On 5/13/2011 6:54 PM, Tom Perrine wrote: > So, what's your most memorable command line typo, "think-o", > "brain-fart", or "#$$@#$*&@#$" moment?
That would be the one that almost cost me my job. Seven months or so after being hired, I had a customer who wanted a particular software package installed on his Windows server. I diligently went through and installed the package only to find out that the DLL wasn't being read by IIS even after registration. Somehow, I tracked down that the issue had something to do with the IIS identity. So, following directions in the documentation, I changed the password for IUSR -- bringing down IIS. I then tried to change the password used by IIS but that didn't work. Sick to my stomach, I panicked. I found that if I changed the password for each individual site, it would work so I started that. There were a lot of sites on this server and the customer called wondering why their sites weren't working correctly... I tried the global password change again and then everything worked. Only the fact that I had documentation saying to do this saved me from the unemployment line. After that point, I was forbidden to install software on that server again. Close runners up are: * I once had to fix a Linux system where / had been chmod'd to 0 because a script didn't properly check its inputs. root could do everything but nothing else would work. Fixing it was easy. Finding the cause of the problem was hard. * I was remotely working on a Cisco router. I was in config mode inside the external interface and wanted to see the current running config. In that version of IOS, "sh run" when inside the interface means "shutdown the interface". One phone call to the data center techs later... * I once inherited a system left behind by a co-worker who quit. I was told he had backup and RAID monitoring set up on this system. Since I trust my co-workers, I took him at his word and never checked myself. Several years later, the system dies. The first drive in the RAID 1 array has a lot of bad sectors and isn't bootable anymore. The second drive has apparently been long dead. So much for monitoring. I mount the first drive in another system and look around. The partition for backups is empty. So much for backups. Since this was a production system, I then had the... pleasure of using dd to pull the data off of this drive, carefully working around all of the bad sectors. By some miracle, this actually worked and I was able to put the system back online in a few days. I hope to never do that again. --CAE _______________________________________________ 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/
