Some of those problems continue to live on to this day.... 

I have my .login/.profile set term title when I log in...though there are 
places where its not done or it doesn't work. And, it doesn't reset 
automatically if you get disconnected. Though normally I still check to make 
sure I'm on the right host first....but sometimes when you're in a 
hurry....these things happen. 

Once upon a time, when I was a software engineer. I was working on a large and 
significant change set..... and was cleaning after a compile with "rm *.o", 
except a space crept in...and it told me .o was not found. Yeah...all my work 
was not found either. Unlike some of my co-workers, at least I was doing work 
from my homedir on the main fileserver. Instead of on desktop workstation's 
disk. The company only backs up the servers it knows about...no workstations or 
PCs are backed up. It also uses an explicitly listed filesystems backup 
policy....so there'd be times we'd go to get something restored, and find that 
they never added the directory to backups...so 

started mounting new filesystems under a path that is backed up, and symlinking 
form where we really wanted the filesystem to go. Though that caused problems 
with most user restore requests :) 

Though that problem will probably live on forever, because of NFS. Users only 
seem to know what the mount is, and not request the export name, even though 
they had to know this when they asked us to set up the mount in the first 
place. And, the regular backup admin doesn't seem to check for that case when 
its not a regular mount. IE: we have a normal convention on where NFS 
filesystem are mounted....though its not forced. 

Back when I started...Unix systems were installed from piles of 
floppies....first 5.25" ones later 3.5" ones....seemed later on it was closer 
to 100 disks. Feels like that's how many it took to install my first Solaris 
system. Was also a pain later when it was taking 7 tapes to back up the system. 
But, I did it....along with differentials and cumulative . It was lucky when 
the drive crashed...it right after a cumulative. Was fun installing from disks, 
and then finding that one of the disks near the end is bad.... 

I'm not sure how the destroyed the NIS master at my last job....except that 
they said it wasn't recoverable, even though I had left a CD to restore it from 
baremetal. And, I've heard they can't figure out how to promote a slave....so 
they've just been continuing along with just the NIS slaves as they were before 
the master died. 

We used have an rdiff propagation system for configuration management...and the 
server was an old SunOS 4.1.3 box on a shelf....probably was the disk was small 
and the root fs would fill up now and then, so somebody would have to find a 
session and try to find something to clean up now and then. I'm the new guy, 
and I knew to leave the vmunix file alone. But, one day the Unix manager 
decides to help us all out and immediately deletes the vmunix file. That was 
probably the first sign that maybe she didn't actually know much Unix, even 
though she got the job through seniority. Now that she's a devop, she reminds 
us regularly that how little she knew with the kinds of tickets we get. More 
recently, one of the admins that used to work for her that had to be 
fired...now works with her in the devop group. 

He had previously applied twice to come back to work in our group....both times 
threatening legal action. The second time the search committee chair 
accidentally let slip that it was a comments made by one of his references 
(starting with, something to the effect of "I didn't know I was listed as his 
reference and I find it strange given what I think of his shortcomings....") 
So, he threatened to sue his reference. Didn't matter that he didn't meet the 
technical requirements for the job. Basically for hiring it comes down to, do 
we think the person knows what they need to know and is the person somebody 
that will fit in. Though at one time there were two distinct groups within our 
department, but everybody in the other group has quit....to eventually where 
they all work together somewhere else....twice. 

L 
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