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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.
...thinks that datacenters should be open to ANYONE besides critical staff? At work, we don't even let the janitor in...
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.
Stimpy, don't press the red button!
~> 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.
I was a QA intern at Fujitsu working on the WorldsAway chat world when I discovered a rare crash bug with a new artist tool that I could reproduce successfully but my boss couldn't. Since the tool was supposed to be used on the test server only, my boss approved release of the update to the production server. Everything was fine for a day before the production server started crashing. Turns out that the artists were creating new content on the production server instead of the test server and using the new tool that caused the crashes. The production server was shut down for three days a complete code rewrite was required and Fujitsu lost $250,000 USD in revenue. My boss kept his job as he led the programming team to rewrite the code. I, on the other hand, was given two weeks notice that my six month contract wasn't going to be renewed. Two weeks after I left the company, one-third of the division was laid off to pay for the lost revenue.
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...
Usually those Emergency Power Off buttons are required by fire code. Youre boss's building probably won't pass inspection without it.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
All new keyboards have a single key Shutdown/sleep thing.
Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh @ little fingers.
I either rip the bastard thing right off the board or dig out the regkey thingy to disable it.
liqbase
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
1) I was working with a friend of mine, and we were setting up the graceful shutdown of the servers after getting all the UPS on the network.
He manually tripped the battery low condition with the intention that the UPS would abort the shutdown when the power came good again. Nope, all the servers were triggered for shutdown (Couldn't abort on the UPS or the servers) and had to be rebooted. The best part was that the UPS sent commands to another site for servers to shutdown there. We had to phone another data centre and get them to go power on the servers after we quickly faxed through forms telling them what they had to do (Cabinet number, server name etc)
2) Another job, I had just wired up a big red button next to the door in the new data centre (Someone had forgotten to install one, so I had to do it on a weekend). Well, one of the guys who I worked with phoned me up asking me if the switch was connected. I told him it was, and that I hadn't installed the Molly Guard yet, but was going to do it after I finished all the testing when I got back from lunch. He said OK, and hung up. He got it into himself to finish the testing to save me the time. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't have been a problem, pulling apart APC UPS units wasn't a major concern to us at this point. What he assumed had happened however was that I had left the toggle switch for test on. No, I hadn't. The switch worked and was live in case it needed to be used (It was there for a reason, just because I am a block down the street getting lunch doesn't mean that it might not have a purpose as far as I am concerned). About 5 mins later, he phones me back up and asks if I can come back to the office, I say "Sure, not a problem, what's going on? The SQL server not patching?" (Something else we were doing that day) "I am in the data centre". At this point in time, I realise that normally I am asking him to walk out of the data centre cause it's too noisy. Glad it was the weekend and there wasn't much going on.
I have also had a UPS engineer blow dust into a VESDA and we had a few fire trucks turn up, but that wasn't big red button issue.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
On top of the support calls, he was of course getting his daily "yelling at escalation managment party conference call" because not everything was smooth, needless to say. For instance, that brand new customer was brand new to deploying a cell phone infrastructure: bad planning, downtime, crazy schedule were the least of their problems. To add some icing to this merry cake, our switching software was quite new as well, and prone to er, quirks?
Talk about a recipe for wide-scale disaster ;-)
But this day, instead of storming to the next support specialist to wearily beg for some random node reboot, X was running to each and everyone desk, doing his grand floor tour, smiling like a madmam, yelling for everyone to hear:
"They shut off the switch, they shut off the ***** switch, I tell you".
Turns out some cleaning lady tried to shut the **light** off after a good floor-cleaning session, but when for the BIG SWITCH, the one with the big conspicuous red handle, labelled "MAIN POWER - DO NOT..."
BLACKOUT
X did not get his yellint at party this day, and possibly a few days afterward.
(No real names was used, because all the abovementionned companies are still operating as of today:)
[Pruneau
You know the submission queue is slow when by the time the story is posted the site has changed its name.
Around ten years ago I was looking to rent a house in Park Royal, London with a couple of friends. We went into a decent house on Twyford Abbey Road for those that know the area (just off Hanger Lane Gyratory).
The landlord was abroad in Tokyo, so it was just ourselves and the agent. Nice house, but whilst looking around we saw a big red button in the main bedroom. For those to whom it's obvious what the purpose was, at that time it was my first encounter with such a device - first encounter for all of us in fact. And so, with the agent waiting downstairs, the conversation went...
Friend 1: "What's that for?"
Me: "I say we press it. That's what big red buttons are -for-."*
Friend 2: "ok" (presses button)
The next scene - pandemonium as the alarms all round the house go off. It's a panic button of course - we'd never come across one at that point, so we pressed it anyway. Up runs the estate agent to find out what we'd done. We tell him - yep, love the house. We'll take it. Oh, the alarm thing? That's fine, it's because we pressed this big red button. Ah - the owner's in Tokyo and you don't know the code? And it's -what- time in Tokyo? Hmm. Err...
And out the house we went, as fast as possible. And away we drove, again as fast as possible. We'd left the agent in charge of a screaming house, which every neighbour for a mile must have heard, and with absolutely no way to shut the alarm off for several hours. It was, as the saying goes, time to be somewhere else.
Still took the house though - lived there for a few years, enjoyed it actually.
Cheers,
Ian
*I was actually quoting a friend of mine, who in turn says he was quoting some film or comic. If you happen to know the source of the quote, I'd be interested to hear it.
I wanted to delete temp files that my editor created it did so by putting a ~ at the end of it. FileName~
/bin/rm -rf * ~
I also had some directories I wanted deleted so I renamed them with a ~ at the end as well So I can delete them in one swoop.
So I was in a rush and didn't want to be warned because I had about 50 or so Temp Files so I did a
That one acedental space whiped out all the files and folder in that directory then preceded to begin deleteing all the files in my home directory as well. I suck most because I had a 1000 line HTML code I just finished (This was in the days before dependable Javascript and CSS). I spent the rest of the day shifting thew the Cache files on my windows box for IE and Netscape for Windows testing. I was able to get most of it back, but man that was a bad day.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
There are big red buttons at the power station that kill the plant and are designed to stop all rotating machinery extremely fast. Turbines with a 10 minute cooldown cycle stop in something like 30s with the big red button. The power grid is designed to cope with such an immediate loss of supply- the grid controllers maintain a "spinning reserve" that is greater than the capacity of the the single largest plant. If one plant should happen to have a sudden mishap then nothing happens, an already running plant takes up the slack. But if two large power plants were to simultaneously kick off grid at the same moment on a very hot day bad things could happen.
There were a couple days last summer where there was no spare capacity in the Northeast. It was simply so hot that all the AC's were cranked and the grid was saturated in many places. This year should be interesting.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
While not an official "Big Red Button" story I think it is worth telling.
In 1999 while I was working as a private consultant for the capitol city of a small New England state, a colleague of mine was attempting to make a change to the city's core switches. Per usual with this guy, he over-sold his skill set and was way out of his league - while never willing to admit it.
Meanwhile, I was working in the server room on the squid web caching server while he was attempting the change...
I kept hearing him say things like "I wonder what this command does", and "I wonder what the reset command means. Should I enter it?"
Suddenly I was no longer ssh'ed into the proxy server... I looked up and asked "What the hell did you do?"
His answer: "I entered the reset command"
Me: "Well, fix it. Restore the configuration. It looks like you just reset EVERYTHING..."
Well, needless to say, there was NO saved configuration to restore, and no documentation for the city's network nor the equipment installed, and on this equipment the reset command was the command to reset it to its default settings. (BTW, he entered the reset command on the core switch) There were several local switches (connected via copper), and many fiber connections to all the remote departments across the city - several fire departments, the main police department, city hall, you name it... All off-line.
In the end, the city's network was DOWN for 3-4 full days while he contacted qualified people to attempt to rebuild the network...
We would have been better off if he had hit the big red button near the sliding glass door at the server room's exit.
sigh...
P.S. I am pretty sure he blamed it all on me.
Windows is not the answer.
Windows is the question.
The answer is "NO."
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?"
Ford: "What happened?"
Arthur: "A sign lit up saying 'Please do not press this button again.'"
(Douglas Adams)
Then again, this would make really want to push the button...
I had custody of the kids (2, 5 and 7 at the time) every other weekend. Saturday night, I get a call from work, and it's something that can't be fixed from home. I can't find my ex, I can't find a sitter, so I bring the kids in. One of the operators volunteers to show them around the computer room while I work on things. Five minutes later, the IBM mainframe mysteriously halts. Yes, one of the kids had wondered why there was a big red button on the console. My problem was suddenly minor, so I took the kids out for ice cream.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
When I was at Purdue, an engineering club was given an office with a big yellow button on the wall. Late one night... figuring it couldn't be connected to anything... and slap-happy from studying late... someone hit the button and took down the whole engineering computing network :)
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Ever have to escort a bunch of suits through a new data center and have the Chief Operations Officer open the goddamn EPO and punch it?
I have.
I adminned for a LAN party once. We did it in the school cafeteria from 10AM to 11PM. The guys who set up the boxes had half of the machines plugged into a single outlet. Apparently this half of the place was pwnz0ring the other half because I remember things getting louder from that side. Then they got louder still in the form of some words I had never heard before when I walked past and tripped over it. I don't remember much after that. Good times.
Working at a computer center, I think the best design I've seen was the "Big Red Button" was actually 2 buttons, spaced far enough apart that you couldn't hit them both at once with on hand, but close enough together that they were obviously related. They were also much higher off the raised floor than any other switches, and clearly marked.
Just as trivia, that type of circuit is common on industrial equipment (think of the big press from the end scene in Terminator 1) and is called a Two-Hand No-Tie-Down. Basically there are two switches, and they have to both be depressed within a certain interval in order to close the circuit (generally 0.5s or so). If you "tie down" one of the switches, or have something leaning against it, or whatever, pressing the second switch won't trigger (otherwise it would be just a simple AND gate).
The circuits to do it are pretty standard and easily available. What's cooler, is that you can actually get a basically-identical circuit that uses compressed air or other gas instead of electricity (for use in chemical plants and other explosive atmospheres). One of the cooler things I've gotten to see made was a pneumatic "circuit board" cut out of Lucite for this purpose. I've always thought they would make a nice demonstration device for teaching kids about electronic circuits.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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!)
Back in the 70's when I worked in the IT department at TI Austin we had a fairly large computer room with a Big Red Button, and no clear box. We also had no UPS and power outages were a regular part of life (cheap bastards wouldn't listen), so as sysadmin I would deal with these outages. I was getting sick of it, so one day when I had just gotten done rebooting 55 systems from the front panel (7 words of 16 bit binary switches for each) and then read cards in to do the boot on the servers my boss was watching me go through the motions. When I was done and everything was up we talked for a few minutes, I walked out of the room and as I passed the door, right above the Big Red Button there was a light switch. I turned it off and you could hear him gasp. I grinned and turned it back on. They still wouldn't buy a UPS.
Great story on the Big Red Button. A well known company built a new datacenter, and started populating it with servers. Everything was going great. But the datacenter had the Big Red Button. It also had a somewhat smaller Yellow Button. You see, the datacenter's sprinkler system (yes, no halon... water sprinklers) worked in two stages. The first was to fill the tubes with water, and the second was to open up the heads in the sprinklers.
But, in their wisdom, they offered a Big Yellow Button to hold off on opening up the sprinklers. As long as the Big Yellow Button is held down, the sprinklers won't actually spray water. So you can see that this could be very useful in a false alarm situation.
Well, one day, an employee decided to play around with the Big Yellow Button. Yes. Do you know what is coming? No, you probably don't. And neither did the employee. Well, earlier in the story, I mentioned that this was a new datacenter. And it looks like they didn't do a great deal of testing of its emergency features before they put it into use. You see, the people who wired up the Big Yellow Button had swapped the wiring at the other end with the wires to the Big Red Button. But nobody tested the buttons out to make sure they worked. Since you are a Slashdot reader, I'm sure you understand the result of this unfortunate wiring mistake, and lack of testing.
The employee, however, was not fired or significantly disciplined for the significant outage (and disk damage from a sudden power loss) that resulted.
Here's the Molly guard story - although the term is pretty much self explanatory.
(And while we're at it, BRS.) "It is alleged that the emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actually fired a non-conducting bolt into the main power feed."
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I serve as IT support for a company which manages several properties and facilities in a national park. Just two days ago, we experienced an entire property (200+ machines requiring access to a variety of servers on another property and in two different cities elsewhere in the country) suddenly disappear from the grid. No connectivity of any sort, nothing. A team was dispatched who proceeded to troubleshoot everything from NIC cards to cabling to virus scans on the affected machines.
It turned out that a main switch had the power cable removed by someone who needed the outlet to charge her cell phone. Since she is a retail manager with a different company who happened to share one of our retail spaces, I traded out the knowledge of her mistake for goods from her store, including a nifty pair of Timberland boots and some sweaters.
1. Wait for BRB disaster.
2. Determine it's not your fault nor anyone on your team.
3. Blackmail the culprit.
4. Profit!!
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;
Arguably the biggest shutdown-button screw-up in history ...
... didn't register any parameter changes that could justify the SCRAM. Commission ... gathered and analyzed large amount of materials and, as stated in its report, failed to determine the reason why the SCRAM was ordered. There was no need to look for the reason. The reactor was simply being shut down upon the completion of the experiment."
... "
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster :
"At 1:23:04 the experiment began. The unstable state of the reactor was not reflected in any way on the control panel, and it did not appear that anyone in the reactor crew was fully aware of any danger. Steam to the turbines was shut off and, as the momentum of the turbine generator drove the water pumps, the water flow rate decreased, decreasing the absorption of neutrons by the coolant. The turbine was disconnected from the reactor, increasing the level of steam in the reactor core. As the coolant heated, pockets of steam formed voids in the coolant lines. Due to the RBMK reactor-type's large positive void coefficient, the steam bubbles increased the power of the reactor rapidly, and the reactor operation became progressively less stable and more dangerous. As the reaction continued, the excess xenon-135 was burnt up, increasing the number of neutrons available for fission. The prior removal of manual and automatic control rods had no substitute, leading to a runaway reaction.
At 1:23:40 the operators pressed the AZ-5 ("Rapid Emergency Defense 5") button that ordered a "SCRAM" - a shutdown of the reactor, fully inserting all control rods, including the manual control rods that had been incautiously withdrawn earlier. It is unclear whether it was done as an emergency measure, or simply as a routine method of shutting down the reactor upon the completion of an experiment (the reactor was scheduled to be shut down for routine maintenance). It is usually suggested that the SCRAM was ordered as a response to the unexpected rapid power increase. On the other hand, Anatoly Dyatlov, chief engineer at the nuclear station at the time of the accident, writes in his book:
"Prior to 01:23:40, systems of centralized control
The slow speed of the control rod insertion mechanism (18-20 seconds to complete), and the flawed rod design which initially reduces the amount of coolant present, meant that the SCRAM actually increased the reaction rate. At this point an energy spike occurred and some of the fuel rods began to fracture, placing fragments of the fuel rods in line with the control rod columns. The rods became stuck after being inserted only one-third of the way, and were therefore unable to stop the reaction. At this point nothing could be done to stop the disaster. By 1:23:47 the reactor jumped to around 30 GW, ten times the normal operational output. The fuel rods began to melt and the steam pressure rapidly increased, causing a large steam explosion. Generated steam traveled vertically along the rod channels in the reactor, displacing and destroying the reactor lid, rupturing the coolant tubes and then blowing a hole in the roof.[7] After part of the roof blew off, the inrush of oxygen, combined with the extremely high temperature of the reactor fuel and graphite moderator, sparked a graphite fire. This fire greatly contributed to the spread of radioactive material and the contamination of outlying areas
anyone remember ol' professional write? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfs:Write)
Some people seem surprised that i remember this vividly. I was 3 years old, my mother was just starting to work on her law degree, and was writing up something important via professional write. The "microcomputer" we had i believe was built by my uncle, and the power button on that thing was big and visible. From my vague memory it was a red circular button, with at least an inch in radius. Just like a frustrated horny bull running towards a red cape, my nubby little index finger launched towards that big red button. Result: (insert the dirtiest swear words here), my father comes running in, my mother starts crying (my guess is it was important, and back then autosave was only a dream), and the rest of the memory is too fuzzy to remember. Perhaps for the reason that it was something that shouldn't be remembered. Now that i look at my watch, it's almost time for my psychotherapy appointment! Cheers!
Don't know if it qualifies as a Big Red Button story but the effect was the same. I work in a satellite TV broadcaster. We were standing around in Master Control one afternoon discussing stuff and the cleaning lady snuck in when no one noticed. She proceeded to use a wet rag to wipe down the main switcher and switched every channel to black. It was pretty amazing to see a wall full of monitors (about 100 of them) suddenly go black. For a moment we all thought the SDI router must have melted until we noticed the cleaning woman polishing the desk.
The other thing she did was she worked out that she could get into the machine room with her pass if she went via the emergency exit. We kept finding puddles of water under the raised floor that we couldn't explain until one weekend I noticed her carting a bucket and mop into the machine room to give it a good scrub with a liberal amount of water.
She doesn't work here anymore.
Harking back to the good old days of high school...
We had several antiquated BBC micros in one of the classroom blocks public areas - in theory for getting work done during break but since no other classes used those machines they usually ended up having games on them for those that knew how to find (or write) them.
Bored one lunch time I typed in the same 20 or so lines of basic on each machine and with the help of a friend hit enter at the same time on each.
The screen now flashed from black to red and black, beeped every second and read "This computer will self destruct in: 5:00" counting down every second. After a bit of a giggle (ok we were 12) at how this looked we walked away and wondered who would find it.
It turned out to be one of the dinner ladies (for those that didn't have this concept in school - they are non teaching staff that wander the open building and grounds during breaks keeping an eye on things). Being about 60 or so she obviously beleived what the computers said and hit the fire bell!
One evacuation later and a short investigation of the computer screens (which if I had got the code right should have one letter on each screen - B O O M - I never did see the final result so I don't know) everyone returned to classes.
Didn't really hear much until my next IT class, at the end the teacher took me to one side - his comments were basically:
"Very nice trick, but please, don't do it again, ok?"
Was fairly obvious it was me, only the lowest years of the school were allowed in that area, I was the only one in that categry that could have done it. I do remember the teacher was trying to stop himself from grinning.
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
Perhaps this one is too nerdy for /. - no forget that I said that.
/etc/passwd in vi, then immediatelty realized that this was not where he wanted to be. Now, normally one qould use ':q' to exit a file without saving, but he was in the habit of using ':x', which is a convenient way of saving and exiting at the same time. Unfortunately he forgot the ':', which makes it a command to delete whichever character you are standing on. When nothing seemed to happen, he automatically did it again, this time getting it right. Then he logged out.
/etc/passwd? I'll give you a hint: it begins with root:x:0:0 - so this guy had deleted the 'r' in root, saved the file and exited. And since nobody else was logged in as root, we were stuffed - one couldn't log on as root, since he was not in /etc/passwd, and logging on as oot didn't work either because he was still called root in /etc/security/passwd (this was on AIX - it corresponds to /etc/shadow). And using 'su -' from an ordinary user didn't work, since this command actually looks for the username 'root'. Unfortunately it turned out that booting in single user mode meant that you had only very minimal access to the disks, and getting the others online is not easy when you know too little about AIX and have a very complicated arrangement of disks and volumegroups. In the end we had to reinstall. This of course had to have the traditional, serious consequences: the guy was .... promoted.
You can do really interesting things as root; in a place I worked one of my colleagues wouldn't admit that he had done the following on one of our biggest and most important UNIXes: He had logged on as root and opened up
Now, what is normally the very first line in
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
Back in 198x, I was working for an aircraft electronics manufacturer on their prototype flight management computers.
Unfortunately resetting them involved touching a wire to a ground pin....which was near to a 48V avionics supply pin.... as I found out....twice.
Burning out the only two systems in existence did not make me popular.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Our company finally got a new medium-size UPS, large enough to power two racks of servers and a router rack. It was placed on the floor in the midst of them, giving us a sublime sense of security and well-being. Trouble was, the manufacturer put the UPS's reset switch in the front, exactly at knee level. We had several instances of all of the servers rebooting in the evenings after everyone had gone home. Turns out that the cleaning crew was bumping into that switch while making their rounds. Took us a while to debug that problem. The fix: open up the UPS box and snip the reset switch wire.
...but certainly qualifies..
6 .jpg
The US Navy's P-3 Orion (in many variants) is a 4-engine maritime patrol airplane. The engines are Pratt and Whitney T-56 turboprops, a powerplant shared with the C-130, the E-2 and the C-2.
In the flight station, in the top center of the instrument panel are four big yellow handles that you pull when you need to shut the engines off in an emergency. Because they are used for emergencies, the are cleverly called "e-handles". Underneath each e-handle is a red button. This is the the button that releases the contents of the high-rate-of discharge (HRD) fire extinguisher in the corresponding engine compartment. You can see a picture of this configuration here:
http://www.namsa.nato.int/gallery/systems/p3orion
I was in the navy flying with a P-3 crew in the mid 1980s. We were at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, trying to take off and get to the same place in the ocean where some foreign naval unit was exercising its right to free navigation in international waters during the Cold War. Even though there are other P-3s on the ramp that day, *our* P-3 was special, since it had some sensors that that other kids didn't have yet..which is why we got to hang around the airplane during this maintenance delay...
During our engine starts, there was a problem with the number two engine (inboard on the port side). It was fixable in an our two, but the mechs would have to pull the plane into the hangar to do the work.
It's late spring, a mild sunny day, and I curl up by the port overwing exit in the tube; this part of the crew cabin it has enough space to stretch out and get a decent. The overwing hatch is open, cool breezes are flowing off the East China Sea. Others are lounging in their seats, on the bunks in the back, in the flight station, listening to the radio on the ADF receiver. We're just chillin', waiting for the mechanic on the ladder under the number 2 engine compartment to work his magic so we can go flying.
I can hear the sound of his tools banging around in the engine compartment, and just as I'm about to go asleep, I hear him call to the flight station (whose side window was also open): "Hey, somebody pull the number 2 e-handle"...
The e-handle does a number of things, including severing some mechanical connections between the propeller and engine turbine, cutting fuel flow, and generally making sure that the the motor you shut down during an inflight emergency won't be further damaged.
That's the 'splaining. Here's what happened next....
The guy in the flight station who responded to this request was neither an aviation mechanic nor an aviation electrician, nor an aviation hydraulics technician. Regrettably, he was an aviation electronics technician, and this particular one was not, shall we say, the sharpeset tool in our shed that day.
Here's what he didn't know:
He didn't know that the red button under the e-handle was *not* the push-to-release-button for the e-handle. So, before he pulled the e-handle, he pressed the red button underneath it, believing it *was* the push-to-release button.
When he pushed the button, the contents of the HRD fire extinguisher emptied --immediately-- into the number 2 engine compartment...where our helpless mechanic was still working.
The good new was that nobody got hurt (including the poor bastard who pushed the button, who was spared physical harm by the mechanic). The mechanic was none too pleased, because now cleaning the engine compartment just got added to his list of things to do...we didn't get to go fly that day because it takes many more hours to clean up the engine compartment after the fire extinguisher is emptied out in there.
Big red buttons ang big yellow handles...equal sources of entertainment.
You are correct that blue dye squirting out of fire alarms is merely a myth. I have a somewhat sizeable collection of old fire alarm equipment and not one has any dye-squirting ability and no other collector or fire alarm installer I've ever known has come across such a thing in their travels.
You could spread some dye on the outside pull station itself - somewhere out of sight in the handle - but that would require you know where someone would pull the alarm or dye a massive number of stations just to be sure. Even then you run the risk of shorting out the damn thing which would result in a horribly ironic outcome.
What do you mean "not truly free". She's open source, and created by relatively unskilled labor, right?
Best Slashdot Co
there's only one thing any self respecting geek can do.
Hang a note on it that says "Pull me."
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
My current job involves, amoung other things, safety wiring and control systems.
One thing I found interesting is that the emergency stop button for safety
systems always has electrical current going through it. In the case of a saws
and robots, that current might hold a relay closed, which in turn delivers power
to the saw or robot.
The reason they wire it that way is so that if the wire ever breaks or becomes
disconnected from the emergency stop button, the machine stops.
For those systems, stopping the machine when you don't mean to is preferable
to not stopping the machine the one time in ten years that you really need to.
I had worked with computers for years and would never have though of doing it that way.
The most common "big red button" I see turns off the power to subway third rail
power. Now if they could do something about workers getting hit by trains.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
Well, at least one office.
This was nearly 3 decades ago. I was a new clerk and had never even had a computer. I had done a good job with my paper-shuffling, so much so that my boss lent me out to another function (big perk, goes on your record as a wider set of experience) where I was to work in the "NEC room." This was a tiny room with a big NEC computer hooked up to an even bigger line printer inside an acoustic shell that held pin-feed, 8-part forms. These forms were Revenue Agent Reports, the final results of all audits, the paperwork you sign to agree to a change in your taxes.
I *really* impressed those folks. Seriously. First off, they couldn't get the forms aligned in the printer; they were always printing everything a fraction of an inch too high or too low on the form. It seemed a simple job to me. I noted the position of the pin-feed holes relative to some random part of the printer, printed one report, changed the position of the forms relative to that printer part to a degree roughly designed to compensate for the error on the first form, then printed another sample form. It was, as expected, properly aligned. I had aligned a new box of report forms with just one test print. The long-time workers in that little room thought I was a god. Literally, mouths dropped opened. They were accustomed to spending hours and half a box of forms getting set up. They loved me.
Next, they had a bunch of garbage records in the database that kept printing out. It was pretty simple to figure out that if I deleted each record, they wouldn't start each day with 20 garbage prints. By this time, they loved me so much the manager stopped by to meet me, sent an official memo of praise to my boss (something normally never done until a detail is complete) and started making noises about creating a position for me in his group. I was flyin' high.
A couple of days later, I asked the question I'd been curious about since I got there but there was never anyone around who could answer. "What's the button for?" "What button?" "This big red one next to the door" I said as I pointed at it. I SWEAR that I didn't intend to touch it; the tip of my index finger just barely kissed the dome of the button.
KLUNK!
Every light in THE ENTIRE BUILDING went out. This was the emergency shut off for EVERYTHING, pre-dating the installation of the computer equipment and intended to be tripped only in case of fire. It took building maintenance about 6 hours to go floor by floor and get every circuit up and running again.
My temporary boss called my permanent boss who called me at home that night and informed me that not only was I no longer on the detail, I was not to set foot in that building until further notice. There were apparently about a hundred Revenue Agents who lost their cases (Remember, this was back in the days of dual-floppy computers without hard drives and saving your work meant deliberately pulling out a disk and inserting another) that morning and had to rebuild their files. Each and every one had apparently vowed to strangle me on sight.
There's a Bugs link on every page Slashdot serves. We'd need detailed information about the issue before we can solve it.