[CentOS] OT: SysAdmin Stories

[Digimer]

On 10-06-06 06:19 AM, Geoff Galitz wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm compiling a collection of stories from the systems administrator
> trenches.  They can be short or long, funny or about a particularly
> challenging problem or period, or even something that appeared very
> technically challenging and ended up being something very simple.  Stories
> which are more political would be ok so long as they do not have an agenda
> or can be interpreted as a public attack.
>
> I can't promise money but I can promise 15 minutes of fame.  The stories
> will be accumulated over the next few months and go into a book about real
> world experiences of Systems Administrators and Systems Engineers.  Some of
> the material may be used in our training classes, as well.  All stories will
> be duly credited and I'll even buy a beer (or other non-alcoholic beverage)
> for anyone I ever meet in person.
>
> Stories may be edited for grammar or clarity.
>
> This book is still in the proposal stage so there is no firm target date,
> yet.  If for some reason the book is not published (just like tech projects,
> books are sometimes cancelled at the last minute) they will go up on our
> website.
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Geoff

Under the category of "learn from the mistake of others..."

About eight years ago, I was working on a program with tight deadlines. 
I'd worked through the night, only catching an hour or two of sleep in 
the office.

The next morning, one of the servers remounted it's file systems 
read-only. Being a small shop, I decided to just take the server down to 
run a quick fsck.ext2. In my sleepiness though, I typed 'mkfs.ext2'.

When people say that "root" is god, well, no one asks god "Are you sure?".

-- 
Digimer
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