topic Re: greatest blunders in Operating System - HP-UX

greatest blunders

U.SivaKumar_2 — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:02:38 GMT

Hi,

Please post the greatest blunders you think you have done in the life as a system administrator.

regards,
U.SivaKumar

"Best Men are moulded out of Faults - Shakesphere "

Re: greatest blunders

Chris Wilshaw — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:07:59 GMT

Well that would be one of 2.

1) creating a filesystem on a database raw log location (that's was the last time I used SAM for any LVM-type work).

2) Believing what I was told when someone said that we could remove a FS from a system as the database that was using it had moved to another machine. Apparently, Ingres is a little picky when you take one of its data locations away, even if it's not being used. That led to an inconsistent database, and several days of tension while it was fixed.

Re: greatest blunders

Jean-Louis Phelix — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:11:33 GMT

Hi,

Using a lan console, then telnet on another lan console to do a CTRL-B RS. Guess which machine has rebooted ...

Re: greatest blunders

H.Merijn Brand (procura — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:15:01 GMT

Trying to test how "hot-swap" disks work. The fast way: just pull one out. Needless to say that this (production) machine went down.

Re: greatest blunders

Robert-Jan Goossens — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:22:22 GMT

Working with NIS the first time and putting +root in the passwd file guess what happended!!!!!!

Re: greatest blunders

Ravi_8 — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:25:41 GMT

applying SNAPlus2 of 11i on 11.0 and crashing the system

Re: greatest blunders

Vicente Sanchez_3 — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:29:15 GMT

Think that computer world is logical.

Re: greatest blunders

Tomek Gryszkiewicz — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:36:00 GMT

Deleting all hidden files in /root: rm -rf .* .........

Regards,
Tomek

Re: greatest blunders

BFA6 — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:38:14 GMT

Hi,

Forgetting how links work. Copied what I thought was a file to a file, but ended up overwriting a linked .profile - oops.

Good job we had a backup :-)

Hilary

Re: greatest blunders

kish_1 — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:39:14 GMT

created home area for new user, and instead changeing the permission of new user i gave *

Re: greatest blunders

Michael Tully — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 09:53:42 GMT

Many years ago I deleted all of /var that had files over 10 days old. The best thing was that no one ever noticed....

However I saw a good one the other day, one administrator, rebooted the wrong machine.... where's that egg?

Re: greatest blunders

Bill McNAMARA_1 — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:00:49 GMT

I've done this with people looking over my shoulder (while in single user):

echo "/dev/vg00/lvol6 /tmp vxfs delaylog 0 2" > /etc/fstab
reboot!!

Other good ones:
mv /dev/ /Dev
(try it - and don't ask why!!)

Later,
Bill

Re: greatest blunders

Donald Kok — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:01:55 GMT

worst thing?:

ls /somedir
#oh that's rubbish
rm -r *
# removed all in current directory

Re: greatest blunders

Olebile — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:29:03 GMT

The worst one i did was becoz of laziness, the intention was to remove a directory under /. So I typed rm -r then using the intelli mouse copied the file name and pasting. Quess what... the mouse copied only part of the directory name which matched other mounted directory names. Everything under those directories was zapped but you still get an error message " mouted filesystem could not be deleted" only the mount point remains you'll be horrified to see what lies underneath. Always type when using rm -r....

Re: greatest blunders

U.SivaKumar_2 — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:41:12 GMT

Hi Michael ,

Your case is common in racked servers. Sun uses
a locator to locate the server in the rack before giving reboot.

HP has anything like that , I doubt

regards,
U.SivaKumar

Re: greatest blunders

Christian Gebhardt — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:53:29 GMT

Hi
As a newby in UNIX I had an Oracle Testinstallion on a production system
productiv directory: /u01/...
test directory: /test/u01/...

deleting the test installation:
cd /test
rm /u01

OOPS ...

After several bdf commands I noticed that the wrong lvol shrinks and stops the delete command with Ctrl'C

The database still worked without the most binaries and libraries and after a restore from tape without stopping and starting the database all was ok.

I love oracle ;-)

Chris

Re: greatest blunders

Justo Exposito — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 10:58:40 GMT

Hi,

Develop a script in order to change the permits for all the files and subdirectories under the actual and when run change all the permits in the system.

Regards,

Justo.

Re: greatest blunders

Systeemingenieurs Infoc — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 11:07:59 GMT

trying to undo script-wrapping :

cd /usr/bin
rm -f remsh : mv remsh.org remsh
=

remsh was rappidly restored ; i overlooked the disappearence of mv. It took 1 week for someone to notice it (only cron jobs were affected ; the other jobs used /sbin/mv).

Re: greatest blunders

Pete Randall — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 11:09:06 GMT

Well, there's the old standard of re-booting a workstation, only to find out the window the programmer had up was actually logged into the production server. The only "good" thing was that, even after I su'd to root, the shutdown message said that the programmer had done it.

Pete

Re: greatest blunders

Pete Devlin — Wed, 04 Dec 2002 11:17:56 GMT

From home I got the syntax to tar wrong whilst testing a newly replaced tape drive :- tar -cvf /etc/passwd /dev/rmt/0m. Then my connection dropped.... Luckily it was a dev box at the weekend & there was a console session running so I was able to travel the 3 miles and after first copying/usr/newconfig/etc/passwd into place I recovered from tape. No one knew. I only ever use files in /tmp now for testing tape devices with tar!!
Cheers