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SysAdmin Rite of Passage
Greg, one of my colleagues in an adjacent cube, is having a very hard day today and it's only 9:30 AM.
About 30 minutes ago, he meant to type the following (with root privileges):
crontab -l | grep reboot
What he actually typed was:
crontab -l | reboot
For the non-geek, the first command would have searched through the list of automatically-scheduled commands for the time & date of the automated reboot. The second one listed the commands and initiated the reboot immediately. It's a small typo with big consequences: the unscheduled reboot set off all manner of alarms & automated pages for the system administrator staff, our managers, the business users, the developers, the customer support staff and our senior corporate management. There's a conference call in progress at the moment to examine the causes & consequences of the reboot.
Since Greg is something of a perfectionist, he's dying of embarrassment as I type this, and would like nothing better than have the earth swallow him up.
This significant faux pas is, for our staff at least, something of a rite of passage: every senior admin in our data centers has made this kind of error at least once in his/her career. I've done it myself at least twice in the past decade or so, which isn't a bad average since I support a division of approximately 400 servers. In a twisted kind of way, Greg has finally arrived: he's now truly One Of Us. :-)
It's not much of a comfort at the moment, but we'll have a good laugh about it some day.
About 30 minutes ago, he meant to type the following (with root privileges):
crontab -l | grep reboot
What he actually typed was:
crontab -l | reboot
For the non-geek, the first command would have searched through the list of automatically-scheduled commands for the time & date of the automated reboot. The second one listed the commands and initiated the reboot immediately. It's a small typo with big consequences: the unscheduled reboot set off all manner of alarms & automated pages for the system administrator staff, our managers, the business users, the developers, the customer support staff and our senior corporate management. There's a conference call in progress at the moment to examine the causes & consequences of the reboot.
Since Greg is something of a perfectionist, he's dying of embarrassment as I type this, and would like nothing better than have the earth swallow him up.
This significant faux pas is, for our staff at least, something of a rite of passage: every senior admin in our data centers has made this kind of error at least once in his/her career. I've done it myself at least twice in the past decade or so, which isn't a bad average since I support a division of approximately 400 servers. In a twisted kind of way, Greg has finally arrived: he's now truly One Of Us. :-)
It's not much of a comfort at the moment, but we'll have a good laugh about it some day.
no subject
back in 1983 (on a Sun 1 !) typed "rm *" when I thought was I in some deep subdirectory and I was actually in "/" as root. bootloader gone, vmunix gone, etc.
needless to say this was unrecoverable and we had to reload the OS.
no subject
Yeah, I've nuked my root partition accidentally more than once in my younger, dumber days. And dropped a stack of punched cards just before setting them in the reader. And accidentally formatted the wrong floppy (back when they actually were floppy). It's the joy/pain of the trade.