Page 7 of 7 FirstFirst ... 567
Results 61 to 68 of 68

Thread: computer screw-ups

  1. #61
    PHP/PostgreSQL guy
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Posts
    1,164
    (edges away from petemcevoy) I hope I don't get trashed like that! Hah!

    Before I proceed with some of my more glorious screw-ups, my mentor for unix told me once:

    "There are two kinds of sysadmins: those that have completely ****ED a system up, and those that will."

    That said, onward we go!

    1: deleted the font file for solaris 2.51. If you're booting into anything other than single-user mode, it won't boot. Period.

    2: destroyed the swap file by accidentally dd'ing it to /dev/null (this is what happens when you don't pay attention to what you're typing while talking to someone)

    3: set the first tape device as the swap device...mainly because I wanted to see how long it would take for a box to boot...a loooooooong time.

    4: did 'cleanup' on the DNS server and unfortunately blew out all the zone files because bind hadn't updated in over a month due to a previous change BY AN NT ADMIN WHO HAD ROOT ACCESS FOR SOME REASON (don't get me started on what I was yelling that day) that didn't work, go figure.

    5: powered off an N-class HP 9000 server without knowing that Oracle was in hot-backup mode with Omniback...the DBAs didn't like me very well that night.

    6: accidentally zero-lengthed the kernel for an HP box (I still don't know how I did this?)

    I think those are some of my more glorious screwups that halted business to some level. Windows problems, while I've had many, don't really count because everyone knows there's two methods to fixing Windows: reboot or reinstall.
    We the willing, led by the unknowing, have been doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much with so little for so long that we are now qualified to do just about anything with almost nothing.

  2. #62
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jul 2001
    Posts
    281
    Peter,

    Whoever you quoted could be a janitor for Microsoft. It's like I could say I work for RedHat, but maybe I am just the guy that makes the coffee.... Well I don't work for RedHat, because I am a consultant downtown...

    I am the Chat Nazi though!!!!
    You\'re either a 0 or a 1, alive or dead

  3. #63
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    183
    Originally posted by DjM
    I too have had my share of screw-up's. I am a member of the

    rm -rf (as root, from the root directory) club.

    Unix doesn't like that very much.



    Good one - I probably would've tried that sooner or later if I ddin't read up on *nix before I started screwing around with it.....
    “People don’t talk about anything.” [Clarisse]
    “Oh, they must!” [Guy]
    “No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the cafes they have the joke-boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it’s only color and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That\'s all there is now...\"
    -A conversation with Clarrise McClellan and Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451

  4. #64
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    183
    I always thought it funny to get ppl who you don't like to press alt-F4
    “People don’t talk about anything.” [Clarisse]
    “Oh, they must!” [Guy]
    “No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the cafes they have the joke-boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it’s only color and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That\'s all there is now...\"
    -A conversation with Clarrise McClellan and Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451

  5. #65
    Junior Member
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    8
    Hows about receiving 200 new computers and as the Junior Tech was told to clone the drives from the computer in the corner, OK not too difficult, finished the whole lot, went back to check the first couple. All were blank, I had just been cloning from 1 internal drive to another.

  6. #66
    PHP/PostgreSQL guy
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Posts
    1,164
    Small screwup - chown -R oracleinstall /u* (trying to cover all of the /u01, /u02, etc file systems)...what's bad is, /usr is first, hehe...

    Medium screwup - tried to make a mounted drive a virtual 'man page from cd' file system for an AIX 4.2 system. Instead I copied the cd, per instructions, to the mount point, which filled it up to 100%, and then mounted the cd on top, hiding all the files. Took me 30 minutes to find out what I had done...bleh.

    Major screwup - was halfway through copying one machine to another for a /usr and /bin copy...then I realized machine A was solaris and machine B was hp....oops! I became real intimate with the phrase 'nobody cares if you can backup, they only care if you can restore.'.

    "There are two kinds of sys-admins - those that've really ****ed a machine up, and those that will."
    We the willing, led by the unknowing, have been doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much with so little for so long that we are now qualified to do just about anything with almost nothing.

  7. #67
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Dec 2001
    Posts
    321
    yeah i had my share of screws up too
    deleted the tacacs lists servers from a critical node ... whole network down for 3 days till we found a work around ....

  8. #68
    Junior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2002
    Posts
    3
    Found a great site for anyone wanted to grow their knowledge of IT (and pretty much anything else).

    www.howstuffworks.com





    Live as though you'll die tomorrow,Learn as though you'll live forever.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •