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A Christmas stocking filler competition

Dos_Box
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Dos_Box

Dos_Box

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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!

daveyboy

daveyboy

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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.............

 

:oops:

CyberNerd

CyberNerd

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@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_

_Bat_

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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

edie209

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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 :roll: and I blamed the sparkies :wink:

GrumbleDook

GrumbleDook

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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.

Guest Guest

Guest Guest

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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
MkII

MkII

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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

GrumbleDook

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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.

russdev

russdev

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Posted

ok worst at moment i can think off..

 

 

The scene a it support desk somewhere...

 

Caller 1: Internet is not working help

 

Me: - ok let me look into it...

 

so i fire up firefox and about to click home button when....

 

 

Caller 2: net is down...

 

 

10 calls later and much trying to work what is going on i look over to my chair that has hit the powerbutton on the cache server...

 

 

This thread reminds me need to pick some winners from the donate to edugeek comp will go sort that out tonight...

SimpleSi

SimpleSi

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Posted

Not done much harm in this job but in previous one I was working on a piece of equipment on a transmitter in Northern Scotland and decided that to be safe I should switch off the other piece of equipment connected to the changeover relay.

 

5 mins later my boss came into the room and said they don't seem to be getting any TV in Orkney and Shetland and was that anything to do with me :oops: :oops: :oops:

 

regards

 

Simon

webman

webman

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Posted
I pressed the "test" button on a electrically protected socket resulting in half a dozen computers in the suite next door suddenly losing power. In the middle of a lesson :oops:
markcuk

markcuk

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worst thing i did recently was drop an nec projector on the floor (and broke the focus button) while i was having a laugh with one of the cleaners at work (well he wet himself) anyway i phoned NEC and told them it was ceiling mounted and it just broke anyway got it fixed under warranty (hope no one from NEC is reading this)

 

the best one was when i was messing around with a wake on lan program anyway i was trying to set the time to shut down all computers in school when i hit go and the timer came on and the head of ict burst in and said all the computers are shutting down..WHOOPS i told her and everyone else that lan ranger had crashed and caused it!!! (thanks ranger)

 

mark

russdev

russdev

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ohh that reminds me time of sitting there on school open evening lots of people around and bam the shutddown script starts to shutdown the computers I had forgot to turn it off...
john

john

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Ive hit the restart button on NSM before now when I had an entire IT room selected, whoops! I was sure NSM was supposed to not restart them if someone was logged in but it seems it did :D Oh well it was only a load of A level coursework that went missing, I blaim the anti-virus software :D Thanks Sophos you are ace
webman

webman

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Posted

I've heard first-hand the story of somebody using RM's Local Support Tools (allows you to create/restore backup images on local machines) but accidentally restored the whole school from the last backup instead of just one room.

 

Some people who had things saved locally weren't pleased :lol:

_Bat_

_Bat_

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I blaim the anti-virus software :D Thanks Sophos you are ace

 

Aren't we all supposed to have a program that generates a daily excuse to give to callers who say "well what was wrong?".

Midget

Midget

Posted
Posted
i was messing around with a wake on lan program anyway i was trying to set the time to shut down all computers in school when i hit go

 

Fancy telling us the name of that piece of software please?

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