A Christmas stocking filler competition

[Dos_Box]

Mrs dos_box (bless her) has insisted that I should start to spend a little of the money that is now starting to trickle in on our members, especially as the season of goodwill is just around the corner. I said 'Bah! Humbug!' but she insisted, so to be a little different I am going to be the Anti-Santa. Santa gives presents to boys and girls who have been good, but I think its time the naughty ones got a break.
To this end I have 4 prizes (you will only find out on Christmas day when I announce the winners just what these are) to the EduGeek member who has been the most naughty with their employers system. Be it shutting down a suite of computers remotely 5 seconds before the teacher was to delcare that it was time to save their work and logoff (personally guilty of that one!), to declaring a member of staffs' laptop to be 'beyond repair', only because you dropped it in your office after they had given to to you to install some software on.
The prizes are nice geeky stocking fillers with a booby prize for the crappest story. I await your outpouring of guilt!

[tosca925]

God................i feel several confessions coming on.

[alan-d]

I suspect your PM box will soon fill up with confessions from people who wish to remain annonymous

Mine will be there soon

[john]

Yeah I can think of some.....

[GrumbleDook]

Will they be anonymous .... please say yes ...

[webman]

And post them all after the event so we can all learn from them and use them in the new year

[_Bat_]

Lol, I really don't think I have done anything bad yet... the worst I have done is waste between 10-20 mins a day on edugeek lol.

[daveyboy]

Go on then - I'll start

In a previous job - to stop our students downloading / running batch files I banned .vbs, .bat, .com & .cmd on our new super duper proxy server.



That went down really well for a while.............

ops:

[CyberNerd]

@daveyboy. Sounds like a rather good idea - Thought most schools block script downloads, we certainly do.


I've done a couple of careless things when I've been rushed that have had dire consequences - RDP into server and shutdown rather than logoff - rather stupid. Also I've been guilty of copying files rather than shortcuts into a mandatory profile - big mistake on Terminal servers when everyone has a few hundred meg profile. oops.

[_Bat_]

RDP into server and shutdown rather than logoff.

Haha, I watched my NM do this while I was being trained. The three servers and his own client machine were at the time all connected in a four port KVM switch. As you can imagine, he shut down the curriculum server accidently instead of his own machine.

[edie209]

In a previous position we had the sparkies in to sort out a problem in the admin area.

So I walked around all the admin staff to warn them and get them to log off...........well all but one the business manager who had done nearly 2 1/2 hours work (without saving any of it as it turned out),

yes your all ahead of me here she lost the lot and I blamed the sparkies

[GrumbleDook]

I have a few that I will do publically and a few anonymously ...

Here is one for you ... an honest mistake made by someone slowly getting to grips with *nix and shell scripting.

Imagine the scenario ... your file server (and authentication box actually) is a Sun box running Solaris 2.6 ... you have 35 Gig for user file storage for home areas but no way of sorting out quotas since users connect via Macs or PCs ... and you know that students are storing some increasingly large files and games too ...

We have already been told not to delete files we don't like as some students have claimed that we have deleted work (yeah ... a SNES emulator is work ... ) and so we have gotten into the habit of changing ownership and permissions ... but it is a long an laborious process.

Now we have a young (-ish) and eager techie who has come up with a few scripts to search home areas and log the locations of the offending files ... but he is still having to manually change ownership and permissions.

Imagine that, after talking with a few *nix heads he knows, he comes up with a script to change permissions based on that original log file. It is checked over by the Network Manager who smiles and thinks that the young padawan is maturing ...

The script is tested on one or twon home areas ... and found to be good (and annoying to users that think they have managed to get one over the techies).

It is run over night ... and imagine the chaos the following morning when noone can log in ... you can't even open a shell to the server ... everything, and I mean everything, has gone pear-shaped.

Calls to Sun and other *nix heads are made ... finally a shell is gotten via a backdoor with the webserver (another Solaris box ... both had been setup by one of the previous techies who had moved on to being a serious *nix head for a major university) after said former techie was called in a plea of help.

Ah ... the permissions at the root of the volume had been changed ... but there was no evidence of anyone getting in and doing anything nasty ...

Everyone, including the Sun guys, look through the cron jobs ... and they look at every script run ... they check them all and think they are fine ... the young and eager techie breaths a sigh of relief ... until the former techie decides to dig a bit deeper.

It turns out that some students have decided to play around and have been creating nested folders with nanes like " " (a single space) and "." (a full stop) ... and so you may end up with a file location such as /usr/1995/95787/history/ /./ /hidden stuff/sexy pics/anna.mov ... and the folder called " " has had the icon changed on the mac to be a blank icon so it cannot bee seen when a teacher looks over their shoulder.

When you parse this location into a script, even though you put it in quotation marks, the / / returns the script to the root of the volume ... oops.

The string was not broken down properly and the root permissions were changed ... oops.

The young(-ish) and now not so eager techie steers clear of shell scripting for a few months, and when he does start to do stuff again they are rarely run via a cron job but an open session from one of the other servers so that if things got seriously bad there is still a way to get in.

Did the young(-ish) and now wiser techie ever make a mistake again ... of course he did ... but as with all these things it was very carefully covered up and dealt with within the team ... look after one another is the secret here. The former techie kept his mouth shut and the Sun guys just shrugged their shoulders and had the attitude of ... sh!t happens ... and manglement were none the wiser.

[j17sparky]

When i was new i made the simpleist mistake ever. I managed to make the print spooler run in a loop, quickly ending up crashing eth print and app server! lmao

[mark]

lol!

People wonder why, when you've had gut churning moments like these, you appear very calm when they think the end of the world has happened after they've lost a file.

[GrumbleDook]

Being told by a sparkie from Central networks that power to the whole building has to go down in 5 minutes flat otherwise the incoming feed might cause the cabling to burn out resulting in a major fire means that you have to get everyone off computers (reduced the feed) get the litchens to stop everything and power down all the servers in a reaonable order.

And when one of the admin staff politely ask you to wait 10 mins they sometimes look puzzled that you say "I am sure we can wait for you to finish wha you are doing ... and I am sure that you can work off the bill for the replacment electrical system over the next few years."

When I say "no" ... I really do mean it.

I may be smiling ... and accomodating where possible, but the fact that someone might lose 5-10 mins of work is small stuff compared to other things that can go wrong.