greatest blunders

[V. Nyga]

I was setting up the newest OS to serveral workstations with ignite using a created image.
And ever client had got his old hostname.
But at one client our CAD program didn't want to run properly. It found no tablet.
I checked the scripts serveral times - at least I called the support.
We checked the same scripts again. Nothing wrong.
Then I saw the mistake:
All clients had their hostnames written with small letters - during my ignite installation I gave the name to thie client with captal letters. So for the script it was a unknown client.

Volkmar
Never touch a running system

[Chuck J]

Apart from all else, we had two mailing lists both with the words "global" in them. One was for all the IT staff globally, the other was for every single person in the company (globally). Yes, you have already guessed what I did, but that's not all, what I sent out was IT instructions for a topic so had users emaling me back left right & centre. Lucky though I caught my mistake straight after hitting the send button and we managed to find the message in the lotus notes mailbox and remove it. In the end, the message only got sent to my site (biggest global site), but noone else in the world at the other sites got it, thanks to our removal from the mail.box

Chuck J

[Ian Lochray]

Fortunately this was on a test server that nobody else was using. I decided to remove stuff from a lost+found directory. I did a cd lost+found and ls showed directories called things like #12345. As root, I did a cd #12345 then an rm -rf *. The cd took the #12345 as a comment and put me in root's home directory of /. Bye-bye machine.

[Chuck J]

Oh no Ian, what a blunder that was. Hope you had a laugh about it later.

Chuck J

[Steven E. Protter]

A second greatest blunder.

I once managed to make my root disk unbootble, while playing around, trying to get an extra disk into vg00.

The disk itself was probably dead and in fact died several months later, while not in use.

I spent all night on the phone with HP Support, putting humpty dumpty back together again.

My Ignite tape had a bad kernel on it generated by my greatest blunder. The system file was corrupt. Turns out this machine won't do an ignite tape boot unless you unplug the fiber card, figured that out six months later.

The good news? With support through three hours of hpux -is and hpux -lm we fixed it.

No loss of data, no loss of service to users.

:-)

The lesson learned that if a disk won't joint a volume group, (vgextend I think), check the darned thing out before pulling out sledgehammer commands.

Steve

[Ian Lochray]

Chuck,
I certainly did have a laugh about it later as it was only a test machine that nobody else was using. I doubt that I wold have been quite so jovial if it had been a production server though.

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Procura , you are smart :-)
No points without matter. :-)

[Ramkumar Devanathan]

I don't know. I deleted /etc/* once. (just a few config files, eh?? nope, had to reinstall the OS);-)

And on linux, I tried kill -9 -1 as root. The entire machine froze. had to reboot it.

- ramd.

[Radhakrishnan Venkatara]

hmm,
I was new to NAS, want to configure NAS for 20 workstations which are in production environment.Configured the NAS and pushed some files from NAS to workstations and left.Suddenly got a call saying root filesystem full in all workstations and all their applications running got crashed.
I was totally clueless. booted the system in single user mode. removed all the log files still system root filesystem shows 100% usage.

then just du on /etc found that /etc/passwd file was 150 MB , it was shock.
the file pushed from NAS, had made something wrong and all of the workstations gone down.

there was another blunder.
I was configuring another root hard disk for the prodcution system.I got the down time from the customer.customer is good enough to gave me the down time at the night , but he told server should be up at any case by morning 5 o clock.I assured him it will available by 1 o clock it self.
But really i did nasty thing.there was no mirroring software available on the system. I added the pv into the root vg and did lvlnboot the system gave me error that one anothe root filesystem exsist.
then i understood, that the procedure is to create a separate vg and do.
but mean while,I have to add one hard disk on the system so we down the system and booted it .
the system didn't come up.it was giving unable configure the swap space and going to crash.
clueless how system gone down.I couldn't enter in to single user mode also.
then i got struck up the problem was with lvlnboot command i gave, which changed the swap and boot area on different disk on the same root vg.
thank system went thru recovery cd and i could do lvlnboot and brought the system at 4:45 pm
more horrible thing is customer was sitting beside me, he doesn't know that is production was totally down and one engineer is trying to recover it.

greatest blunder

tempuser::450:20:temporary user:/home/temp:/usr/bin/sh > /etc/passwd

one live setup and went out.
nobody no that passwd file was changed.I was leave for 4 days ,they recovered the system from backup.
when came back i was going thru my history and found this.

radhakrishnan

[Ollie R]

Hi,

When I was a rookie, I was on customer site. I was having problems installing some software because the root disk was full (back in the good old days before LVM).

My decision was to move some sections of the filesystem to a second internal disk and create required symbolic links.

I moved a few bits around using "cpio -p" including, sadly, the contents of "/etc". Everything worked fine until reboot.

Ever seen the message "init not found"???

Wonce I cunnot even spel Administrator - now I are it!

Ollie.