greatest blunders

[Richard Darling]

When I upgraded from 10.20 to 11.0 I finished the system installed, and then used cpio to copy my user applications. One of the vendors had originally had their app installed in /usr (before my time), and I copied the app up one directory and wiped out /usr. By the way, I didn???t back up the installation before the cpio copy. It was a Friday night and I wanted to get out...figured I could backup after getting the apps copied over...learnt an important lesson regarding backups that night...
RD

[Belinda Dermody]

writing a script to chmod -R to r/w for the world on a dir. Not doing a check to see if I was in the proper directory and all of a sudden my bin directory files were all 666. Lucky enough I had multiple windows and it hadn't gotten to the sbin directory yet. Had a few inquiries why certain commands wouldnt work before I got it all back correctly. From then on, I do $? and check the return status before I issue any remove or chmod commands.

[Ian Kidd_1]

I was going to vi a script that performs a cold-backup of an oracle database. Since we prefer not to be root all the time, we use sudo.

So I typed, "sudo", but then was interrupted by someone. I then typed the name of the script when that person left. Nothing appeared on the screen immediately, so I got a coffee.

When I came back, I saw " sudo {script}" and realized - 1 minute the DBAs started screaming that their database was down - that I started a cold backup in the middle of a production day.

[Chris Wong]

export HISTFILE=$HOME/.profile

- chris

[john korterman]

Most of my blunders have already been well covered by other members, although I must admit that I may not have managed them as well as others. However, it made me think of a reception I attended many years ago. I had just started to work for the company that held the reception, whose purpose was to honour a life-long employee now to be retired. The usual speeches about how valuable this employee had been to the company were made, etc. etc. Around where I stood people were talking respectfully about the main character of the event; he was especially well-known for never to have made an error in his long career - it should be mentioned that the person in question had actually managed a number of promotions. I was particularly impressed by my elder colleagues talking about the person, who apparently was not capable of making mistakes - really a person to be held with reverence. Later the same day when I told my boss about it, he's only comment was:" That's right, he never did a day's work in his life!"
I will leave the morale of the story up to you.

[George_Dodds]

Giving up forklift driving and going into IT ;)

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Thanks for starting this thread. The correct conclusion might be drawn that we are all human :)

Now we can have a laugh, and learn at the same time, hoping we are not to be the donkeys that hit their head to the same stone twice.

Enjoy, have FUN!

[F. X. de Montgolfier]

Not mines, but some things I saw the result on clients' systems...

remove localhot from /etc/hosts ;-)

ln -fs [full path of the current dir]/foo foo

find / tmp -exec rm {} \;

rm /etc/password

# ll bar
lrwx------ 1 root sys 3 Dec 6 11:50 bar -> foo
# ln -fs bar foo

Technical support can be fun sometimes ;-P

Francois-Xavier

[Duncan Edmonstone]

My worst two:

Installing a server in a major call centre of a US bank...

I built the OS as required by our apps team in the US, and following our build standards put the system into trusted mode.

They installed the app, and realised they'd forgotten to ask me to put the system into NIS (system could be used by any of the call centre reps in over 40 call centers - a total of 15,000 NIS based accounts!) It's the middle of the night in the UK, so the apps team get a US admin to set up the system as a NIS client. (yes it shouldn't work when the box is trusted, but it does!)

Next day, the apps team is complaining about some stuff not working - can I take the system out of trusted mode so we can discount that? Sure course I can - I run tsconvert and wait.... and wait.... and wait.... hmmm - this usually takes about 30 seconds - what gives?

Try to open another window to check whats happening - can't log in as root, the password that worked two minutes ago no longer works!

Next root file system full messages start to scroll up the screen!

It turns out that tsconvert is busy taking ALL the NIS accounts and putting them in the /etc/passwd file (yes all 15,000 of them) and guess what? There's a root account in NIS!

All I can say is thank god for good backups!

The other one was a typical junior admin mistake which comes from not understanding shell file name generation fully:

A user can't log in, I go take a look at his home directory and note the permissions on his .profile are incorrect. I also note that the other '.' files are incorrect, so I do this:

cd /home/user
chmod 400 .*

I call the user and tell him to try again - he says he still can't log in! Huh?

So I go back and carry on looking for the problem, but before I know it the phone is ringing off the hook! No-one can log in now!

And then it dawns on me

I type the following:

cd /home/user
echo .*

and that returns (of course)

. .. .cshrc .exrc .login .profile .sh_history

Oops I didn't just change the permissions on the users '.' files - I also changed the permissions on the users directory, and (crucially!) the users parent directory /home!

These days I always use echo to check my file name pattern matching logic when doing this kind of thing...

We live and learn


Duncan

[Systeemingenieurs Infoc]

is it a coincidence that we have almost 2 times as much blunders as achievements ;-) ?