On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 8:39 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > And that's when I learned that the best way to learn > things is to break stuff! :) > > Amen to that!
My biggest "stupid" moment was in my first job as a sysadmin when I ran "rm -rf / someplace" (see the space?). I had worked the whole day, got home and still wanted to continue working on the project (replacing a bunch of misconfigured Linux servers with a new FreeBSD machine). Nowadays I know when to stop and how working tired can lead to very bad things. This was at 1am and I had to be back at work by 8am. I lost my SSH session and couldn't connect back anymore. By looking at xterm's history it was clear my mistake. Two weeks of work down the toilet. I decided to go to bed and tell my boss how I screwed everything up the next morning. Lucky for me, it wasn't in production yet. That night I had the worst nightmares and woke up many times. At 6am I decided I wasn't going to wait anymore because trying to sleep was pointless. I then headed to the office in my bike. Since I was very methodical about learning, I had written down every single step used to configure that server. In almost 2 hours, I reinstalled FreeBSD and ran down my notes configuring everything (it was a boat load of services plus security hardening, etc). For a junior sysadmin, even with detailed instruction I wasn't sure I would be able to do it on time. There was a lot of compiling, patches, etc, but I did it. At 8am my boss came to the office and asked if we would be able to go live with the new server that day. I happily answered "Sure! No problem at all" and finally relaxed. From that day on I'm scared of running anything with "-rf". Lessons learned the hard way are the ones that stick I guess :-) -- Giovanni Tirloni
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
