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Big Red Button Disasters?
FredDC asks: "The Daily WTF has a story about a Big Red Button disaster. What Big Red Button disasters have you experienced? Which ones have you caused? Are there any that you've heard about, or do you know of any that can happen any day now?"
When I was a young child, I found a fire alarm, and, with my father screaming ``No!'' in the background, proceeded to pull it. This is right after we moved to America from Russia, and dealing with the fire department, while barely understanding what they are saying, must have sucked.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I was doing I.T. support for a 400 person call center. In the server room there was a Big Red Button that was very clearly labeled "EMERGENCY POWER SHUT-OFF" near one of the sets of double-doors.
A technician from U.S. Worst had finished his work in the server room and on his way out he hit the Big Red Button thinking that would open the doors, like at a hospital.
Hilarity ensued.
Later that day I printed out several mock "Big Red Buttons" on sheets of paper to use as decoys next time the tech had to visit.
~> ftp www.workplace.domain /mis-typed/path /mis-typed/path: The system cannot find the file specified.
/index.html with something that was supposed to be a couple levels down is bad enough.
/index.html is owned by someone else entirely. Someone who now must be woken up in the middle of the night, in a different country...
Connected to www.workplace.domain.
220 Microsoft FTP Service
Name: shag
331 Password required for shag.
Password:
230 User shag logged in.
Remote system type is Windows_NT.
ftp> cd
550
ftp> put index.html
local: index.html remote: index.html
227 Entering Passive Mode.
125 Data connection already open; Transfer starting.
226 Transfer complete.
ftp>
The realization that one has just overwritten a public-facing, high-traffic
It's worse when
After I did this two or three times, I decided to stop being such a hardcore geek and got an FTP application with a GUI.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Wow, I haven't posted in forever.
Anyway, we did a big datacenter migration at my last company. I'm not going to name names, but it's a Fortune 100 company based in Austin, TX. The move was happening because we built our own building with our own datacenter.
As part of the technical staff (network engineering/security), I was given a tour of the new datacenter before it opened. My boss and assorted other folks were on the tour. My boss, by the way, was a huge...jerk.
The electrician showed us the Big Red Buttons by each of the exit doors. He also said that each of the Power Distribution Units (of which there were three) had a Big Red Button that would cut power to just the areas powered by that unit.
My boss said, not jokingly, "If you need to cut power in an emergency, see if you can figure out which PDU is involved and just cut that one, so we don't lose the whole datacenter."
I piped up: "If I'm getting 220 across my nipples, cut the whole damn room. I really don't care enough about the company to die. I can see my epitaph now: 'Here lies Dimwit. He died saving two-thirds of the datacenter.'"
Man, if looks could kill.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
to tell people that "Halon" is French for "Exit," so if they ever get locked in the data center, they know how to get out.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You know the submission queue is slow when by the time the story is posted the site has changed its name.
I used to work help-desk, and late at night there would only be two people in the quite large building - me and one of the operators. Anyone who as worked with "ops" knows they generally turn a bit strange due to them working nights with nobody around and only DAT tapes for company.
So anyway, there is this big fire alarm panel with tons of buttons that we never really thought about, until one night when it started beeping constantly. The ops guy found a key to it, and then we both stood there looking at the probably 60 buttons and flashing lights, etc. Personally, I would have chosen one of the black buttons marked "mute", but the ops guy went straight for the biggest red one on the board.
The result was more beeping, lots of red lights and about 5 fire-engines.
And as long as we're talking halon, who can forget the classic Vaxen, My Children, Just Don't Belong In Some Places.
Act One
Big test floor, where several large (multi-million dollar) computer systems are being configured and tested before shipment to the customer.
Tall skinny hyperactive developer (no, not me, I was just an observor) leaning against the wall of the test floor, actually *fiddling with* the Big Red Button.
Someone suggests that he ought not do that. He promises to be careful.
Act Two
Five minutes later. All the power has just gone out. It's amazing how quiet it is all of a sudden. Everyone is looking over at the tall skinny developer with his hand on the Big Red Button.
No words are spoken.
Act Three
Half an hour later. Electrician is leading the tall skinny developer around as he turns on each part of the power system in the right order. CEO and various unmollified developers watching. Back by the door, guy from facilities is bolting a flap over the Big Red Button.
This story has been around for years and years. In case you haven't heard it, here it is again.
***
Magic Switch Story
Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no-one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labelled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch was in the "more magic" position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the "more magic" position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on "more magic".
GLS
(1995-02-22)
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Two solaris oopsies.
One: Somehow, I don't know how, I accidentally deleted
Two: Not wanting to accidentally halt the machine without really meaning it, I moved the halt command to halt.ireallymeanit. I then replaced halt with a small shell script that echoed "You don't want to halt this machine" (sleep a few seconds) "If you do, type halt.ireallymeanit" (sleep a few seconds) exit.
Then, to test it, I type halt. Without (duh) first typing which halt to make sure there wasn't a halt command before the
Needless to say, it's not Solaris' fault, but somehow I always managed to screw up that OS without meaning to, so I have developed a healthy fear and loathing for it. I'd like to think I've grown up a bit since then - this has been like 3 or 4 years now, and I've learned a helluvalot since then.
~Wx
sig?
...on the way to the toilets.
...and some pipes.... ...this used to be a factory... ...compressed air? Sprinkler valve? What?
It is on a chain that goes way up to the roof...
I don't know.
I wonder, I wonder.
Other people wonder.
Maybe it has been pulled many times? Maybe someone will pull it and sprinkle all the PCs? Maybe someone pulls it and we all get flushed down the intertubes. (Funny, my kids have never seen a toilet with a chain)
Life is full of little puzzlements.
(It all goes wrong tomorrow, IT WASN'T ME! I HAVE RESISTED TEMPTATION FOR YEARS NOW!)
Articles to slashdot have to be fact checked, and tested on a focus group to make sure that they don't cause emotional distress. After a two months of this, the editors will submit a form P41B with a write up, which is circulated to have it's facts, grammar and spelling checked. The legal department need to process a form P09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0B for the story to make sure there are no legal implications as to publishing it, due to trade secrets, the DMCA or libel. Then it's pretty much a quiet month of tuning the write up and testing it on focus groups before publication. Seems like cramming all this activity into three months is remarkable to me.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I took a great deal of effort to toddler-proof my study. PC and laptop with exposed buttons at desk height or above. Synth moved from wobbly stand to sturdy wall-mounted shelf. Linux server, under my desk, rehomed into a blacker-than-black case, fancy lighting rig unplugged, all buttons, optical drives and recesses safely hidden behind a plain black door. O'Reilly Wall moved from bookcase to high shelves.
I even got a "decoy" keyboard for my 11-month-old daughter to play with.
Of course, she found the UPS switch in seconds. It had a nice glowy LED above it, and was sitting on top of the Linux server just at her shoulder height.
All three PCs, the whole study, powered down, and not in a nice graceful apcupsd way, just a sudden BOINK, follwed by darkness and silence, penetrated only by a happy gurgle.
Thank heavens for Linux software RAID mirroring.
(A couple of months earlier, she managed to cause Windows to prompt "Add new hardware - Searching for drivers" [blur-o-matic cameraphone photo] by sucking the end of my iPod USB cable. Unfortunately I didn't have any Win2K drivers for a 9-month old baby. I bet Ubuntu installs them by default, even though the GNU crowd complain they're not truly free.)
Annabel is one on Sunday. Wish her happy birthday.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
What do you mean "not truly free". She's open source, and created by relatively unskilled labor, right?
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there's only one thing any self respecting geek can do.
Hang a note on it that says "Pull me."
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