Admin horror stories

[Bruce Dawson]

Tom Buskey wrote:
> On 10/10/07, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
>   
>> On Oct 9, 2007, at 17:31, Ben Scott wrote:
>>
>>     
>>>   Did you know 'rpm' will let you remove every package from the
>>> system?
>>>       
>> rm lets you remove libc too.  DAMHINT.
>>     
>
>
> I had a user call about a user supported system that was having issues.  We
> explicitly do not support it and the users only use the root account.
>
> He gave me the root account to login and I couldn't.  I went to his system &
> looked around.  /etc was empty.  I told him he was fsked and he should ftp
> any files he wanted to elsewhere & that he wouldn't be able to login again
> or reboot.  In any event, we were not supporting it.
>
> Sure enough, a help desk ticket came in for another admin, claiming that the
> system got corrupted during bootup.  Why do users lie so often?  All it does
> is obscure the problem...
>   
Hmmm. Did you check lost+found? I've had similar symptoms only to
discover that there was indeed a bad sector that remapped all of /etc/
and some of /var and /usr. fsck didn't help much until I moved the drive
to another system and ran fsck there.

But you're right - if its not supported, then they'll have to go
elsewhere to get this done.

BTW: My point is: the user may not have lied, but was just calling the
shot as s/he saw them.

--Bruce