Accidentally wiped an app's directory? Hey, just play the 'unscheduled maintenance' card. Now you're a hero The oversized rear of Monday is obstructing our view of the receding weekend. Never mind, pour yourself a beverage, select a pastry and settle in for a morning with the Regomiser and another edition of Who, Me? We skip back a few decades this week, to 1990 and the misadventures of "Terry", a student of computer science at a US …
hah, did a del *.* in the root of a DOS 3.30 workstation once.
Fun times.
IIRC DOS 6.00 and higher will ask you the location of COMMAND.COM if the system booted up and the command interpreter was missing. Not so with DOS3.30 and others, you get the dreaded "Bad or Missing Command Interpreter. System halted" message.
Which requires trundling off to find a boot disk, boot that up, and copy COMMAND.COM over (plus other gubbins like AUTOEXEC.BAT and/or CONFIG.SYS and other drivers).
At least it was simple to fix such mistakes back then.
One more interesting thing to note is that all DOS messages have been formatted for a 40-column screen, due to the existence of CGA monitors.
When I was young and only had a PC with DOS on floppies, I had the clever "idea" of copying all data to a RAM disc and then copying back at the end so everything was nice and fast. If you ran out of memory then you'd need to delete a bit - of course I managed to del *.* in the wrong directory and deleted the DOS disc.
Luckily by this point I'd learnt to not touch the original disc and to only use a copy.
Doing chroot development work.
All the dev boxes were in use - Manager told me to use the build server.
Couple of days in and I cleared out my chroot jail:
`rm -rf /bin /usr /etc`
Yep, I accidentally added the `/` to the start of each path...
Took me about 1 second to realise that the command was taking too long, by which time most of bin had gone...
About 5 years ago I wasn't paying the closest attention to a DevOps trainee who asked me if it was ok to deal with a warning message from AWS regarding a failing instance. I told him to go ahead, which resulted in a terraform script not only terminating the instance instead of just shutting it down, but also releasing the elastic IP address. The good news was that the RDS database was untouched, as was the S3 CDN, so it was just a matter of rebuilding the image, reassigning an IP and updating Route 53 and then to come up with a plausible lie downtime error message. But still a rather nasty moment.
On a remote site , i borrowed a colleagues laptop and needed to get / update some files on laptop for the job at hand .
I thought a Robocopy / MIR might do the trick nicely.
The thing with /MIR is if you dont get your path exactly right every file in the destination folder becomes the enemy.
A sinking feeling was rapidly growing as a saw an unexpectedly large amout of deletions scrolling past.
The thing was ripping through the win\system32 folder like a cancer, gutting the OS.
After a hasty Ctrl-C the machine managed to stay alive for few minutes like a wounded soldier riddled with bullets, before passing away.
I was pretty red faced as we knocked off for the day. I bought the after work pints and rebuilt the machine next day.
The few minutes extra is worth it, even with NOW!!! jobs, especially if you are using /MIR or /PURGE.
I have a standard default set of switches I use with robocopy to ensure I don't get bitten, including /L
Run the job, CTRL-C after a few seconds, sanity check the log headers then run without /L.
Recently installed a beta client for a certain game launcher (yes, I have a gaming rig, I've got a few macs and two servers at home. Don't judge me) and discovered it wouldn't start... No problem I'll just uninstall and reinstall...
Yeah, no...
This started an hour long tearing through various locations, cache directories and regedit before finding that CC cleaner (I was getting desperate by this point) deleted the recycle bin by default removing a folder I needed for the actual solution (uninstalling via a cached msi).
Got it sorted with some file recovery magic but still far more buggering around than a game client should ever require.
Gimp icon because I must be to continue to pay them money for this crap...
I recently installed a alpha client for a certain game launcher (the free Call of duty thing)
After downloading 70 gigs the thing just flat out wont run. no errors . just nothing happens, apart from an exe is launched , then closes.
Perhaps its a sign to stop wasting my life on first person shooty
I had a colleague using VM/370 and filelist - where it would display a screenful of files, and you could type a command in front of each filename
He had E for edit, BR for browse and ER for erase. When the command finished it would change the first letter to * so BR became *R
I remember watching him, type BR to Browse the file, and realising he needed to edit it, he typed E and the file disappeared. He said "that's strange - it often does that"
I asked if he used "ER" for erase - and he said "ah yes - that would explain it". I suggested he rename er to ERASE. I was amazed he had never taken the time to find out why his files kept going missing.
I assumed this was going to end in an error where E was meant to be typed but ER was by accident, by virtue of those letters being adjacent to each other on the keyboard. Another good reason to make your suggested change. (Icon is keyboard related.)
I seem to remember borrowing a PC (possibly a new-fangled 286!) from school one summer holiday when I was about 8 or 9, and doing some "tidying up"... which possibly involved the use of "format c:"
It didn't have any immediately deleterious effect until after I switched the machine off if memory serves, at which point it became completely apparent that I'd buggered it up big style - or that's how it looked to me at the time. I think the head teacher managed to reinstall everything from floppies and saved the day.
I remember that same gut wrenching moment of terror on only one other occasional: I was, for $reasons, merging two NDS trees within a school (one admin and one curriculum). I'd done the merge, and then started updating the ADMIN server from Netware 5 to 5.1 (again, $reasons - it was working fine, I should have left it be...) and somewhere through the install there was an option to either leave the disks as they were or format them. No prizes for guessing what I managed to do! I had backups, so nothing was lost except a bit of extended downtime, and I've learned to read things a bit more carefully since then, which is no bad thing.*
*Unless you ask me to check a document over, in which case I've a tendency to notice all of those little things you'd rather I didn't.
Late eighties, early nineties maybe... a TV and radio newsroom using Basys to handle all the scripts... ten to six... user needed to be restarted. No problem.
But it turns out there were two similar commands, one of which restarts a single user and one of which restarts the complete system. Guess which one I remembered?
Newsrooms are good at swearing, but it all fired up before the critical six o'clock.
You'll need WP 8 from 1997 and a virtual Win XP machine.
When things don't turn out exactly right just look at the embedded codes with a single key. Hey presto!
I write write a quarter of a million words a year on mine. Don't get me started on the alternatives!
(If somebody wants to collaborate, then make sure they agree to do all the formatting on Word or Libre Office etc.)
My limited experience of LaTeX (which seems good in theory, but I find all those backslashes even more awkward than HTML closing tags) is that as soon as you want to do anything "complicated", like handle Unicode, graphics, hyperlinks, etc, it can all too easily turn into:
"You are in a twisty maze of add-on packages, all not quite alike, nor mutually compatible."
Accidental deletions are more common than management realises.Really? [Fill in Eastern European expletive of your choice]
It's not exactly what I call «accidental deletion» but deletion nevertheless: for at least a half a year we have recurring situations with Microsoft Word and Excel files. You open the file again after someone else edited it and what you see is your last version but not the other persons' more recent changes. Lucky you if you notice the issue.
Don't know if its Sharepoint or the Office suite or something else and neither do I care. It's just a bloody cock-up.
And yet so few systems have an easy way to undo an accidental deletion.
Android phone plugged into PC. Copying my photos across to make space on the phone and back up to DVD. Was doing them in batches of 100 (easy to spot if anything was missed, for some reason there's always one or two that don't get copied over).
Checked, double-checked, that 100 is good. Hit Delete. Blindly click on the OK message.
And promptly shit my pants when I realise that the highlight was in the other half of the window, and I'd just nuked the entire DCIM folder.
.
.
Thankfully I had a full system backup of two weeks prior, so nothing of importance was lost. But in between hitting OK and remembering the backup, I swear I aged an entire year.
There ought to be an "Oh Shit" button that can undo the last command given. Wipe /usr by mistake? Hit the Oh Shit button. Delete all your photos? Oh Shit them back again.
[before anybody suggests, no, I don't spew my photos to a foreign cloud based service]
Wasn't there some OS (BeOS??) where the filesystem was actually a database, so the "oh shit" button was the equivalent of a transaction rollback?
I'm getting too old to keep track of all the cool shit that was completely abandoned. I believe it was because it was too slow and they didn't have the CPU horsepower to throw at it.
Once when fixing a shared folder permissions issue, nice and easy, right click folder, permissions, reset permissions on child objects, job done.
.....except if you have accidentally highlighted the workgroup folder for the whole office, not the single folder at the top that you actually wanted to reset.
Correct folder resets, then it started on the next one......ohsh!t moment. Frantically cancelled out of it....after 5-10 seconds of terror, and it had only got part way through folder 2, which fortunately had no special permissions or structure under it.
Step away from the computer.......slowly. Get drink, calm down. Resolve to be more careful in future.
In my defense, we had been pressured to move a project along even though we did not have enough storage, so we hosted the VM's on local storage on a host. We forgot they were there then one day rebuilt the host as it was playing up and it's quicker to rebuild and join the farm than waste time troubleshooting. It soon came to light the 2 VM's on the local disks have gone off the network.... Fun times!
Or maybe it's more of an anecdote.
It's Bob's first day on the job and he's ready to hit the ground running. A call comes in, Bob rushes off to deal with it, and in the process ends up causing $10,000 in losses for the company. Bob slinks back to his desk and is almost done with his resignation letter when his boss turns up. Bob tells him not to worry, he's writing his resignation letter now so there's no need to fire him. Bob's boss looks at him with a puzzled expression and asks, "Why would I fire you? I just spent $10,000 on your training." Change that to the currency of issue for your location if desired.
Let's say there's a network folder named S:\Department\Project and it contains Excel, Word and Powerpoint files...
User1 realises that if they open that folder in Excel, they only see Excel files. If they open it in Word they only see Word files, etc.
User1 also realises that if they change the filter to "All Files" they can see (obviously) all files and mentions this to User2.
User2 does this and then gets confused. So because they don't want to see Excel files when they're opening files in Word, they DELETE the Excel files.
User3 then logs a ticket asking where the Excel files have gone...
I learnt not to assume that end users know *anything* about the PC you've just given them when I gave a new medic the PC that had belonged to their predecessor. I told her that all the guy's stuff should have been on the network so delete anything you don't recognise... She deleted the Windows directory.
I didn't want to tell IT because they were a bunch of grumpy sarcastic buggers. That's when I learnt to restore Windows XP from the recycle bin...
Happy memories of joining an Oracle team as the newbie.
My "trainer" decided to show me how much authority he had by logging on to a test database and deleting a cross-reference table. As he proudly showed me how nothing would now work in the application, the phones started ringing.
As you might have guessed, he was actually in the production system.
It was passed off as a network problem while the table was restored from a backup.
Couple of stories here. One was me, one wasn't.
The first was a few years back, I was setting up Windows again. I do this from time to time whether it needs it or not, as it's a good way to ensure that I get rid of unnecessary files and application. When I do this, I only re-install applications if and when I need them. I have few HDD partitions full of different applications and data. I planned to delete my Windows System partition, recreate it and install windows on the now blank partition. I got to the page in the Windows installer that enables you to delete and recreate partitions. While I was doing this, a housemate walked in and start talking. All of a sudden, I wasn't really focusing on what I was doing, so I happily selected the wrong partition, deleted it, recreated it and installed Windows on it. I only realised when I found I had two Windows installs. I lost quite a lot of data, thankfully, none of it really important, so it was a pain in the arse rather than a real problem.
The second, I got from someone else. A friend worked for a small budget games developer and publisher. He told me a story about his boss, who accidentally went to the C:\Windows folder on his machine. This was Windows 3.1, so there was no protection, and when he did this, he called my friend to try and retrieve the contents of the machine. The problem was, his boss had installed every application to this folder, and put all his data in it. I think my friend managed to recover some of the data with an undelete tool, but only some.
Didn't PCTools have an undelete function?
...and I still have a WordPerfect 5.1 key board template that layed on top of the function keys. I lost the one from the original IBM keyboard where the function keys were in two rows on the side of the keyboard, not above the numbers.
http://www.edugeek.net/attachments/forums/general-chat/36177d1460558438-computer-brands-graveyard-wordperfect-5-0-keyboard-template-top.jpg
"Didn't PCTools have an undelete function?"
If you caught it before the file space got overwritten, you could easily undelete in MSDOS. The action the OS took to delete a file was simply to set the high bit of the first character of the filename so it was pretty simple to undelete by just resetting that bit back low. At a pinch, you could do it with DEBUG in the root directory. It could be a bit more tricky to do so in sub-directories, so one of the many undelete tools that could identify and follow the linked list to sub-dirs was a lot simpler.
DELTREE didn't appear until MSDOS 6.0. Pah, kids today! Don't know they're born. In my day, you had to go into right to bottom of the tree and start doing DEL *.* one directory at a time, working your way back to the top before you could cause that much damage. And do they believe you? 'course not!
Now git orf ma lawn!
Just had a couple of Cisco routers where someone's attempt at deleting the config appears to have been to format the flash... except the config isn't in that portion of the flash and all they did was to delete the IOS.
I power the router on and it just keeps cycling through looking for the specified IOS, not found, looking for ANY IOS, not found, reboot the hardware. I try to break in to the loop and it responds 'Y to delete config' (NO PASSWORD RECOVERY has been set). I hit Y and it just reboots because the 'delete config' routine is in the IOS that the router can't find!
I ended up borrowing the flash module from another (working) router just so I could boot an IOS and could then start changing boot options so that I could boot the sod from a USB stick and reinstate the original flash module
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