Admin horror stories (was: Replacing NIS)

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, at 4:05pm, gnhlug at sophic.org wrote:
>> Imagine my suprise when I accidentally set a desktop's IP address to be
>> that of the NFS server.
>
> You can't be a sysadmin for long without doing something like that.  At my
> first Unix job, I was there about 6 months before rebooting a production
> server during the month-end busy time...

  Heh.

  My best "I still can't believe I did that" story happened relatively
recently.  I needed to remove some of the RPM packages installed on a
server.  In the process of doing so, I had generated a list of every package
on the system, and a list of packages I wanted to remove.  At the last step,
I fed "rpm --erase" the wrong list of packages, and RPM proceeded to happily
remove every package on the system.  It actually worked remarkably well -- I
only realized what I had done when it suddenly spit out an error trying to
run the post-remove script for the "rpm" package.  At that point, I hit
[CTRL]+[C], but most of the system was already gone.

  Thank goodness for backups.  :-)

  Anyone care to top that?  (I have no doubt that some could; I'm curious if
anyone *will*.  <GRIN>)

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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