You know you have got it wrong when:-

[Volker Borowski]

... a M$-User calls in and asks:

"Who is General Failiure and why is he reading my harddisk ?"

Have fun
Volker

[Nick Wickens]

... You assume you are the only one old enough to remember punch cards. Tronds reply about punch cards reminds me of an initiation ceremony for new staff we used to operate where the poor unsuspecting victim would be told that there was a problem with the punch card batch and the holes needed to be "re-instated" where upon they were given a bucket of tiny square punched out paper and a reel of selotape. If we were feeling particularly nasty they would also have to find the correct numbers on the "punches" as well.

The other scam was to be given a tray of cards (and for those that don't know each tray held proabably a couple of thousand cards with each card being the equivelent of one line of code) by a programmer who had spent the last week creating the batch, take it into the computer room and switch the tray out of site before dropping it in front of his eyes.

[Kelli Ward]

You're troubleshooting a workstation, telnet in to a server to check some settings. After a bit of doing this back and forth, you decide to reboot the workstation and instead seeing of System going down... you see "Connection closed by foreign host." Oops, and no of course I didn't do that. ;)
Kel

I bought donuts. It worked. Whew...

[Seun Ewulomi_1]

Hi,

Might not be related but I had the horror in my past experience of issuing a
"debug all" on a core router. I nearly collapsed. But it all went well in the long run.

Dont know why cisco even have/allow the "all" command to be used with the debug command knowing the detrimental effects it has on a router.

gab

[Daniel Crow]

There is something that smells like backed-up sewer in your server room but it is nowhere near your sewer lines. Later you come to find out it was a cracked burning battery from a workstation UPS.

(and yes it happened to me)

[Jim Marsden]

You call your vendors support line and get "Ooh, that's a new one on me..."

[Ceesjan van Hattum]

You marry, 5 months to go to become a daddy; you think to rm -r $HOME/bin.. but it is actually /usr/bin on a production system... :(

[Michael Tully]

One long and lonely day I did this when I was trying to clean /var/tmp, and I was sure (not) I was in the right directory.

# cd /var
# find / -mtime +10 -print | xargs rm

ooops.....

funny thing was no one noticed.... restored eveything from backup....... no more sweat....

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

OK, I must confess I did wrong too. Like reading an archive to update software, and then testing it ...

Vague problems ...

Ahhh, this was an update meant for 11.00 that I just installed on 10.20. No harm done for scripts (sh & perl), but there were also some shared libraries involved, which did not like the OS :)

Since no-one else was using that part of the software at the moment, the problem was quickly solved by getting the libs from the 10.20 archive.

[Martin Johnson]

You call support with a problem and they ask you if you have the latest cummulative patch installed. You check and find that you have the next to the latest patch installed. Support tells you to install the latest and call back when it is done. You check the latest patch and the only difference from the previous patch was a bug fix for a product you don't have. You call back and Support still won't talk to you until you install the patch. Unfortunately, it is a production box and it is a kernel patch.

Marty

"Take two patches and call me in the morning"

[Jeff Schussele]

Well...you know mgmnt got it wrong when...

They hired Arthur Anderson to audit your group.

Jeff

[Pete Randall]

You know you have got it wrong when:-

You're a user on the system and your sysadmin forces you to reset your password every two days - see this post:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x4578107d277ad611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

I wonder what the poor guy did to get his sysadmin that p.o.'d???

Pete

[Nick Wickens]

..... You call your prefered HP-VAR's only HP-UX expert mid-SAN installation project only to get the reply "Ooooh he no longer works for us !".

Hi Jim :@)

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

As the first step of security for update the system you ( not me of course) type

tar cvf /etc/passwd /etc/group /etc/.....


and begin to see

tar: couldn't get uname for uid 6654
tar: couldn't get uname for uid 6655
tar: couldn't get uname for uid 0
tar: couldn't get uname for uid 6656
tar: couldn't get uname for uid 6654
tar: couldn't get uname for uid 6655
tar: couldn't get uname for uid 6654
tar: couldn't get uname for uid 6655

...

[Edward McCouch]

You spend 2 weeks researching new hardware and set up 3 seperate propsals and a presentation to justify the cost of everything and the first question you are asked is.....

"Why don't we just run all that on a couple of windows NT/2000 servers. They are cheaper AND have gigahertz processors."

[John Payne_2]

You turn on the AC units, and the baffles do not open. This causes the roof of the elevator shaft to blow off. Rocks from the roof go flying off and hit people walking by...

[Pete Randall]

That *must* be a true story, John.

;^)

Pete

[Tony Romero]

My three year old daughter walks in the Datacenter and presses the on/off switch on a prod server that was missing the protection cap.

[Sanjay_6]

Instead of doing an "extendfs" after lvextend, you do "newfs".

[Ricardo Bassoi]

You setup the boot to non stop and lost your root password.

[Angus Crome]

You walk into a REALLY hot computer room (< 100 degrees) see that someone has set the thermostat at 45 degrees. Conclusion, the chillers are obviously frozen solid inside, so
you dare to turn the thermostat up to 70, to give it a chance to thaw (and try to remember where you put the fans). Suddenly, the entire room goes dark and you hear that wonderful sound of silence. Guess that was the wrong thermo device, since it was the control for thermal overload protection in your data center controlling power units.

Really happened, but was a student operator that performed this mental madness. Took about 2 days to completely recover from that one.

Really gets management to sit up and take notice when you say you absolutely need something though.