# Dumbest computing mistake you've made?



## CodeBlock (Nov 22, 2009)

Ripped this topic idea from the ArchLinux forums, but there are some pretty darn interesting stories on there.

What is the dumbest computing mistake you've made?


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## vivek (Nov 22, 2009)

Rebooting the wrong box, rm -rf, running sql statement for all users to resetting password to null etc.


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## FBSDin20Steps (Nov 22, 2009)

I remember my first encounter with visudo... 


```
# %users  ALL=/sbin/mount /cdrom,/sbin/umount /cdrom
# %users  localhost=/sbin/shutdown -h no 

  
quit 
exit 
? 
-- help 

reboot 

man help 

qqW
~
~
~
```


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## gordon@ (Nov 22, 2009)

I ran rm -rf in the wrong directory. As a result, I deleted about 200,000 records from our production system that had no backup. Yeah, it kinda sucked.


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## graudeejs (Nov 22, 2009)

I lost my keys to geli


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## Blueprint (Nov 22, 2009)

A few years ago at work we were migrating a couple of AIX server disks from SAN attached to SAN volume controller ( basically a storage virtualisation layer ).

The first server came up with all its disks and volume groups ok. When I brought up the second server, the root volume group was ok, but I couldn't bring up the data volume group. So after hours of scratching my head and mucking around i finally decided to do a restore on the second server.

Little did i know while i was restoring to the second server i was simultaneously killing the first. It turned out our storage guy did a bad copy and paste while preparing his scripts and didn't double check the values. He accidently zoned some of the disks to both the first and second server.


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## SirDice (Nov 22, 2009)

Blowing up my C64 by connecting to wrong pins on the expansion port trying to reset the thing, check. rm -rf'ing the wrong directory, yep, did that. Losing my geli keys, did that too. Executing the wrong SQL query, yep, been there, done that. After 25 years of computing of which 15 professionally, I think I made every mistake in the book :e

Worst mistake however was on my first job, a computer repair shop. Customer wanted us to build in his new harddrive. Already had a drive in there, partitioned as C: and D:, a primary and an extended partition. Added the drive, partitioned it and formatted E:.

But guess what happens when you add a new drive with a new primary partition? Yes, the drive letters move around (primary partitions are listed first). So I ended up nuking the customers data on E: which was the old D:. Norton disk doctor didn't help getting the stuff back too. My boss was cool about it though, the customer wasn't


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## roddierod (Nov 22, 2009)

I worked for a big health insurance company, that ran a VAX cluster. At the time I was in charge of processing transplant related claims, which was the high claims job there was. Once I got to the level the gave me access to VMS mail. To this point, no one new I was a "hacker". I discovered that with VMS mail came access to the system and began to explore. There was no X or anything. So I happen to stumble upon the netscape navigator binary...so of course, without thinking,  I was going to try and access the internet from my no X dumb terminal. I tried to get it to run and ended up issuing a command line that crashed the VAX system running our claims shop...I got up a took a long smoke break. Came back and acted shocked. It was the only time in my 5 years there that anything like that happened, eventually my boss found out and we became good friends...which leads to my really bone head move...

A few years later my former boss called me to come work as a Analyst for a start up Behavoiral Health insurance command. After 3 months they told me they were getting ride of my position but putting me in IS because of my "geekiness". At the time IS consisted of 3 people and I made 4, so we all did everything. One day, no one was around and there was a problem with a customer service phones so I was going to long into the AT&T phone switch and see what was up. I ended up typing the root password incorrectly 3 times, which locked the system. No big deal I thought, call at&t support. The only problem was they need to send a technician to fix that problem and that would take a week! So for a week customer service had no phones...needless to say I was never allowed to touch the phone switch again


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## vivek (Nov 22, 2009)

Another one not related to software; I dropped Xeon chip while adding another cpu to existing server. I send it back to retailer. At first, they refused to accept it but when my boss twisted their hand, they agreed to forward it to OEM / Intel. We have large account with them for suppling printers and computer hardware. Finally, after 3 weeks later they send us a new boxed pack cpu...heh

Oh and the worst part about software mistake is,, someone ask you to investigate the matter (your own mess) and report it on to boss..it is fun. Usually, I end up dumping on users or hardware and/or ghosts... :r


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## saxon3049 (Nov 22, 2009)

vivek said:
			
		

> Oh and the worst part about software mistake is,, someone ask you to investigate the matter (your own mess) and report it on to boss..it is fun. Usually, I end up dumping on users or hardware and/*or ghosts*... :r



Is that ectoplasm on your keyboard or are you just happy to see me?

..._sorry that just sprang into my mind._


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## kpedersen (Nov 22, 2009)

Getting a bit annoyed because I couldn't work out if the 0 in a hex wep key was a 0(zero) or O(letter) but then I realized that there could be no O(letter) in hex!!.

There was 4 of them in the key and I was trying out every combination haha


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## saxon3049 (Nov 22, 2009)

I could picture that being highly annoying, worst mistake I had made was deleting a photographers pictures of weddings that was a fun night of data recovery lasting till 4am. 

I have a LONG list of errors by others including some woman who washed the inside of her computer with warm soapy water, it's a little long so I will save it for another day.


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## anomie (Nov 22, 2009)

I had a customer whose web/mail server had been somehow (not by me) turned into an open relay. He called me to correct it, and in my haste to fix the problem, a couple important emails got deleted. 

Free advice -- don't ever tinker with qmail's mail queue while qmail is running. 

Two things came out of that muck up: 

 I bought _The qmail Handbook_ by Dave Sill
 That customer has not spoken to me in awhile


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## SPlissken (Nov 23, 2009)

Did a rm * in /usr/bin when trying to delete a file called '*'


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## CodeBlock (Nov 23, 2009)

ouch. xD.


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## graudeejs (Nov 23, 2009)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> I lost my keys to geli



Did I say, I didn't have backups..... 
After that I wrote this at daemonforums.org.

Here it is the original thread


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## Ruler2112 (Nov 23, 2009)

Rebooted a production server when I thought I was on my personal PC because I couldn't figure out why my flash drive didn't appear when I plugged it in.  (Stupid KVMs...  )

When in college and doing an assembler project at home, somehow nuked the partition table of my hard drive and corrupting the running DOS, preventing me from copying anything off.  No idea what I did either, since the assembler program was stored on said drive...

Corrected a college instructor, in class, and in front of everybody.  I was right - the flowchart of the program we were supposed to write wasn't efficient.  My program, built the way I told him to do it, ran several orders of magnitude faster than everybody elses.  He didn't appreciate it though, even though I was respectful.

Different instructor, whom I had almost no respect for, told us to turn off our monitors so he could lecture.  "You can still work on your program, but your monitor has to be off." he said.  Well, I clicked syntax checking off in QuickBasic, turned off my monitor, and kept coding.    He was royally POed because I wasn't listening to him blather on about crap I already knew (I knew more about QB than the instructor did by far), but I simply told him that I was only doing what he said we could do.  

Spent an entire semester re-writing an instruction manual for an independent study in college.  (Last required class and it wasn't offered otherwise.)  Ran my PC without a UPS.  Power went out *just* as WP/DOS was doing it's backup - corrupted both the original and the backup.

(QuickBasic, WP for DOS... I'm showing my age, aren't I?)


While modding my home PC, I took a molex off the power wire, sleeved the cables, and put it back on.  Plugged everything in and couldn't figure out why my new DVD burner ($165 at the time) didn't work.  Took my machine apart and made certain everything was seated well.  Wondered about the odd smell, but didn't worry about it.  Went back and played with windoze 95, trying to get it to work.  Finally the smell got so bad I *had* to pay attention to it.  Turns out that when I re-connected the molex, I transposed the 5 volt and 12 volt wires; the smell was the chips on the logic board of my DVD burner melting.  (Literally, melting.  Took it apart afterwards and looked like it'd been boiling on the logic board.)

Tried to wire something hot at work so 20 people wouldn't be idle.  A wire nut in the bottom of 8" deep box fell off, exposing several wires that wouldn't reach up.  Shut down all the machines, killed the circuit, tested everything with my multimeter to verify it was 100% dead.  Reached in and started re-connecting the wires and got zapped.  The 20 people on the other side of the room on a completely different circuit all went down and 15 of those needed new PSUs.  (STILL can't figure out how the building is wired, nor how everything registered as 0 volts and I still got zapped or how changing something on one circuit that was turned off affected another circuit, so much so that it killed 75% of the power supplies in the machines on that circuit...)

Laughed out loud to the VP of operations at my last job.  He wanted to buy a new compound bow for hunting that fall and was looking online at work.  Suddenly he jumped up and literally ran out of the building.  He was headed to the admin building to tell the guy who did nothing but monitor what people were doing online (yeah - they were that bad) that he did NOT intend to access what he did.  FYI, for anybody interested, <4-letter censored shorthand for Richard starting with d, ending with k, with ic in the middle>s-dot-com is !!NOT!! <shorthand for Richard>s Sporting Goods...     I could not stop laughing about it and he tried to get my fired.


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## dennylin93 (Nov 24, 2009)

Ran `# rm -rf` on the wrong directory a dozen times. On many occasions I _nearly_ typed my password on an IRC channel (I use screen and I often switch to the wrong one).


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## Pushrod (Nov 24, 2009)

I was just getting into Linux and playing with various distros. I had a Slackware system setup, and was editing stuff in /etc. I noticed the "file~" files, and wanted to remove them, so I typed "rm *~" only without the tilde.

It hosed the installation (obviously) and since I had no backups, I was hooped. I took the opportunity to install FreeBSD, loved it, and here I am on FreeBSD forums telling the story 9 years to the month later.


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## Arcanius (Nov 24, 2009)

Was trying to change ownership of all the files in a directory, instead of:
# chown arcanius *

I did

# chown arcanius /*

Didn't end well. Was too lazy to figure out if fixable, so I just reformatted.


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## lme@ (Nov 25, 2009)

@dennylin93: You'd be a good candidate for tcsh's `# set rmstar`


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## dennylin93 (Nov 25, 2009)

Thanks! Excellent feature. Now I won't delete the wrong files by accident. Perhaps I should alias `# rm` to `# rm -i` as well.


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## mix_room (Nov 25, 2009)

dennylin93 said:
			
		

> Thanks! Excellent feature. Now I won't delete the wrong files by accident. Perhaps I should alias `# rm` to `# rm -i` as well.



I would strongly advise against it. What happens when you get used to being asked for confirmation, getting sloppy in the process, and then end up at an important machine where this alias is not set. Bye-bye important system files.


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## jb_fvwm2 (Nov 25, 2009)

I've aliased rm to "just a comment".  Thus I have
to type the full path

```
/bin/rm -iv
```
and use -iv out of habit since first installing Freebsd
after reading warnings.
That extra second or two of typing means one has
enough time to think to oneself about "really what I
want to type? " I would be very leery of reverting to
non-aliased usage ever...


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## saxon3049 (Nov 25, 2009)

Interesting one came across my desk today, a guy who considers himself a Techie calls me up and says "Help I have got a virus now my computer wont boot" so i tell him to bring it to me and I ask what happened well AVG wouldn't shift the infection so he read about highjack this ran it deselected everything and restarted... oh but it gets worse... I don't know how fammilure you are with the concept of a Car Boot Sale well there is always a number of stalls selling CD's with things on like "10 thousand PC drivers" or "Watch SKY TV ON YOUR PC FOR FREE" or the best one "FIX YOUR OWN COMPUTER WITH ONE CD" normally it's nothing more than AVG, CCleaner, Double driver etc on a CD well some one was selling BartPE at one evidently and this supremely intelligent individual some how managed to delete his C: partition.


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## wonslung (Nov 25, 2009)

on a CentOS box which had Cpanel installed i was trying to install subversion, and it wouldnt' install with yum, so i downloaded the rpm's from the subversion website.  sqlite on this machine was at 3.3 and subversion needed 3.5

when i tried to upgrade, it just gave me a conflict error.  So i was like, screw it, i'll just remove 3.3 and install 3.5

now on most of the OS's i've used (like freebsd for instance) when you remove a port/package, it will allow you to do this regardless of the files which may depend on it.  On Centos apparently, it removes EVERYTHING which depends on it...unfortunately for sqlite 3.3 this included yum and rpm and about 100 other important things.

I completely borked the install.


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## Pushrod (Nov 25, 2009)

mix_room said:
			
		

> I would strongly advise against it. What happens when you get used to being asked for confirmation, getting sloppy in the process, and then end up at an important machine where this alias is not set. Bye-bye important system files.



One solution which I came up with but don't actually use is this:

alias rm=echo
alias RM='/bin/rm -i'

I guess over time, one would just type the capitals all of the time, but the same can be said for '-i' in general (habitually putting -f after each issuing of rm to override it).


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## paean (Nov 26, 2009)

8 or 9 years ago I was working as a hardware inventory tech for a health care provider. One day my counterpart realized that he could save time scrubbing drives before they left the organization. Why use a piece of software that would take hours when he could use a 8 pound magnet to do the same work in a few seconds? ( ;

Unfortunately he left the magnet on his desk right beside his beautiful CRT monitor which soon had a permanent magenta cast (which looked not unlike the auroras) no degaussing could fix. It probably didn't help I used the magnet like a bookend to keep a stack of laptops from falling over.


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## lme@ (Nov 26, 2009)

saxon3049 said:
			
		

> Interesting one came across my desk today, a guy who considers himself a Techie calls me up and says "Help I have got a virus now my computer wont boot" so i tell him to bring it to me and I ask what happened well AVG wouldn't shift the infection so he read about highjack this ran it deselected everything and restarted... oh but it gets worse... I don't know how fammilure you are with the concept of a Car Boot Sale well there is always a number of stalls selling CD's with things on like "10 thousand PC drivers" or "Watch SKY TV ON YOUR PC FOR FREE" or the best one "FIX YOUR OWN COMPUTER WITH ONE CD" normally it's nothing more than AVG, CCleaner, Double driver etc on a CD well some one was selling BartPE at one evidently and this supremely intelligent individual some how managed to delete his C: partition.



Hehe, i almost accidently banned you because it looked like a SPAM post at a first at a glimpse.


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## DutchDaemon (Nov 26, 2009)

Me too


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## CodeBlock (Nov 26, 2009)

Dutch, what was your dumbest computing mistake? , just guessing here, but you probably have some interesting ones


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## DutchDaemon (Nov 26, 2009)

I'm sorry, not very prosaic: the usual rm -rf, followed by a panicky series of Ctl-c's, and frantically looking for backups. And of course the occasional shutdown -p now in the wrong ssh session. Plus the random pf -Fa when it was least convenient. Boring


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## lyuts (Dec 1, 2009)

Just like many of you, i did [CMD=""]rm -rf[/CMD] in the wrong directory.

The other day I was helping my colleague and ran [CMD=""]ipfw flush[/CMD] on his remote server (very very remote). It denied everything by default and was very far from our location.


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## graudeejs (Dec 1, 2009)

god dammit.... 
while I was experimenting with zfs compression
I just deleted /var/db/ports/*
I keep it on separate fs, because that saves me trouble configuring ports every time I Install FreeBSD from scratch.

Grrr, and I never did backup for it, or even snapshot....

Oh well... Will start building fresh system in jail..... to recover this.... don't want to guess what I picked when I was building this setup next time i rebuild things....


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## mk (Dec 1, 2009)

once i buy new pc and assemble it at home,plugged it directly to the lan, install fbsd and .. no internet connection! omfg - my lan is not recognized! rush to install 2k3 - half the installation i figure it out - i didn't change the mac address...


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## jb_fvwm2 (Dec 1, 2009)

re the post 2 above:
I periodically backup the entire 
/var/db to somewhere like
/var_db ....

```
cp -Rpv
```


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## fronclynne (Dec 2, 2009)

wonslung said:
			
		

> on a CentOS box which had Cpanel installed i was trying to install subversion, and it wouldnt' install with yum, so i downloaded the rpm's from the subversion website.  sqlite on this machine was at 3.3 and subversion needed 3.5
> 
> when i tried to upgrade, it just gave me a conflict error.  So i was like, screw it, i'll just remove 3.3 and install 3.5
> 
> ...



Well, so long as you still have ftp, curl, or wget, right?

Oh, I umm put a flexible rubber power connector into a hard drive upside down.  Four years worth of data into acrid smoke in about two seconds.

Note to manufacturers:  polarised power connectors should be rigid plastic because I am an oaf.


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## wonslung (Dec 2, 2009)

fronclynne said:
			
		

> Well, so long as you still have ftp, curl, or wget, right?
> 
> Oh, I umm put a flexible rubber power connector into a hard drive upside down.  Four years worth of data into acrid smoke in about two seconds.
> 
> Note to manufacturers:  polarised power connectors should be rigid plastic because I am an oaf.





lol, i was working with a guy who accidently mounted his hard drive badly in one of those old Dell cases.   It had a LOT of metal surfaces, somehow the bottom of the circuit board was touching bare metal and the entire hard drive caught on fire.


Burning circuit board smells terrible....it ended up with a burn about the size of a 50 cent piece.


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## saxon3049 (Dec 2, 2009)

The old Dell piano hinge case is a nightmare lost count of the number of times my knuckles have been jammed in one.

I have a legendary one from another forum - "How do i download more RAM?"


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## jrick (Dec 2, 2009)

The dumbest computer mistake I ever made? Hmm, well, there was this one time where I decided that I would install emacs...


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## wonslung (Dec 2, 2009)

saxon3049 said:
			
		

> "How do i download more RAM?"



hahaha, yah, that's funny stuff.

When you figure out how to download more RAM please upload some to me.


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## Beastie (Dec 2, 2009)

wonslung said:
			
		

> saxon3049 said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


How about someone who once asked me where to download 3dfx from?


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## saxon3049 (Dec 2, 2009)

Got a golden one guy walks into my shop and says "Hey mate can you upgrade this?" and he drops a 1st generation Panasonic toughbook on my counter (Denting it too) and I say not really it's too old to do much with and he looks at me like I am a idiot and says "are you sure?" eventually he says ok what can I get for part exchange and Â£200 quid I said for for part ex your looking at nothing as I wont take it and for 200 your looking at a old refurb he looks at me calls me a idiot and walks out leaving this brick of a laptop on my counter.


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## CodeBlock (Dec 2, 2009)

saxon3049 said:
			
		

> Got a golden one guy walks into my shop and says "Hey mate can you upgrade this?" and he drops a 1st generation Panasonic toughbook on my counter (Denting it too) and I say not really it's too old to do much with and he looks at me like I am a idiot and says "are you sure?" eventually he says ok what can I get for part exchange and Â£200 quid I said for for part ex your looking at nothing as I wont take it and for 200 your looking at a old refurb he looks at me calls me a idiot and walks out leaving this brick of a laptop on my counter.



haha; I love when stuff that we (techies) have no control over goes wrong and we get blamed. I'm a student technical director for my high school (mainly work in the school theatre), and I go through this quite a bit.


@saxon, when you find out how to download more ram, let me know. Also let me buy some stock in the company that organizes this, because I think that would be a bit revolutionary.


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## DutchDaemon (Dec 2, 2009)

saxon3049 said:
			
		

> "How do i download more RAM?"



Just start the .torrent and let it download to /dev/md0. You don't need a reboot.


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## saxon3049 (Dec 2, 2009)

I have one about some one washing there computer out with warm soapy water if they want to here that or another about a woman asking to return a computer because there kid painted the screen with gloss paint on a Â£2000 thinkpad if you want them.

And yea if I find what wonderful company you can download ram from I will let you know


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## roddierod (Dec 2, 2009)

You have to tell the soapy water one, 'cause I can not figure out why someone would do that.


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## saxon3049 (Dec 3, 2009)

OK this one is a wonder:

A company I was contracting for, a wommans hubby is a techie and told her that a computer is hot when it's running, anyhow she decided because her computer was hot she would put her Chicken sandwich inside to keep it warm and thought it was dirty and washed it with soapy water plugged it back in and it wouldn't work... some how it was my fault.


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## DutchDaemon (Dec 3, 2009)

http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
http://www.funny.co.uk/stuff/art_172-783-IT-Helpdesk-True-Stories.html
http://www.funny2.com/computer.htm


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## Carpetsmoker (Dec 3, 2009)

I installed Windows Vista once.


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## sixtydoses (Dec 9, 2009)

Ran `make deinstall` and left my computer, came back only to find out I ran it in /usr/ports directory :r .


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## Laurent (Dec 12, 2009)

When I had to install another Linux distro, I moved all my personal data, files, pictures ... to my iPod, cause I hadn't an external HD and my iPod (60GB) was just big enough to store all my stuff. 
Before booting the live CD, I got the perfect idea to boot my iPod. 
I was interested in what would happen. 
There happened just nothing, I got an error message en went on booting the live CD en installing Linux. 
When I was about to move all my stuff back to my computer, I noticed my iPod had been destroyed, it just wouldn't work anymore.
Result: iPod got killed and my stuff, all 60GB of stuff, were gone and I hadn't a back-up anymore because I formatted my HD while installing Linux :r


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## Eponasoft (Dec 20, 2009)

I've only done a couple of stupid things. Obviously, like most people, I learned about hard drive backups the hard way. But that pales in comparison to the time when I learned that you can wrap Unix tools to deny access by certain users. I did this on my server for wget, which blocked user "nobody". So I was like "hey this is cool, now no one can use those stupid remote downloader scripts on my server"...you know, the ones that run from temp but aren't supposed to be able to? So anyways, I was like "well hell, if I did that for wget and it worked like a charm, I should do it for sh too!"...so I did. Most idiotic thing I'd ever done. Since this was a remote server, I had very limited ability to do much. In the end, an admin at the data center had to hook up one of those vterm things and use a live cd version of RHE to boot the system, where I quickly corrected my mistake. The server was completely functional after that. But wow what an idiotic move on my part.


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## Defre (Dec 20, 2009)

When I was 15, I assembled my first PC... CD drive got an audio out which had to be connected directly to the soundcard.
The sound chipset was on the motherboard, near a jumper which looked really like the CD audio out connector... I didn't even had to insist, the cable got plugged really easily. And then, I switched power on.
Both the motherboard and the CPU got killed on the spot, and has a bonus, some burn marks for the CPU and a burned out epoxy (I guess) smell.


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## little_princess (Dec 22, 2009)

My dumbest mistake ever was to waste my time writing a script, which checks mailboxes from an exchange server, with Microsoft technology (MAPI).

ONE month of work and it still did only work whenever it was in a good mood , I guess.

-> I rewrote it in perl with CPAN and it worked (and still works) fine. Days needed: 1


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## vigol (Dec 25, 2009)

in *FreeBSD* (A few days ago):
`# more /etc/fstab | grep proc`

```
proc   /proc   procfs   rw   2   2
```
:h
in *DOS 6.22* (Around 1993):
All of my Apps/Data was resided on 20 floppy disks. I needed some empty disks, so I copied them to HDD, done formating, ...,
after a few days my PC(486) was attackted by OneHalf Virus and MBR gone. I was Crying about 15 minutes! :x - Fortunately, my angel freinds came with a Norton Toolkit and repair it. :beer


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## FBSDin20Steps (Dec 25, 2009)

Ohhhh WOW! Where you attacked by BBS's? You are a lucky person.


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## vigol (Dec 25, 2009)

I received a 1.44 floppy that contained a few photos from Those-days-BBS plus a .exe file that I ran it proudly. -- in those times in my region if somebody talk about BBS, people wass correcting her/him : it's BBC not BBS.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Dec 25, 2009)

In 25 years of playing with computers I once (only once, and never again) bought a name brand computer. What a rip off. I guess they need to make money somehow, but they sure saw me coming. Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that it came with one of those pre-installed operating systems that they give away with new computers. Luckily I was able to fix that part.


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## wonslung (Dec 25, 2009)

OJ said:
			
		

> In 25 years of playing with computers I once (only once, and never again) bought a name brand computer. What a rip off. I guess they need to make money somehow, but they sure saw me coming. Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that it came with one of those pre-installed operating systems that they give away with new computers. Luckily I was able to fix that part.



LOL.

I remember my first computer....it was a Packard Bell

That was the last name brand computer i bought, unless you count laptops.


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## sossego (Dec 25, 2009)

Not checking to see if I had the right equipment- see posts on here.
Not creating a simple / + swap for older computers.
Not creating a root account password.
And basically, not having patience.


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## LateNiteTV (Dec 29, 2009)

take a look at this if you guys have some spare time.
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/misc/horror.txt


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## Uniballer (Dec 31, 2009)

In the mid-80's I once unthinkingly deleted a data file on a customer site that contained at least $250K worth of unposted charge transactions.  No backup.  It took me about 30 hours of writing tools and rebuilding the disk to recover the data (PDP-11 running RSX-11M+).  Not a fun weekend.


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## foldingstock (Dec 31, 2009)

*Shutdown wrong server in wrong building*

I was a newly hired junior sys admin in a mixed Windows/Linux server environment. We were in the middle of upgrading to SP2 on some Windows Server 2003 boxes, which I was hired to help with. This was my 3rd day on the job, and My boss had given me a list of server names. I was to remote desktop into each one, install the service pack, and reboot the machine. We were doing this in stages, so no one would lose any work. 

The problem: I was using the IP address of each machine to remotely connect. Due to a typo on the sheet I was going by, I connected to a rather important ERP database server, upgraded and rebooted it. This would not have been a major issue, but, the machine did not come back online. You can imagine my horror, only a few days on the job. Not only did I shutdown the wrong server, but it wouldn't even come back online!

So, I went to the server cabinet to see why it wasn't online and....I couldn't find it! I didn't know it at the time but several of our servers had been moved to a different building before I was hired. This was not mentioned to me during my initial briefing. My boss was gone and no one else had any idea where the server was. 

After lots of frantic calls and much searching, I finally discovered it was across the street. I ran over and found it was waiting at a keyboard halt error. Pressed F1 to continue and it booted back up with no error. 

Luckily the department that used that server was not working that day so no data was lost. I always double check IP addresses given to me on paper now.

edit: spelling/grammar


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## jjthomas (Dec 31, 2009)

At home: rm -rf in the / directory from an ssh connection to my server.  In a panic I hit ctrl-alt-del and rebooted my desktop.

At work: lost a head on a hard disk.  Had a non-admin user moving data *off *the hard disk to tape and restoring old data tapes for a project they were working on.  Somehow they got the tapes mixed up and the project person was backing up their project data onto the system backup tapes.  It took me a weekend of working nonstop, but I got 100% of the data back, using a sector editor and restoring what remained of the backup tapes.

Hitting the off switch in the back off my UPS while trying plug in a monitor.

-JJ


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## mdg583 (Jan 2, 2010)

When I was new to & using & learning linux, I started going through all the programs in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin to see what they did - usually by running them. Eventually I needed to become root, so I did. I was looking for a program to resize a partition. Eventually I found things like fsck.ext2, mkfs, etc. I don't remember exactly how, but I formatted both of my partitions, and lost all my data.

When I was younger (13) I accidentally deleted everything on c:/ from dos prompt on a windows machine, on my dad's computer.


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## darkshadow (Jan 3, 2010)

*?!@*

I change the mount of home folder to zfs file system without moving files which delete all configration inside my home folder ï¿½e I reinstall the hole system after that


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## ohauer (Jan 4, 2010)

Update a system remote via ssh to a very late time.
After checking everything works well decide to stop working and type `# shutdown -p now` and wondering why my desktop doesn't go down...
Quickly connect to another system in the same remote segment, read out the arp tables compile wol and bet I get the system back.
Now wol is a default on every machine.


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## wonslung (Jan 4, 2010)

darkshadow said:
			
		

> I change the mount of home folder to zfs file system without moving files which delete all configration inside my home folder ï¿½e I reinstall the hole system after that



I've done this before but if you then change the ZFS mount again via 
	
	



```
zfs set mountpoint=/oldhome tank/home
```
or whatever, then the stuff in /usr/home will still be there, provided it was a ufs filesystem before.

Zfs mounts in FreeBSD mount ON TOP of a dir.  At least this is how it is in my experience.


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## respite (Jan 8, 2010)

Not backing up a machine. Setting yourself up for failure.


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## rden (Jan 8, 2010)

When I was a lot younger, telling my parents friends I liked computers . . . ended up being the neighbor hood 'anything to do with a computer call Rob' guy.

This is back when a lot less people understood computers, TRS-80's and one guy had an IBM-PC with the fully expanded 128k memory - that's kilobytes.

Mostly inane crap like:
- "can you teach grams how to type a letter"
- "my printer is jammed, can you help" and again and again and again . . .
- "my floppy disk wont work (and many frustrating hours later revealed) I accidentally put my coffee cup on it, does that mean I have to buy a new one?  What about my saved programs . . ."
- lot's of: "it doesn't work" mostly fixed by: "you forgot to switch on the monitor - it is a separate switch from the computer" (or similar)
as well as "can you write me an accounting program" - typically answered: "sorry, but I don't have an accounting program and it's too big for me to write" [with unspoken] "yes I know some BASIC programming but geez I'm just a kid who CLOAD's "SPCINV.BAS" - give me a break].

Talk about a way to kill your weekends.

(Younguns: CLOAD means load a program from a cassette tape, for "kilobyte" "floppy disk" "BASIC" and "cassette tape" try wiki.)


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## jjthomas (Jan 8, 2010)

rden said:
			
		

> (Younguns: CLOAD means load a program from a cassette tape, for "kilobyte" "floppy disk" "BASIC" and "cassette tape" try wiki.)



Crap, I'm old!

-JJ


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