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10 Computer Mishaps
Ant writes "ZDNet UK posted Ontrack Data Recovery's 2004 list of the 10 strangest and funniest computer mishaps... Some of them are funny!" My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box thinking that it was just an alpha driver. Of course since this Alpha meant DEC and this was an x86 box, the server barfed pretty hard. Also the time I spilled an 8oz glass of water on my laptop and lost all my email from 1994 to 1999 and my backup was corrupted. That I liked too.
Hey, freezing a broken hard disk works, really, just don't do it like this.
These really aren't very good but hopefully people will send some better ones in.
My personal ones:
A friend in the office had to install identical 2 machines with linux. Step 1: Install linux on one machine. Step 2: Install the hard drive from other machine into the computer. Step 3: 'dd' one disk over to the other one. Step 4: Scream as you did it the wrong way round and overwrote your newly installed disk with blank disk garbage.
On a server I needed to remotely manually replace libc with an older version file from another machine. Ofcause you have to remember to do everything in a single command otherwise if you delete the old version you cannot run anything else. (I am sure there must be a simpler solution to that than take the disk out and do it on another machine)
Leaving a computer under the desk but pushing it back as far as it would go so the back board of the desks fully covered the fan hole. It got very hot after a day and then burned out the cpu and powersupply in one go.
Inserting a K6-3 into an older board which I didnt want to replace. The board had jumpers with markings for the CPU voltages 3.1, 3.0, 2.9, 2.8, 2.7 and followed by 2 unlabelled jumpers. The chip wanted 2.6v core supply (I cant remember the details) so foolishly I assumed the other two jumpers were the lower voltages for which there were no processors at that time. I was wrong and a puff of smoke appeared as my lovely new 450MHz executed its first and only operation.
Checking if the IDE cable worked itself loose without moving the computer from its place and leaving it turned on. So I am reaching round the side and blindly feeling around for the cable and I suddenly feel something like an electric shock (which turned out just be accidentally touching the cpu fan blades). I very quickly remove my hand snagging it on one of the many sharp pieces of metal sticking out of old cases. It was quite cool to be able to see my muscles moving around as a huge piece of skin flopped open exposing the tendons in my hands.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
One man became so mad with his malfunctioning laptop computer, he threw it into the toilet and flushed a couple of times.
It must have had problems dumping his log file. It was probably stuck in the backside cache...
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
Not to sound like a miserable bastard, but exactly which of these are supposed to be funny? This article is really lame, uninformative and about as funny as colon cancer.
/. going downhill>
The first item on the list takes the piss out of some guy for putting a HD in the freezer in an attempt to get it to work, when that is well known for sometimes working in temporarily resuscitating dead drives, if the death is due to a mechanical fault.
Also, the link for page two seems to keep taking me back to the first page in Firefox.
<insert misc comment about
Bah. Humbug.
Remember that time when Taco tried to revamp the slashdot login system and none of the stories had comments for like half a day? Ahhh, memories...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
This is a Commodore 64 user I knew. He got around to reading some computer books, and remembered the phrase "you must format a diskette before you use it". Guess what he did first when he decided to use a commercial program that was on a diskette?
wrt the "10 computer Mishaps"
t id=218) was not found.
I thought it was funny/ironic that when I clicked on the link, I got:
404 File Not Found
The requested URL (hardware/05/08/23/1425259.shtml?tid=133&tid=198&
If you feel like it, mail the url, and where ya came from to pater@slashdot.org.
Beer and keyboards don't mix. I spilled nearly a pint on mine and its tough working with it now. I won't give it up because its one of those old IBM keyboards and I just love it. But man its tough typing without arrow keys, a backspace and some letters. Reminds me of that Simpsons bit:
Marge: You know Homer, the "E" doesn't work on that typewriter
Homer: We don't need no stinkin' "E"! Ok, "Food Box: Go or No Go" by Homer..no, Earl..no, Bill Simpson!
Delete from Users; where ID=1;
Fleur de Sel
I really would have expected Taco's story to be about "the one time we updated Slashdot..."
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Killed my drive
This is nothing but a list of vague semi-technology related stories. They're not particularly funny either. This looks more like a lame email forward than a slashdot story...
"You have been redirected to this page during a temporary period of planned downtime."
Planned ou slashdotted ?
Article Moderation Totals:
-3 Unfunny
-2 Uninteresting
-1 Uninsightful
100% suckage.
Must be a slow news day.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Guess this really isn't a coffe-mug holder!
http://efil.blogspot.com/
How could I forget yesterday so quickly? Do we really have that many Memento-style disabled Slashdotters?
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
One day, frantic call from my friend: "can you come with me to $AIRPORT, $AIRLINE's mac is down (I was the Mac expert then). Seems that $AIRLINE is running it's whole fleet management software on ONE computer.
We get there, and the VICE-PRESIDENT OF FINANCE is waiting for us at the receptionist desk. He hands my friend a $50,000 cheque!!! We go look at the macintosh, and I cannot do anything, the hard-disk is totally molten...
We get out of the airport and rush to the bank to have the cheque certified.
The next day, $AIRLINE filed for bankrupcy...
When I was 12 or so I bought a 2400 Bps internal modem for my Compuadd 486 SX25.
:)
I had no idea what I was doing so I called up the Hayes support line. I told the support guy I wanted to install my new modem but needed help.
He asked me if I had my computer's case off, to which I replied yes. He then told me to go ahead and plug the modem into one of the free slots.
Zap! OUCH! Poof!
He neglected to tell me to turn off the computer.
Hey, I was 12... leave me alone.
For those of you who are worried, some how, both the computer and the modem survived and I eventually got it installed and working.
While working outside on my laptop in Key West some kids scared up the wild rosters that live there. Airborne and over my laptop he shat a full on metric ton of bird juice onto my laptop.
I was cleaning roster shat out of my keyboard for the next 2 weeks. Smelled good as well. At least it was not in my beer I guess.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I was using BBedit, and wrote a fairly simple script to update all of the copyright statements that were hard coded in several thousand web pages, it worked fine on several test pages, but when I told it to do the whole server, it just erased the pages and saved a new blank copy. Thank god for a back up that was only three days old
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
From the heading of the article:
"It's amazing some of the ways people can lose data. Our favourite excuse of late incolve [sic] everyintg [sic] from toilets to tarmac and mountaineering to meterology [sic]"
Wow. There's no need to proofread the heading, because afterall.. What are the chances of making a mistake there?
My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box thinking that it was just an alpha driver. Of course since this Alpha meant DEC and this was an x86 box, the server barfed pretty hard.
What are you doing installing what you beleive to be an alpha quality driver on a server?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I don't know about that article being funny, but I knew a guy in colleg who woke up to a random dude pissing in his keyboard. I'm not sure if the keyboard was ruined, but I do know that it was trashed (much like the random dude). Cops were involved and the guy ended up having to buy a whole new system for my friend. So if you're in college and you're not locking your dorm room door, you might want to put a towel or something over your keyboard at night.
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
Having your webserver shine briefly in the ultraviolet range before slumping in a heap of molten slag because you got linked on the front page of Slashdot.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/05/bbspot_labs_ice _drive.html
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2004/11/mailbag_2004111 7.html
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
This one time, I made a list of mishaps and posted it on Slashdot. Suddenly, I remembered that we needed to have "Planned" downtime.
Where $Some == 0.
My best mishap was the following: I decided to make bubble solution for my little girl. So I went on the Internet using my laptop and found a recipe that involved mixing water, glycerine, sugar and dish washing liquid.
The mixture makes very good, but very sticky bubbles. I made about a litre of it and put it in a jug. I then got up from the table and knocked over the jug onto my laptop keyboard.
Oops.
Luckily the laptop I have is almost sealed under the keyboard (there's a small hole for the keyboard connector) and I was able to remove the keyboard and simply wash it unde the tap and then dry it out. In fact you can pretty safely wash laptop keyboards once separated from the machine because there are no electronics in them, just a PCB with rubber keys on top.
John.
I hold one of those much admired positions within my small workplace, that of the "guy know knows what a computer is". As a result I look after our server, all the desktops, database application, etc, etc - even tho I have only a rough working knowledge in the field (I'm actually a multimedia designer!) During a weekend RAID-5 upgrade (from the single 200mb HDD with no redundancy / backup (you can see where this is going, can't you)) I was informed there were errors on the disk, so I naturally ran chkdsk to sort them out. Chkdsk did sort them out, and I was able to copy accross the old drive data to the new raid array. It wasn't until the next monday in the office when I (and to an extent, everyone else in the company) realised that the chkdisk had neferd _everything_ on the data partition - 4 months of un-backed up accounts, contact databases, artwork, pretty much everything were left with massive holes. I rang ontrack, the guy at the other end of the phone felt sorry for me. morale: backup, please.
The worst/oddest I've seen went something like this:
/.)"
1. Someone ran rsync with -r at the end, intending to do something recursive. This option was treated as an argument, causing a file called -r to be created. This was done in / on an HP-UX workstation.
2. Two years later, someone wrote a script to be run from cron that would run as root then change to a directory containing data files, erase them, and create new ones. This directory of data files was NFS mounted on the workstation in 1 above. Many, many other filesystems were also mounted on this workstation, all rw, all as root.
3. Some time after that, someone rebooted the workstation. Not All of the NFS mounts came up, so when the script in 2 ran as root and did not check to make sure the destination directory existed, it was not able to cd and ran in /
4. The script executed "rm -f *", intending to delete the data files. Unfortunately, the file called -r was still in / and was included in the argument list. Rm of course interpreted this as an option, so the command became "rm -f -r (everything else in
5. 3 and 4 happened on a saturday night when no one was around, so no one noticed all of the data disappearing until Monday, when it was all gone.
6. Several people had a very, very long day. Actually, several long days. A few weeks, actually.
Can you count the number of gross and avoidable administration mistakes, boys and girls?
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
How about this one :
/left/ power supply.
A big telecommunications company wanted to upgrade hardware on a Compaq ES40 cluster, justed fopr access control on their ADSL network. The operator stopped all the applications and the OS on the left hand node (A). The right hand node (B) was taking over the load at that time, so no users would be affected. Then he stepped behind the cluster, and switched off the
Only when he heard the SNMP alarms going off, he realized that he just switched off server B, the one that was carrying all the load. Node A was already shut down, so couldn't take it over.
It took about an hour to boot everything back up. ADSL access for the entire country was interrupted, and the press had a field day.
I lost all the data on an old hard drive once... after I beat the shit out of it with a hammer.
It was a dying drive, didn't need it anymore. So we had fun! The platters made a nice spiral in the air after I broke the spindle off...
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
This mishap wasn't so bad really, but somehow managed to get a lot more public attention than I cared for.
Somebody better cache this thing quick. Looks like the server is crying already.
Crybaby.
Howdy.
I once managed to connect my first CD-ROM drive backwards to the power suppy so that it was getting far more voltage than it should have (stupid Y connector). That was one of the times I managed to cause smoke to come out of the computer.
Another time I was putting in a variable resistor to quiet down a fan. Unfortunately it wasn't rated at the voltage I was passing through it, so that was smoking computer #2.
This final one happened to someone else (really). They were a domain administrator, thinking at they were looking at all the users with access to their computer, though they were really looking at the domain users. Since there were so many, they decided to delete them all out. Sure enough, no one in our organization could log onto the domain again. Eventualy people figured things out and restored from backup. The person felt pretty guilty, especially as they were a manager of the network team.
I have to agree with first posters... these aren't very good stories. But, thinking maybe it's phishing for better stories, I'll byte:
I once created an extremely complex script, crafted lovingly to do something at the time I'm sure I thought important. As always I incrememtally built and tested, assuring myself of one more self-anointed masterpiece. Finally, finished, as an afterthought...
I inserted a variable to point to a directory node below which I would clean up all of my work (even though I knew I had no need for the variable and would never tweak it). It was such a simple addition. No need to test.
Fired up the script, it ran a couple of seconds, I was prepared to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Hmmmm, I don't remember ANY of the test runs running so long. Why is the hard drive light flickering so much? And why still? And why so long?...
Yeah, the
command worked perfectly. Except I defined the variable initially as: cleanupdir=dirname
So, everything was lost except for the frigging "masterpiece".
Undaunted, (I'm no idiot, golllll!), I calmly inserted the QIC backup tape with my prerun backup.
No, wait!, I'll not be caught with that error again! I quickly edited the only remaining file in my tree of files, the offending script and smugly fixed the rogue spelling. I hadn't been working in this industry this long without knowing how to take safeguards!
Now, twenty minutes later, my script fixed... my files restored... let's try this again. Yeah... something about the chronology of fixing the script, then restoring the broken version over it from the backup tape. At least I proved the error was replicatable. So, I am an idiot afterall!
disclaimer: this happened over ten years ago, so I'm a bit short on exact detail of the snafu, but it really did happen. And, even though I repeated my idiocy, the fact I had the backup tape at all with only the one error to fix in the script saved my butt... so not all was lost in the lunacy.
You have been redirected to this page during a temporary period of planned downtime. We apologise for any inconvenience this work may have caused you. ZDNet UK should be available shortly and we encourage you to visit us again soon.
-The ZDNet UK Team
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Killed my web server
There was the time I tried to submit a $JOB with the $PRIOTL card ahead of the $DATA card, but forget the change the ppu patch panel on the IBM 1401 with the jpu panel - Hahaha, the operators were cleaning green-bar paper out of the chain printer for hours.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
A friend of mine (honestly, it wasn't me) was formatting a pile of floppys when he was distracted, and typed format /u c: instead of a:
It took us a while to figure out what had happenned, because windows kept working (in a sort of half dazed way) for a surprisingly long time.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Melting down ZDNET UK site, using slashdotting tehnique. Thanks guys for give me reason don't read this article and waste my time :)
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
After he pulled the pipe out of the pump I distinctly remember 'hearing' the sound of water hitting a fan followed by 'seeing' that the pump was pushing water upwards-straight into my graphics card fan which was very effectively 'flicking' water over the rest of the PC.
PCs are hard to break, and after 2 days drying out it worked fine.
NB: this happened three times and after the third time and the purchase of my x800 xt I moved back to fans
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Get slashdotted by posting the URL of your website on the slashdot front page.
#1: Getting your article posted on /. and your server set on fire.
I walked away from the computer with the "10 Computer Mishaps" page open.
Then my fiance used the computer and glanced through the page that was open.
Let me tell you, the jabs I got for being a huge dork and finding any humor in these sure were funny.
"Computer Mishaps" should be "Data Destruction Disasters". That is what the ZDNet article is about and that is why most of the examples are lame.
Proposed Slashdot Editor Checklist
1. Read the article referenced (or at least the headline).
2. Check to see if the submission is on the front page already.
3. Check spelling, grammer and style.
Well, I guess 1 out of 3 is the best to hope for.
We're not going to have to start locking up the glue and white-out, are we? Hey! Stop sniffing that!
on a gentoo system, I typed:
emerge unmerge portage
Gentoo users probably are laughing hard at this one. I must admit after tearing out my hair I had a good laugh too.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
back when I was new to linux, and configuring my own system, my computer was pretty slow and I wanted to remove all the Redhat extras that I thought were slowing it down.
out goes wine, samba, all those extras. And then I see stuff called glibc, libso, and more clearly unneeded baggage. Delete delete delete.
Ah well, that taught me right quick not to fiddle with things you don't know about while logged in as root...
My best computer mishap was back in about 2000 when I had only been using Linux on my desktop for a year or two. In an attempt to get Apache acting as I expected it to (or something, I don't really remember why) I created a folder called ~adam somewhere on my system. It didn't work, so I went rm -rf ~adam. Ooops!
And that's how I learned to fear and respect the power and glory of our lord savior, the Bourne Again Shell.
When I was in university (1985-88) I worked in the computer lab and my buddy and I were asked to take a look at one of the secretary's PC that had a floppy drive that was acting up.
Rather than try to diagnose the problem at her desk we usually just replaced the drive and checked it out back at the lab. We removed the existing drive and plugged in the replacement. Because the floppy mounting was rather tedious we didn't completely mount it until we were sure it worked so my buddy held on to it while I powered up the machine.
Now what I haven't mentioned was that the power plugs in this particular brand of PC did not have a "notch" on them like modern PCs and we weren't paying attention to it so when we plugged in the drive we put the power plug on backwards.
When we powered up the machine smoke began pouring out of the floppy drive as my friend began screaming, "Turn it off, turn it off!".
When we realized our mistake we got a new drive and installed it correctly. When we left, the secretary (already cautious of computers) was now almost terrified by the PC on her desk.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
I have a beloved Playstation 2 USB kb, which is nearly impossible to replace now. I got coke ( very acidic ) spilled on it and lost all but a few keys.
How do I fix it? Simple, I bought a conductive pen off amazon.com and retraced all the bad traces. You really need to clean with alcohol a lot to make sure you got all that coke off first. It also helps if you have a multimeter to figure out what needs to be retraced and save time. Everyone should have 3-4 multimeters lying around. =)
You could try pouring distilled water into the keyboard, while it's unplugged naturally, and let it sit for a while then drain it. It should remove the stickiness, and not leave any residue or rust the connections if you're fortunate.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
installed a linksys ethernet adapter into a asus pb400 mb, and got and ip, but no network connectivity. fix: each time i boot, uninstall and re-install the driver. so in a way, it becomes secure (no network connectivity) if someone else boots it. :)
I very quickly remove my hand snagging it on one of the many sharp pieces of metal sticking out of old cases.
Ouch. A lot of otherwise (relatively) harmless electrical shocks cause secondary injuries due to just this sort of thing. I cracked my elbow pretty damn hard once because of this. I was amazed at how fast my arm moved (then i was amazed at how much it hurt).
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Maybe its just me but my email from 94-99 would be a whole lot of worthless bytes, I wouldn't miss.
Years and years ago, I had to connect an RS-232 cable between a Mac and an Iris 4D machine. We worked in an office which didn't exactly have the best power supplies and the two machines had different grounds.
As I plugged the cable into the Mac, there was a pop and the smell of burned chips filled the air. The joy of this was that it fried the IRIX box as well.
Two computers (one quite expensive) in under a second!
Well, there was this one time when I spilled an entire cup of coffee on my laptop. When will manufactures learn to make the integrated cup holders strong enough to hold a Starbuck's Venti? The worst offenders are those cup holders that go back in all by themselves if you push too hard.
When I was 12, I spilled a nearly-full big-gulp into my Commodore 64. The screen instantly went black. I just about crapped my pants.
I took the entire thing apart, cleaned off circuit boards, keys, and all, dried them, put it all back together... and it worked.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
i wired the power up wrong on an old AT case i was switching out. I plugged it in, turned it on and boom! i've never seen a computer catch fire before. It blew the breaker in the office, blew the insulation off all the wires from the power supply and filled the office with the pleasant smell of an electrical fire.
I had an intern corrupt a very critical database with some bad sql. I was able to recover from backups and a binary log fairly easily but it still made for some frantic moments. I took the blame (she shouldn't have had the access she did) and besides she was already in tears heh.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
A shop I worked at had a DG Aviion that was being shared by several developers. We all had root access, and things generally ran smoothly.
/bin dierectory weren't owned by "bin"...so he fixed it. And all the suid programs that had to be root to work stopped working, including the ones that handled the login process.
One day as I was working, some of my friends came into my office and mentioned they were having trouble with the system, that it wasn't allowing logins. I was surprised, since I hadn't noticed anything in several hours of work. "Look", I said, "I'm not having any problems", whereupon I logged out and couldn't get back in.
After lots of diagnostics, and booting from the support tape (which is something that I'm glad I'll never do again), we determined that the ownership of critical files had been changed. It turned out that one of my friends (normally a very bright guy) noticed that all the files that were in the
The really annoying part is that the fellow in question didn't come forward (for a long time). The day it happened, he swore he didn't do anything, and even went to lunch with the other programmers while I was on the phone with DG support trying to track down the problem! It was still many months of occasional failures before we got most of the files fixed.
But, in keeping with the Ontrack theme mentioned, here's a couple I've heard of:
- One customer guessed that maybe his hard drive didn't work because it had been "sitting in a snowdrift by the barn for a while."
- Another customer, concerned that he would void the warranty if he disassembled the hard drive by removing the screws, used a hacksaw instead.
- An Ontrack representative told a customer to pack his hard drive in peanuts for protection during shipping. The drive arrived the next day packed in salted peanuts - instead of foam peanuts.
- Another drive arrived smelling fresh & clean, wrapped in Bounce fabric softener sheets. The customer had been told to pack it with antistatic material before shipping.
I worked at Convergys, a tech support sweat shop, and had just been switched to Dell 95 support (I had been supporting Gateway NT4.0 systems). A user calling in had an error, the team lead, who was like... 16, told me to delete C:\windows\etc (or something), and reboot, because Windows would re-create it. What did you know? It didn't recreate it and I was stuck on the phone for 5 hours reinstalling every little piece of software and change very little configuration on the end users computer because I hosed it out.
It did teach me a very important lesson. Never delete, all ways rename.
Another Convergys story, a kid who worked on the Dell account was troubleshooting a womans CD-Rom drive. He told her to touch the power connector to her tongue, like a 9 volt, to see if it recieved power. ZAP! She got more than she bargined for... unfortunately the kid didn't get fired because he was buddy buddy with the supervisor.
Yopu for you?
We're testing out OSX, so I have a list of five people we're going to move from 9. Up until now, there's been a special network drive for them, but OSX talks SMB so we're going to have them use the main filestore on campus.
I show this one very nice but computer clueless prof how to access H: from her laptop- I've got a little Applescript that automounts it along with some other fileshares on login. I tell her to make sure to copy her files from the local drive to H: whenever she's on campus.
Just to make things easy for her, I create an alias on her desktop for her local /home directory so she can find things since her OS9 machine was set up that way. See where this is going yet?
She dutifully copies over the alias to H: every day. She now has all her files on H:, right? Opening (userfiles) on H: shows her all her stuff, right? Until her laptop disk dies a horrible, horrible death roughly two years later. Then suddenly nothing is on H: at all, save for that alias helpfully pointing back at her laptop hard drive.
Two years of research, gone.
That was classic viewing -- so classic a song includes a mention of it.
-- haaz.
-The ZDNet UK Team
Wow! A list of experiences from people that should know what they are doing but made a mistake once or twice as opposed to the usual funny list of stupid things people have done to their computer because they didn't know better.
Slashdot - The Nuts and Volts of News for NerdsQ. Is this news?
My favourite computer nightmare happened as I was giving a one-on-one "Introduction to Computers" class at a local "Golden Agers Club", ie. a community centre where retired people go to hang out, play shuffleboard, etc. They had just invested in a computer and high-speed net access so they had me come in and give classes. One lady came in all keen, proud that she had prepared herself beforehand and gone out to buy a floppy disk on which to save all her data from the class. She took it out and I began to explain how to find the floppy drive from the desktop, etc. Suddenly I heard this deathly "SNAP". My gaze turned to the small strip of metal in her hand which had once been attached to the floppy disk. She had ripped off the floppy's sliding door, apparently thinking it was some sort of removable tab... Let's just say the lesson went downhill from there.
Dan
http://pizza.sandwich.net/
My personal funniest mishap was the day I learn ice cream and laser writers don't mix. I was about 12 at the time I think and we had just gotten a LaserWriter and Macintosh 512 at home.
...lets just say from that day forth the printer always made a funny gear grinding sound but it still keep printing for several years until it was upgraded... about the time I was allowed to go outside and play again IIRC.
I was working on my science fair project on that system (best darn looking presentation seen at a science fair in those days) while licking away at a vanilla ice cream cone I had (flat bottom cone). I set my cone down on the top of the printer and got distracted (when outside to play some bball I think).
I came back 2 hours later to find the ice cream cone had collapsed and done a noise dive into the paper feed area.
My parents well...
My sophomore year of college, my roomate and I built a loft bunkbed very close to the ceiling. I could not sit up in bed without my head touching the ceiling. However, it created enough space that we could have a very large couch, bookshelves, and TV underneath.
First night, 1 AM. I climb onto my desk and jump into bed. I remember that I forgot to lock the door, but I make the conscious decision not to do it. Several minutes later, some dude I've never seen before walks in, turns on the light, goes under the bed to the couch, lifts up a cushion, and starts peeing.
"Hey!" I jump out of bed, but he's not drunk. He's sleepwalking. I grab his arm and move him (quickly) into the hall. I watch him walk away, because I want to see where he lives. He opens a door and walks in, but then walks out again seconds later, and continues to wander down the hall.
I get out the Tide and some crappy towels, and start trying to clean up the piss. My roomate sleeps through the whole thing.
WAY back when.
We backup a MAJOR UNIX file server to a NEW machine's really large 330Meg drive.
Since we had thousands of files in the directory we couldn't just ftp all of them. (FTP couldn't read a directory with that many files/inodes.)
So we just tar'ed, compressed it and sent it.
THEN we updated the UNIX on the box and restored the files. Or tried to.
LESSON:
ULIMIT. Learn about it. Love it. Never forget that FTP will stop sending a file when it reaches that size.
So... we had to restore a week old backup. The users and management was NOT amused.
My favorite and most frustrating service call was from a lady who's laser printer wouldn't stop printing. I get a call and can hear it in the background just running printing random crap on pages. She says the printer has been printing for 3 hours and it wont stop. I ask "um at some point I would imagine it ran out of paper right what did you do then." Of course she filled it up with new paper every time it ran out. So here is this lady shoving reams of paper into this printer for 3 hours. The fix ... "have you tried turning it off?" After she turned it off and turned it back on, problem solved. I figure the most logical thing most of us would do is turn the damn thing off, but then again users are not so logical are they?
Soon after I got a Pet 2001 (CBM precursor to the C64, for all you young 'uns) I decided that 15 minutes to load Telengard from the tape cassette drive is too slow... so I rigged it to fast forward with the tape heads in read position. Obviously, I'm not exactly a genius at age 9.
Terrible noises come out, I pop open the cassette cradle, and try to remove the tape. The spool is still trying to wind, but not moving because the tape is tangled. The tape breaks as I am inserting my finger to untangle it... my finger gets caught in a loop, I can't pull my finger out, and I'm afraid to mess any further with the drive. Eventually, my finger turns a dark enough purple that I get some scissors and cut the tape.
Goodbye, Telengard. Goodbye, cruel world.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Back in the days of the 9600 baud modem (Actually, I still use some of those today, but that's not the point) I sent an approximately 10 meg zipfile of DBFs down to a remote site, maybe 50-100 DBF files in the zip, to replace all the files currently there.
After the hours it took to send down, I wanted to verify that the zipfile made it, so I figured I'd type 'pkzip -v zipfile.zip' but I forgot to put the '-v' switch. All I typed was 'pkzip zipfile.zip'
After much swearing, I started the transfer again...
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Once upon a time, I was building myself a new PC on a hot summer day. I was sweaty and barefoot and somehow or other managed to let the detachable sheet of metal from the case slip from my fingers, off the table I was working on and right into the middle of the toenail on my right middle toe. The toenail was cut pretty cleanly in half, with the top half still attached to the flesh of my toe. If my toenail hadn't been in the way I would have had a broken toe if not half a missing digit.
And I never made fun of anyone's steel-toed boots ever since
I was doing some maintaining on my Linux computer, logged in as root so that I would have suffice access.
/
/lib dir, and seeing that I didn't have _that_ much of important data, I just did a reinstall.
What I _meant_ to do was to delete everything in the folder I was in. Pretty sure of myself added an -f flag so that i wouldn't have to answer yes to a bunch of questions. So then.. ready to delete I did a quick rm -Rf .
I know I didn't have to have the last slash, but what i tried to write was "./". See what a small space can do? It didn't take too long before i figured out what I had done, seeing that it suddenly took several seconds. I did a quick Ctrl+C, but it was already to late. It had wiped out almost my entire
Long story short: Think twice before you flag f boys and girls!
Scully: Should we arrest David Copperfield?
Mulder: Yes we should, but not for this.
This is really a cheesy article even for zdnet uk. There are egregious mispellings in the first paragraph and the (first) link for page two is broken. /. readers to this reeking pile of shite?
Perhaps the mispellings are meant to be funny. They are not. The article is not redeemed by it's content. As many other posters have pointed out: this article isn't funny. With so many really well-done articles published every week, why subject
This sig kills fascists.
When I was a younger lad (13 or so) I finally ditched the old 386-33, which served me exceptionally well, I might add. I moved up to a 486-100 that someone gave me in pity. The ZIF socket was a relatively new thing for the time, so I took it upon myself to take out the 486 and look at it. Content with looking at it, I stuck it back in the socket and turned the PC on. Nothing. I didn't have much clue back then that their was a Pin 1 and that the first pin needed to be aligned. The chip was fried. Of course, putting the chip in at every possible position and hitting the power button helped seal its fate. Thankfully, AMD made cheap 486-100s back then, and I ended up with an AMD 486-100, which wasn't as fast as the intel back then, but only really the FPU was slower and many programs back then didn't use an FPU, especially games. I think Quake was one of the first games to utilize the FPU heavily.
Fast foward. I was sitting at my girlfriend's PC and had the brilliant idea that I could overclock her 1.6ghz Athlon. After setting the FSB to a faster setting, nothing would boot. "Of course!" I thought, "it must be the CPU voltage that needs increased!" In the BIOS it was set to the default. But what exactly was the default? By taking a wild guess I picked a voltage setting somewhere in the middle of the options. Rebooted to a blank screen. I yanked the power cord and felt the heat sink. You could have cooked eggs on that sucker. $50 and a lot of bitching from my girlfriend and she had another processor that worked.
On the same machine (she built it), she forgot to put in the panel where you screw on PCI cards, so all the cards are just basically hanging on the board. She kicks out the rather nice video card that she has in it and of course fries the card and damages the AGP slot. Now there is an old Riva TNT in the board that tends to freeze every once in a while if it wiggles a bit loose.
I remember hearing stories about the older hard drive drums that would break if they were shut down improperly. Basically you have these huge drums, heavy drums that spin at high speeds and tend to shatter and throw shrapnel if precautions weren't taken in halting them properly, usually taking out equipment nearby and killing and maiming anyone that happens to be in the room. If that isn't a mishap, I don't know what else is.
I have more, but those were the best in my memory, and the two CPUs I've fried are the only real things that I've damaged, asides from that one IDE drive that I had loose and knocked around a bit while it was running. Still worked for a while after that, but boy did it have a lot of bad sectors. The clunking sound when the drive stops spinning and spins up again is always classic. I heard a syquest Macintosh optical drive make the same sound when I set it down too hard one day. Thankfully the expensive 80meg drive was fine.
zosxavius photography
ZDNet.com.au Maybe not /.'d yet?
I'm impressed..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This was way back in the time of double-sided 5 1/4" floppy disks. I was working at the school's computer lab, and was called to help out a professor's admin who was trying to install a program, and it would only get so far.
You can probably see this coming already, but while the disks were double-sided, the data was only on one side, and so when the program asked to "Insert Floppy into Drive A to continue" without suggesting that you first remove the floppy that was already there...
Admin had managed to get about 4 of them lodged in there in the time between the first call and my getting there as she had decided to try it one more time and see if she just pushed a little harder if she couldn't get it to finish.
Friend of mine owned a Commodore 64 (yeah, well, it's been a while) and had just bought an external floppy drive for it.
And now he wanted to lock that thing, so his little brother couldn't mess with it.
I got him one of these neato-cool-brand-new tubular computer locks, which he worked into the back of the drive, using it to switch of the power.
Sadly, when switching it on, it somehow managed to connect to power connector to the data bus... zZzap.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
My friend in high school had a room in his basement where he kept his computer. The basement was divided into rooms, but there wasn't a finished ceiling. One day the plumbing became backed up, they called a plumber, he snaked the pipes, declaired it a job well done and left. When my friend went to use his computer the next day he discovered that the waste pipe ran over his computerdesk, and instead of clearing the blockage the plumber had accidentaly punctured the pipe right over the computer in the basement and dumped several all the backedup waste, as well as the waste created since the previous evening onto my friends computer desk.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
OK this story isn't exactly technical nor was it that costly, but it is true and stupid and kinda funny.
A few years back when I was into doing computer mods, I had recently put together what I though was a pretty great rig, a BP6 with dullie 433mhz overclocked to 500mhz each, with dual golden orbs, 16mb voodoo card, etc... so this was done awhile ago...
Anyway after finishing my master piece, I notice it was housed in a beige box. This simple would not do! So I spend a lot of time designing a custom case design. It involved special glossy paint, three sepreate masking jobs to have overlaying geometric inverse colors (Silver and Black mostly), and fitting my computer handle (that I have used for the last, oh 15 years or so) into the design also inversing the lettering as it crossed geometric boundries (only one). It also took several coats. Anyway very complex and well thought out (or so I thought).
I was all proud of my rig, and when one of buddies came over I made sure to show it off.
His ONLY comment was 'Who is "DartVain"'?
..a paper on the PC, and it was like "bleep bleep bleep bleep", and then, like, half of my paper was gone, and I was like, "Huh?"...
:p
Ducks
My parents' Pentium 120 once died on us. Not very strange, it ran Windows 95 and the registry died somehow (of course you aren't surprised!). As the CD on it was already broke, I gave up on it, we used the new computer instead and used it only to run old DOS games (it started alright in DOS mode without the registry, but refused to boot in normal mode). Until I about two years later, accidentally forgot to choose "DOS mode" on bootup. And it started flawlessly. And I hadn't done anything at all. That machine is still running strong, my sister uses it for playing old games... As it now works, I've upgraded it with a bunch of memory, and overclocked it to 133 MHz (yay!). Should make a fresh install too, but my sister refuses to let me do it (she doesn't want to lose the oldie games).
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I had a guy come in with a beat-to-hell PowerBook that he wanted fixed. He also wanted to get a copy of his data. I asked how it got so pounded to shit, and he said that he got angry and threw it at his girlfriend.
Now, once I opened the machine, I noticed that there was a strange sound from the hard drive. I gave it a light shake, and realized that he had shattered the drive platters. He asked if there was a chance he could get his data back.
I did everything I could to NOT laugh at him. However, I then started to worry about his girlfriend. You know, shattering the drive platters means she got beaned by that laptop pretty damn hard.
I do not know if this is actually a mishap or not, but it is one of my favorite stories. Sometime about 10 years or so ago, during high school, a friend of mine was building a computer. I do not actually recall if it was for himself or not, but I believe it was a 486 25 or 33 mhz or so.
He just couldn't get it to work at all, and asked if I could stop by and help him out. When I got there, the machine would power up, and the power supply fan was spinning just fine.
I recall I started with easy things like reseating the memory, reseating ISA cards... When none of that worked, I disassembled the whole thing and put it back together. Same symptoms as before. He tried similar things, same problems.
I was sitting staring at the machine... And I saw the problem. I told him I knew exactly what was wrong, but I told him I shouldn't tell him, and I should let him find it himself.
I did end up telling him... The power supply voltage was set to 220 instead of 110...
Quite a long time ago I worked as a consultant/salesguy/toiletcleaner in a computershop to finance my life as a student.
Olivetti had recently brought out its M24, which was a lovely computer (except for the dust-sensitive keyboard).
Having sold yet another one, the customer asked to see it running first. Hey, no problem: I unpack the whole thing, put it on the desk, turn it on and: BANG! Nice black smoke coming up from the power supply...
I don't remember if the power supply could be switched from the world-standard 220V to the weird US 120V*, but it certainly seemed that way.
Having a display room full of stinking hardware smoke gives a really warm fuzzy feeling to your customers.
*Yeah, yeah, I know.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
At one point I spilled half a tumbler of cranberry juice on my Sony notebook. The fun part however was that I was able to clean it out well enough for it to keep working but every time it started to warm up (as subnotebooks are want to do) it would release a cranberry sented aroma that most people found very pleasing. Makes me wonder if there's a market for sented keyboards.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Posting AC because I dont want to admit my mistake. I had what I thought was a bad motherboard, but thought it could possibly be the processor. So I pop the processor off and put in a different one. I was going to turn it on just long enough for the memory check and thought it would be safe to leave the heat sink off for 2 secs. NO, the processor cannot survive for 2 seconds without the heat sink. So the next day I had to visit the computer store for a new processor and motherboard anyway. Luckily the mobo was on warranty.
Once a major publishers website was slashdotted.
Get your Unix fortune now!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
http://savingiceland.org
Awhile back, I had wrote a program to analyze log files for a large retailer's web site. The program would run regularly and report the visit rate, etc standard metrics.
After a few months, the results suddenly changed and the analytics people wanted to know why. We investigated and it looked like one of the 3 web servers had been miss-set and was an hour off. We corrected the log files after the fact and continued the run.
6 months later, we got the same problem. I was annoyed at this point because how could the server techs mess this up again? we had told them!
So, someone was looking into it and kept showing me results that just didn't make sense and then it occured to me: the time was screwed up because of daylight savings time. One of the 3 servers was set to use daylight savings time adjustments and the other two were not. It should have been fine except I had misread the time function and used the wrong variable to get the daylight savings time.
This would be no big deal except that this last time that daylight savings had hit, it had actually _corrected_ the results- our "fix" had been messing them up again. For the last year, we had been reporting these messed up results.
It gets better. The results we were reporting suggested that their return rates were far higher than they were. This is an important metric for clients as they use it (among others) to determine the success of the site. Whereas it was really single digits % return visits, we were reporting high (very high) return rates. Outrageously high really (we had conducted reviews to double check but no one could figure it out)
so, the same day that I discovered all this and we were going over a strategy for telling the client, our Annual Report comes out and one of the pages states, using numbers _literally_ that took up the whole page (5000 pt or something), this amazing repeat customer rate we had produced for them. (For those who don't know, annual reports are very legal documents that investors sue over if there are falsehoods) I started to pack up my office.
But then, just before we were about to tell the client, they went out of business. just like that. I hope, and doubt, it had nothing to do with the bad website numbers.
Once upon a time I worked as a sys admin for an engineering company, and man those guys were into creative destruction with their laptops.
1. Had an one guy dump a cup of coffee into his laptop. Nothing new there, right? We'll he tried to clean it out with solvent. I've never seen such a gooey mess.
2. One engineer actually ran over their laptop with their car.
3. Had one pack theirs in the checked in luggage at the airport because it was too heavy to carry around. Ever see the Sampsonite commercial where the monkey tossed luggage around? Aparently he hadn't.
4. One programmer was working on the logic board of a conveyor system and had their laptop plugged in to the serial port, but the only place to put the laptop was on a HUGE magnet designed to stop metal trays. Guess what Einstein triggered?
5. P0rn, p0rn, p0rn - 'nuff said.
Lots more stories than anywhere else I worked at. Those guys averaged a new laptop every six months.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
And all I'll say about that is -- ever notice how close to the 'x' key on a qwerty keyboard is the 'c' key?
-- Alastair
Install an Alpha software on a X86 box?
This reminds me of the British EDS event where they crashed 80,000 systems trying to update a half dozen test systems.
Obviously, they tried putting on an XP patch which proceeded to destroy 80,000 Windows 2000 machines.
You'd think the patch mechanisms would be designed to see if the patch is even for the right architecture...let alone the right version of the OS.
Morons.
"Here, Bill! Write any old binary over the binary on our servers! It'll work! No need to test!"
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
So stupid, I actually tripped over my laptop power chord, sending the laptop flying through the room. My screen was totally kaput. Not quite related, I also dropped my mobile phone into a glass of water once.
My favorite is:
I had a very damaged Starcraft CD. When playing a Protoss mission, there was a characted who said "I repeat, I will never surrender". Well, the computer was trying to read the CD and failed. This resulted in the character repeating his phrase over and over again until the PC was rebooted.
So I was in college last year and I was working on a graduate math course.
The teacher had provided us with several postcript files to have as notes. I wasn't keen on printing off the hundreds of pages required so I thought I'd put 8 on a page using mpage.
I dutifully saved each file from the class website as math1.ps, math2.ps, math3.ps, etc.
I then went to that directory and executed:
mpage -8 math*.ps > mathMaster.ps
And it finished (like I thought it should). So I opened up a shell and attempted to print the ps file from the command line but the printer wouldn't take it (said it required too much memory).
I opened it up and started scanning through the postcript. Everything looked fine until I got to the last page and watched my workstation grind out an infinite recursive impossibility in the shape of some sort of snail shell. I had somehow printed the mathMaster.ps file into itself!
My workstation then froze and crashed. Who says you can't crash Unix?
My work here is dung.
the same old story over and over again: using 3.5" floppydrives with a twisted connector. the one half died, the other half killed every disk. long ago this was really expensive.
* a merry live and a short one
he Ontrack 2004 Top Ten List of Data Disasters
1. Data Defrost - One man brought in a hard drive in a wet plastic bag. He said he had read on the Internet that if you place a broken drive in the freezer it would fix it. So he tried that method and asked the recovery engineers not to laugh.
2. Reckless Recycling - One man tidied up his computer folders and inadvertently deleted the ones he meant to keep. He then cleaned up his system, emptied the recycle bin and defragged the hard drive before realizing his error. He now triple-checks files before deleting them for good.
3. Rowdy Relatives - A man suddenly found his laptop would only boot up to the 'blue screen of death,' putting his data at risk. A week later, his nephew admitted that he used its screen as a punching bag to relieve his frustrations with the slow computer. The man sent his nephew back to live with his parents.
4. Digital Disaster at 19,000 Feet - The Polish explorer, Krystof Wielicki, dropped his digital camera when climbing the Himalayas on his latest expedition, smashing it to smithereens and damaging the memory card in the process.
5. Gone in a Flash - One medical company worker completed 1,200 customer billing entries - a process that took several days - when lightning struck the transformer outside the building. Everything was gone, including all the bills she had just prepared.
6. Baby Blues - One couple had hundreds of pictures of their baby's first three months on their computer. When a virus struck their PC, the computer manufacturer advised them to reload the operating system but they forgot to save the data.
7. Construction Calamity - During the construction of a large office building, a steel beam fell on a laptop computer containing the building plans, crushing the laptop.
8. Toilet Trauma - One man became so mad with his malfunctioning laptop computer, he threw it into the toilet and flushed a couple of times.
9. Road Kill - A woman placed her laptop on top of her car while she got in. She forgot about the laptop, which slid off the back of her car, and she then reversed straight over it and reported hearing a 'crunch.'
10. Runway Wreckage - A laptop computer was run over by an airplane. Even Ontrack's recovery engineers don't understand how it happened, but that was the customer's explanation.
Posting as AC so some mod doesn't rate a simple c&p informative.
Working tech support, guy dumps entire glass of Orange juice into his IBM Thinkpad. It won't boot, and he wants me to fix it over the PHONE. He was obviously scared to death to tell his boss he trashed a 2K dollar notebook. When he FINALLY sent it in, it took two people to yank the battery, as it was glued in place with crusty orange juice
Again, tech support. Salesman's laptop comes in won't boot. Reason: buggy porno screen saver. We remind scared, contrite salesman "not to install unapproved software on company machines."
Worked in a power plant for a few years. Tape drive caught on fire from being caked with coal dust. While it was still flaming, I grabbed the drive by the parallel cable and whipped it into the middle of the parking lot where it could burn without catching anything else on fire.
Also in the power plant. Guy calls in to say his monitor is "rainbowy". Turns out the CPU underneath the monitor is filled with coal dust which clogged all the fans. The CPU was burning hot and was cooking the monitor. I literally burned my hand on the CPU case.
We had a support contract with HP, who was charging us upwards of 100 dollars for replacement network cards (this was years ago, but was still excessive.) We were testing some machines with 3Com cards we got at Best Buy, even though if HP found out, they wouldn't support those machines. One day, the ENTIRE network goes down. Nothing will bring it back up, until someone happens to yank the power strip connected to the new machine with a 3Com network card in it. The network IMMEDIATELY comes back up. I don't know why a 3Com network card would bring down an entire network, but it DID.
This isn't a mishap, at least not for me. I was initially hired to be an operator on the company's HP-3000. Within about a week, I had written automated scripts to literally do 90% of my job. The rest of the time I just looked at web pages and slept. I figured out that I could lie down by my desk with a screwdriver and sleep on the floor by my CPU. If anyone came by, I just started removing screws from my CPU case like I was working on it. I was behind two locked doors, so I had plenty of time to react when I heard the door latch. I loved that job. The computer mishap here was that they were paying me.
Back in the day.
/home/students/class204; rm -rf ..
Hardware: AT&T 3b2/600g with dual weitek cpus and 300 students on it.
OS of choice: AT&T System V r 3.2
Stupid command: cd
Yes, that is 2 dots which recursed backwards thru all of the home partition. QIC-150 tape recovery in progress. All 12 of them.
First programming job right out of college and I'm suddenly the sysadmin responsible for 6 SPARC II workstations because I'm the only person in the office with any UNIX experience at all. One of the workstations is complaining about a full disk, so I start poking around the filesystem looking for ways to make room. But since it's not my box and I don't know what to junk, I decide to compress stuff until I can find the user and ask.
/vmunix wouldn't have been such a bad move, had I not also decided that a reboot was in order.
Compressing
I learned how to install SunOS 4.1.2 from 1/4" tape that afternoon.
-- Cerebus
A few years back we had an intern in named Dave. Not a very bright fellow, I might add. We tasked him with installing Linux, Windows and other software onto various desktops we use around the office. At one point he came across a desktop with a faulty hard drive.
For some reason he thought he could repair it, and so he proceeded to open the hard drive up. None of us were there to witness it directly, but somehow he managed to get the very strong magnets close to his penis. They stuck together, crushing a portion of of the bottom of his manhood.
So he rushed in, blood all over and crying, and we were dumbfounded. We got him to the hospital, and then we couldn't help but have a good laugh over his folly. He returned for about a week or so after he recovered, but left soon after that.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
my friend on his first assignment at his new job was told to write a program to format A hard drive partition. So he went up to his boss and said, I got good news and bad news.
Good news are the program works, the bad news are the program got deleted when I formatted my main partition while testing the program.
I wanna know how many of these they were actually able to recover.
"When they invent bitch slaps that can go through a monitor you better f'ing duck" --deft (253558)
One time I built this great website and put some really interesting stuff on it. I then thought "hey - why don't I share this with everyone?" and posted the URL on slashdot.
Needless to say my website died under the strain.
Then there was this one time at band camp...
A long time ago, in a land far, far away I was restoring a users directory on a Solaris box. In one of those, I don't know what I was thinking moments, I ran a chown command with .* as the file... wanted to get those dot files you know! Well when the prompt didn't return after one second I knew I f***ed up. I hit ctrl-C and went about figuring out what got changed and set to fixing things. Well I was in a hurry and not very thorough and the next day the group manager asked why his and his bosses account where owned by somebody else.
/usr/bin directory of a heavily used machine(literally 100+ users on it at the time).
That wasn't nearly as bad as when a co-worker didn't pay attention to the xterm he was typing in and did and rm -rf * in the
First, I was upgrading something in my computer (probably 10-15 years ago, I don't even remember what I was upgrading).
I had the cards/memory/cables all situated and ready to go, so I powered it up.
And nothing happened.
So I pulled all cards/memory/cables, reseated it all, and tried it again
Still nothing happened.
Then I heard my friend chuckling (not exactly being helpful). I stopped, looked at him, and he pointed.
He pointed to the workbench at the CPU that was sitting there, a good foot or two away from the case. Yup. I forgot to put the CPU in at all.
My other mishap (this was due to lack of knowledge of AMD Athlon Processors, as I'd worked on first Motorola 68xxx Amigas, and then Pentium machines before) was one day when I decided to swap heatsink/fan with a better one (keeping the same Athlon 650MHz CPU).
Having worked with older CPUs, I knew that for short periods (enough time to make sure it would POST), I could just set the heatsink on the CPU (with thermal compound, of course), and once I was sure it would POST, I could power it back off, and secure the heatsink a little better.
Yup, you all know where this is going. After 7 seconds, no POST, and a strange electronic burning smell filled the room.
That was when I learned that AMD Athlon processors don't cope well without a heatsink, even if it's sitting on it, if not secured down. Even the AMD site (checked afterwards, of course) confirmed that the CPU would burn out in seconds.
And looking at the 650Mhz CPU (oh was I glad I didn't use the other CPU I had on hand and was going to use later - a 1000 MHz Athlon), you can see the burn mark on the top and bottom of the thing.
Remember that time ZDNet got slashdotted, and then you found out that the story was split across multiple pages, because they didn't realize you could just scroll down and get all 10 on one page? Those were the days.
Shucks.. I think even the comments are pretty much the same. What is this.. some sort of backup copy of the original article? ;)
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Here's the updated URL:
1 0_list_of_data_disasters/0,39023769,39207076,00.ht m
http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Top_
One of the technisians, Microsoft Certified, of my former company once was given the task of replace a broken disk on the RAID of a customer's webserver.
He went to the rack, pulled out the bad disk, pluged into a new one, and to make it sure, reinitialized the RAID erasing, well, everything.
What was worst was that the customer didn't have good backups and its website was offline for quite a while.
I had a friend who always logged in as root and su'ed around from user to user. He was in a subdirectory of his home directory as himself, trying to blow it all away. He didn't have rights as he had created some stuff as root. Remembering that he had su'ed to himself from root, he ctrl-d'ed back to root and successfully ran the 'rm -r *' command. Once the command had been running for about 30-45s he realised it really shouldn't be taking that long, and root had been at '/' when he su'ed to himself. A fair chunk of everything was gone and a complete reload needed...
Ho hum
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
I had a job in highschool working with a guy who sold Apple II's with Visicalc as business machines. We had a client with a 'high end' system that had an external floppy drive. They kept calling and complaining that they were losing the data on their floppy disks. We looked at the disks and, sure enough, they would contain nothing. We replaced the drive twice, but the problem recurred. As the calls continued, we decided to make a visit to try and figure out what was going on. When we arrived, we saw an antique type telephone sitting on top of the floppy drive. The phone had a bell ringer. We assumed that, when the phone would ring, the floppy in the drive would be erased. We moved the phone over to nearby counter and the problem never recurred.
Wait. Stop scrolling for a sec. O.K. Thanks. - P
Sure, you are supposed to check that switch on the PSU to make sure it set for the correct input voltage but have you ever checked the outlet into which the machine was plugged for the appropriate line voltage?
I've had two friends in the last year suffer during data-center upgrades (different friends, different companies, different data-centers). In each case, an electrician had incorrectly wired power to the racks so the 120V outlets were actually wired for 240V.
In one case they blew up the PSU on the main corporate mailserver but fortunately the machine was otherwise unharmed and they were able to salvage a spare PSU from another Sun box.
In the other case they blew out a whole rack of CSUs that handled all the voice lines to corporate headquarters and found out that it's nearly impossible to get 5 CSUs to their location rushed on a weekend in time for business Monday. Fortunately, I ran into my friend that weekend on his way in to work and was able to grab 5 CSUs from my supply shelf for him so both disasters had satisfactory endings.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
In my newb-ish days my dad bought me a used computer for university. It had WordPerfect 5.1, which I used to type up all my essays. Being that it was a used computer, it had some file left over from the previous user. One whn I was saving a file in WordPerfect i noticed that there was a great number of files that I had not created. I tried to open them to see what they were, but they were all gibberish and random non-latin characters. I figured that the files must have been left behind by the previous user. No problem - the WordPerfect file browser allows you to delete files! (This is the same WordPerfect file browser that saves files in the WP directory by default - I expect I am not the only newb to do this...)
Since the computer did not come with the WordPerfect diskettes, I learned quite a bit more about in computers in the process of figuring out how I was going to write my essays now that WordPerfect was hosed.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
However, this is a very interesting cockup, and the author wrote the story well:
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Once on my birthday I was sitting on the floor installing a new video card I'd received, and my little brother came in and spilled a whole plate full of cake and ice cream right into the open computer. It took me forever to clean it out, but it did work fine afterward.
My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box ... the server barfed pretty hard.
WHat's even more funny is that you thought it was acceptable to install an alpha-anything on a server box. If you were in my group, you would have barfed yourself when I handed you your walking papers for doing something like that.
One computer mishap that I had over 10 years ago is that above by Mac LC III my coworker had a plant, so he watered it and it went through the planter, monitor and into the computer. The tech mentioned that there were some waterspots inside. The LC III did not grow by the way ;-).
73 KC2BQZ
My "favorite" mishap was back in the 1980s using a HP minicomputer. I was trying to copy the contents of a floppy disk to the hard drive, but unfortunately "copy" in the HP OS meant "replace". The entire contents of the hard drive were replaced by the contents of the floppy.
Freezing will not help with a head crash or key sectors going bad. But there have been cases where it works. Back in the early 90's there was a problem with many Quantum-brand drives called "stiction", where the platter would not spin up after having been powered down. An internal lubricant (or adhesive, I forget which) basically got slightly runny when the drive got hot and re-solidified a bit out of place when cooled. This provided just enough friction to prevent the low-torque motor from being able to spin the drive up. Sometimes just rotating the drive quickly by snapping your wrist back and forth would do it. Freezing is another technique that worked (sometimes a combination of the two).
bp
I was working tech support and talking someone through formatting a hard drive. My workstation was Windows 95. I typed subconsciously as I talked to the guy: FORMAT C: /s/q/u [enter]
1%...2%...3%...4%...5%... OH MY GOD!!!!!!11!!!!
I slapped the reset button and amazingly, nothing bad came from it. It booted and came up just fine!
Another one, I was a net admin and I had an apartment-size fridge in my office. I got the idea to defrost the fridge using a hair dryer, since a block of ice had formed inside it. A few minutes into this, the hair dryer overloads the circuit and I flip a breaker. The breaker on which the ENTIRE SERVER ROOM was running. I sprinted around looking for it, and I found it... 45 seconds after the UPS'es drained.
I once spent four hours painstakingly debugging some extremely intricate modules of a B to B application going through countless objects and different levels of the system only to realize that i hadn't populated the database table that the entire thing was dependant upon. Then i had to go back and fix everything i had broken during the 'debugging' period.
Moral: Programming and whiskey do not mix.
A laptop computer was run over by an aeroplane. Even Ontrack's recovery engineers don't understand how it happened, but that was the customer's explanation.
Could it be the laptop that contained the plans of Japan's arrow-shaped airplane that is capable of flying at twice the speed of sound?
w00t
This one hurt:
The mainboard, both processors, and 4 gig of RAM were toast after that incident. Good thing my employer paid for the spare parts, although I got to hear a few words from my boss that cannot be found in a family-oriented dictionary...
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
That was neither funny nor interesting. Thanks for wasting my time.
I remember this one going around DEC 20 yrs ago in the NOTES files.
This borders on urban legend it's so old / well distributed, but should probably be included. google for it or check out: scratch-mokey.html
When I was in my teens I attached my Timex/Sinclair 1000 16k ram expansion to my C64's RS-232C port. I flipped the switch on the power supply and the fuse popped. The ram pack worked fine afterwards but The Commodore 64 couldn't access any disk drives after that, but otherwise worked fine. I went to replace the chip that was damaged a year later in a high school electronics class. A friend that was helping pushed too hard on the solder sucker and proceeded to cut several traces on the mother board when he slipped. I bought his C64/1541 combo at a discount as a result.
I was cleaning up our backup server's root directory. It was early morning, no coffee and little sleep the night before, I was cleaning up a mess I had created at an earlier date and eliminating a lot of directories and files that had been created. Some of what we consider "OS hardening" on our AIX systems is remove a lot of the unnecessary links in the / directory such as the /bin link to /usr/bin and /sbin to /usr/sbin. I noticed they hadn't been taken care of, and because I was half asleep and removing full directories to that point just arrowed up (in bash) to a previous rm -fr and changed the directory to the /bin link.....
/usr/bin we were able to restore the directory without a hitch. It actually turned into a nice test of our backups. I got my coffee after that, woke up and proceded to work on system documentation off of the systems for the rest of the day not wanting to break anything else.
And then smashed my head down on the desk afterward. It was rather funny. The fortunate thing is that nothing running was broke and because our backup client and server sit outside of
Sitting next to a total idiot in a "WAN" class I was asked a lot of questions on how to do this and that (you see I paid attention, a novel idea I have about school).
After a four hour lab the total idiot asked me how to erase the configurations from the router, as this was required of each of us as we left class. I respond (in haste and anger):
erase flash
When I should have said:
erase nvram
Well, I came to class the next day with the teacher pulling her hair out because she had to upload the IOS through a serial cable. Well, it never quite worked and it took three days (of her time) to finally get it uploaded. She had to contact Cisco at some point because the routers were old and abused by idiots like me.
No one ever found out what really happened, even total idiot was clueless that he was the one who actually erased the IOS.
Get your Unix fortune now!
We were watching TV one night and my friend spilled a 12oz of Pepsi all over his iBook. Thanks to Apple's superb engineering, all of the liquid dribbled off the side, finding no crevaces through which it could enter and destroy the machine. In fact, the Pepsi beaded up as if my friend had waxed his iBook . . .
"User reinstalls, forgets to back up, loses all their baby photos!" Hilarious. Not"
Furthermore, why should one assume that a user knows they must backup when reinstalling? On some O/S installs the old data is retained.
Anyone familiar with PC stuff who tells a typical user to just reformat and reinstall WITHOUT telling/showing them how to backup their data (or ensure their data survives) is irresponsible (or even an asshole).
One of my companies had a sysadmin who told a user to backup his data. The user backed up the _shortcuts_ to the data. The sysadmin asked the user "are you sure?". The user said "Yes". This "confirmation" went a few rounds, but end result was user ended up with just shortcuts, after sysadmin did stuff...
When said sysadmin recounted the story, I told the sysadmin he was evil for doing that. After all, he knew what was likely to happen.
Most of the 10 cases in the article are boring. Except maybe the one about the airplane rolling over the laptop...
I can't believe this made slashdot.
The only redeeming feature was that it reminded me I hadn't visited bash.org for a while.
Are all AC posters made out of money? How fricken stupid do you have to be to lose your temper over a computer and actually break working equipment?
Let someone introduce you to coffee breaks.
When I worked at a small educational software startup in the 1980's, we got back floppy disks from school libraries more than once. They had staped card catalog cards to them.
I saved a cow-orker's ass by crank-starting his Seagate that had the same problem.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
The big question is: how do I get free slashdotvertising for my data recovery company.
Oh wait, screw that. How do I get my own data recovery company?
Eh, screw that too. I'll settle for a job.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
Earlier this year I lost a 1 gig. SanDisk CF card full of gorgious photos of large animals and such from the Serengeti. The card just decided to forget its purpose. Later that week I lost my 200 GB Seagate drive WITH MY DISSERTATION AND ASSOCIATED DATA! Also (stupid me) I had not recently checked our Retrospect client-side info. tool to find out if that drive was being backed up. And, when I check with our IT guy I found out that that drive was not being backed up (rather my other failing drive was being backed up). I send the drive in to DriveSavers.com and they found that the drive head had come in contact with the platers; therefore, the disk was unrecoverable. After a day or two of genernal freaking out, I realized that I had many reams of hardcopy raw data and and old copy of the folder containing my dissertation on the old "failing-but-not-dead-yet drive" and so I am just now getting caught up. This was a lot of fun!!
And John if your reading this... I just had to tell the story and thanks again for the St. Peter's Porter!!
(Disclaimer: I have built dozens of systems and am normally very competent)
OK, this was very late (2:0am) and I was EXTREMELY tired - DON'T mess inside pcs at 2:00am, especially when tired...
I decided to install my shiny new Zalman Super flower cooler into the kids computer as it was in the living room and quite loud. I had to remove the memory to install the cooler, which I did without a problem. When I was re-installing the memory, I noticed that the cooler fins were fouling one of the memory sticks, in fact I had to kinda bend some of the fins out the way to get the memory in. Somehow, the fact that the memory was touching the cooler fins didn't register as being significant...
I turned on, and BANG!
OMG! I realised what a VERY stupid thing I had just done...
What did I do next?
well, I had to determine what parts had blown...
Memory? CPU? Mobo? so of course, I decided to test the easiest thing first, so....
I took the memory stick out that had been touching the fins..... and installed it into my primary computer!!! (All rational thought had obviosuly looong gone!)
I turned on my main machine - nothing. OK, I thought, that memory is bad. I'll put the original memory back in my primary machine...
Turned on, NOTHING!
At this point, the full horror of what VERY VERY VERY stupid things I had just done hit me. I looked closely at the memory I blew up, and there was an actual hole burned in it and several melted tracks...
I ended up replaced two motherboards, two cpus and 4 memory sticks - I just didn't know what parts were safe and didn't want to risk blowing anything else up. I know that I definetley killed the CPU, memory and mobo on the first computer, as each had melty-burney bits on them - in fact, there was quite an impressive hole in the cpu!
The zalman ended up in the trash too...
Upside was I got two much faster systems. It was a very expensive mistake.
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
I had a user call me from a Hotel. She complained she could not log on because her username/password was invalid. I checked her account and found it was locked out. I reset it, she was still getting the sam message. The account was locked again. I unlocked it. I tried resetting her password for her. Still no luck. I tried the usename/password combo. It worked for me. Hmmm. I turned on a sniffer and watched the RADIUS data going to a Domain Controller. Something was weird, the username was right, but the password hash was different for each of us trying the same password. Huh? WTF? I was stumped. She was getting tired and asked to check her mail for messages from someone. I did that and told her to bring in the laptop so I could examine it when she got back in town. She said fine. Then she told me there was a problem with the keyboard as well. I asked her the problem, and she told me a few keys popped off when she dropped her compact on the keyboard. She put them back in but one was not "springy". She had reversed the "S" and "D" keys.
I once had a friend who worked as a system administrator in a university. I think he would like to remain anonymous.
... 15 min later, the back of his mind, told him that something was wrong. He logged into the server and checked the jobs that were running. And as you might guess, the deletion was well under progress from the root directory, smashing everything!
... and he was lucky! The server was also running as a news server, so the deletion had used a lot of time chewing through tons of news. If not the disaster would have been even worse.
One day he checked into the one of the servers and was cleaning up a little. He logged in as root (you might already hear disaster coming). Then he made the well known "rm -r *" to delete some files. As nothing happened (this is Unix, no messages is not the same as nothing is happening) he moved on to do something else...
Several student accounts were deleted - including two that was doing some serious research.
It took him 3 months to completely restore the machine.
Oh, and backup? Just guess...
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Here is a computer story that I find very funny. The company I work for has an office in europe, and for about a 2 month period, our communications link would go down at about midnight, each and every night.
After a few weeks, we escalated the issue with the data carrier, eventually getting one of the VP's involved. After the second month, we decided to have some of the communications people go into the computer room a little before midnight, to see what was going on.
Before midnight, everything was running fine, and still nobody could think of a reason that the communications should be going down. The janitorial staff came into the room, and were suprised to see the technical guys checking over equipment, and wiring.
The janitor asked if it was okay if he continued to clean while the techs were working. "No problem" they said, and he began to clean. A few minutes later, sure enough, BAM, the router went down, and the comminucations link was severed, as it had been each night.
As it turned out, the janitor was unplugging the router so that he could plug in his floor buffer. There he was, buffing the floor in the machine room - with absolutely NO idea that it was bad to unplug routers... I thought it was very funny.
I had a nice spot-bulb desk lamp, and happened to have it bent down at the desk, usually not a problem until I placed my Psion under it, later returning to the scene I found the cover melted horridly, and the screen black... thankfully after cooling down the LCD returned to normal.
:)
Later I sliped on ice, with the psion in my pocket, and sent myself crashing down ontop of it, damage - completely broken hinge which now ment the case opened at an odd angle, but it still worked.
Finally I had it in my jacket pocket of a winter coat, put the coat over the back of a chair, pulled the chair out and sat down *CRACK* the screen was dead.
Hey ho, wonder what will happen to my Zarus
What happened to Windows NT Service Pack 6?
A couple of years ago, I had a Compaq that was giving me problems. I think it wasn't turning on, so I wanted to try to swap parts out to find they were proprietary (I was still somewhat new to the hardware side of things at the time.) Anyway,seeing as how I couldn't replace parts, somehow a mishap occured involving me, some friends, an axe, a pick axe, a sledge hammer, and some fire. See a pic of it at http://www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/7745/burning_ compaq.jpg
During desert storm one, had an emergency order for a replacement machined part that HAD to get out. I get a call that the PC running the machine tool for part of the process went down. A quick look had it as the CRT was bad. Union shop - had to have a union guy do it or face consequences. Waited 45 minutes for him to show up and then tell me that he was taking the computer. My reply was that it just needed a new display. Argued with the idiot for five minutes even swapping displays so that he could see that the PC was working (over his objections). Still he wanted to take the PC. I left the working display on it, went to the tool crib and checked out a hammer, put the hammer through the old display and told the jerk that the display needed replacing. He took the display without comment. Probably because I had the hammer and a really angry face at that point. (hey - minutes counted here...)
Initial install there was a blast -
installs had to be done from government cut tapes. After four tries with us sitting there with thumbs up our behinds for two weeks we were told that I could use MY personal backup tapes since the government procedures could not provide us with valid source. Loaded them without incident. However, the exause fan on the roof jammed, and the firefighters dousing it with water flooded our computer room. Wait for replacement parts. Kitchen underneath had a grease fire fire - computer room flooded again. Wait for replacement parts. Harrier crashes and parts hit the roof. Computer room flooded again, wait for replacement parts. AC in computer room dies. So old that we have to wait for parts to be fabricated. Finially after two months on sitting on our behinds due to all of these disasters, get everything working, have all of the acceptance folks fly in for testing to show up after the kick off meeting to find out that between out 8AM start and the 9:30 "let's start the testing scripts" the WHOLE BUILDING WAS CONDEMNED and we were not allowed in. My whole team was laughing so hard we were crying.
So, back in the day, I conned my old boss into springing for some cheap hardware to turn into a Slackware test machine - which he took to mean 'whatever that guy down the street has left over from all those machines he builds in his basement.' Fine. Whatever. I can make it work, sure.
Actually ended up with halfway decent innards, but the only case he had on hand wouldn't close properly. Or, in fact, cover all the components. Fine, whatever, etc. Make sure the thing boots...yup, there's 95...get called away to do something else.
Packing up to leave that night, I see there's an alert on the soon-to-be-linux box. 'It'll still be there in the morning,' I think as I head out the door.
Check on it the next day...yeah, it was a CPU heat warning.
So that was fun.
every good
http://www.datadocktorn.nu/us_frag1.php
One day the building housing the machine took a direct hit by lightning. Despite surge protectors, der blinken lights lit up like a Christmas tree and then went dark. No problem, they powered everything off, waited until power was restored, reset all the circuit breakers, and did a cold start sequence. When this failed, they called IBM in. A couple of hours later the IBM techie arrived with his suit and toolbag, ripped open the access panels and was soon up to his elbows tracing wires and testing circuitry. He started looking more and more worried, and finally backed out of the machine. He asked the head admin to cycle the power on, said "I hope this works!", went around to the back of the machine and carefully kicked it. The lights came on and the machine booted up!
Apparently the power surge had frozen a solenoid which was positioned such that they'd pretty much have to disassemble and then rebuild the entire machine to get at it. This would have taken days or weeks to accomplish. However, the solenoid was physically located right next to the back panel, and the vibration from the kick had been enough to get it to unstick.
One I can now look back on and laugh at:
gcc mtp.c -o mtp.c
(after having spent a lot of time debugging mtp.c, and working too quickly to make a good backup).
Anyone else think this is a bunch of newbie BS? This article only describes a few actual 'disasters', most of what this article demonstrates is human stupidity. I'm trying to determine which is dumber, the people who performed these acts, or the editor for compositing this list of newb retardedness and calling them 'disasters'.
...
/. worthy?
1. A freezer is a common solution for Stiction-related disk problems, any tech that has been around for more than a year or two has recovered data this way. ( Although keeping the drive dry is obvious. )
2. Oh My.. Some Idiot Deleted his Files (gee, that's never happened to anyone before), and then defragged his computer ( no comment, regular users that defrag their hard drives weekly should learn something about filesystem design ).
3. I fail to see the connection of punching the screen to Blue Screens of Death.. A cracked display perhaps, but unless the laptop was closed and he kicked it around the room until the hard drive crashed.. (at which point it shouldn't boot, not BSOD -- regardless.. sounds like 'BLUE SCREEN' sounded better than 'wouldn't turn on' to the numbskull editors)
4. Oh My.. Someone dropped a camera (that's never happened to anyone I know.. not even last week when my friend dropped his digital camera into a lake)
5. OMG, who hasn't worked in IT and had some employee come crying that their data is gone after the computer locked up after writing some 50 page report (not saved of course, hopefully in an app with no auto-save)
6. Stories about the manufacturer's 'format-and-recover' wiping out personal data are only there to remind us that those who aren't smart enough to back up their data or are dumb enough to call the HP Pavilion Helpdesk in the first place obviously don't have any valuable data.
7. This one sounds like blatent journalistic exaggeration.. "a steel beam fell on a laptop computer containing the building plans, crushing the laptop." First of all, I'm sure a large office building (of which a sizable team of architects, engineers and designers worked on) only keep a single copy of the 'building plans' and only on a laptop that is under the crane's path of destruction. The fact this laptop had 'the building plans' seems extremely irrelevant here.. My favorite part of "steel beam fell on a laptop" is the "crushing the laptop" qualification, (guess it wasn't a panasonic toughbook?)
8. He threw it in the toilet.. (*sigh*) and water washed over it.. BUT HE FLUSHED A COUPLE TIMES!! so.. nothing happened other than it got some water in it? They make this out to sound like with repeated flushing, a large metal and plastic tablet will somehow fit down the 3" hole at the bottom.
9. This is so vague it sounds like it was copy-pasted straight from an urban-legends site. Who upon dropping the laptop off the back of the car (understandable, see it first hand (thank you Dell CompleteCare)) would put the car in reverse and drive so far back as to actually run over the laptop ? sounds like willfull destruction (and an excuse for not having the quarterly financial reports done)
10.
Surely this news isn't
I've built many PCs before and when a college friend complained of her CDROM which output no audio, I readily volunteered to help.
Surely enough, it is a new CDROM drive someone else has put in and forgot to attach the CD audio line to the integrated sound on the mainboard. Without the m/b manual, I plugged the cable in and fired up the machine.
It powered up into windows and I tried out the audio, but there's still no sound. Before I can check further, the PC hung and wierd chemical burn smell emit from the PC.
It caught on fire, and we get the nearest fire extinguisher to put it out. I do not know for sure what's the cause, but I suspect I plug in the audio line into secondary fan jumper.
No-one else seems to have done so, so here we go. http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/54e91e7a18ef63262 ebc47bb1defcf91/index.html
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
http://www.techtales.com/tftechs.html
This goes back to college. I had finished my MP (Machine Problem) in just 20 hrs.. Everything seemed to be working fine so I decided to delete the emacs backup files (~) before I submitted my work.
Unfortunately the shift key was small and the return key large on those old Esprits. And of course I had removed the alias rm='rm -i' as being too annoying. So my rm *~ turns into rm * and it happily deletes all my files.
Unfortunately I had no backups (soft or hard copy). It only took me 10 hrs to do it the second time.. And I remember thinking at the time that it was much better code the second time around.
Later in that same semester I came back to my dorm room to get on my Amiga.. I find my room mate sitting at my desk and the first thing he says is "I didn't do it!". My brand new 150mb HD is dead. I'm still not sure if he was telling the truth or not.. But I threatened him with extreme bodily harm if I ever found him near the computer again.
Of course going even farther back there is the time my sister dumped a large glass of cherry koolaid into my C64 disk box. I saved about 50% of the disks.
-Jerry
..was my girlfriend setting up a new Shuttle box for the first time that I built for her. She has an external Maxtor HD. The older Maxtor power cords happen to have an S-Video plug interface on one end. This caused her to boot the computer with 10V a or so power cord going into the S-video out across the 3.5V moherboard. After the new motherboard and PSU that were required the repair was about the same as the original cost of the box.
You think that Maxtor would have engineered that one a little better.
On one job I was approached by a programmer who calmly said he was having problems with his monitor. As I approached his cube, there was black smoke pouring out of the back of the monitor and the top of the monitor was on fire. After grabbing an extinguisher, unplugging the monitor and putting the fire out, I found out he had put a blanket on top of the monitor to "keep the dust out".
At another job, I had spent a couple of weeks installing fiber optic routers and cabling to all of my servers. Turned it all on, configured the networking, and was congradulated by my boss for a job well done. Less than 24 hours later, I was showing the higher ups the new hardware when we heard a cracking noise and smoke came rolling out of the cabinet with the routers in it. After putting out the fire we found that an old IBM mainframe (Model 3033) we were going to remove soon was to blame. The bottom of the coolant reservoir had rusted out and dumped a few hundred gallons of water under our computer room floor. The water pooled under the router cabinet and shorted out the socket that the cabinet PDU was plugged into. We later found out that the spot that the cabinet was placed over was originally going to have a drain there that was omitted during construction. That was a quick $100,000 down the drain (pardon the pun).
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I had cleaned up my hard drive, defragged it and was loading the backup program to make a complete backup with all my settings and the $%#@ thing froze.
I discovered that day the importance of keeping sufficient 'free air delivery' around the drives. I had four, count'em four drives, that decided that it was the perfect time to pack it in. Just before I ran the back up program.
Grrrr.....
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Someone loses photos of their kid, and it ranks in the top 10 data recovery disasters? The whole list sounds like someone with no imagination made it up.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
My personal best was while I was the chief operator/administrator of a Data General MV/9600.
I loved the hell out of that machine, even wrote some very nice system utilities using the CLI. But over the years the system went from async terminals to everything over TCP/IP using the Pacer terminal emulator on a Mac.
But there still were a few async connections to things like DG printers, etc. Of course over the years nobody bothered to remove out of service cables or wires so the back of the machine was a literal copper rats nest.
One day I decide I'm going to clean the mess up. As I'm pulling old wire out I suddenly hear the console beeping. Beeping on those consoles wasn't generally a good thing. I look around the corner at the screen and see "volume hansel dismounted" followed by every other system volume. Uh oh!
I go around front to the SCSI array and see the power is off. Toggle the switch, nothing. Around to the back and the breaker isn't tripped. Power cord is plugged in, etc.
Now the boss comes flying into the computer room. You can tell he's upset by the giant red knot that appears in his forehead whenever he's stressed or angry.
Turns out the power was connected via a twist-lock Hubbel connector. Somehow I had backed it off a half twist which was enough to break current to the device.
Once I got power back on I just re-mounted all the volumes. Of course the outage had tanked a couple of jobs running so I caught flak for that.
I was a new UNIX Admin and asked to change the ownership of someone's home directory. Inside it, there were a number for dot files, so I did a chown -R .*
I learned a valuable lesson about regular expression parsing that day.
It's the mid-90's, and I'm a developer with one of three vendors collaborating on providing a large US bank with a US-wide demographics database (a precursor to a modern CRM). The system was Unix-based, and pretty distributed for its time (8 front-ends, 8 back-ends, and 3 dedicated routing/replication servers in the middle).
It's the first morning of the pilot-to-production phase, and we're all sitting in the datacentre at our terminals, bringing the whole system online for the first time. I'm personally familiar with PC-based terminal emulators, not the fancy X-Windows stations that the client has on their premises. So, once we get everything finally up and running (and it's taken us about 2 1/2 years to get here from concept stage), I start exploring the settings on my X-Windows station. (Anybody remember CDE, and how... bizzare it is to configure, contrasted with KDE or Gnome?)
I'm fiddling around with settings, trying to create application shortcuts to fire up sessions with servers just the way I like, when at one point I get the message that a reboot is required for changes to take effect.
I issued the standard "sync; sync; shutdown -r now" command -- and just after I hit I realized that I had been typing into an xterm session ON ONE OF THE BACK-END SERVERS -- not the local X-station!
Well. The backend server goes down, and when the event-collector picks up the unavailability, it starts up alarms and red flashing lights (I kid you not), and also starts paging people (including myself, ironically).
I'm stunned, and terrified, for I've just brought down a system that had been operational for only 3 hours after being in development for 2 1/2 years.
We eventually get the server back up and running, and afterwards, the ProjMgr (from the prime vendor) drifts over to me and quietly mentions that I had a strange expression on my face earlier that day. We look at each other, and then he says it "must've been a s/w fault somewhere" before wandering off knowingly. (Whew!....)
Moral of the story #1: NEVER work in root/superuser accounts when you don't absolutely need to.
Moral #2: Use color-coded xterms to indicate which systems & what access-levels you are working with!
When I was in college, I helped my housemate build a PC. AMD 486dx4-100. Thought I'd save him a few bucks by getting the CPU separate and installing it myself. I put it all together, and plugged it in. No joy. "Hmmm, maybe I put the CPU in wrong?". I pulled the CPU from the ZIF socket, scratched my head, and rotated it 90 degrees. Plugged it in. The stench of burning IC and the whit glow of the traces indicated that this was officially the wrong thing to have done. Oy! Luckily, the vendor took the board and chip back and sent us a new one. D'oh!
That's not an article that's an ad, its a commercial posing as entertainment. how totally LAME to see it's LAME ass here.
I recount the tale of my computting lecturer standing infront of the class lecturing about backing up out course-work (all stored on a single 5.25" floppy), and in the pathetic manner of all "further education" teachers in the UK, tried to be funny by placing the floppy on the glass of the Xerox machine. 5.25" have holes to allow the head in, photocopiers have bright lights. Diskettes don't like bright likes. And so, for the sake of an unfunny joke - he erased the coursework of an un-suspecting student from the front of the class.
Microsoft released an operating system.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
I had a cell phone when the pound key would only work 5% of the time, pressing it would give me a '9' (!) 5% of the time, and the rest of the time do nothing.
I opened the phone as much as I could, poured some 91% isopropyl alcohol into the keyboard area, and the pound key works like 95% of the time, and never gives me a '9' (the '9' key works normally as it did before).
It buzzes when it rings and people have trouble hearing me but having my pound key is more important (can't live without the pound key).
People had trouble hearing me even before, the old TDMA AT&T network appears to have gone downhill after Cingular bought it.
I should've just bought a GSM phone.
I used 70% isopropyl alcohol to make a CD stop skipping - one song was constantly skipping in a certain point - and now there is no problem.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Don't know if this in the same league as some of the other stories here, but I welcome the chance to come clean and finally confess..
I had a nice home built computer that I used for gaming and internet access. I was upgrading the network card and was having issues with getting the card identified properly. So after some poking around, I realized that my BIOS was a few revisions out of date. Manufacturers website had a current BIOS rev that purported to fix the problem I was having, so I proceeded to flash my computer with the latest version.
After about halfway through, I saw a message that said something like "Error in checksum, press Y to reboot or N to Exit".
Then I had a neuron misfire or something, because I thought "N" and pressed "Y" instead.
Doh!
So I found out then that a computer with a corrupted BIOS will not boot or even turn on. I searched for someone at work or online that could re-flash my bios, and ended up ordering a new chip from somewhere in Texas. After waiting a few days for the delivery, the lack of internet access at home was driving me nuts so I broke down and bought a new MB/RAM/CPU and got things up and running that day.
Next
First week on the job, a computer in the R&D area was having issues with performance I had fixed the problem and decided to do some cleanup as well. Deleted the temp files, removed some unnecessary programs, had a look in the User Profiles tab and saw there were a whole bunch of user profiles there that said "account unknown". Must be from users who have logged on to the computer in the past and have since left the company. So I started deleting them all (hmm, seem to be a lot of them) and noticed as the list scrolled down that the last profile was "Local Computer\Administrator".
Oops, seems I had unplugged the network cable and was off the domain, so the User Profiles window could not resolve the names. And of course deleting the profiles this way means no recovery from the recycle bin. Had to apologize profusely to the guy for deleting his profile, but it did make me more paranoid about deleting files.
At our high school, near the end of every year there was an event called the "Lunch Bunch," or the "Lunch Munch," where bands would get to play in the school courtyard for a few hours at lunchtime.
For some reason, I decided to play in bare feet. And I noticed an odd tingle in my fingertips when I stood on the asphault, which had metal bits mixed in to it.
By the end of the song, I was getting shocked outright. That's the hardest I've ever had to work to pull off a song in concert.
"My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box thinking that it was just an alpha driver. Of course since this Alpha meant DEC and this was an x86 box, the server barfed pretty hard."
... NOT funny.
HO HO HO!! HAHAHAH! OHHH MAN this is sooooooo...
BY The way, is using Slashdot a viable business model now? You set up a website using just an IP number, then put a couple pages of "geek humor" slap some ads at the top, then post on Slashdot = PROFIT?
?!?!
Twenty-or-so years ago, I was a young airman maintaining the Transportable Ground Intercept Facility-II (TGIF-II) at Metro Tango, a site located about 10 klicks north of the former Hahn Air Base (now Frankfurt-Hahn International Airport) in Germany. TGIF-II was used by Air Force and Army intelligence operators to intercept communications from the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. The operators sat at "collection positions," computer keyboards used to "gist" (transcribe in shorthand) the transmissions they listened to through their headsets.
One morning, as the operators entered the facility and began their pre-mission checks, an Army E-4 sat down at Position 11, close to our places at the maintenance terminal. He didn't look well, and sure enough, within a few minutes he promptly barfed his breakfast onto the keyboard in front of him.
He apologized and we said hey, no problem, get yourself to sick call dude and we'll clean up the mess. Thanks to mil-spec, the WWW III-grade circuit board under the keypad only required a quick rinse in the sink and a few hours to air-dry before it was reinstalled and the position checked good.
One of our civilian contractors was ex-Army, and when we told him the story, he got pissed and said "That guy did it on purpose - he's trying to get kicked out." We looked at the contractor in disbelief. Why the hell would anyone do something like that? But we were Air Force guys and had no clue to what lengths some people will go to escape the Army.
The next day and another mission, the operators filed into the facility and took their places to begin their pre-mission equipment checks. The same guy sat down at Position 11, looked at the terminal for a minute, and blew chunks into the keyboard. The kicker was the little grin on his face after he deposited his stomach contents into the keyboard.
The guy apologized again (still with the grin on his face) and excused himself from the facility. We disassembled the keyboard, washed, rinsed, dried and re-installed. To his credit, they guy didn't eat much either morning.
We don't see the operator for several days, but within a week he returns, sits down at Position 11, and within three minutes regurgitates on the keyboard. This time, we tell him to get the hell out and then we call his duty section. We explain what's happened and tell them since they keep sending the guy back to work, it's THEIR turn to clean the abused circuit board. They send a warrant officer (I guess he was the only technician-type the Army had) to whom we hand over the circuit board.
The next time I see the E-4, he's on the site's Goon Squad, folks assigned to jobs outside the compound while they await administrative or disciplinary action. He's driving the military-issue Volkswagen 9-passenger van used to shuttle workers between the site and an overflow parking lot a quarter mile down the road. It's winter, there's snow on the roads, and my boss, an Air Force master sergeant, and I are on our way to the main base to run errands on our lunch hour. The E-4 slams the van into gear, hits the gas, and power-slides down the small two-lane road, fishtailing back and forth as my boss yells at him to stop. I'm sitting in the back seat and in the rear view mirror I can see that little grin on the E-4's face.
Looks like our contractor was right after all. . .
What?
My funniest (and unfunniest) moment was when I finally took my Compaq Presario 1275 apart after the battery wouldn't take a charge and the power kept shorting out. The warranty had just expired.
It was clear that there was simply a broken contact that needed resoldering - no problem. I did the job, turned it on (still open) and after a few seconds ozone was detected, followed by what looked exactly like a lighter flame. New Year's Eve, 1999. $3200 down the drain. I almost cried, but it was really funny to everyone else in the room that witnessed it.
Turned out that I used the wrong kind of flux, which specifically stated on the bottle that it wasn't to be used for electronics, because it eats the board.
Back in the day, our high school allowed us to take home a Apple IIe on weekends. My friend took one home and called me a few hours later saying he couldn't get it to work after a while. We were 17 at the time, by the way. I drove over to have a look since I was the whiz kid and he was the wannabe. I couldn't get it to boot either, they booted off the floppy drive. I put in a custom boot disk I built and tried it, it didn't work. I pulled out my 5.25" disk and looked at it. It was coated with something and looked wet. I asked my buddy why this would be, his answer: "Well, I got it home and was playing Castle Wolfenstien, and the drive was squeaking pretty loudly, so I just opened the drive and shot a blast of WD-40 into it to quiet it down. It stopped the noise, but now it won't boot."
Ahh, the memories.
http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
San Francisco Photographers
My favorite come from a UNIX guru I know from what now seems like a land far away. From his own words: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.next.sysad min/browse_frm/thread/88484ceff067fef0/1a62d7a5e5d 5f126#1a62d7a5e5d5f126
That was the worst, lamest, most pathetic computer list I have ever read. That's something my wife would forward (mechanical engineer).
Here's a much better story: my inlaws called in yet another computer-induced panic. Sis was crying, mom locked herself in the bedroom, and dad was in a frenzy yelling at us about his computer and wanting us to come fix it (a four hour drive). The problem was that the computer would not print and the home phone stopped working. We politely told him that we weren't going to travel 8 hours to fix his printer, and he really needed to call the phone company about his phone line.
2 days later the phone guy showed up and unplugged the printer's USB cable from the phone jack.
My personal favorite was a friend who will go nameless to prevent embarassment was installing a 25 mhz processor accelerator in his Amiga 1000 computer if I remember correctly. The original CPU speed was a 7 mhz 68000 and this was a 68030 processor with math coprocessor onboard as well.
This device set him back a pretty penny, nearly as much as the cost of the computer originally and the anticipation was high he would be computing at maximum possible speed.
He had installed it and was nearly at the point where he was about to boot the machine that the halogen work lamp that was installed via a clamp to the frame of his desk in his work area became unclamped and fell several feet on top of the processor board.
Which promptly shattered in several pieces.
Destroyed. Unusable.
Needless to say, the anger was furious and the smiting of said lamp was legendary.
I can't think of many incidents that top that one.
I don't know if this qualifies as a hardware mishap, but this story is worth repeating. (Yes, this happened to me personally.)
I had lent out a computer to a girlfriend. (this was back in the days when the cheapest computer was still around $1,500.) Well, the relationship came to a sour end and we exchanged back all of our stuff. I had a rather expensive leather jacket of hers, so I went to her place and we traded back (a rather unpleasant visit).
At this point in my life, I was fairly desparate for cash & had needed to sell this computer. I plugged the machine back in only to find... tada... she and one of her girlfriends (who was an admin or something) had decided it would be great revenge to set the BIOS password so that it was required to boot the PC! Wow... wasn't expecting that!
This chick is no match for my superior computing skills, I decide! I will not give her the satisfaction of asking for the password. Some research tells me that I can remove the motherboard battery and reset the BIOS to its default. This I do, but no luck. I leave that frickin' battery out for an entire week! I hear tell of reset jumper switches. No joy. I even called the motherboard manufacturer. No help. In desparation, I began trying every possible BIOS password combination of "dickhead" and "jackass" I could imagine (because you know that is what it will be).
Finally, after about 3 weeks, I was getting desperate. I really needed the money & had to sell the PC. It was looking grim. So, with great reluctance and my tail between my legs, I called the old girlfriend. Luckily, she gave me the password without much fuss. She spelled it out for me: A S s h o l e 5 7 9.
I can only laugh about it now, after many years.
TODO: come up with a clever sig
First, was when my cousin spilled a coke all over his C64. He turn it off immediately, opened it up and used the blow dryer on it. Once dry he put it back together and it worked great.
the second one was I was moving back from college after the end of the freshman year and had the brilliant idea of using my rolling chair to move things from the dorm room to the car. So, I've got my PC and printer on the chair and aoing along at a happy pace, laughing to myself at all of the kids that are lugging their heavy stuff to their car. when I hit a crack in the side walk, that's a little to big and I'm pushing on the back of the chair. The chair comes to a sudden stop, but the pc and printer don't. They both fly about 3-4 ft. Now this was back in '92, so it was a dot matrix printer and my dad's old pc (8088). I just stand their a few minutes staring before I start to pick it up while the kids walking by just look and shake their heads, knowing that it destroyed. Suprisingly though, when I got them home both of them had survived. They both worked fine. My saving grace on the PC was that it was an 8088 so it did not have a hard drive. I always booted from a 5 1/4 floppy. before and after this, the pc also would temporarily lock up for no reason and would have to be rebooted. Out of frustation one time i kicked it and it actually started working again. This became a semi-regular occurance, so from time to time my roomate would just stare as I repeatedly kick the crap out of my pc so I didn't loose the work I had done on a paper. It turned out to be a loose wire between the Mb and the keyboad connector ( this was before they were hard wired to the MB)Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
One day i've noticed that my computer started working slow, then it started rebooting once in a while.
I checked the CPU heat sensor and it was like 80 degrees (celcius) and the CPU fan is at 0 RPM.
So i open up the case, try to spin the fan and i can hardly move it.
Apperantly, since i have long hair, the fan is sucking up air with hair in it and the hair got tangled up in the fan and caused it to stop.
...but I'm not talking beer on a laptop, I'm talking "I just %#$^ a server and 300 users are banging at my door" ... "Of course not" ... So I reboot the server and turns out the server is not running 6.0 anymore, it's running 6.5 BETA. Turns out the NIC driver wasn't compatible with the new version, they didn't have DHCP and they hadn't noticed... Oh, the joys of consulting.
I did a Netware 6.0 install, and installed the DHCP server on it. I get a call, they are dead, NOTHING works, I go through the normal phone troubleshoot, nothing works. I get there and I ask: " Have you guys changed anything?"
Another time they screwed with the replication schema of the NDS (Novel's equivalent to Active Directory). The whole NDS tree got crapped. Users took about 6 HOURS to login on the network. We had to rebuild the 1,500 user NDS tree from scratch... Most complex job I've done to date. While we were working, people were screaming at us, banging on the door, sending anonymous threat letters, etc... And that was before we told them "all your passwords have been reset, please change them"
please excuse my apathy
Put computer case back on after replacing a hard drive, ,hamster had crawled into the case unbeknownst to me, chewed through evvery cable i had that night when I turned off the computer.
My best story comes from my sister. I was teaching her a number of years ago how to organize files on her computer, as in "you can put all your documents in this folder", simple stuff like that. I also happened to mention, "if you don't know what it is you can just put it in some random folder and not worry about" (speaking about old, unused files on her desktop).
Well, she goes up to her room, new found knowledge in hand, and begins cleaning up files. In her Windows directory. Yes, that's right, she moved all of those files since she didn't know what they were and put them into random folders. Had to do a reinstall of Win98 after that fiasco, which wasn't too bad.
Fun stories:
1. Customer moved drive from one computer to another then copied files to it. For some reason the new system showed the drive as properly formatted and empty and proceeded to overwrote about 2GB worth of data.
2. The recipe computer for a coke bottling plant got knocked over and dropped into some kind of syrup (it was a small self-contained unit with a touchscreen). Spent an hour cleaning the contacts off before replacing the controller board.
Advice:
1. First thing you should do is make an image of the drive. If you use ghost make sure to mark skip bad sectors, force clone, image all and no compression then just work with the image. Also, stick a fan next to it during recovery so the drive doesnt overheat and die.
2. Some old Tandy floppy drives carry power through the data cable and can kill any current motherboard. It will actually pop traces up on the PCB.
Spilling a 7-11 64-ounce Coke on it.
Is it just me who doesn't find them remotely amusing in any way possible? I mean, it's not like their baby accidentally ate the computer, or a flock of flying monkeys swept in and deleted everything. They reinstalled. Oh, the hilarity!
And wait... someone reversed over a computer. Hilarious! Must go and find duct tape; sides in need of repair...
I originally heard this story from Art during a lull in a seminar on programming implementation when he was a visiting professor at the UofU. It is the best story I ever heard for proving than no good deed goes unpunished. It is also, the funniest computer story I have ever heard.
Stonewolf
Read on....
Subject: Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
Date: Wednesday, 3 September 1986 16:46-EDT
From: "Art Evans"
To: Risks@CSL.SRI.COM
In another forum that I follow, one corespondent always adds the comment
Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
after his signature. In response to a request for explanation, he replied somewhat as follows. Since I'm reproducing without permission,
I have disguised a few things.
My friend Bud used to be the intercept man at a computer vendor for calls when an irate customer called. Seems one day Bud was sitting at his desk when the phone rang.
Bud: Hello. Voice: YOU KILLED MABEL!!
B: Excuse me? V: YOU KILLED MABEL!!
This went on for a couple of minutes and Bud was getting nowhere, so he decided to alter his approach to the customer.
B: HOW DID I KILL MABEL? V: YOU PM'ED MY MACHINE!!
Well to avoid making a long story even longer, I will abbreviate what had happened. The customer was a Biologist at the University of Blah-de-blah, and he had one of our computers that controlled gas mixtures that Mabel (the monkey) breathed. Now Mabel was not your ordinary monkey. The University had spent years teaching Mabel to swim, and they were studying the effects that different gas mixtures had on her physiology. It turns out that the repair folks had just gotten a new Calibrated Power Supply (used to calibrate analog equipment), and at their first opportunity decided to calibrate the D/A converters in that computer. This changed some of the gas mixtures and poor Mabel was asphyxiated. Well Bud then called the branch manager for the repair folks:
Manager: Hello
B: This is Bud, I heard you did a PM at the University of
Blah-de-blah.
M: Yes, we really performed a complete PM. What can I do
for You?
B: Can You Swim?
The moral is, of course, that you should always mount a scratch monkey.
There are several morals here related to risks in use of computers. Examples include, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." However, the cautious philosophical approach implied by "always mount a scratch monkey" says a lot that we should keep in mind.
Art Evans
Tartan Labs
Have you ever tried it? No? Then don't judge it. It actually works.
Of course, make sure it is dry- ice forming is bad. But it does work. This tends to be an "absolute last resort" after you've realized the drive is not going to be fixed by sane means.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Back in the early 1990s I worked for a company that sold computer systems, peripherals and printers.
I was working technical support at the time and received a call from someone up near the arctic
circle and they were a print shop or some-such and had a critical job they needed to print but had
ran out of toner.
They had no spare toner.
The closest spare toner they could get was several hundred miles away and accessible only by helicopter.
We set-up an arrangement so that they would get several toner cartridges though they would miss
the deadline.
A little while later, the woman I spoke to called me back and indicated there was giant black streaks on anything they wanted to print.
Apparently, in utter desperation to print they
took an electric drill, took a toner cartridge
for their copy machine and used a drinking straw
to place the liquid toner for the copier into
the empty container for the printer which used a
dry toner system.
What resulted is what our production people
called "toner bombing" a printer.
You can sandblast it all you like but it's not
going to ever print like it did before and it's
all but destined for the landfill at that point.
They RUINED a high-end, $10,000+ printer for
volume production.
Thus endeth the lesson.
then I guess I still don't get british "humour."
In our computer lab we had a very un-friendly admin. We used to hate him like anything. Our revenge was to screw up the Win 95 boxes assigned to us. They were the so called protected ones - hooked on to the Novell netware server, had no floppy / cd drives and no internet access. But being running Win95 we were easily able to achieve our goal of hosing the OS. We had to put in efforts only until we figured out the following, after which OS destruction was automagic! -
As I said the boxes didn't use to have floppy/cd drives and so re-installation of OS was very problematic. The net admin figured out a 'slick' way to deal with the situation -
a. Boot 95 to command prompt
b. Enable network and CD to the novell netware share which hosted the Win 95 CDROM
c. His theory being that reformatting destroys the hard drive - fdisk it. (Actual reason being that he won't be able to access the 95 CDROM share after the format) Remove all partitions and recreate them as-is.
d. Run win95 setup from the netware share.
e. Profit!
The machines generally remained on unless a software install required a reboot, in which case the partition table was re-read on boot and things were screwed up, once again.
The admin used to feel better by cursing at the software installation program which hosed the OS!!
He never found out why this was happening and we never bothered to tell him!!
Remember that ONE time we updated slashdot and nothing worked right for like half a day? Haha, yeah, that was funny once, but I bet if it kept happening like once a year on average for the last umpteen years it would get annoying.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My i had a machine running with it's case open while i was debugging some sort of problem. I don't remember why, but I left the room for a few minutes. My gf decided to clean up my desk so nothing would fall in the computer when she managed to knock my change jar in. About $40 worth of change landed right on the motherboard.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
'Twas the early-mid 1990s (don't remember precisely) and just east of downtown Albuquerque, in the middle of the night, there was some weird derailing incident. Some train cars ended up going right through a small office building that contained a construction company that was a client of ours. It totally "cleaned" the office right out, just sweeping away everything within. I guess they found the computer nearby.
They brought the machine in, and I got first crack at it. It was an old AT-style steel case (though I don't think it was an actual AT) but bent and partially compressed. I remember seeing some fractured circuit boards, but the HD appeared intact. I transplanted it to another box, but it didn't start up. I dunno if it ended up going to Ontrack or what. (Yeah, ok, I failed, but at least I got an anecdote out of it.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
While going to school for my IS degree, I did some PC repair work on the side. I was called over to an accountant's house to retrieve data from her computer that had apparently crashed. I sat down at her computer and the first thing I noticed was a giant speaker magnet attached to the side of her case, right about where the hard drive was. Nothing was recoverable. She was lucky she had a backup of her accounting stuff from a few days prior on a floppy disk.
I've lost count of the number of shocks I got when I was in a band and we used to use old (read cheap and shit) equipment.
I think the main reason for it is that the guitar strings are earthed and your sweaty hands make really good contact so if you then touch something which is even a little live you know about it.
The most dangerous thing I've ever seen happen was someone changing some strings with the guitar plugged in, as the old string came off the machine head it flicked out and the end landed perfectly in the gap between a power plug which was not pushed in all the way and the socket.
The guitar string acted a little like a light bulb filament becoming white hot and then breaking.
Amazingly the guy holding the guitar was not hurt. (we should have been using RCDs and stuff but hey, we were poor)
Karma: Bad. Calmer, good.
My story:
... takes half a day.
So this one time I was looking at porn, then next thing I know there are pop-ups everywhere. I spend all day trying to eradicate the spyware, finally give up and re-install the system which takes another half a day.
So, a couple months later...
I'm looking at porn, the next thing I know there are pop-ups everywhere. It only takes a couple hours to determine the spyware can't be removed, so I re-install the system, which takes half a day.
So, a couple months later...
I'm looking at porn
So, a couple months later...
Finally, I try FireFox. Ahh, I love FireFox.
ummmmm.... i'm waiting.
A $School, needed some computers. $Wiserack techi being a $Techie decided to make a macro in suck away that the reel name of gov official was changed to "No good asshole $", and his wifes name was also changed to "that bitch". Every 5th word was a volgarity---without checking that it was changed back this version goes out--- the school admin thought it was hilarious.---Mr giver of computers was not so amused
Here is my favorite debugging story, from here: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TarongaZooStory
P.S. as if this wasn't funny enough, the "confirm you're not a script" word I had to enter for this post was: tigers
-----
I was working as a contractor at Taronga Zoo (Sydney), on a livestock tracking system.
The deal with this is that most of the larger animals have eartags that can be detected by radio transceivers located at strategic points around the enclosures. This allows the zookeepers to do stuff like detect that the orangs are already in their night cage and lock the door without actually going out to check, or to notice from the office that a zebra has approached within 2 metres of the outer fence (i.e. they have got past the inner fence). One day there was an enormous fuss when it was discovered from the console that the male lion had gone off-line, so either we had a system failure or the lion had escaped. Luckily, since the lion was still where he was supposed to be, it had to be a system failure.
Since none of the other animals were missing, we guessed that it was a problem with the ear tag. As it turned out, the only staff members who had any expertise with the tags were (a) sick and (b) on maternity leave; so the only person in the zoo who knew how to install an ear tag was me. This meant I had to go with the lionkeeper into the lion's enclosure, and install a new ear tag. Well it wasn't so hard to get the tag on the lion, him being well-fed and not really being interested in moving, but of course once we got the new tag on, it didn't work. That was pretty strange, since I had tested it already and I knew it did work. I figured it must be the radio transceivers. So I took the ear tag myself, and started walking around the perimeter of the enclosure trying to see where/whether the tag would be detected.
I think this is where we breached the OccupationalHealthAndSafety? guidelines - because the lionkeeper stayed with the male, I went behind this bamboo thicket and was suddenly by myself with only the female lions for company. And the female lions were much more curious, particularly about the laptop I was carrying. Now don't forget here that it is the females which are the killers. So I am slowly, carefully, mostly terrified, walking around the perimeter of this enclosure, followed by two female potentially man-eating lionesses; when suddenly I pass the break in the transceiver network, and the laptop lets out this tremendous beep and scares the heck out of me.
And the lions.
I jumped, they growled, and I dropped the laptop. Luckily for me, one of them bit the screen of the laptop, and the other one tried to bite the keyboard. I had enough presence of mind to leave them to it, and strolled back to the lionkeeper, where I politely asked if we could leave in a hurry.
Lesson learned: Let sleeping lions lie.
This was back in the '80s when the first Mac came out. It wasn't even available in 220V by then so the demo guys had to drag along a transformer that gave it the 115V it wanted. Surprise surprise... Somebody forgot to use the transformer once - alas one very dead Mac.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
And thanks to the Wayback machine... I can. Yes folks the infamous "Baked Apple"
Recipe for a Baked Apple
Ingredients: 1 Apple iBook
Remove all keys and keep seperate. Preheat oven to 200 Degrees F. Place keys and laptop on an ungreased cookie sheet. Insert both laptop and keys into oven for 20 minutes.
Click here for more
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I think you want infrared, not UV. Excessive heat is usually associated with the IR portion of the spectrum.
... briefly. Oh, yeah, a good pulse will hit all the frequencies.
... Slashdot as trigger for a WMD ... .
Although I suppose a good slashdotting could make a server shine across the entire EM spectrum
EMP
this was already /.'ed....
I am tired of seeing it!
and yes freezing your hdd can get it to work for a limited time if the problem is either seized up heads or a case of bad bakelite or other silicon related badness
(as cooling the IC's or DSP's off will result in noise reduction and increased conductivity)
Back in the early days (1960's) computers required big rooms and huge A/C systems to cool them. After replacing an old computer with a newer cooler-running one, the A/C froze and burst a water pipe, flooded the computer room, and then froze the new computer in a slab of ice.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
1) dd if=~/ris.img of=/dev/hda instead of /boot partition. But I understand that Linus did something like this too by writing to the hard drive instead of the modem.
dd if=~/ris.img of=/def/fd0 (believe it or not, I did not lose data on this one, just rendered the system unbootable as I was able to save the partition table and only lost the partition headers on the
2) Trying to rig a barcode scanner to work with a somewhat-too-powerful power supply unit. Burned out the scanner and nearly burned out the (external) decoder. Lesson learned: If you can't find the specs, don't apply third party power adapters.
3) Realizing half-way through formatting a hard disk that I had rebooted in the middle of the backup...
Hopefully I can think of others later
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Everyone knows backups are important, right? Well, pretend you do if you don't....
So, my first full-time job, I wound up being de facto system operator of the department's AIX machines, since I'd learned the Magic Incantations necessary to upgrade AIX 3.2.3 to 3.2.4 or 3.2.5... or even, this was really great, install AIX on a new computer!
After my first 6 months in that group, the guy who had been doing the backups left for hopefully-greener pastures. No big deal, you just had to run this program which told you which tape numbers to load in to which drives, and printed out the label sheet for the previous night's backups. Everything was done with the standard dump command, which is a nice and robust way to back up.
Everything seemed good; every now and then, a few nodes would fail to back up, but no big deal, they were done on an earlier night, and the tape selection program made sure that a "recent" backup was available for each node before it allowed a tape to be re-used.
If only I had noticed that it was always 3 machines in a row that had backup failures....
So, the inevitable happens... we need to restore an important filesystem. (Anyone who worked with IBM 857mb SCSI drives knows that the inevitable happened about once every 6 months. Per drive.)
Pulled the latest tape, seeked to the right record... funny, this looks like a different filesystem, but that should be a much later record on the tape.
Try the next-earlier one, same thing.
One before that... found the right filesystem. Restore went good, fortunately it was a read-mostly system, and we didn't lose any important changes since that dump.
But having filesystems in the wrong place... I couldn't figure that one out. I went through the backup script (which had been adapted from a magazine article...). Added a whole pile of logging and tracing, especially putting stderr somewhere where it could be read back (it had been sent to /dev/null... of course.)
So those three failures in a row? The went something like this:
What the error messages didn't explain, but some experimenting found, the operation that hit end-of-tape returned end-of-tape, as expected. The next operation got an I/O error, because the last operation resulted in an I/O error, and the tape had not been rewound or ejected.
The thing is, these tape drives would automatically re-wind when you read back an I/O error from them...
So device not ready was obtained while the drive was rewinding. (Normally, it should just block until the rewind is complete. In this case, the NEXT command after it started rewinding would block.)
Then the remaining backups would go fine... overstriking the eariler ones on the same tape.
I've had a fetish for proper error-checking in scripts ever since... and I don't accept scripts written by others unless they will run with #!/bin/sh -e or equivelent.
When I was 17 I was workin' in an auto shop that had a Coke machine that I had to keep stocked. Coke is caustic. When a Coke truck flips on the highway, the first people they call is HazMat.
Anyhoo, once in a while I'd get a flat of Cokes that was empty. I asked the Coke delivery guy (same guy that told me about HazMat) and he says that because Coke is so acidic, they use specially lined cans and if the Coke gets on the OUTSIDE of the can, it eventually eats thru it and all the Coke seeps through invisible holes in the can. That's how you get those unopened empties.
Back when I was working at Compaq, pre-merger, my most memorable call was from a lawyer. Seems he had gotten so totally frustrated with the quality of support at HP that he'd thrown his computer through his 6th floor window and into the street below.
:), and didn't mind paying the $40 fee for help with unsupported software, as long as I was able to get the thing working.)
:)
:)
Not out the window, mind you... through the window. Shattering the glass on the way by. That afternoon, he was on the phone with me, at Compaq, for help installing his software and restoring backups. (amazingly enough, he'd been smart enough to make backups just before throwing the damned thing out the window
The story does not end there. He was so happy with the support that he asked to talk to my supervisor.... A half hour later, the supervisor comes by and asks if I'm busy. He's just finished talking to the lawyer, and found out that the cause of his problem was his HP laser printer that didn't have driver support for his new Windows XP-based computer, and he didn't like being told by HP that they didn't support that printer with XP yet.... So my boss asks if I'm busy, and I say no, so he hands the guy off to me again to fix his printer, on the house.
How did I fix it? I sent him to HP's website to download the Windows 2000 drivers for the printer. I explain to him that yes, I'm aware that he's running Windows XP, but that Windows XP shares a kernel with Windows 2000, and that because of it, XP Home will not install as an upgrade over 2k Pro. Basically, they're the same OS, except that XP has flashy graphical enhancements. (at the time, that was true). So we download the 2k driver for the printer, and 5 minutes later, he's printing again, and asks to talk to the supervisor again.
Long story short... $100 gift certificate for a local steakhouse, and a plaque that reads "top letter generator" is all I have to show for it. Oh, and the satisfaction of knowing that 4 months later, HP announced the Compaq acquisition.... I bet he was peeved at that.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
From the article:
8. Toilet Trauma
One man became so mad with his malfunctioning laptop computer, he threw it into the toilet and flushed a couple of times.
That must be one wild and crazy guy (ala Steve Martin)
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
"Safety Regulations? Bah! I know those safety regulations just like my three fingers!"
-Palal
I had about 15 ssh sessions running. Most into a development machine. It was about 1:30 pm. Needed to reboot the dev box. Got a phone call and answered it.
Supervisor came in and asked me a question.
Lotus notes popped to the front with an email that I needed to take care of.
Ok, now where am I? Oh yes, need to reboot.
Click on window. su, shutdown -r now.
Wait for reboot.
Supervisor steps in "are we having a problem with the production server?"
Me. "hmm... must be a network issue, I'm sure it will be back up soon"
Note, this HP-UX box runs POST for 20 minutes before booting.
Note to self, Try "uname -a first"
This tech is a masterful idiot. http://chroniclesofgeorge.nanc.com/tickets1.htm
I used to work at Dell's refurbishing center where all the customer returns arrived, including warranty returns.
1. Customer dropped laptop in ocean. Result: salty laptop.
2. Puppy peed on laptop. Result: salty yellow laptop.
3. Customer left laptop on car, and made it to the freeway before it fell off. 18-wheeler ran over it. Result: garbage bag of fragments.
4. Wild frat party with blowtorch present. Result: hole burned into (unfortunately not through) laptop.
5. Laptop dropped in river. Result:wet muddy laptop.
6. Customer was an extreme smoker. Result:desktop packed full of brown, moss-like dirt.
7. Laptop stepped/sat on. Result: Broken LCD screen...quite psychedelic when turned on.
that's all i remember off the bat.
12:50 - press return.
Good thing this was on Slashdot, because now I can kill myself without that stupid smile on my face.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
Well after reading some of the other stories here ... had to throw mine into the ring ...
...
... POOF tomorrows paper ... gone... ... gone
... ya not much good as it had expired all of its data when its time got updated ...
So I work for a small daily paper, we have an assortment of solaris based servers where everything is stored.
So one Sunday evening one of my co-workers decided that our time server was slightly out (also a solaris based server) so he decided to set the time manualy...
date 123108232050
Now, being a daily paper we tend to begin laying out pages in advance, we have clients ads and artwork in
various places throughout our system. Most of those places are automaticly "cleaned up" based on their ages.
So all the servers update their new time and fire off the clean up jobs
OH look we no longer need to keep this its 45 years old
all those client ads etc
And just to add insult to injury... our backup server
3 days of HELL getting what we could back from a 30 tape library.
Hi - those 10 things weren't all that funny or odd. To /.'ers I would suggest the old book "The Devouring Fungus" which has many strange and odd incidents going well back to mainframe / punch card era.
TWR
Am I the only one who caught the Ads for Symantics data protection server system at the top of those pages?
I sense the foulest of ad related plots.
Working at a gov't contractor, we're forced to use Windows 3.1, only one Netware fileserver, nothing fancy anywhere.
Windows 95 comes out and looks GREAT (especially compared with 3.1) and somehow we get a couple of boxes with floppies (no CDs on the 486s we had). Of course, 3.1 is the only "approved" OS, no matter how much anyone hated it. We only used the machines for email, Word docs, spreadsheets, etc. And the occasional Doom game on the network. (really cool at the time when we had telephone headsets and could talk trash to each other on a conference call as we played)
We want to use 95, but the manager is terrified of us being caught using it. He finally comes up with the following ridiculous scheme: Install the boot manager from OS/2. Create two partitions. Make one partition bootable with the boot mgr. Format, install 95. Reboot and repeat with the other partition and 3.1. He fully intended both partitions to be equal in size, but we gave 3.1 just enough room to install with a few apps. If anyone official was coming through, a reboot would make sure the proper screen were showing. Big Pain in the Ass.
Of course I found a way to greatly magnify the pain. Format (around an hour just for that), then install Win 95 from the 25!! floppy disks. Reboot, switch to other partition. Start formatting again. "Why is it taking so long? The 3.1 partition should go pretty quick. Auugghhhh!!!!!" Of course I picked the wrong partition.
I hated installing from floppies.
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
I don't know if that would be a good school or a bad one to go to.
:)
:)
Pro:
Lunch lasts a few hours!
Con:
You get zapped with electricity from bizarre electrified asphalt (or was it just a ground and your mike was electrified
I once was in a house where neutral and hot were reversed to a light fixture. Worked fine until we decided to upgrade it to something better and the electrician got zapped.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Nuff said
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
My best one was having a Windows DFS share fall over and 1/3rd of the files go missing. The backup tapes were pretty screwed so we paid somebody to manually restore every single file one by one - several months later we had all of our files back.
Flush your cache/temp folders a couple of times during the oepration.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
This is why debian annoys me, you can't simply restore the file permissions.
rpm -qa | while read rpm
do
rpm --setperms "$rpm"
done
while fix your redhat perms but with debian if you abuse your perms you are stuffed and need to re-install the packages really.
While at one of the large multi building companies I worked for just after graduating college, one of the senior techs was proudly showing off just how much more he knew then the new college graduates while walking around on the "introduction tour" of his building. When we got to the computer center, I asked him what utilities he used for administration of Novell server. He was happy to provide me with a live demonstration right there on one of the administrative workstations using Norton Commander, whereupon he finishs his explaination with a "And you can delete multiple files in the directory just by selecting them", He hits the keypad plus key (select all),"And typing the correct function key." He then hits F8 (Delete) to demonstrate NC deleting the files.
Then he went on to explain how the new Halo gas system would suppress fires in the computer lab, when the lead network administrator suddenly bolts into the room moving quickly towards the administrative workstation exclaiming, "The fileserver just blew up bigtime!"
Whereupon our guide quickly glances back at the workstation where he has just finished his little file deletion demonstration and pales quickly as he realises why, "Aw sh*t - We'll need to restore from last nights back up. I think I just deleted the entire System directory."
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
Actually, though I'm sure you're correct in some cases about the cold helping with a malfunctioning temp. sensor in the drive - I think the freezer trick also sometimes just works because of defective IC chips on the controller board portion of the drive.
(Every IDE hard drive actually has the drive controller electronics bolted to a circuit board on the bottom of it. That's why the "IDE interface" is such a basic thing on your PC, whether it's integrated onto the motherboard or is a seperate PCI card. Most of the real work is done on the drive's electronics.)
With some malfunctioning electronics, you can manage to keep them working properly as long as you keep them cold enough. (One of the old tricks for troubleshooting bad parts in TV sets and the like was to selectively spray them with a can of compressed air, chilling them temporarily.)
One day a coworker was having some liquid yogurt, when another coworker bumped into him and spilled the whole glass in his keyboard. What we did was to take it outside, and wash the keyboard with water from the garden's hose. Then we left it in the sun for the whole day, so that it dried up.
We had to do that process a couple of times, since the keyboard will get full of ants as soon as we brought it back into the office. But, it eventually worked.
-.
The funniest mistake I made was accidentally removing everything in /etc. After doing that, my computer told me: ``You don't exist. Go away.'' I reinstalled the whole system and everything was fine again.
-- Cheers!
I used to work at a company that refurbished old computers and gave them to schools. One day we got a computer from canadian customs. Apperently they used this beat up computer to train new recruits on how to identify objects in an xray machine. so they put stuff inside the computer and asked them to identify it.
But when I sat down with the computer and started taking it appart i realized that some of the equipment that they use was still inside the computer.
I shit you not, there was a hand gun, some handcuffs and C4 plastique inside the case. I asked my boss if he wanted me to strip the computer or call the cops.
The swat team arrived and took the thing appart and removed the dangerous cargo. The gun was not loaded but the handcuffs and C4 were real. According to the chief, there was enough explosives in there to level the warehouse.
I believe the funniest moment came when I saw that news the next day. You could see the whole staff playing football with a makeshift ball made out of a WD40 can, duct tape and some foam.
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
The earliest was when I worked for a VAR back in 91/92 building custom systems for CAD/CAM use. Our clients would pay for the absolute latest and greatest CPU's, at a time when most others managed to get by on 286's, they HAD to have 486 chips. So, we tried out a different motherboard than we had used previously, I carefully grounded myself and seated the rather expensive 486 CPU... Built the rest of the system and turned on the power. The room went black. The breaker had blown. Crapping my pants knowing my boss was going to kill me. RTFM - I had inserted the chip 180-degrees, this was before we had those nice missing pin 'hints'. Re-seated the CPU and turned the power on again.... vrooom - worked fine, even passed a 3-day burn-in test. Phwew. Next up - the story of how my crapberr..., uh I mean Blackberry fell in the toilet...
This came to an end when he neglected to set an environment variable then executed "make clean" with the following Makefile:
clean:
Took days to restore that baby.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
We've recovered drives that way for long periods of time.
If the bearings on the bottom of the drive are going out, just flip the drive upside down and it will mainly use the other bearings.
Ahum... 2004 ? Is there something about the word 'News' in the phrase 'News for Nerds' that I do not understand? This list was covered on bbc world nine months ago, and discussed here as well.
Though I must admit, they do stay funny,
I was helping a friend build a system for the first time, about 4-5 years ago. He had heard from another friend that a RAM heatsink would greatly improve performance. It might've, had he not stripped off one of the tiny resistors on the RAM in putting on the heatsink. Needless to say, he stuck it in the slot, fired it up, and it immediately caught on fire. He powered the system down and ran out of the room, flaming chip in hand.
I couldn't stop laughing for nearly an hour, though replacement motherboard and RAM wasn't so funny later.
Read the only personal Runyon page out there.
Damn, hit submit instead of preview :/
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
A college roommate was impressed by how easily I built my own computers and got too anxious to install his DDR memory in his new PC when he got home that he didn't wait for an expert to arrive. He managed to jam the memory in backwards against the key as hard as he could until he heard a snap. Both the motherboard and memory started on fire.
This is a great site to get other people's stories from: http://rinkworks.com/stupid/
-Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither. -Ben Franklin
I had just returned from a LAN party, and was setting up my computer and monitor. I was almost done-- All that was left was to plug in the monitor.
I decided to use a slot on my new power strip that I had never used before for no reason. In the past, I have had no trouble plugging into a hot power strip, so I didn't bother to turn it off. The next thing I heard was the loud FIZZLE-POP!-FIZZLE of my monitor's magic smoke escaping...
ALWAYS respect the power supply.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
I've worked as an on-site tech and PC Support Specialist for quite a long time for various companies, so I've seen a few good ones.
1. We had a lady who kept calling our on-site PC service business every day or two, insisting that her floppy drive was "eating her data". My friend went out there and tested the drive and it seemed fine, but he went ahead and cleaned it with a cleaning kit. But that didn't seem to work. The lady called back the next day reporting the same problem. He went back out again and just replaced the floppy drive with a brand new one. Nope, more complaints after that! So finally, he said to her "Ok. Show me exactly what you do with your computer when you start it up in the morning, an example of what you do with it during the day, and exactly how you shut it down at the end of the day." Everything seemed normal, until the very end, where she said ".... and then I take my disk out of the drive, and I keep it right here on my filing cabinet" (and proceeds to stick it up there with a big refrigerator magnet)!
2. One time, I got a call from a painter that I recently did a bunch of computer work for (memory and hard drive upgrades, etc.). He said he "thought he was going to need to buy a whole new computer". I tried to argue with him, pointing out that it was only a month or so ago that I did a lot of work to it, and it seemed perfectly good to me. But he insisted I come out and look at it. So I did.... When I arrived, I saw his problem. The tower case was completely smashed in on top and the 5.25" drives were falling out of their distorted bays. Turns out he bought a copy of "Battlefield 1942" and couldn't get it to do anything but draw a black screen (probably old video drivers) and in a fit of frustration, whacked it a few times with a sledgehammer.
3. A long time ago, I worked at a mom and pop computer store, and a guy came in with this mangled mess of circuit boards, a hard drive that was split open, misc. cards, and so on - and asked if we could "put it back together again for him"? Apparently, he just bought the computer at another dealership and put it all in the back of his pickup truck, and it flew out on the interstate and got run over by one or two other drivers. I guess he was out on the shoulder of the road trying to scrounge up all the pieces he could find, hoping it was salvagable!
In SunOS the streaming tape drive was usually /dev/st0. The operating system was usually /dev/sd0. I know someone (this /dev/rsd0 ...
installed on
time it wasn't me) who used:
tar cfv
Instant removal of the operating system.
(of course they were root)
As root, with working directory / instead of the one you thought it was. Fun.
A man suddenly found his laptop would only boot up to the 'blue screen of death', putting his data at risk. A week later, his nephew admitted that he used its screen as a punching bag to relieve his frustrations with the slow computer. The man sent his nephew back to live with his parents.
It took him a week to notice someone had "punched" the lcd on his laptop?
An lcd will crack, and not cause the system to bluescreen...why would the OS know or care that the lcd is shattered? And why would that take a week to notice?
Sounds like someone was just trying to get some hits on that ad-infested page.
One day a bottle of mountain dew that was in my backpack with the laptop burst, undiscovered until I get out to post and find a screen that shows only a brightly lit tie-dye pattern, and reeks of mountain dew.
It goes to compusa then to HP, and a month and a half later I receive the laptop back with the same broken screen, they refuse to fix it.
The screen is readable but infuriatingly broken, so after a month I'm forced to try again.
I turn it into compusa, they turn it into HP, and a month and a half later they give me a brand new screen, but not the 1400x1050 screen I purchased, they install a standard 1024x768 screen the same size.
I'm tired of being parted from my laptop months at a time so I live with it for a few more months. On my way to natnl guard drill, I leave the laptop on the top of my car while loading up. I drive off and get a good mile down the road before I hear the sound of a laptop sliding off of my convertable top and crashing to the pavement behind me, treated to the sight of it in my rear-view, pieces flying everywhere. I pick up the pieces and go to drill anyway.
I go to compusa again and my best friend is working behind the tech counter. I show him the battered and smashed laptop, with the battery and cd drive ripped from its chassis, and the techs can hardly contain themselves. I fill in under 'customer's description of problem' "Severe Gravity Induced Trauma", and when my friend goes to fill in 'technicians description of problem' he stalls and just puts "See laptop"
Long story later, I am refunded and buy a new Gateway laptop with the difference.
I once had to go and display some computers for the employees for a garbage recycling company. Very nice and unexpectedly sophisticated people by the way.
Unfortunately, chance threw one of the dumbest my way. He asked where if he could create copies using the provided scanner. I had to explain (slowly, and multiple times) that you could do that using the computer and - of course - a printer.
He then went on asking where the (blank) paper had to go in, pointing to the scanner of course.
His wife was obviously quite a lot smarter, since we managed to share a moment of utter desperation.
My all-star moment was running v5 or so of Partition Magic on a drive that I was going to mirror, but needed to shrink the partition first. Got to about 2% completion on the resize and realized it was taking forever, then figured I wanted to do something else first before letting it sit for a few hours.
Cancel. Wait patiently. Barf.
Rather than halting nicely like I TOLD it to, PM decided it was going to write its logfile. Into the FAT. On top of all the valid filenames.
Luckily a friend had recently rifled through my hard drive and copied a lot of stuff, so 6 months later I got 90% of it back when I went to visit him.
For more horrific results, recall the story of Marshal Nedelin's end, here and here.
One version I've read...
After the rocket failed to fire, Nedelin ordered technicians to go service the rocket and try again. As he stood by the pad watching, someone re-cycled the launch sequence. The launch clock had meanwhile counted from T-Minus to T-Plus, so the rocket's (perfectly functioning) second stage ignited, ending Marshal Nedelin and many others.
A few years ago I was writing my first book, a game programming book using DirectX. It was late one Saturday night and I was itching to install a new CD I had of Linux. It was a different distro than I was used to (can't remember the name now) but it had "extra" security features that I wanted to check out. I chose to run the "express" install and let it partition the drive for me. I had Windows installed on C: and my data was on C: and backed up on D: (a non-OS partition). Unfortunately I didn't have a CD backup so you can see where this is going. The install kicked off and asked me if it could automatically install and setup the partitions. I thought it was only going to be doing it across a single drive. My bad. It then asked me if I wanted to use the security features on the format. So a couple hours later I had a clean hard drive with a new OS. Problem is that the format went across both physical drives I had. I tried various recoveries that I had on-hand. Sometime around 6AM I pronounced the drive dead. I took it to a data-recovery centre on Monday but since the format was so secure and had written over the data several times, there was no hope. I lost the book and had to rewrite it from my notes and what was in my head. Took 3 months for the rewrite after spending 6 writing it the first time. It's funny now but boy was I peeved when it happened. Needless to say, BACKUP YOUR DATA and DON'T INSTALL AT 2AM ON A SATURDAY! :)
I was working in college as a data lab helper kinda person when two people approached me and said they could not write their thesis to the floppy. When I went over to see what they were doing the were at the abort, retry, ignore prompt as the disk was indeed having a problem. When I asked them did they have a backup, they replied they had put the backup floppy in during the critical error handler loop and now.... the backup too was unreadable. Just got to love the critical error handler and no media change detect on those old DOS pre 2.0 releases... :)
Here are a couple of personal favorites. These were 100% my fault so I'm going for atonement here.
#1: Few years back i'm doing a remote import of a large database onto a client's system. The idea here was to replicate a good db then import the data into the tables via sql embedded in csh scripts.
After the import (~300 GB), I needed to go in and delete some records that the client wasn't supposed to have. I wrote some slick PL/SQL to loop through the table and delete the records. In order to speed it up, I also included a COMMIT command after every 50 records (this means no rollbacks to you non-DBA's out there).
Well, the lesson here is to always double check your logic. Of course I deleted all of the good data and left the bad. Compound this with the fact that they had never tested their backup system so all of the tapes were bad. Three weeks later, the system is finally back online. That sucked.
#2: Early 90's and I'm in an all Mac shop. We were experimenting with AppleTalk and one of the graphic designers was sharing her system with mine.
I don't know about you guys but they way I had learned to eject a disk was to drag the icon over to the trash can. I dragged her share folder icon over the trash can and proceeding to watch her system files get deleted. That one was fun
When asked how it got that way the user replied that he had used the notebook in the field on a recent exercise and that it was exposed to rain. (Already stupid.) Water had accumulated in the screen, which still worked and probably would have dried with a few days of care. The user unfortunately decided to dry it out quickly with a 'hairdryer' he had found on the field site.
The 'hairdryer' turned out to be a heat gun from an electronics maintenance kit, used for shrink tubing, etc. Took only seconds to burn a hole in the LCD...
My friend had the bright idea that he wanted to organize all the files on his computer.
..
Normal people just organize their documents according to "work", or "personal".
His approach was to organize files by their extensions.
This was a Windows 95 machine. The C: drive (after "optimization") resembled:
C:>dir
.
bin
dll
doc
exe
ini
xls
etc...
He made folders on his C drive corresponding to the file extensions, and had gone through every file he could move (including C:\windows).
You can bet, it didn't reboot after that!
While I was still a Perl novice I was writing a Perl-based script which would gather information about payroll timesheet corrections and email each employee a description of the aforementioned changes. I had recently begun to use functions in Perl, but hadn't yet stumbled upon how perform data hiding. My email function employed a for loop which used $i as a counter variable. Unfortuantely so did the function it called on each iteration through the loop. During my test run the outer loop counted higher than the inner loop, and subsequently got caught spinning. It sent an email to 2 addresses during each pass (one address being my own). After running for 10 seconds or so I guessed something must be wrong and ended it abruptly. Unfortunately the damage had been done. The beefy university web server had queued 150,000+ emails to each of the accounts during its run.
When I was grad student I worked at Bell Labs. The machines on which phonetics was done were several single-user SELS (kind of like VAXen) networked to a PDP11-23, to which the tape drive we used for backup was attached. Audio occupied a lot of space, so we each had one or more personal 100MB disk packs. When you came in you would shut down the machine, remove the scratch disk, put in one of yours, and reboot.
The disk packs were removable in the sense that you could open up the drive and take them out, but they weren't removable in the sense of being intended to be removed. These were sets of I forget how many platters on a spindle that hung down from a plastic cover with a handle on top, kind of like the covers on cake and pie stands in restaurants. When you took one out, the platters were exposed to the air, and dust, and anything else floating around. The drives lived in a machine room, but it wasn't a clean room. We tried to expose the disk packs to the air as little as possible and to inspect them as best we could, but in these conditions it is pretty much guaranteed that after a while you're going to have a head crash. You just can't fly a Boeing 747 at 600 miles an hour six inches off the ground for very long before it hits something. So backups were important. They were also somewhat tedious since they involved not only the usual business of mounting tapes on the tape drive and so forth but incantations to get the data from a disk drive on an SEL to the 11-23 to which the tape drive was attached.
To make a long story short, having collected a fair amount of data I decided it was time to make my first backup. Everything went alright until it was nearly done, at which point the disk drive decided that it would be a good time to have a head crash. That's right: it crashed DURING the backup. This is one reason I recommend against digitizing speech directly into a laptop - I just know its going to die before they back it up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In a house where I lived with four other people, we had an old old Linux box set up as a gateway for dialing in to teh Intarweb. It also functioned as our print server. Anyway, one day, I wanted to print something out, but upon inspection of the box, someone had unhooked the printer cable from the ISA hard drive controller/serial port/parallel port card. So, I picked up the cable and started hooking it back to the parallel port connector.
What I didn't realize was that somebody had also neglected to use a mounting screw to hold that card in place, and the force I was applying pushed one side of the ISA card up and out of the slot. The box started beeping like crazy, and I went "OH CRAP!" and quickly slammed home the card. Looking up at the screen, I saw a couple dozen error messages from the Linux kernel, but I tried a few commands at the prompt and discovered that not only had nothing burned out, but everything was still running just fine.
My least favorite experience was when I had a hard drive that had the plastic around the power connector broken. Unfortunately, this allowed the power socket to be plugged in in backwards and one day right after I installed a new motherboard and hooked everything back up... You know the rest.
Way back in the 80's I was working at a computer builder/reseller when we got a phone call from a customer who wanted his hard drive (probably a Seagate 30M RLL drive, for you old-timers) replaced under warranty.
When we asked him what was wrong he said the drive had started to make a lot of noise, so he opened up the case and lubed the bearings and cleaned the
heads while he was at it, but now it wasn't working at all...
I swear, true story...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Many years ago when I was still new with Unix, I decided one day that I wanted to remove all the dot-files and dot-directories in my home directory. I think I was trying to clean out some old config files plus a .mosaic directory or something. The remaining dot-files I needed would be easily recreated.
.*
.* would include .. :) :)
So, I issue:
$ rm -rf
Next thing I know I'm getting all these "Permission Denied" errors while it was trying to remove all these other directories.
Silly me, I forgot that
Thankfully, I wasn't root
This isn't as good as some, but I'll submit it anyway.
My first real tech job was to replace 36 dumb terminals with some Micron P133 PCs. One old bat who had been in the Customer Service department forever declared, "You're not taking my computer!"
Well, I eventually did Mildred's terminal last. I'd had no problem with any of the previous users, but the day after replacing Mildred's I had a call waiting for me as soon as I walked in. "This computer doesn't work! I want my old one back!"
I called Mildred and asked what the problem was. "Doesn't work." When you turn it on what happens. "I don't know, it doesn't work." Is there an error message on the screen? "I don't know, it doesn't work. Bring back my old computer!"
I wandered over to Mildred's desk to see the message Keyboard Error on the screen. Not a big deal, I picked up a spare, plugged it into her PC and it booted up fine. Picked up her old keyboard and half a cup of tea ran out of it. She declared "It must be those cleaning people!"
Walked back to my desk, and Andrew saw tea still dripping out of the keyboard. He said, "That must be Mildred's." I asked him how he knew and he replied, "Until she got diabetes and had to stop using sugar we used to have to put her dumb terminal keyboard in the washing machine about twice a month."
We bought her a keyboard skin.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&p ostid=384992
Turns out it was a fake, but still, funny as heck to read.
Sig Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Thats because that "1% 2% 3%" crap you have to sit through when formatting a drive in older MSDOS based OSes is actually the "verifying" stage. The actual "format" is really really quick at the end.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I also worked with a guy who came in one morning and found that someone had killed the janitor and his workplace was now a crime scene. Everyone on remote access for three days.
The same place had the sprinkler system go off accidentally, and they bought every hair dryer that Target and Walmart had. Only lost a couple of monitors.
Worked with a lady who used to be a lead programmer at Pacific Bell's headquarters. The building predated Cat-5 wiring, so the moron electricians just ran the new wiring up the elevator shaft. Every time an elevator moved and sent a magnetic pulse through the lines the network went down. They finally installed a light with a motion detector in the shaft, so that they knew if the light was off they could transmit data.
We once had the network go bizerk, every light on every hub completely lit up, collisions everywhere, the network monitor device nonfunctional, pretty much everything unavailable. When I stepped behind the rack I brushed against the power cord for the network monitor. The plug fell out and suddenly the network was restored to usability. The cord had been so loose that it was arcing in the socket, turning the monitor on and off 60 times a second and saturating the network with spurious signals.
My friend's kid got a full scholarship to Harvard, so Kulwant splurged and bought him a brand new top of the line IBM laptop. Second day in the dorm his roomate tripped over the power cord and broke the screen. IBM said a new screen would be $200 less than a new laptop, so instead Kulwant bought a monitor, mouse and keyboard to plug into it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
At school I foolishly had the case off on my computer, which I kept under my desk. The PC speaker was attached by sticking it in a small indentation, but it was not very sturdy.
I leaned over to grab something from the fridge and bumped the case. The speaker popped out, and the metal leads on the wires touched the bottom of the case. It started shrieking louder than I had ever heard a PC speaker chirp. Smoke started pouring out of the case. I tried the power button, but it would not shut off. In a panic, I pulled the plug from the UPS, and it went "EEEEeeeeeerrrmmm - "
I waited several minutes (after opening the window) and pulled the speaker out. The insulation on the wires was charred and crumbling. There was a nice twisted scorch mark about 4 inches long on the inside bottom of the case.
Then the smoke alarm in the dorm went off.
I lost the PC speaker then, but the motherboard & video card both died about 6 months later. I was really amazed that it did not die sooner.
Yeh, I once had two $1000+ specialized video cards explode on me due to that.
The GPU blew right off the board.
Twice.
(These cards were "multiconsole cards", essentialy 4 video cards crammed onto one board, plus a usb-like serial bus. the card had 4 rj45 connectors, and you used cat-5 to connect 4 port expander boxes w/ standard svga, mouse, and keyboard connecters on 'em. It allowed you to put 4 extra monitor+keyboard+mouse comboes on a single computer. Usefull for POS stuff. ) The first time it happened, we didn't know what was going on. We thought it was a short or something in the board. The second time, tho, I got a nasty shock as I was plugging the cable in, and the chip exploded inches from my nose (the case was open). I recognized the feel of 120vac, and checked the outlets. Turns out that someone took a shortcut wiring the building. They only used 2 wire cable in the walls, so they wired the ground prong of the outlets to the neutral. That would have been fine, except for the fact that the cable for the outlet the computer was plugged into had it's hot & neutral flipped at the fuse box. Thus the ground of the computer was 120vac off from the ground on the monitor I was plugging in. Yikes.
Oddly enough, the computer survived both incidents just fine.
-- -- The Dragon De Monsyne
I was so proud of myself when I wrote a program to automate the use of my school's observatory. It not only kept the dome position in sync with the telescope, but allowed for remote operation of it.
Well, I set a computer up in there, got everything working, and wandered off for a few months. When I tried to use it next, I found that my program wasn't working. Checking the computer, I found that it wouldn't even start. After reinstalling the OS twice, I kept getting the same problem. Finally, I got a new computer from downstairs and set it up again, getting everything working.
Once again, I wandered off for a few months and tried again, finding the same issue had recurred. This time I opened up the computer... to find that the screws holding the motherboard to the case had rusted, making little rust-stalactites onto the motherboard.
You'd think they'd make them stainless.
~Ben
My backup was corrupt = I didn't have a backup, but I'm not going to tell you that.
So my company had a rather lengthy confirmation code that was automatically generated every time a customer made a transaction on our systems. This code contained a series of digits and alpha characters. Unfortunately, after many millions of these codes had been generated, some started showing up with 'DAMN', 'FUCK', 'SHIT', and other curse words embedded within the automatically generated confirmation code. Needless to say, a few rather clueless, and maybe slightly paranoid customers started accusing us of trying to corrupt the youth, and at swearing at our own users. That must have been a fun couple of weeks while the developers modified that code! LOL!
OK, so I was a contractor working as a tech support drone for a large government agency's legal department, which has a big office in DC and various satelite offices around the country. I get sent out to the Salt Lake City office to fix a bunch of stuff. Obviously, my first priority is to figure out what's wrong with the backup system, because they haven't done one sucessfully in a month (you can see it coming can't you). So I go look at the server, and it's monitor has entirely lost v-synch, everything is just scrolling up too fast to read. No problem, I grab a spare monitor. But the server is pushed all the way against the wall, so I can't unhook the old one with out sliding it out a couple inches. Which I do (very gently even!), and immediately hear a ping-pong sound coming from the HD. Something had come loose in there, and was just waiting for any movement to fall apart entirely. It's toast.
There is nothing like going into a conference room full of lawyers who had no problems before, and explain that, five minutes after you walked in the door, their server is down and all their work from the last month is gone forever. They seemed singularly uninterested in the fact that it was not my fault...
You guys think this is funny? I just wasted five minutes of my life reading that crap.
I was working on a machine and saw a little "string" of plastic sticking off the case in one of the drive bays. I grabbed it and gave it a good pull to break it off and make everything look clean and tidy. Unfortunately, it wasn't platic at all, but a tiny thin strip of metal from the case. Yeah, that sucked.
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
Id like to see the windows command to install an digital unix package onto a PC. Im pretty sure you couldmt just double click on the package and NT would recognise it.
For those of you who use Linux, you might have already done this: I have a computer with 2 hard drives. The second hard drive is mounted to /mnt/storage. This is just for all the junk and backups that I don't want on my main drive. I wanted to reload Linux with a different distro, so I copied everything from my home directory to /mnt/storage (about 20 gigs), then unplugged the second drive and began to install Linux. After i was done, I plugged the second drive back in and mounted it back to /mnt/storage on the new install. This is where I began to pull my hair out by the handfull. I had forgot to mount the second hard drive to /mnt/storage before copying all the data from my home directory. So as you all know, it ended up on the filesystem of the hard drive that I had just reformatted. I learned a lesson or two that day!
Try sending dd a SIGUSR1. At least with the current version of GNU dd, this prints the current progress. See the man page.
My personal best oopsie was when I accidently deleted 460GB of home directories on a rather large cluster. Luckily the backups were in-tact and the nature of the delete lead to no actual data loss. But it did take about a day to restore it all...
ok, the linked article's list was pretty lame, but the comments have been entertaining.
One: I lost a laptop because it was in the back of the car and when my wife got home she put it behind the car while unloading. I then backed over it the following morning thinking, "damn kids left a toy in the driveway." I didn't enjoy explaining this to my boss as it was a work computer... but otoh thank god.
Two: Uncle and friend replacing motherboard get the two power plugs in the wrong order (they were not keyed)... motherboards were expensive back then too.
Three: Friend wanted to print out something from a BBS but his printer was in the wrong slot (it mattered back then, this was a Franklin, an Apple II compatible computer)... I watched him switch the board in slow motion... the words "don't do that" wanted to come but they didn't... the computer was gone.
A co-worker and me were co-oping with SGI back in 1997 and we had some Origin 2000s set up for demos. One of the processor boards had gone bad so we did the nominal replacement procedure. This is pretty straightforward, although a little time consuming. As it turns out SGI used these incredibly touchy connecters to attach the Node (CPU) boards to the backplane. Besides the normal mounting bolts on the cards, there were also these two long screws that were attached on either side of the connector. When you installed the board, the proper proceedure for screwing those screws in was to alternate between the two and turn them only one half turn at a time.
:P ) on this and was cateloging the old board while she finished up the O2k. What I didn't notice was that she probably didn't screw the board in correctly. After everything is all done, we walk around to the front, start up the little 486 that operated the power on those things, and tell it to boot. 10 seconds later I get a whiff of smoke and start rushing around the rack to get to the breaker on the back before it gets too badly fried.
Anyway, I was teaching the new co-op (being the senior co-op
As it turns out the other Node boards were fine, but the on the backplane (a far more expensive part) a resister had exploded and burned a finger sized hole through the motherboard and scored the metal underneath. The other Node board might have been fine too, but it had a relatively large amount of soot deposited on it.
I read the internet for the articles.
the suckiest place on earth.
worthless article. Not the least funny.
Zzzz
I remember one time my friend wanted me to get his video card from his computer at home, because we needed to test a computer at another house. Well, i opened up the case and pulled out the agp card, only there was still that lock there, so i jiggled that around a bit and got the card out. Then i realized the computer had been on the whole time. :o
luckily, no damage caused to any components.
Another time, after windows decided to uninstall itself on a drive (the drive was on its way out, i figured out later) i wanted to reinstall windows on the drive. it didnt let me. so i plugged in another drive and tried to install on that. it had stuff on it, so it wouldnt let me install there either. so i went to format it and discovered halfway through that i'd gotten the wrong drive. I'd killed all my data that i hadnt backed up, from pretty much my entire computerized life.
Eventually i found a data restore program that saved the majority of it, and i got 2 new hard drives out of the deal.
My employer runs a home automation company out of an added-on office in what used to be an unfinished basement in his home. It's a nice conversion, but because of poor planning the house has toilets below the level of the sewer drain, requiring a holding tank with a sump pump to get the sewage back up to street level. This tank is below the floor of what used be the unfinished basement (cleverer readers are starting to see where this is headed).
He'd had his brand new G4 (when those were brand new) set up under his desk for a few weeks when something went wrong with the pump, and raw sewage began backing up in the holding tank. In a panic, he moved his desk chair aside, ripped off the carpeted access hatch he'd been sitting over, and knocked his brand new, candy-coated Macintosh into 3 feet of poo soup. Where it sat until he found a way to fish it out, by which time the entire carpeted office floor was saturated with human waste (fortunately, this all happened before I started there, and the carpet has been replaced).
Maybe the poopy Mac was salvageable, maybe not, but he just decided to write it off, along with the only copy of the company QuickBooks database that was sitting on its crusty HDD. I can't say I blame him.
oh man, one time, way back, i was trying to set up some batch file to run in autoexec.bat when windows 95 was booting. it was supposed to delete the netscape cache.
/y mistake. i ended up losing hours of music that i'd made for fun. seriously probably 200 little snippets: some songs, some just beginnings... that was really cool.
anyway, it was my first and only deltree
oops!
My favorite happened while I was using a sig that said something like:
;-)
Unix perversity of the week:
find . '*.o' -exec rm {} ';'
Don't try this at $HOME
This got appended to messages that I sent to several mailing lists. Of course, I got several very nasty letters from people who didn't understand what was wrong with the command, and tried it. At $HOME, of course.
You can probably imagine how I learned what this command does. It's one of my favorite examples of bad UI design.
(No; don't try it at $HOME. Try "mkdir foo; cd foo" and link in a few random files from some other directories, to see what it does with them.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"So I'm running a CPU fan booth at a computer show, and some guy walks up and puts his finger into one of the high speed fans, then complains it doesn't have a grill. See, if he had been wearing his 'I'm Stupid' sign, I could have said, 'Now, I know you're probably not going to understand this, but putting your hand into a moving fan is really gonna hurt!"
Help us build a better map!
I couldn't get my modem working. I was new at linux administration, although I'd been using unix for years, so I thought it'd work just great to do something like: cd /dev
for x in `ls` do echo "ATDT4911234" >> $x; done
and listen for the modem so I could figure out its location.
turns out /dev/hda1 comes WAY before /dev/(serial stuff) and it does not like having random stuff written to it. I don't know quite what happened but it didn't boot anymore.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
This actually happened to me some time ago with my IBM Thinkpad 385XD (P-233). Put my laptop on top of the roof and then ran back inside to get something. The person driving the car (ES300) decided to move out of the way of another car and ended up having it drop corner first to the pavement and drive over it with the rear wheel.
Fortunately, the laptop worked perfectly, so it didn't need recovery. In fact, I gave it to a family member who is using it to this day for basic word processing! The only flaw was one of hte clips that holds the screen down cracked (not worth fixing- it has two), but the laptop works perfectly. Not a scratch.
Just proves those Thinkpads used to be spectacular for their money... Better than today's Dells that break just sitting on a desk.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
The first one was about the luser who used the CD drive tray as a copyholder. It was explained to her that this would cause dust build up in the drive, so when it came time to use a CD in it, it wouldn't work. She didn't believe him.
Well, come around a month later, and she wanted to play an audo CD. It wouldn't play, and she wondered why, and he explained why - dust build up. She still didn't believe him, until he dismantled the drive.
The second one involves a spray bottle. Remember once upon a time when there were these vents on the front of thecomputer? Well, one luser decided these were getting a touch too dirty, so she used a water spray bottle she kept around for her cube's foliage and sprayed it once, which was partly effective, so in her logic more would be better. That is, until water got into the case, on the motherboard, and caused such a short that there was a loud POP in the office right before the magic smoke came pouring out the back of her computer. Damage was complete - the entire interior of the case and everything therein was coated in soot and the joltwas so powerful that it actually cracked and split the chip (one of the old style ceramic top chips).
So the luser's response? "Well... can you fix it?"
I don't think the drive was even recoverable.
This sig no verb.
Whilst performing dull and boring tasks I often find I'm compelled to fidget. I can't help it, and I've always been this way. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of working for a small ISP in an overly cramped office in London. Space was so tight that my colleagues PC, whose desk was situated across from me, had his PC case rested directly against my monitor. Having his PSU fan blowing in my face was actually quite welcome during the summer time. I would often find my fingers running over the back of his machine during less than captivating conversations, on occasion accidentally removing his keyboard or mouse in the process. Before the advent of auto-sensing voltage PSU's - most power supplies in the UK were sold with a 240/120V switch. Without being consciously involved in the decision process, I somehow managed to push the switch down to 120V. I was immediately awoken out of my slumber by the flash of light, puff of smoke and enormous cracking sound that were emitted at the end of my forefinger. As a result of this traumatic experience, I have now taken up doodling.
I used to habitually keep my machine's case open to allow for easy access. Aside from having to blow the thing out a bit more frequently this never really posed a problem, until I came home one night, drunk. As I lurched into bed, I noticed a very loud, irregular buzzing sound. My CPU fan had started to flake out over the past week and I hadn't yet found time to replace it, but again, no problem-- all I had to do was lightly thwock the side of the heat sink to get it to shut up, at least for long enough to allow me to pass out in peace. I staggered up, weaved my way over to my desk, then jabbed my finger in the general direction of the heat sink.
Here's what happened:
1. My finger went directly into the spinning CPU fan, causing one of the blades to break off and fly directly into...
2. My forehead, causing me to windmill my way backwards onto...
3. My ass, where I noticed with relief that the annoying buzzing sound had stopped, because...
4. The fan was no longer spinning. Of course, it took me a couple of seconds to realize that...
5. Oh shit! I have to turn everything off before...
6. My monitor goes bright blue as my motherboard decides to shut itself down rather than allow the CPU to melt itself into a small pool on the bottom of my case.
Thank you, ASUS, for protecting me from myself.
Posterity, my posterior.
So I set about installing the drives in the hot swap bays. Then I rebooted the machine and ran the RAID config utility. I guess I was a little too tired because I wasn't reading very carefully. When presented with the option to initialize the RAID, I chose to initialize channel 0 (the existing drives) instead of 1 (the new drives).
Imagine my suprise when the file server would not boot after finishing the RAID config utility. I knew it was going to be a long night so I called my friend down from Seattle to help. We stayed very late and came in early the next morning, fueled by energy drinks.
Luckily I had tape backups of all of the deleted files on the file server. Setting up Windows 2003 in our domain wasn't too hard either. What was really bad was that we found that, due to an oversight over a year prior, none of our accounting data was backed up! All payroll, income, tax, expenditres, all of it -- gone! Needless to say, I feared for my job. Luckily I work for some great people, and the data re-entry from paper hard copies of all of our accounting data continues to this day.
I am still recovering from the trauma of that day. Thank heavens I have my stable Windows 3.1 (although that isn't saying much compared to ME.)
The "road kill" scenario is probably not that rare. It happened to me years ago with a pair of SIMMs, and back then their value was probably equal to my fortnightly salary. Luckily my boss just laughed it off...
Those who don't know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it.
EMC Symmetrix 3000 series SAN falling off the back of the delivery truck.
I worked for a company that had this happen when moving one of these cabinets (about 1500 pounds and I'm told something like $750K worth of equipment) between two sites.
EMC takes care of the move of equipment like this - they contract to a freight company, and they train the freight company's personnel on how to move the equipment safely.
I'm just glad I retained the e-mail that said to underinsure it "because what could possibly happen?" - yep, my name was on the shipper form, and the quote is what I was told by the person who decided how much to insure it for. Never did find out what the remedy was from this disaster; fortunately, there was no live data on it, as the device was being re-tasked after the move.
That article is well, crap. I mean come on:-
"The Polish explorer Krystof Wielicki dropped his digital camera when climbing the Himalayas on his latest expedition, smashing it to smithereens and damaging the memory card in the process"
So... man drops camera and breaks it. Excuse me while I laugh at the stupidity, the cruel irony and....
Anyway. A friend worked at a company that sold accounts systems to small businesses many years ago, back in the age of the 5.25" diskette. Reception was operated by dear old Pat, a somewhat confused woman in her mid 60's. Reception didn't have a lot of receiving to do and so one quiet day, she was assigned the task of installing Sage something or other on a PC. The software shipped on half a dozen 5.25" disks.
"It's easy, says the techy - just follow the prompts on screen to the letter and you can't go wrong".
So, in goes the first disk, and after a while, the screen says "Insert disk 2 and press Enter".
Yes folks, you got it - at no time did the install script say "Take out disk 1". It was a struggle, but Pat managed to get disk 2 in the drive and shut the door again.
Despite the sparking, the SIMMs survived, and the machine came up fine after a reset. Funnily enough, I was even wearing a grounding strap ...
Anything I do, I get a kernel panic. So, back to single-user mode and try to fix everything using plain old vinum.
It is supposedly working right now, I am sorely tempted to reinstall this server from scratch using something else.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Back when I had an XT w/ two 5.25 drives, my friends came and we played some games which I don't remember what and oh we were having some snacks and one poor soul says (w/ the floppy disk in his hand) "Hey don't you ever touch this hole area!" and he touches the right spot with his oily fingers. Of course I got mad but fortunately nothing bad happened except I could see a crust(!) and a small oily spot on it. I still don't understand why he touched it and No it wasn't a mistake.
Back in 1994, I decided to install Slackware on my parent's system. Soon the extra space on the 420meg drive was needed. Instead of just removing the Linux partition and resizing the C: partition, I figured that I would be clever. I would delete Linux while it was running to see what would happen.
I ran "rm -rf *" in /. After about 10 minutes, I realized that I had mounted the DOS drive in /dos to access some files. Linux was deleting Windows! Not that that would be a bad thing normally, but my parent's accounting data was there.
I reset the system. Windows did not load but the system booted. Luckily for me the data was still there, although most of the software was gone.
Now I use my stupidest computer mistake as my nick.
Most of these incidents actually had a pretty high rate of recovery, upwards of %80, usually better. Basically its more of a success list, an advertisement, a testament, of the quality of my employer's services.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Best computer mishap I remember was discovered in a friends basement. While we were hanging out playing some video game of some kind, I started noticing an odd smell (not that unusual in a Geek's basement). Looking around, I saw a little bit of smoke coming from the back of his desk.
'Dude, your computer's smoking!!'
When we took a look, we found a slurpee cup that had spilled over into the monitor, and a trail of ants crawling up the side of his case. For each three ants that walked in, one ant and two puffs of smoke came back out.
We watched this for about 20 minutes before washing the monitor down.
"Hey, did you know RPM will let you remove every package from the system?"
I once had cause to utter the above sentence. I was working on a customer's web server remotely. I was performing some maintenance, upgrading this, migrating that. At one point, I had a list of installed packages I wanted to remove from the system. Well, I screwed up something and somehow managed to run "rpm --erase" with a list of every package currently installed on the system. I was multi-tasking and had switched to other things, so I didn't really clue in to the fact that my RPM transaction was taking way too long to run until some of the scripts tied to the uninstall action started complaining because things like "perl" were missing. I started pounding on [CTRL]+[C] but it was already too late. Almost everything was gone. I couldn't even scp files in.
That was a fun drive to the client site. At least the data was all still there, since only the software was removed.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I worked on it for 4-5 months. Pretty much full 8-10 hour days doing nothing else but posting rental transactions and restaurant/bar sales. It was a ski resort that I was working at.
I finished up the reports and spreadsheets, backed everything up to floppies put them in my desk. Printed everything out on a 9 pin IBM dot matrix printer and put the reports on the bosses desk. It was LATE Friday night and they had to go the the accountants office Monday morning. So I pretty much finished everything up.
I left the office that night and found out Sunday afternoon that a security guard left on a kerosene heater in the office Saturday night - fell asleep in the guard shack and the office was burnt to the ground by Sunday morning.
When I got there Sunday afternoon, I actually thought that I was going to cry looking at all the burn wood and ashes from the building and knowing that all those 1 and 0's that I worked so hard to put together was nothing more than vapor...
Funny/rotten/stupid things do happen with your computers - but if you take backups with you when you leave - you might be OK...
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
This topic made my day - I haven't laughed this hard in a while.
Okay - my story. After I got EQ Companion published and before I returned to university to go after a second degree, I worked in a local not-for-profit corporation as a front desk clerk. The setup around the computer was like this:
LCD monitor on the desk (which is an L-shaped desk), the main box below the desk, and the HP laser printer at one side beside the wall. Above the printer was a shelf, which I had put some papers on. Above that shelf was another shelf, and a houseplant is sitting there.
One of my coworkers, who was a very helpful sort, decided to take care of watering all of the office plants. This is usually something that happens during lunch, and makes no difference at all to anything.
Well, one day she wanders to my desk and waters the plant...a bit more than she should have. The water overflows on the little plate the plant is sitting on, and drips onto the shelf beneath it, and then drips directly into the tray of the laser printer. By the time I come off lunch, there's a small pool of water in the printer.
Now, I immediately unplug the printer and inform the manager. And then, since due process demands it, I contact technical support.
So here I am, part techie, talking to HP's tech support line in the most embarassing conversation in my life.
"I've got a problem with the printer, and I just want to find out if it's salvageable."
"What's happened to it?"
"Well, we, um, well, we, um, watered it."
For this next bit of the story, you have to understand that the front office had two laser printers, and one of them had just died of completely natural causes less than a week before this incident.
To make matters worse, I was also the recording secretary to the Board of Directors, AND responsible for reporting the state of the front office to them, and shortly afterwords I had to inform the Board precisely how we had lost two laser printers in less than a week...
(Amazing how much territory "attrition" can cover...)
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
A friend had a customer that rang up and said that they had been running DOS and decided to delete two files that they didn't want '.' and '..'.
.., everything else had gone.
The customer rang back and complained that the only two files left on his machine where . and
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I think you have to work in tech support to appreciate how good these are!
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Back in my PC tech days, I had a few drives that would fail due to the heads being stuck or the platters not spinning up. Often a quick twist of the drive (NOT while it was powered-on) would do the trick. In a few extreme cases, I actually took the cover-off and spun the platters with my fingers (by the edges) then powered the drive up and did a quick backup/transfer to another drive. While I did not do this alot, it usually worked. This really surprised me as I thought any grains of dust in the air would crash the heads.
I'll never get back those minutes I spend reading this stupid list.
Has there already been 10 different version M$=B$ operating systems.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Best one I've had was when I was working in a Tech department.
We had a computer in for maint. The system in question was a old AMD 1.6ghz, the older procs that burned around 60*C Constant idling (AMD's version of a toaster).
The case was rather dusty, enough so that the fans were basically jammed up and hadn't been moving enough air to keep the system relativly cool.
So, I took a can of dust-be-gone, the Pressurized stuff that says "Flammable" on the side.
I spent a good 3 minutes spraying the dust out, I might add, while the machine was operational and reinstalling Windows 98 SE (this was some time ago).
The video card was a rather large 3DFX unit that blocked the processor heatsink in on one side and the CDRom's covered the right side, the powersource at the top and the case to the left of the sink. There was no clear view to dust the heatsink off.
So, I turned the can *upside down*, stuck it in the heatsink, and pulled the trigger.
It was at this point in time when I looked up to notice Win98 asking for the CD Key. I hadn't noticed that I was spraying instant-freeze crap all over the place, and I continued to spray for a few seconds. When I looked down, I managed to spray the CPU socket.
There was a blue spark, as I remember, that lept a few CM into the air, followed by what I can only describe as a "expanding blue light". The plume expanded to the sides of the case as it traveled upwards, and shot into the PSU.
Thats about when the flame turned a more visible yellow. There was a psuedo-loud "PHOOMPH" as a flame shot out of the PSU and continued upwards toward my dazed expression painted on my face.
Long story short, the burst of flame fried the PSU, and probobly landed up travling about 4 feet into the air above the computer.
Lost two eyebrows, a wad of hair over my forhead, and I gained a new respect for "Compressed Air".
Just after finishing my engineering degree I worked for Sys Admin dept of a big multinational. Everybody in the company had a windows machine and a Sun workstation. Also there were many flavours of UNIX on the servers. All these Unix server/workstation were to never be shutdown until unless instructed by the head of Sys Admin dept. It was because these workstations used to run complex compilations which used to go on for days and developers just used to lock their workstations while going home. The same setup was at other offices of this big multinations all over the world.
... ... Holy $%^&^!
To make the administration easy, there was a system of automated scripts and programs where you just have to specify the target machine/network and the action to be performed. The action could be as trivial as shuting down a local workstation for H/W repair to fixing/upgrading any software on any machine/network all over the world. This Automation system was run as root privilage for installing/upgrading the software.
For performing a wide scope operation (like, installing software on all the servers and workstations in the Honk-Kong office), the actions settings have to be first tested on a test workstation and if everything goes fine, run the automation system for whole network etc.
Only one person was in-charge of running this automation system, but when I joined he trained me to use this automation system for performing easy and non-critical jobs like collecting list of all the users accounts on servers/workstations in US office etc.
One friday evening I was supposed to run the automation system to collect the user list from Taiwan office. I set the action to "Collect the user list" and set the target machine/network as the "Test machine". Ran it, wow success!
Now I just had to change the target machine/network to "Taiwan office network". I took a very short break for drinking water, came back changed the target network to "Taiwan office network" and ran the automation system, and went for dinner. After the dinner I checked the log
server1 shutdown
server2 shutdown
....
The whole Taiwan office was shutdown (all the servers and workstations) because when I was drinking the water after running the automation system on the test machine...the other guy used the same automation system for shuting down a local server for repair.
So he set the target as "local server" and action as "shutdown". When I started to run the system on Taiwan office, I just changed the "target network", not the "action", bceuase I did not expect that jerk to use the automation system during when he instructed me to use it.
I can never forget the horrified face of our Sys Admin boss, when he was trying to call Taiwan office, hoping that somebody would still be in the office who could switch-on all the servers and workstations one by one.
i appreciate that this topic has gotten a lot of works to relay their interesting and sometimes funny computer tragedies, but does any else think this post is not a lot more than an attempt to get folks to look at the banner ads on the initial "top 10" link? really, a guy got mad at his laptop and put it in the toilet and flushed? is that funny? more like the guy making up the list was running out of ideas towards the end of the list.
Jesus Christ!!!! When I decided to read this article I thought I'd find something amusing. This was the most pointless crap I've ever read. Only a true dork would even begin to think this was interesting at all. Even in my own personal experience I've seen more amusing things done to computers. Hey dude the tape on your glasses is coming unraveled.
*: Literally, "from lost to the river"; a Spanish saying which means that, if everything is lost, trying something else, no matter how absurd or desperate, won't do things worse.
Strength, balance, courage and reason. If you know what's this about, contact me!
The strangest one I've ever had happened right before I was about to reformat and reinstall winXP on my system.
I just emptied the recycle bin when I noticed the icon didn't change to empty. I tried to empty it again, at which point windows asked me if I wanted to permanently delete "C:/WINDOWS" from the recycling bin. Scared me for a second, but I was reinstalling anyway. When I checked the contents, there was nothing there.
I almost didn't catch it, but it was really strange. I should have grabbed a screenshot.
No rest for the livid.
In 1991, a co-worker asked me how to re-partition his hard drive. I told him that this was a silly idea, considering that he had lots of space and the partitions didn't get into anyone's way. He just wanted to do it because it was "better".
Anyway, after explaining that he would have to save all of the old data some place (and suggesting that he not use millions of floppies, but instead FTP it up to our Unix system), he went away.
About an hour later, he came back asking for PKzipFix. I asked him why, and he told me that PKunzip was complaining that he had a bad ZIP file. I went over to his desk, and after about 15 minutes of questioning, I realized what had happened.
He had PKzip-ed each of his partitions and FTP-ed them up to the system. Unfortunately, he did not specify BINARY mode, and so it only transferred ASCII characters and converted CRLFs to LFs. Since he had reformatted his drive, all of that data was lost...
The RISK was that FTP had no warning message of the following sort:
WARNING: Non-ASCII characters found while in ASCII mode.
I suppose that some further argument could be made that BINARY mode should be the default (instead of the data-modifying ASCII mode)...
Back in the day (tm) my girlfriend was developing semi-custom business aps on minicomputers. Good programming practice was being followed and there was a text file used to parse error codes to actual human readable messages. The text file could be swapped out at will, and great fun was had by all by writing things like "This error occurred because that great wanker (insert customer buyer name here) insisted we add this f-ed up feature that will never work!". Much hilarity of this nature insued. The day the said wanker came in for the demo, they very carefully backed out the bogus error text file and put in the legit one. They even tested to make sure everything was a go. I'm sure you see where this is going. During the demo, some last minute changes blew up and while they took the guy out to lunch, showed them pictures of the new kids, did whatever they could to keep him busy while they restored to the last known working condition, which, as they were wont to forget in the panicked atmosphere, had the bogus error messages. After the restore, wanker says, "but what would happen if I did this" does something wanker-like with the keyboard and POP! Up comes the "hilarious" message.
They say intelligence is learning from your mistakes and wisdom is learning from others. Since that day I have never, ever put anything in any code that I wouldn't want anyone in the world reading....