AW: Dumb moment (was Re: Evil Interview Questions (was Re: [SAGE] Coolest thing?)

[Thomas.Leyer@infineon.com]

this all reminds me of another ex-co-worker at university...

 ok... let's no longer bother about him calling me at almost 
midnight saying 

	"hey, we got a small problem... it all started with this
	 small script I'm working on..."

 (this little problem took 3 days of restoring indizes for 15 
  webservers...)

 but what I really hated was his accidentially changing 

 root -> Root 

 in a solaris /etc/passwd... on a productive webserver... after
I offered him help in adding a new user... 

 oh boy... I hated cleaning up his "small problems"

Thom
 
 
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Lloyd C. Cha [mailto:lccha@pobox.com] 
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 6. März 2003 20:53
An: sage-members@usenix.org
Betreff: Re: Dumb moment (was Re: Evil Interview Questions (was Re: [SAGE] Coolest thing?)


Once upon a time (like on Mar 05, 2003), Yves Dorfsman wrote:
> This was in Europe, and whoever setup those machines before me didn't 
> know a lot more about UNIX than I did at the time, so TZ was set, but 
> not properly, something like GMT1DST (This was in a country that 
> switched at a different time than the US).

Ah.  This reminds me of a problem we had with some SunOS 4.x machines. For some reason, each time we switched into daylight savings time, roughly half the machines switched properly, half did not.  Some of you might remember that SunOS used to have two locale options for the Pacific time zone, Pacific and Pacific-New.  The ones I setup were using Pacific, but the ones setup by another sysadmin used Pacific-New.  Oops.

Another installation "oops" story:

As part of a weekend upgrade we were to install ten newly purchased HP workstations.  Our plan was to place them on user desktops first, then install the OS over the network.  One guy made up a list of machine names and IP address assignments.  We took that list with us as we went around the building.  Whenever we encountered one of the new machines, we'd assign it a name off the list, load the OS, and cross off the name used.

We were nearly done when we realized that there was still one machine left on our list.  Somehow we must have missed a machine.  We figured we probably missed it since we only visited the cubes where we thought were occupied by engineers.  We resorted to a careful cube-by-cube search.  An hour later, still no missing machine ...

... then I noticed that there were 11 names on the list.  D'oh!

I still remember the name of the 11th name.  rolls.

-L