Do Unix admin fiascoes count? I once had an SA do "# chmod -R 700 /dev"
because he thought someone was inappropriately dinging something there. Can
you imagine how many things break when /dev/null is unwritable and
unreadable? And when /dev/vx/rdsk/... (with a database on raw devices) are
not readable or writable by Oracle?
The same fellow also once changed oracle's UID and the dba GID and did a
chown oracle:dba on all of oracle's directories and files - without telling
anyone or shutting down the instances running on the server. Oracle hung -
suddenly it did not own any processes or semaphores! ("ipcrm" is not the
preferred method of shutting down oracle!)
My own most embarrassing fiasco occurred many, many years ago - when I was
fairly new to Unix. I created a shell script named "rm" which did "rm -i
$*" You can imagine what happened the first time I ran it - processes were
spawning faster than I could kill them, even with a script... It was admin
by BOB time. (BOB=Big Orange Button.) Fortunately, it was on a development
server!
Don Granaman
[certifiable OraSaurus]
----- Original Message -----
To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 10:53 AM
> On Tuesday 09 April 2002 20:03, Deshpande, Kirti wrote:
>
> Well Kirti, if you're going to morph this thread into stupid DBA tricks...
>
> We had one young fellow working for us that was new to unix. He had
> just discovered that he could run a job in the background via '&' at about
> the same time he was assigned the task of recompiling all of the files
> for an entire application.
>
> You can probably guess the rest. ;)
>
> About the time he started bragging about how "quickly" he was able
> to recompile all of the code, we were all headed to the server room
> to find out why our dev server was suddenly so slow...
>
> Jared
>
>
>
> > We had one dba who (by mistake) issued a 'chown -R oracle:dba' followed
by
> > 'chmod -R 750 *' from the '/' directory while logged in as root.
> > Fortunately, it was a server with no production databases on it, just a
> > couple of Development databases. She never new what a '#' prompt was.
She
> > is long gone but such memories linger for ever ;)
> > It took a while for the SA's to let Oracle DBAs get root privileges
after
> > that episode.
> >
> > And in my previous job, I had a junior DBA who tried to kill a
background
> > job (%1) with 'kill -9' as root. The problem was, he forgot to put in
'%'
> > before the '1' .... and then came to me stating that the Server does not
> > respond anymore :( while I was talking to the Customer who had beaten
him
> > to place a trouble call about 'the database just hung-up'..... Is there
a
> > Darwin Award for the Living (DBA)? =;)
> >
> >
> > - Kirti
> >
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
> --
> Author: Jared Still
> INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
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--
Author: Don Granaman
INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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