I think my worst disaster happened when I was in college and working for the CS helpdesk. When I had first been introduced to Unix, someone had taught me that if I had a stuck process, I could run the command ‘kill -9 -1 0’ and that would kill all of my stuck processes. I had never really thought about the *meaning* of the command until I had a stuck process on the primary server for the department, and ran that command as root. It did kill my stuck command … and every other process on the system. The computer was just slow enough that I could look out into the lab and see people’s sessions getting terminated and the confused looks spread in real time. That was the day that I learned exactly what ‘init’ was, and that with great power comes great responsibility not to screw things up.
I haven’t made a major disaster mistake like that in a while, but I’m glad we also have a forgiving culture here where we also try to learn from mistakes. I know that I did something a couple of years ago that caused some issues, but I fixed it and sent out an apology email with details about what happened and how I was going to avoid doing it again. I got a kudos email in response from someone who said that they had been used to people just sweeping problems under the rug or focusing on placing blame at their previous job. Brian -- Brian Sebby ([email protected]) | Infrastructure and Operation Services Phone: +1 630.252.9935 | Computing and Information Systems Fax: +1 630.252.4601 | Argonne National Laboratory On May 29, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Michael Tiernan <[email protected]> wrote: > Okay, how many of us hit the return key while hearing a little voice go > "NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!" :) > > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/28/joyent_cloud_down/ > > To quote a friend's sig "Oh god, please, not another learning experience!" > > -- > << MCT >> Michael C Tiernan. http://www.linkedin.com/in/mtiernan > Non Impediti Ratione Cogatationis > Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs > should relax and get used to the idea. -Robert A. Heinlein > > _______________________________________________ > 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/
_______________________________________________ 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/
