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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.
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.
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.'
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.
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,
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.
Oh, I guess I have punched a couple keyboards when I was pissed off. I've broke about 4 keyboards that way. I've also punched a few monitors but never damaged those. Apparently a CRT is stronger than a car windshield.
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
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.
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
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...
...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.
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".
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?
...and excuse my bad typing, I'm on my Mac G3 at the moment and I can't type for my life on this keyboard :P
My phone rang at 3am.
/osrc, where else would it be?
/osrc and I don't see it.
/osrc .` /backup
Boss: Sorry to wake you, but where's the source code?
Me: Uh, what, oh,
Boss: I'm in
Me: Do an ls and tell me what you see.
Boss: Dot and dot-dot.
--------------------
I had removed a mount point (/backup) for a failed disk where we mirrored the code. The dumb backup script did something like this:
cd
size=`du -s
cd
rm -rf this that the_other_thing
Fortunately, the tape backup had finished before the stuff was deleted.
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.
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
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).
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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've found that smashing keyboards can take the edge off :)
Swing it towards the ground like a two-by-four and watch all the keys fly all over the room. It's even funnier if you record it and one of the keys flies straight into the microphone or lens.
Yes, CRTs are very durable. It took me and a friend over two hours to break his old monitor. He dragged it by the VGA cord over curbs and such and nothing. Dropped it into a muddy creek and still nothing. Pulled it out and tossed it way into the air and finally it smashed into a bunch of little pieces.
One of my new neighbors managed to find my old, broken monitor sitting by the curb of a dumpster at my old place and picked it up. About two weeks later, I hear PSSCSCHCHKCHCKHCKHCHCHHSSSSSSHHHHH!! That's the sound of a 19" monitor breaking. The guy who did it drives a crappy Toyota wagon he regularly beats the shit out of and shared my appetite for destruction. I was glad to see the monitor go.
I'm on my third keyboard, second monitor (CRT), and second mouse (about to smash this one too because it sucks) by the way. I love breaking stuff.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Yup.
.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
Installing Windows Me.
That's not accident! That's sabotage!
\m/
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
The laptop landed on the PCMCIA WLAN card, this became a embedded wireless card.
The good news is the home insurance paid out.
when i got my first computer, (a dell pentium p60) I accidently installed a demo version of OS2 warp cause it came with a magazine and i thought it was a game, completely wiped out my dos/win 3.11 setup.
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
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.
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'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
when i got my first computer, (a dell pentium p60) I accidently installed a demo version of OS2 warp cause it came with a magazine and i thought it was a game, completely wiped out my dos/win 3.11 setup.
;-)
That was a *mistake*?
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
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.
That was a *mistake*? ;-)
I was 11 at the time, and when my dad found out he wasn't very happy...
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/
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 seriously think I just now topped that, in stupidity value, not in monetary value.
So I just burned 33 CDs to be mailed out Tuesday. I go to play one in my CD player. The awful sound of data screeched across the room. I had burned 33 audio CDs with the ISO file I made instead of the CUE file.
I swear to God, this just happened, and I'm flipping out because I don't have enough CDs or a car to go get more CDs before Tuesday. Dammit.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
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 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...
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
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...
I've done the same thing when losing track of which server I'm working in (having multiple ssh connections to various machines to compare config files, ect.)
Learned to rename my konsoles....
sigaar
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 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 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.
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!
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.
If by reliable components you mean reliable powersupplies, there are a few brands which are well known to be high quality and reliable.
Antec is considered to be the top end for reliability and performance. They contain seperate transformers for the different voltage rails. I have 3 Antec powersupplies in my computers. All have worked great.
Enermax is another maker of very beefy powersupplies. I've got one and haven't had a problem with it.
There's bad news, though. 50% premium? No. Try 200%, if you're used to those shitty $30 powersupplies. A 380W Antec will set you back somewhere in the region of $90. It's worth it, though. Cooler powersupply, cooler system, increased stability due to lower temperature and solid voltage.
Some reviews at Tech-report and AnandTech should give you some baselines to look at.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!)
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
===
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 --
(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.
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
It's not just Windows. It's the Windows 9x line, also known as the longest batch file in the world.
I love C++
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.
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
oh, yeah? i was using it in '87, when it hadn't even been written yet!
Be careful! Bears shouldn't consume large furry dogs.
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
- 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
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.
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.
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."
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"
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
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. ... and your memory slots too? :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
A friend of mine was making curry while talking to me on the cellphone. He dropped it into the stew pot. A few days later, he offered it to me, and I gladly accepted, my cellphone having been lost in an unfortunate PSU disaster. (Yes, I charge my Siemens from the +5v line) Anyway, the thing naturally didn't power on, and it smelled HORRIBLY of curry. So, just for shits'n'giggles, I immersed the thing in water. Then, I put it in a bowl with a strong, very very strong detergent. Then I rinsed it again. Let it dry a few hours, didn't work. Put it in the oven! 30 minutes at 75C, and voila, a Nokia.
toresbe
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.
Ah yes, the early Half-Life CD's. I am under the impression the later versions of Installshield follow the "if this is not my file, I'm not touching it" philosophy.
Yes, and "Open-XP" costs only a third compared to average linux distributions - one burned cd versus three burned cds!
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
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.
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 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
Boy, was I in trouble :(
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 use a single floppy disk to install Debain. What kind of weird distro are you using?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Small children and computers go together like water and... well, computers.
One of my instructors in a networking course had a five year old son (We'll call him Sammy, even though I don't know his real name). The instructor had been playing around with a Linux distro, and left the CD in the drive when he powered it down. The next person to boot up was Sammy. Something unfamiliar appears on the screen, and he asks his mom what to do. Mom, not paying attention, says, "Just click OK!"
Whoops.
The kid ended up installing a new OS and wiping out all my instructor's data.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I stuck slashdot into my bookmark list...
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...
A 5 year old installed Linux? Man, I REALLY suck then... I'm 22 and still having trouble with it. ;)
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 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)
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
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.
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 :)
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)
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
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.
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/
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
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
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 :(