDs in the sun isn't bad because it degrades data... it's bad because it can warp the CD, causing flying shards of death when you put it in a 52x drive. Again, case 1' from my head, and it died during a FPS game. Took me a few seconds to realize the bang wasn't from my surround sound.
And while I'm at it... if your friend has their darling kid over, and you're all eating leftovers, and you have your case open on both sides... be sure and confiscate the tinfoil from the brat BEFORE he decides to wad everyones tinfoil up and shove it down between the mobo and case back.
RAM is not microwavable. Microwaved RAM should not be put into a system. Children who mess with my new RAM sticks should be microwaved. Repeatedly.
When the cute kids come door-to-door selling your fav chocolates, and you're gone for a few days on business, make sure your gf knows that putting them on top of your new 20" monitor is indeed a surprise, just not the one she was expecting.
When you're monitoring the computer lab at the U, and you see someone look perplexed, walk to the front, borrow scissors, walk back, snip for a few minutes, walk up, borrow a stapler, and walk back, make sure you run fast enough to stop them before they put their freshly 'fixed' floppy in the floppy drive.
Speaking of university labs... remember to put a sticker over every floppy drive that says "THIS IS NOT WHERE YOUR CREDIT CARD GOES". Apparently, high school education no longer covers this.
Hide your tools. Whatever you do, hide them. Never let anyone find them. Especially your PHB. And mention to him that the server rack is electrified. All of it. Even the rails. That way, when he decides to "borrow a screw or two" for his home project, he won't pick the ones that stop it from toppling over, and he won't run and leave your tools there, thus causing you unending hours of questioning before he finally confesses (thanks, security camera!)
I think that's the worst, offhand. Of course, being a BOFH, I've caused many "accidents", but these are the ones that I didn't have a hand in.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I was interested in playing with the Apollo workstations run in my buddies ME class, so when he went to take his final (designing some stuff in Autocad), I snuck in and played on one of the workstations. Apparently, the station I was on was logged in as an administrator (unbeknownst to me).
:) (I was a freshman with zero *nix experience). And it never would have happened if someone else didn't leave root logged into my machine.
I clicked around and eventually saw an option that said "run system tests", so I figured why not, let's see what it does. Then a shell window opened and I read a few lines, one that said "shutting down systems".
Just then, I hear a girl behind me say "Oh shit, I didn't save!", and then a guy say "Oh my god, what's happening!?" I told my buddy to hurry up and save his work. He looked at me and realized I was the cause of the pandemonium striking the room and saved immediately, luckily his system hadn't started shutting down yet.
Soon enough, all systems in the room had been shut down, restarted, and then began running a series of self-tests.
I backed away from my system, pretended to be just as upset as everyone else, and casually got out of there. My buddy was one of four people in the class who had saved his work, while 21 others were out of luck an hour into their final. Lucky for him, my problem put his grade at the top of his class since most of the other students weren't able to finish in the time remaining.
If you were there... sorry, I didn't know what I was doing
(1) Installing a PCI ethernet card in a slot, and then not making sure it was seated correctly - apply power, smell smoke.
(2) Trying to place a large heatsink/fan on top of a processor, and not watching how close I was to a voltage regulator on the motherboard - apply power, arc of electricity, and then smell smoke.
(3) Stupidly applying OS patches to a Solaris system without bringing the system down, or at least into single user mode. Reboot machine, see string of error messages about corrupted libraries and missing files. Spend weeking recovering before people arrive Monday.
(4) Condifently tell wife that I need to apply the lastest service pack to her working Win 2K box. She says, "it works ok", I say, "You really need this svc pack". Result...a Win 2k box that rebooted whenever you logged in. Fortunately, I had selected "archive old files" before installing it.
(5) Ok, this one is not mine...I give the wife a PDA, she puts the PDA in her purse and goes to the store. She finishes loading the groceries into the trunk and reaches up to close the lid. At the same time, the PDA slides out of her purse while the truck lid is travelling down. Her timing is impeccable, and the PDA gets perfectly smashed by the trunk lid. The funny thing is that I was able to hot sync it one last time and retrieve all of her data. And then I had to give her my PDA because she didn't have one.
The worst thing I ever did was back when I was just getting introduced to Win 95 (sadly, prior to my linux days). In my never ending effort to milk more performance out of Win 95, I got the idea to boot the computer into old DOS 6.2 and run Norton Speeddisk on the Win 95 disk, so it could defrag the files Windows defrag could not. It did. And replaced every single long file name on the disk with it's 8 character dos compatibility equivalent. As it was my only machine at the time, and reformatting wasn't desireable, I renamed every file by hand... :(
Umm, couldn't you just have said "rollback;" after your mistake? Or did you have auto-commit on?-)
What database are you working with? PostgreSQL requires that you preface things with BEGIN; if you want the opportunity to choose between ROLLBACK; or COMMIT; after every statement. It doesn't do an auto-begin (that I'm aware of).
i *know* this, AC. i admin several. i was just pointing out that 30 days uptime was *nothing* to any OS, rather than being a /. troll.
So I was fixing some bugs in the Linux Kernel... and I couldn't think of any really good variable names... so I looked in this copy of the SCO Unix source I had lying around and oh boy, do I feel silly today!
Well, not any damage here, but was certainly noteworthy nonetheless....
I was administrating a small network and had a virtual console logged into one of the other Linux workstations. This workstation was used by a co-worker of mine. This was via Telnet because it was still standard at the time.
Anyway, one day the CPU was pegged at 100%. So, as I always do, I switched to a virtual terminal, ran TOP and much to my surprise, it showed a low CPU utilization. Well, I trusted the higher reading and began to kill the programs using the most memory. Things like Netscape, etc. But it made no difference to my system.....
Then I realized that was the virtual terminal that was logged into Luke's system, and he was wondering why his programs were silently exiting.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
These aren't exactly my own accidents, but I've experienced plenty of interesting destruction over the past few years.
Working with beginners in a repair shop is quite fun when it's not frustrating. I've become accustomed to hearing the loud, silence-shattering yelps of someone who has just learned not to touch the capacitor on a digital camera... It wouldn't be so funny if it could cause serious injury, but I know it won't, so I just enjoy hearing the sounds of people learning the hard way.
Power supplies seem to be prevalent in my destruction stories. Not long ago we had a batch of power supplies with lots of units that wouldn't turn-on... At least, not after they'd been used for a week. A cow-orker was testing them on a spare computer (not sure why, I would have just returned them) and they wouldn't turn on. He asked if I had a suggestion, so I offered my help... I toggled the power switch a few times, then told him it would turn on, and started to leave. He hit the computer's power button. An ear-piercing "whirrr" sound came from the PS, as the unit's fan pushed enourmous ammounts of highly-toxic smoke out. I couldn't reach the power supply, or the power button, so I stood there for about 5 seconds, as smoke went everywhere, waiting for him to shut it off. He stood there, right in the way, looking like a deer in headlights. When I realized he wasn't doing anything, I quickly went over and unplugged the power cord from the wall. We quickly evacuated everyone in the room, then opened all the doors and windows, with airconditioners and fans going full blast to clear the fumes. What a fun day, all to save a couple dollars on postage, to mail the defective units back.
I've seen people who have actually managed to plug-in a molex connector backwards. A good pop, a few seconds of magic smoke, and it's all over. Dead hard drive, CD-ROM, etc.
About the only thing that I've experienced in my private computer use, was a major power supply problem... I had just hooked-up a new case fan, then turned on the computer. I can only assume that the cheap fan had a short. Unfortunately, computers aren't engineered well. The simple short managed to take out 2 very expensive hard drives, an expensive CD-RW, and the power supply itself died on the spot. That one sure ruined my month. I would buy dozens of massively over-priced power supplies, if only they made them with fuses on each connector, to make sure a short in one cheap device doesn't destory thousands of dollars of hardware.
In many systems, your CD-ROM cable hangs right over your CPU fan, so if that cable is just pushed a little, it'll be in the right orientation to block all air intake. The CPU overheats, the computer programs are all crashing, etc. A smart person would shut-off the computer at that point, but not everyone. I've seen plenty of people that leave it running while they go read through their Windows 98 book for the error message, start showing it to everyone, and asking about it, etc. By the time I get there to help, the CPU is burnt to a crisp, because they throught any idiot could work on a computer.
Then there's literally hundreds of stories of people who heard something (mostly screws) rattling around in a component, or the computer itself, and just disregard it, and turn the unit on. POOF!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not wanting to pollute a huge archive directory with artifacts of my datamining, I often make a working directory and sym-link all the archives into it, then do my thing...
/some/huge/archive/dir/* ; do ln -sf . $i;done
for i in
This is still my favourite rm -rf * story! http://nightmare.org/textfiles/computers/rm-rf
I was trying to replace the power switch on an AT box but the new switch had a different outlet, so I short-circuited 220V... Both the power supply and the motherboard were fried, but my brother's HD (defragmenting at the time) remained intact!! I once spilled lemon juice on a keyboard with membranes - ruined 5 keys. My brother spilled instant glue on an OLD keyboard - a couple of melted keys (just the covers) but it still works fine! My PC was just playing music when it froze. Reboot - can't load OS. Turned out that the FAT table had been erased, so I got my data back... Funny fact #1: By the time, I was studying in another city (8h by bus from here) and I used to carry my *other* HD back and forth. But no. The HD that crashed had to be the one with the OS and everything! Funny fact #2: It turned out that the battery made loose contact. That PC is now running as a server, incredibly stable - I have it lying on its side, so the battery's weight fixes the problem! iptables -F and the default policy was DROP... Locked myself outside. Fortunately I got terminal access from a modem attached to the box. I didn't mess this one up but here it goes: I was called for help because the mail server had gone mad. I realized that the mail queue was so enormous that it ate up all the disk space! I deleted everything, but it kept getting huge. What happened was that the previous administrator had root's mail aliased to her account, which she forwarded to an address which had ceased existing when she quit. Every mail to root (including a bunch of proc tasks) couldn't be delivered and resulted to a total of four other emails. Two were generated after the 4h limit, one was to the postmaster (aliased root) and one to the sender (usually root), and two similar ones after the 2d limit. Each was trying AGAIN to be sent to root, generating 4 MORE emails... Left a W2K server unattended & without automatically installing the updates. Enough said. An old server (with an old battery) lost the date when it rebooted and went some years back. I logged in and fixed it. Result: everyone who had logged on with the old date (including me) had their accounts expired, because the last login was some years ago!! I can't remember how we fixed that, honestly :)
Back when we had all important data on floppy disks, we often found our desk covered with them. On such a moment, coffee was spilled on the desk... Many floppies (and MANY old arcade games) thrown away :(
Color me stupid. All the hardware I had been working on had memory SIMM slots where you put the SIMM in at an angle and then "righted it" to snap it into place.
Then one day I was asked to put a memory upgrade in a large Sun SPARC machine. This beast had vertically-insterted SIMs but that was unclear.
I reached in... spread the latches... and applied a gentle forward pressure to the SIMM...
SNAP!
The slot was ruined, and so the bank of four slots was ruined.
On closer inspection, someone else had previously done THE SAME THING to one of the slots on the other bank-of-four (and then just hid their mistake by moving the memory and reinstalling the board in the system) making that CPU card completely useless from a memory point of view.
Fourtunately we had two CPU cards and memory stacking was flexible. If that had not been the case, the project would have been down for days.
Things learned:
Always double-check the directions when moving from platform to platform.
Never hide a mistake now (especially if you have maintenance) since hiding it now may compound someone else's mistake later.
Cowardace in the face of a screw-up is not a viable option.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Once, long ago, I was both foolish enough to be wearing a small silver hoop earring, .
.
.
and willing to stick my head inside a computer case in order to determine if the hard
drive was spinning up at power on. .
No, the hard drive was not spinning up, and yes a silver hoop earring makes a great
conductor when touching motherboard circuitry. .
A loud pop, a nice electical zap to the head, and a stinky cloud of smoke from the
fried capacitors in the power supply brought multiple insults to a minor injury. .
Moral of the story? Always insulate your body jewelery while computing!
I had many. I remember I was once playing with debug under DOS using a 486 some years ago (well, quite some...) when I had a quite destructive accident.
.com to a file so I issued a w command:
.com program to the first sector of the hard disk (the boot sector). Yipppee!
I wanted to write my nice
w address drive_number firstsector number
I don't remember exactly what I entered, but the fact is that I promoted my silly
Claudio
I have one hardware & two software based firewalls, I do not ever use Internet Explorer for surfing, all unneeded services was disabled, regular daily virus, spy ware & variability scanning. So my cafe was always clean & working good. Because lot of (American) people was asking why I do not have AOL installed, I explained that AOL sucks a*s, so one day I was thinking... "How bad can it be? ... it was bad long time ago, so i am almost sore that company of this size & technology should have OK software, why else people still singing up AOL v Comcast or all other ISP's...
I was SO wrong!
Whit two days, 60% of computers was infected whit spy & ad ware, spam, viruses... even if you close the software down, you still running 3-4 AOL services on background, i was ending up reinstall the windows from 0. Well, i know that all the spy ware was not installed BY AOL, but all this was coming trough AOL, why this people doesn't control what data users send & get? Why they based their browser to IE?? It's like installing backdoor to your network/pc.
If anyone can tel me what is the main reason why people still using AOL, or worst jet - why they sing up AOL v Comcast or any other ISP (like 3-5 reasons)?
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice!
The next day, I went to work, discussed my success with my friend, and he was really happy about it. When I got home, I found that both systems were totally shredded. My son, age 4, had taken my power screwdriver to both machines, and all day, in the presence of the in-home daycare sitter, removed everything, and I mean everything. Diodes, chips, transistors... if it was 3-D on a board, my son had pried or ripped it off. The kitchen was littered with broken ISA cards and my son had sorted everything according to color and shape (roughly... he was 4). He proudly showed me the "bowl of chips" he saved for me.
I was livid. My son did not expect this reaction of horror and anger. I asked the babysitter why she didn't stop him.
She faced my enraged face with a classic, "Who me?" look and said (I am not kidding) "He told me you said it was okay..."
Screaming, "HE'S FOUR!!!!" didn't bring my computers back. Asking, "If he said I told him he could play with the f**king blender, would you let him do that?" gained me no fixed systems. She was so totally calm about it, and wondered what the big deal was. "You're a computer guy, you can fix it..." She even offered to buy the glue herself.
She was so fired (there were other issues as well, and this was the last straw).
I was terrified to tell my friend. I spent hours rehearsing how I would break the news to him. I initially said, "Your new machine died, and I am not sure how to bring it back." Luckily, my friend took it really well. He said after he went home, he reconsidered and decided to buy one of those new Pentium machines. I breathed the biggest sigh of relief when he added, "Oh, and you can throw away those other machines. I don't need anything off of them..."
[later I told him what really happened, and we had a good laugh]
Where I work a few months ago, we were having an AS/400 (a bigger one- the size of a fridge) moved out of our backup server room. The movers sent two guys to move it down a flight of concrete stairs. These guys (assumedly not having moved computers before) decided that they could lift/carry the AS/400 (which, of course, probably weighs a thousand pounds) down the stairs by themselves (even though they had a stair crawler- they decided not to use it).
Apparently they got to the first step.. the words "OH SHIT!" were heard, followed by the sound of an AS/400 sommersaulting down the stairs. Fortunately noone was hurt, although the AS/400 was kind of banged up.
Now it's become a saying around our workplace- ie "yeah, it was slippery out the other day- I almost pulled an AS/400"
it's quality and usability increase dramatically
"its".
No apostrophe.
You have to be a complete idiot to admit to copyright infringement on an open forum like this. Why didn't you post AC?
I'll just add that I did the exact same thing when I was a junior programmer. Difference was that it wasn't a production database, they didn't trust me with production databases yet(with good reason, apparently).
It did teach me to alway write the where clause first, and use select,later changing it to delete, unless you're absolutely certain that your where clause is correct.
okay i had just installed XP for a weeks now and ... i reinstalled
...
was tweaking acces profiles here and there (like
normal user can't power down the computer via
software etc.)
also since i kindda know what i would do if i got
this computer (like run cmd.exe or other stuff)
i tried to deny acces to c:\windows etc.
well i accidentally denied myself (admin) acces
to c:\windows
the other worst accident was e-rage and i
destroyed a few computers
He decided to write a tool that essentially did "rm -rf"-thing in assembly under DOS (it was something like 1993). The goal was "no questions" and "as fast as possible". The mistake was, that first time the program run flawlessly, it was on
directory with the source code for that program. Ooops!
...was the time I dropped a 14" disk drive on my foot.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's the morons who plunk down 33% of the replacement cost of some gadget on an Extended Warranty who need your condescending "grasshopper" lesson.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
It's 1984, my last day of work at my summer job (starting my second year in college) as "the computer guy" for a local business. The company's accountant has one of those fancy brand new IBM PC AT's, with the big 20MB hard drives, which he's been using for all his important spreadsheets. I'm helping him format some floppies so he can do backups. "Very important," I explain. FORMAT.COM isn't in the search path, so I switch to the C: drive to run it. But I forget to specify "A:". I notice my mistake immediately after I hit [Enter] and it stops with a warning message. But this is DOS 3.0, which simply says "Press any key to continue" instead of asking "Continue?" and requiring an affirmative response. And I've been conditioned by all my Lotus 1-2-3 usage to press [Esc] to cancel. So I quickly hit [Esc]... and there goes the entire C: partition.
To my surprise, they hired me back again the next summer. I guess they figured I wouldn't make that mistake again.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
su rm -r /usr/lib
yell --profanity
A friend put a loop into a report and almost got fired for it. He worked in a government office where the printers were in a seperate building and any print-out was brought over hourly; he didn't know anything was wrong until they brought an out of schedule cart just for him, and asked him to sign an expenses form for the extra boxes of paper his report was using.
. . . from the root directory.
The original intent was to change the permissions on a batch of files for a Samba share, but somebody wasn't paying attention to where they were in the directory tree.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
At this one job i had a bunch of servers lined up in a row i used to check backups on NT4 running arcserve.
The routine to close the programs and lock the server would be like, Alt-F4, Alt-F4 to confirm some dialog, crtl-alt-del, lock.
That is, if you actually opened arcserve to check the backup prior to doing the Alt-F4, Alt-F4.
Needless to say the time soon came when crtl-alt-del didn't work properly since the server was already shutting down..
Luckily i was the all-in-one support/admin guy so i got to fix users problems myself also...
It was 3 am, an then sudennly I took an eletric shock.
No big deal. My brother saw it all:
A lightning fell on the PC. The no-break burnt.
Coming from UNIX land i had no inkling that I would have to edit the .bat file to edit it. So here was a bat file to backup our production database. Lo and behold instead of choosing edit I chose open and afterminutes I could hear all the phones ringing.
My worst computer accident (which was more scary than actually disasterous) took place when I was a student at a certain university on the Strand in London. The fan in one of the physics department's DECstations had died and as a result the machine was overheating and turning itself off, requiring much fscking.
A fellow student and I offered to change the fan, duly ordering a part from RS Components and borrowing a soldering iron from one of the lab technicians. Job done, we decided to test the machine with the cover off to make sure that everything (still) worked. We turned on the machine. Sparks everywhere. We turned off the machine. Sh*t. Then we noticed that the case was silvered on the inside and that because we hadn't screwed down the motherboard, it was short-circuiting in probably a great many places.
We could see that the fuse was blown and decided that replacing it would be a good idea, hoping that this would be the only problem. We asked the technician for a new fuse. The technician told us that it was an imperial (length) fuse and that fuses like that weren't available any more. He gave us a shiny new metric fuse... that didn't fit in the fuse-holder. So he gave us a new fuse-holder as well... which didn't fit the motherboard. Fortunately, being creative young physics students, we were able to fashion a floating (air-cooled?) fuse assembly with the aid of several paperclips.
Miraculously, the DECstation still worked, and the new fan whirred away happily. It didn't stop the machine crashing though - apparently it hadn't been overheating after all.
How's that for a fsck up?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Oh yes and I recently converted to EXT3. 'less /dev/hda2' is running now.
Bah, that's nothing. Why, I once had an erection with an uptime of more than 30 days! My girlfriend was hating life by the end of that month, let me tell ya!
Working as a Gateway tech support monkey way back when.
... like 20 minutes before... had a client with a problem with is system
Towards the end of my shift
Had him open it up and begin go reseat *everything* from IDE cables to CPU, to RAM.
Eventually oops... his motherboard wouldn't post or emit any noises, error codes or even power up all those interesting fans anymore.
Hmm, ESD'd[1] motherboard?
Yes.
End of shift
Yes.
Invalidated client's warranty because he had a third party sound card in there?
Yes.
Bastard factor + 4
[1] Electro Static Discharge.