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What is the Worst Tech Mistake You Ever Made?
from the let's-learn-from-them dept.
"In the interest of full disclosure, this is mine:
I was working at a Fortune 50 bank as a consultant. I was due to go on vacation for a week and the company did not have webmail. I decided that I would try forwarding emails to my corporate account. (I know this was a bad idea, and probably against several corporate policies.) I set it up so that any email that came in would forward to my consulting company's account. My mistake was I also left Delivery Receipt on. This was not Microsoft, it was Lotus Notes. The system began forwarding the incoming mail to my account. But then it would get a Delivery Receipt, which in turn would be forwarded to my account, which would generate another delivery receipt, ad infinitum. When I got back from vacation they claimed I had brought down the email system for 4 hours. This incident caused the bank to stop allowing consultants to set up email rules. What's your story?"
One time... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One time... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:One time... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One time... (Score:3, Funny)
easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well recently I've seen at least one each for "IT Manager", "Computer Technician", and "Internet Technologist"... "learn in 6 months!"
They might as well be playing "Taps" [west-point.org] as far as I'm concerned. Well not quite but those ads are ALWAYS for commodity positions, "anyone can learn", etc etc.
And if there are any ice-machine repair-folks reading this, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that most of us have spent our entire lives deeply involved with technology, and we are used to our compensation reflecting that. Those ads tell us that people think they can learn in 6 months, and schools are filling up with people doing just that.
No they're not going to directly take our jobs if we have 10 years of experience, but all those folks sure will lower the paycheck bar for the entire spectrum of IT workers. It's called Flooding the Market.
Add that to overseas outsourcing... it's so depressing.
I used to console myself with the adage "You get what you pay for.", but way too often the people doing the hiring don't understand what they need or what they're getting anyway, they don't understand the benefits of paying for something better, so they go cheaper, time and time again.
There are 50 million computers in the US and somebody needs to fix them.
[buries face in hands]
Parent
File errors (Score:3, Interesting)
And the library did not have the system source media anymore so we spend the next day looking for any machines with a similar version of the deleted file and moveing them back by hand.
DB + Audit Trails (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what might have happened if a certain jnr op had not being paying attention and thought he knew it all.
Yep, there goes the audit trails and the database
Posting on Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Statement by Slashdotters after the supoenas start rolling in: "Posting an admission of wrongdoing on a semi-anonymous public forum, whose owners will most likely cooperate with law enforcement when asked about an admission of wrong doing in a semi-anonymous public forum."
Logging on to /. (Score:5, Funny)
Failing to face reality... (Score:3, Informative)
Never, never, never, never commit to a schedule that is not realistic. If you know it isn't realistic before you get started, imagine what happens when you discover the unknown problems.
No matter how much that guy in marketing wants to meet his roadmap, he will not help you design, code, or test your product. If you are lucky, he will complete the requirements before you are supposed to ship the product.
A small one (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully, that's the worst I've done so far.
Damning evidence (Score:5, Funny)
The next day someone powered up the monitor to my old desktop (still at the office) and what did he see?
SQL Query Analyzer maximized with:(I still don't remember doing it.)
Re:Damning evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
This also gives you time to ponder the wisdom of first running a SELECT statement with the same WHERE clause and comtemplate whether you want to do this.
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Re:Damning evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
My biggest mistake was in my first programming job years ago. I intentionally wrote an infinite loop into a program that was running on a very powerful (for the time) reasearch unix box used at the Naval research lab where I had an internship. It was a sonar imaging optimization routine and I would let it run for short periods (10-30 seconds typically) and then CTRL-C it to force it to stop and inspect the log file to find the results. I was new to unix and so I would use "ps" as opposed to "ps -aux" to see what processes I had running. I had multiple sessions up and managed to leave one of my programs running, switched sessions, ran ps which showed no processes running and went to lunch. The sysadmin was also a meeting and then lunch. When I returned I had a bunch of nastygrams telling me to kill my job immediately, not to run processes that hog the CPU because other projects couldn't use the system and to get approval before running long running jobs because the CPU time was billed (this was around 1985). I actually sat down, ran ps again, saw no job, and wrote back saying I didn't know what they were talking about. The sysadmin (who had returned from lunch) came over to visit me and educated me on a whole bunch of things.
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Re:Damning evidence (Score:4, Interesting)
I've adapted that idea to a lot of other situations; my SQL queries always start out as "-- delete ..." until I'm sure about what I'm typing.
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rm -rf * (Score:3, Interesting)
...five minutes later after coming back from getting coffee: D'oh!
I actually did this once... while logged in as root... at the top level in /home... on a production server. Thank baphomet for nightly backups!
Hopefully none of my clients are reading this. :-)
Re:rm -rf * (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully none of my clients are reading this.
You're known as FunkyRat to them!?
Parent
One that I saw... (Score:5, Interesting)
They were running 13 servers at remote locations (and I mean remote, as in out in the boonies 4 hours from nowhere on back roads) and these servers were unpatched, had out of date or innactive anti-virus and were connected to the net via a combination of satellite and dedicated (always on) dialup. Their communications were secured with nothing more than Windows 2000's built in VPN.
Needless to say, my audit report told them that they had big beefy powerful angels on their side since they hadn't yet had a noticable intrusion. (They had no way of detecting one, but at least the servers weren't hosting porn sites.) I warned them that a virus or worm would come along though and knock the whole thing out. The CIO scoffed at my report, called me an alarmist and said that my opinions were right up there with the Y2K doomsayers.
When Slammer hit, I had described the vulnerabilities and outcome so accurately that this guy actually accused me of writing it myself. Took the whole corporate network down and they couldn't bring it back up until their techs visited each site. It took two teams seven days to get to all the sites. The company lost 6 business days, three customers and a months worth of transaction records.
Needless to say the CIO was demoted (they didn't fire him, which I consider itself a major tech mistake) and had me re-issue my audit report which they then followed to the letter taking every precaution I suggested.
didnt really hurt anything, but ... (Score:4, Funny)
So I typed:
rm -rf
This disk started churning
about 30 seconds later
the disk is still churning
about a minute later
CTRL-C
Where did all the files go? DAMNIT! I recursively deleted
I learned my lesson very well:
CREATE AND USE USER ACCOUNTS!! DONT RUN AS ROOT IF YOU CAN AVOID IT!
blowing up my computer (Score:5, Funny)
It was on 220v. I turned the computer on. It worked. Then I tried putting it on 110v and turning it on. Nothing. Then I switched it back to 220v, turned it on, and switched it to 110v while it was on.
Boom.
Moral of the story is, trial and error isn't the best way to learn hardware, and don't throw water on the smoking PSU while it's still live.
more fire and smoke (Score:4, Funny)
The first thing I did was plug in a keyboard, monitor, and turn the box's power on to see if it would reach the POST.
Smoke started coming from the box, and soon open flame. For a brief moment I just stood there looking at it thinking, "That's interesting. First time I've seen a computer catch fire." Then I pulled the plug from the wall and the flames soon stopped.
I looked into the case to see what went wrong. It seems that the power supply connector for a floppy drive is roughly the same size as a speaker connector on the sound card. My friend had plugged the power supply into the sound card which seems to have caused the fire when the power was turned on. I suppose I should have checked for something like this instead of just plugging in the machine.
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Really? I believe the opposite is true (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the articles implication of "the more we learn, the less we think" is wrong.
not so bad -- but still stupid (Score:4, Funny)
So this wasn't a production machine I screwed up or anything, but I'm still a moron.
I had a Linux workstation that was ultimately adopted by the development group I worked with in the late 90's. Anyway, for some reason I needed to make a boot disk from an image. For some other reason, while typing in my command line, I was thinking fd0 but managed to type hda. So my line was dd if=/wherever/whatever.img of=/dev/hda.
Anyway, before looking at what I had typed, I hit enter. About 2ms later, I glanced up at what was on the screen and exclaimed something along the lines of "holy fscking shit!" and simultaniously hit a ctrl+c. Interestingly enough, the drive still kind of worked. I tried copying the contents of the disk over to another device, but I found that with each command - nay, each disk access, the filesystem would disintegrate further. I was able to save /home -- but I otherwise had to reOS the system.
I guess I've done much more stupid things with production machines -- but these were better machines, with storage on a NetApp NAS, which all had snapshots, so recovery was nearly instantanous.
These are not things that I include on my resume. (So -- anyone want to hire a disaster waiting to happen?) ;)
Playing soundfile on remote UNIX box (Score:5, Funny)
Oh man. So I was a grad student, right? I was always trying to portray myself as a very serious, dedicated student to my thesis advisor. And he had the fastest computer in the department (a Sparc10!) and he gave me permission to use it for batch runs. So I pretty much kept one of my xterms as a remote terminal to his machine.
Anyhow, one day I found this funny .au (sound) file and wanted to play it for my office mates. So I did a 'cat naked.au > /dev/audio'. Nothing happened. So I turned up the volume and tried it again. Still nothing. Then I screached in horror! I was typing this command in on the xterm I use for my advisor's machine! Sure enough, two seconds later an email comes trickling in from my advisor stating 'Please note that you are logged into my machine so your sound file is coming through my speakers.'
So what was this sound file that I had inadvertently played for my advisor?
Butthead: "Whoa! Naked chicks!"
Beavis (excitedly): "Yeah! Naked chicks! Naked chicks!"
GMD
Re:Playing soundfile on remote UNIX box (Score:4, Informative)
sally.au
You old-schoolers know what I'm talkin' about.
Oh, come on, old schooler, get with the program. This is the web, for crying out loud! That should read as:
sally.au [ibiblio.org]
Much better.
Warning, not safe for work
(A class 2 sarcasm warning has been issued for this post.)
Parent
FoxPro-based MRP & Bad Networking (Score:3, Interesting)
My mistake was to give the techie "thumbs up" under pressure. I folded to the "We needed this yesterday" argument despite my misgivings about the software. I paid for that mistake for the next year in slavish tech support. We became the software company's test bed as we found bug after bug. The software "worked", but operator efficiency dropped, and uptime was sub-optimal. "Customization" caused problems, etc., etc.
The second mistake I made was to attempt to use VPN over Broadband with Citrix MetaFrame. Although MetaFrame was a pretty secure and slim protocol for remote desktops, the Internet provider on the remote site had horrible latency problems and was run by a group of amatures. I should have stuck with the original Sprint frame relay proposal.
Morals of the story: don't let PHB push you into a solution you don't trust, and when network reliability is important, pay for assured quality of frame relay.
My Commander told me to kill the network (Score:5, Interesting)
Commander thought I was brilliant, and so did I. I had fractured our network into at least 10 different domains. No one could talk to anyone, effectively "simulating" an enemy jamming attempt. It would take hours to restore the network, with many mad commo guys having to drive about with Pluggers, early GPS devices, to restore each radio to propper time.
Then a tank flipped. Someone died. No one could call for help. I am so damn smart.
No moon black, At 2 in the morning, in an upside down tank, the gunner figured out how to put his radio in plain text to call for help. It took him almost half an hour.
Re:My Commander told me to kill the network (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:My Commander told me to kill the network (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, from the post, I doubt that the person dying could have been saved if the radio had been active.
Furthermore, unless the Army has rules requiring that personnel on training exercises have a comm system always up, I'm not sure that even your CO made a poor decision. There is such a thing as tragedy -- where everyone really did do the right thing, and someone still gets hurt as a result.
It's kind of like deciding to drive down Main Street in a town instead of Lambert Street and hitting and killing a kid that ran out into the street. Yes, had you taken the other road, the kid would have been alive. However, you can't be expected to or be *able* to always make the decision that produces the best outcome, or you'd be the best gambler in the world. The only thing that you can do is what seems the most sensible thing given the information that you have at the time. You did that, and nobody could ask for more.
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Re:My Commander told me to kill the network (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, I'd feel horrible. But I wouldn't hold you responsible.
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I flooded the building. (Score:3, Funny)
Lotus Notes... er.. (Score:3, Funny)
Anyway, as we are standing there, I think, well lets see how many users they have, so I ask if I could look at the Name & Address book. Opened up the people view, hit Control-A to see the count at the bottom of the screen of the number of records. Unfortunalty it was a very small compaq keyboard, hit delete as I turned to the local tech..
Oooops. (Score:5, Funny)
I got one of these calls, and I went one level up the tree, got distracted by something, and without thinking hit up-backspace-y-enter, going up two levels in the tree instead of one. This reset all the connections for the whole network, to all the banks, all across Canada.
Every phone in the call center started ringing. Every LED that could flash red did so. Everyone in the call centre looked around frantically. I looked at my terminal and almost died on the spot.
Not only had I reset all the terminal connection, but trying to bring them back online flooded the network so as soon as they tried to come back up they all went offline again. It took several hours to get things stabalized and the banks could start serving customers again.
Fortunatly my boss was a decent guy. He saw it as an accident and something that no one should be able to accidently do. The command to reset the entire network was modified so you had to type in your password to confirm, instead of just 'y-enter'
Worst...Tech...Mistake...Ever (Score:4, Insightful)
By far, my worst tech mistake was dropping out of college to take a full time job as an outsourced computer admin. Not having my degree has kept me from being competitive for better jobs with larger companies.
I love job now, but I don't have much room to grow, being as I'm the top IT guy in a 70-person company that's family owned (and I'm not in the family). I'm working on finishing my degree now so that when the time comes to move on, I'll be able to find jobs that have room for growth.
Ahh, stories. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wasn't in
My next command was 'ls'. It returned: unable to find
AAAAARGH!
I now know how to solve that under solaris. Under
Ever since then, my prompt has had my current directory in it. That experience certainly made me more careful.
Better (or worse) was when a stupid service rep came in to replace a bad CPU on a sun e10000. The idiot shut down the sub-system, and powered off the board correctly. He then managed to pull out the wrong board, despite the blinken lights. Of course it was the peoplesoft domain. Running year end reporting.
AAAAARGH!
I ruined a phone book (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, what, I'm supposed to proofread the entire phone book by myself?
Anyway, the software used some kind of crazy soundex routine to "fix" addresses that it wasn't able to resolve, and thousands of people ended up with completely incorrect address information. The book went to press, was distributed, and a day later the phones were ringing off the hook. We had to pick up the old books, fix the data, schedule more press time (no easy feat), re-print, and re-distribute.
Total cost to correct was around $1M, got my ass chewed royally, but managed to keep my job anyway.
Must be doing *something* right!
Trying out Kmail (Score:5, Funny)
Funny thing is, people from my previous job were getting work related emails from me again, and they didn't seem to mind that (1) they were on outdated topics and (2) the company was defunct, they played right along and replied stuff like "yeah what ever happened to that issue?".
Click here! (Score:5, Funny)
Back then, we didn't do letterboxing like Media Player does. If the window you play the video in isn't the same as the aspect ratio of the video, then cropping occurs. I did not consider this little fact about our player, rather I got it up on the site as fast as I possibly could. Then, I went to lunch.
When I got back from lunch, I noticed the CEO was looking at the demo. So I poked my head in to say hi. He says "Why is this video telling me to lick it?" Wha? I go up to the screen, look at what he's watching, and... eep. The c in click here was perfectly cropped out of the shot. I mean perfectly. I mean you didn't know it was missing. So here's a horse, reared up on its hind legs, with the words "LICK HERE" just below its.. uh.. tail.
I am so glad that we had the one CEO in our industry that understood what took place.
Very Enterprising (Score:3, Funny)
I was coding the Linux kernel... (Score:5, Funny)
Boy, do I feel stupid now.
Oh geez. (Score:5, Funny)
TRUNCATE TABLE Checks
TRUNCATE isn't a logged option but thankfully Log Explorer Pro from Lumigent can retrieve truncated data if you move fast enough. As well we had a backup that wasn't so very old handy. Out of 1.3 million checks we only lost 34000, but I was so stressed out.
2. Way, way, way back when we had just gotten a new Dell server. I was showing an interviewee the server who I had found out I had known when I was younger. So, joking around I said, "Want to see a hot swap of a drive?" He was like, heh, that'd be cool. So I pulled the drive out of the RAID 5 array. Alarm klaxons started going off from inside the machine, I swear. I stuffed the drive back in but even though the drive officially -was- hot swap we hadn't purchased the high end Dell with an array controller that could dynamically rebuild the data. We'd gotten the cheap version. 8 hours later - with the machine beeping constantly at us - the rebuild was done.
3. This one's not mine but a guy I work with. I had asked him to migrate some databases to a backup server so he set up a DTS job to do the migration. Unfortunately he did two things wrong: the destination was the same server as the source, our primary production machine, and he set the DTS process to execute nightly instead of once. We ended up filling 300Gb of drive space and not having a clue as to what happened to cause it. When we found it we were giggling (it is funny
4. Another one that's not mine. New network administrator was installing Windows NT 4.0 (this was ~6 years back? Roughly?). He was complaining about it taking forever to install and I asked him what he was doing. "Well, shit, NT has like 35 disks man." I asked him why he wasn't installing off the CD and he just hung up on me. He didn't know the NT CD would allow you to do that.
5. On a similar vein my original boss when I started here was I thought a technical God. It's fun to see how that belief fades over time. In my case he was showing me how to install Netware 3.12 and configure it the way he wanted it to be configured. He sent me off on my own the next week to install a new office. The week at home I had burned all the Netware 3.12 files to a CD so I wouldn't have to cart around all those floppies. Apparently the load time off CD blew my boss out of the water because he didn't believe I'd installed the server already when he called to see how things were progressing.
6. I'm walking my COO through hooking up a new modem in our Kansas City office. He's getting mad at me and asking me if I know what I'm doing because we can't get a response from the modem. (I'm working blind over the phone.) I had asked him earlier if he had hooked up all the cables like they were to the old one and he had indicated that he did. Finally I said, "Look, don't take this the wrong way but let's check the cabling. You should have a phone cable to the wall, a power cable to the power, and an interface cable to the computer. These should all be coming from the modem." He had forgotten to hook up the RS-232 cable. To this day I razz him about modems telepathically communicating with machines.
7. My CEO is one of the brightest people I've ever met in my life and has my eternal respect for his intelligence and moral integrity. He called me and indicated he couldn't print. I told him to not get insulted but I was going to start with the basics. "Is the printer plugged in?" "Yes." "Is the power on?" "Thanks Brian, I'll call you if I have any more problems."
8. I had just come off the road from setting up our Texas operations - a 4 mont
Live deletes (Score:4, Insightful)
What the heck are these files doing on E: on this machine? Fsck! Ok... let's delete them...
Sudden realization that it wasn't local after all.. it was our main server for the ISP we ran, 25 miles away!
Hopped in car, had to reinstall, got it back up and running about 2 sweat filled hours later.
Moral: Always be mindful of WHERE the command is running.
--Mike--
The very first Fiber run in Phoenix (Score:3, Funny)
The very first fiber run in Phoneix went from one federal building to another. I'm not sure which, but they must have been important.
If you've ever seen an phone cable room underground, you know that the cables are straight, so straight that you can easily follow them across the room and usually clearly labeled. Well some dumbass manager went down into this one cable room underground in Phoenix, and saw this great big looping yellow piece of shit cable run and wanted it fixed pronto!! So he gets some new hire (been on the job less than a month) to go down there and I quote "Fix that Fu**ing thing! I want it to look just like the rest of the cable down there, and I'm gonna get the guy who installed it fired!!" (yes, he does come off as a jackass doesn't he?)
So this poor newbie goes down into the manhole and starts hammering, and tying down, this 'cable' run. He's using pliers, 3 pound mauls (why won't this stuff stay flat?) and whatever else he could do and wouldn't you know it, after 4 hours or so of this, it looks beautiful, just like the rest of the runs and even re-labeled!
Well, when this guy pokes his head out of the manhole, there are like 20 officers from the FBI, State DPS, County sheriff, ATF, and whoever else waiting for him with guns drawn!!!! Poor guy is fired on the spot and questioned for over 2 days, telling them he's not a sabateur and that his boss told him to do this. The boss doesn't fess up until the 3rd day of questioning, at which point HE is fired and the pleeb gets his job back.
The second first fiber run in Phoenix was back up shortly, and the other workers educated about it's "don't take a hammer to this shit" properties.
--
This sig writes better than I do.
NET SEND (Score:4, Funny)
After hitting ENTER, I hear a hundred Windows 'dings', and everyone in cubicle-land starts prairiedogging. I got a few nasty replies asking who I was, and a very nice one saying "Don't worry: once I sent 'I know you don't have any pants on' to most of HP Belgium".
Worst thing was, the guy clogging up the server was my cubicle-mate who'd gone out to get coffee.
Re:rm (Score:3, Funny)
Re:rm (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad plan. Now, the next time you log into a new machine you'll think that rm will be safe and will wipe out an entire directory tree again.
If you want to have a safe alias, use a different name! For example del would be appropriate. If you're not good enough to use rm correctly, then an old DOS command seems appropriate...
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Suggestion to avoid accidental "rm"s (Score:4, Interesting)
However, accidentally separating a wildcard from text is an infrequent mistake that can cause much pain. For example, typing rm -rf *
Zsh, by default, will complain at you and ask you if you *really* mean it if you use a bare wildcard with an rm command. Invaluable, and has saved my ass a few times.
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Re:rm ... I did this once (Score:5, Funny)
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Copy that floppy! (Score:3, Funny)
I did something similar on my beloved C=64.
I borrowed a game from a friend, and wanted to copy it. Of course, it had the classic 'deliberate bad checksum' anti-copy protection, which meant nothing more than loading a disk copying program that would handle it.
About half way through the first phase of copying, it suddenly dawned on me that I was using my disk copying floppy as my destination disk. I immediately pulled it out of the drive, thus ensuring I had neither a copy of the game nor a copy of the so