You know you have got it wrong when:-

[Chris Wilshaw]

... you turn on the air conditioning, only then to find out that it has a leak

... you write a script to kill off users, only to kill inetd, and your database process first.

... you delete an ID, only to be told that the home directory was actually linked to the main application directory.

... everyone points (or falls silent) when you walk into the office.

... you restore that crucial file to its original location, rather than the test directory.

... your last backup is on floppy disks.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

... You are told that drag-n-drop on MacOS *moves* the folder instead of *copying* it as you are used to in M$Win boxes after you've been told that the company web server suddenly is unreachable

[ You were already wondering why it took so long ]

(This actually happened with a apprentice in a company of a friend)

[Martin Johnson]

While in /tmp you type "rm -R .*" and the system hangs.



Marty

[Steve Lewis]

- you type 'route net delete ...' and get unexpectedly disconnected along with everyone else.
- you change the root filesystem, forget to lvlnboot -R and the system won't reboot in LVM.
- you know you dropped the wrong database when people start to crowd around your desk saying they can no longer connect to it.
- you know your database SQL report was wrong when the company financial SVP or CEO bypasses the accounts department and asks you to sort out the corporate statutory tax reports.
- tar starts listing 'x' filename... instead of 'a' at the start of the line (why did they choose x and c when they are next to one another?) so you accidentally overwrite the file you wanted to back up. Use fbackup to avoid this.

[Nick Wickens]

....When you tell your boss that your planned system upgrade has 700Mz processors.(And he suggests getting something a bit faster from PC World).

[Santosh Nair_1]

You shutdown the machine to replace a system board. Then go to the back of the system and start pulling things out....only to realize minutes later that the system you've just taken the system board from was a live system sitting right next to the down machine.

After that incident, we started labeling the machine on the front AND on the back.

-Santosh

[Chris Wilshaw]

You stand before the smouldering wreck of your server room, and THEN someone says

"But Ignite is a piece of software!!!"

[Dave La Mar]

Your nifty script expects to archive the day's work by performing -
#rm previous week's daily archive
rm archive.`date +%A`/*.*
#mv current day's archive
mv archive/*.* archive.`date +%A`

Then you find out the script you place this in is in a continuous
while loop for another condition.

Bitten this week.

[Uday_S_Ankolekar]

pfs_mount:: you are installing Oracle application and 15th CD got stuck and you have to reboot the box..yes...Pathetic File System

[S.K. Chan]

You begin to remind your boss that you want to do NT admin instead since Unix admin is not challenging enough ...

[John Bolene]

Your boss says that they are replacing the UNIX servers with NT servers since they have faster processors and are so much cheaper.

[Sachin Patel]

You have nfs directory (programming deparments heart) mounted on production system and type rm *

I Didn't do but new guy did it for me. I have to cover his A?? and save mine.

though I had did c:fas\data >del .
on dos once and remove financial data worth of one year.

Sachin

[Pete Randall]

when you start assigning points to your kids' answers at the supper table.

[Martin Johnson]

Twelve hours into a v10.20 to v11.0 upgrade you discover your system disk is unbootable!

Marty

[Nick Wickens]

... Everyone else (except the workaholic Finance director) left the building 5 hours ago, You told the wife you would be home 4 hours ago, Your Dinner was runied 3 hours ago, The Dog ate your dinner 2 hour ago, the HP engineer left 1 hour ago, the security guard is hassling for you to go home now and you wish you had enabled fast boot when you first shutdown the machine 6 hours ago as you hope that this reboot will be the last and the problem would be magically solved.

Thankfully the answers to my problems all lie in these forums and hopefully my instance number for the FC card the engineer just replaced will be back to normal and I won't have to re-import the volume groups. (If you have'nt guessed by now this is a happenin' event. Ho Hum.)

[Paul R. Dittrich]

....the COO publicly wonders "What do all those people in IT do anyway?"

[Michael Tully]

Lean on the red emergency stop button in the computer room,and you wonder why all the power
has just gone off, lights, servers network the lot..... Didn't happen to me but an NT administrator... Now that does make sense....?

[PIYUSH D. PATEL]

Hi,

WHEN YOU BOOT THE SERVER, IT ASKS

ENTER BOOTABLE DISK. PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE !!!


PIYUSH

[Vincent Fleming]

You find out your backup administrator never learned the difference between "format" and "backup" when he took the class *2 years ago*!

Sorry - not a UNIX box story - it was worse - Datakit (remember those anyone?) We (20 of us) traced every wire in every patch panel for every terminal (yeah, I'm old) in 2 buildings for 4 days and nights to reprogram the thing!

The admin was immediately fired.

[John Carr_2]

Hi

my co worker many years ago let an electrician into the data center to work on the air con who decided to turn off the electric to do maintainence. We learnt a lot very quickly about ensuring the secondary supply was actually being used as backup to all servers.

John.

[Nick Wickens]

.... you are walking your dog in the middle of a field 10 miles from the computer centre, 1 hour after you left, having thought everything was done and dusted. (Its amazing how many light bulbs appear over your head once you relax is'nt it ? - Thank goodness for remote access)

[Angus Crome]

Your casually wondering why that two second script is now in its second minute; as your pager, cell phone, email, phone and datacenter emergency pager are go off simultaneously.

It's amazing what kinds of things can be transposed by perl and/or awk (even with proper testing).

[harry d brown jr]

You know you have got it wrong when ...

... everyone understands you the first time

... management approves your suggested upgrades

... you migrate your applications to a newer OS and hardware and nothing is broken (yet)

... you get up in the morning, get dressed, get into the car, and then realize it's a holiday

... someone mistakes you for someone who cares


live free or die
harry

[Mark Greene_1]

you get awoken at 3:30 in the afternoon by your pager, and upon calling in find out that the consultant from the application vendor had just rebooted the DG system he's converting the app from and the HP system he's converting the app to because some guru back at his home office decided that the nic's weren't sync'ing at 100 full duplex with the switch that's linking them (with nothing else on it, including the LAN, just those two systems on a 10.1 network), and didn't see the merit in just sniffing the switch.

(no, it didn't changing anything except allowing for 1.5 hours to go by with no data being transfered. going to be a looonnggg nite.)

mark

[Trond Haugen]

Nick; how about eggs in your input.
I had a teacher who had his punch cards in this briefcase with this lunchbox... You can probably guess the rest.

Regards,
Trond