Admin horror stories (was: Replacing NIS)

[pll at lanminds.com]

>>>>> On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, "Ben" == bscott at ntisys.com wrote:

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

This won't top that, however, at my first sysadmin job, we had a 
source license to Ultrix.  I needed to move the source repository 
from one file system to another, which happened to be located on a 
SunOS 4.x box.  I forgot to sub-shell the different sides of the tar 
command and also didn't realize that back then SunOS's tar did not 
remove a leading slash by default, and did something like:

	cd /; tar -cf - /usr/src | cd /usr;tar xvf -

(that may not be exactly right, but you get the idea).

The net result was that I now had a Sun box which had Ultrix source 
headers/libs which got copied over the SunOS files of the same name.

Suddenly the Sun box began acting very strange :)

-- 

Seeya,
Paul
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