Of course it’s annoying, but we’ve made far more posts about it than their out of office post made. :)
And they’ll be punished enough when they come back and see it, and think, Oh no, made me look like a total neWb or however the young folks spell it these days.
I’m sure all of us have done, if not this, something equally embarrassing like posting a private reply to an email or doing dd with the wrong destination, etc. That’s why I like where I work. The owners on down are technical people, and when one does something completely stupid, everyone knows that stuff happens.
Long ago when I was a beginner with technical mail lists I read, no I
__studied carefully mail list etiquette. And stopping list delivery in case you set auto responder was one of the must do things.
My feelings then were: if I forget to do that I may be kicked off the list and banned from subscription, which I considered quite fair thing. I seem to miss the moment when we started care more about the offender than we do about people whom the offender made suffer (seems to be in all aspects of modern world).
Valeri
Le 26/12/2020 à 18:14, Scott Robbins a écrit :
Then let’s make a little contest out of it: what’s the most stupid thing you’ve done as a system administrator ?
I’m a ten-finger-typer, and I rarely look at the keyboard. Which is a bad thing when your focus is on the wrong terminal. So a few years ago I happened to type
“ssh root@some-remote-server.com“, vaguely sensed in the corner of my eye that something was wrong and discovered to my horror that I just posted it on a densely populated IRC channel.
2 am clean up of disk space to get email servers working again discover a large tree of temp files from a shared service in /usr/ # remember before /home?
/bin/rm -rf . /*
^c up-arrow spew coffee and swearing go get reinstall cdrom and backup tapes
—
—
Stephen J Smoogen.
That’s a popular one. There’s even an instance of it on bash.org, though in that case, they fooled a new comer into thinking that everone saw his password as ****.
Yup that has to count as mine. We had a FreeBSD server and back in older days, you used to do rm -rf /usr/obj before doing a buildworld. The sequence was cd /usr/obj;chflags noschg *, rm -rf * then cd /usr/src and start the build. (I may have that slightly wrong, but that’s the idea).
So in my case, I did that, and thought, Hrrm, that’s taking a long time to remove obj. Then when I got my command prompt back, I did the usual cd
/usr/src and saw directory not found. Hrm, thinks I, that’s odd. cd /usr
ls (shows . and ..) I’d removed the entire /usr directory, and I was fairly new. Fortunately, it was a freshly installed server, I was new to IT and my boss had a sense of humor about it, and even tried to make me feel better by telling me similar stories. That was around 19 years ago, so I laugh now, but sure wasn’t laughing then.
I did the same just to prove for myself I am right. Used fresh test installation for that though:
rm -rf /
– was testing it, as I missed the moment when the following stopped being true:
“the above command will start removing directory tree /
_alphabetically_, hence when it removes /dev/[root file system device]
further remove operations will fail. Hence on physical root device only stuff alphabetically before /dev will actually be removed.”
Of course I was gravely wrong, thing did change (as one of experts on mail list pointed out for me). And the above command did obliterate everything.
Embarrassing part was: I had first said that loud on mail list, and only after I had been told I’m wrong, I actually tested it, and confirmed to my self I was wrong.
Another embarrassing thing was done by my younger colleague. He was helping someone he talked to on the phone to change that user’s password. And as many younger (than I) people he always was typing lightning fast. And instead of typing
passwd [username]
he typed
passwd
[username]
Without noticing anything wrong he changed root password on the machine to, guess what?, “password” (without quotes). He ultimately did help user to change his password. And few days later bad guys just walked into machine as user root. I hope, he doesn’t read this my post.
So mine was not the case one can state funny way: I thought I was wrong but I was mistaken ;-)
Cleaning up some obsolete users on a system that accepts remote SSH logins and somehow managing to remove my own SSH key too. Which I discovered about ten minutes later when I went to log in again and found that I had locked myself out.
Not one I did, but one I was part of. A co-worker and I were discussing something or other (might even have been work related) leaning on top one of the VAX 11/750s in the machine room. They are just a convenient elbow height. Suddenly the console spewed into life, and for some strange reason the system was booting. Oops, my co-worker had managed to press their stomach against the reset button!
Mind, I can also recall the same co-worker sorting out a hardware problem that had been baffling the engineers for an hour – the on-off switch was in the off position!
1)
rm -rf /prodnfs_mountpoint/*
Thankfully, it had some delay before deleting ,so “Ctrl + C” almost broke on my keyboard.
2) Powered off primary prod DB instead of the stanby which usually has planned downtime 3 times per year :)
3) wiped the whole VM during my RHCSA (paid with my own money) with only 40 min left
Best Regards, Strahil Nikolov
Hmmm….I think the worst for me would have been back in the “Exchange Server Admin” days, where you’re asked to CREATE a mailing list, but instead I go in, see that there’s FOUR lists with the SAME name (not thinking that this might be different departments on the SAME server)
and I go and DELETE them, and then create the one requested. Needless to say? I was “restricted” from entering the data center, much less TOUCHING the Exchange server for about THREE MONTHS!!
13 thoughts on - Out Of Office: “CentOS Digest, Vol 191, Issue 26”
Le 26/12/2020 à 13:00, mak@jump.com.hk a écrit :
Am I the only one feeling a strong urge to blood-eagle out-of-office repliers on public mailing lists ?
:o)
—
Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12
Not the only one, but there might be an alternative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered
:-)
—
J Martin Rushton MBCS
You can’t. He’s out of the office.
Of course it’s annoying, but we’ve made far more posts about it than their out of office post made. :)
And they’ll be punished enough when they come back and see it, and think, Oh no, made me look like a total neWb or however the young folks spell it these days.
I’m sure all of us have done, if not this, something equally embarrassing like posting a private reply to an email or doing dd with the wrong destination, etc. That’s why I like where I work. The owners on down are technical people, and when one does something completely stupid, everyone knows that stuff happens.
Long ago when I was a beginner with technical mail lists I read, no I
__studied carefully mail list etiquette. And stopping list delivery in case you set auto responder was one of the must do things.
My feelings then were: if I forget to do that I may be kicked off the list and banned from subscription, which I considered quite fair thing. I seem to miss the moment when we started care more about the offender than we do about people whom the offender made suffer (seems to be in all aspects of modern world).
Valeri
Le 26/12/2020 à 18:14, Scott Robbins a écrit :
Then let’s make a little contest out of it: what’s the most stupid thing you’ve done as a system administrator ?
I’m a ten-finger-typer, and I rarely look at the keyboard. Which is a bad thing when your focus is on the wrong terminal. So a few years ago I happened to type “, vaguely sensed in the corner of my eye that something was wrong and discovered to my horror that I just posted it on a densely populated IRC channel.
“ssh root@some-remote-server.com
Your turn. :o)
—
Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12
2 am clean up of disk space to get email servers working again discover a large tree of temp files from a shared service in /usr/ # remember before /home?
/bin/rm -rf . /*
^c up-arrow spew coffee and swearing go get reinstall cdrom and backup tapes
—
—
Stephen J Smoogen.
That’s a popular one. There’s even an instance of it on bash.org, though in that case, they fooled a new comer into thinking that everone saw his password as ****.
Yup that has to count as mine. We had a FreeBSD server and back in older days, you used to do rm -rf /usr/obj before doing a buildworld. The sequence was cd /usr/obj;chflags noschg *, rm -rf * then cd /usr/src and start the build. (I may have that slightly wrong, but that’s the idea).
So in my case, I did that, and thought, Hrrm, that’s taking a long time to remove obj. Then when I got my command prompt back, I did the usual cd
/usr/src and saw directory not found. Hrm, thinks I, that’s odd. cd /usr
ls (shows . and ..) I’d removed the entire /usr directory, and I was fairly new. Fortunately, it was a freshly installed server, I was new to IT and my boss had a sense of humor about it, and even tried to make me feel better by telling me similar stories. That was around 19 years ago, so I laugh now, but sure wasn’t laughing then.
I did the same just to prove for myself I am right. Used fresh test installation for that though:
rm -rf /
– was testing it, as I missed the moment when the following stopped being true:
“the above command will start removing directory tree /
_alphabetically_, hence when it removes /dev/[root file system device]
further remove operations will fail. Hence on physical root device only stuff alphabetically before /dev will actually be removed.”
Of course I was gravely wrong, thing did change (as one of experts on mail list pointed out for me). And the above command did obliterate everything.
Embarrassing part was: I had first said that loud on mail list, and only after I had been told I’m wrong, I actually tested it, and confirmed to my self I was wrong.
Another embarrassing thing was done by my younger colleague. He was helping someone he talked to on the phone to change that user’s password. And as many younger (than I) people he always was typing lightning fast. And instead of typing
passwd [username]
he typed
passwd
[username]
Without noticing anything wrong he changed root password on the machine to, guess what?, “password” (without quotes). He ultimately did help user to change his password. And few days later bad guys just walked into machine as user root. I hope, he doesn’t read this my post.
So mine was not the case one can state funny way: I thought I was wrong but I was mistaken ;-)
Valeri
CentOS mailing list CentOS@CentOS.org https://lists.CentOS.org/mailman/listinfo/CentOS
Cleaning up some obsolete users on a system that accepts remote SSH logins and somehow managing to remove my own SSH key too. Which I discovered about ten minutes later when I went to log in again and found that I had locked myself out.
Not one I did, but one I was part of. A co-worker and I were discussing something or other (might even have been work related) leaning on top one of the VAX 11/750s in the machine room. They are just a convenient elbow height. Suddenly the console spewed into life, and for some strange reason the system was booting. Oops, my co-worker had managed to press their stomach against the reset button!
Mind, I can also recall the same co-worker sorting out a hardware problem that had been baffling the engineers for an hour – the on-off switch was in the off position!
1)
rm -rf /prodnfs_mountpoint/*
Thankfully, it had some delay before deleting ,so “Ctrl + C” almost broke on my keyboard.
2) Powered off primary prod DB instead of the stanby which usually has planned downtime 3 times per year :)
3) wiped the whole VM during my RHCSA (paid with my own money) with only 40 min left
Best Regards, Strahil Nikolov
Hmmm….I think the worst for me would have been back in the “Exchange Server Admin” days, where you’re asked to CREATE a mailing list, but instead I go in, see that there’s FOUR lists with the SAME name (not thinking that this might be different departments on the SAME server)
and I go and DELETE them, and then create the one requested. Needless to say? I was “restricted” from entering the data center, much less TOUCHING the Exchange server for about THREE MONTHS!!
EGO II