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I found a Solaris "quirk" which ended up requiring a restore of several key directories on a main production server.

My plan was to take a backup of some stuff and restore it it in a different directory to examine the contents. So, a simple tar cvf backup.tar /path/to/important/directory gained me the backup. My problem came when I tried to restore it, on another server, for examination.

cd ~

tar xvf backup.tar

"Why is the production server throwing errors?"

"Erm..."

Turns out that, while in Linux the tar command will strip off the leading /, Solaris' version doesn't. So, when I thought I was restoring in my home directory, it was in fact restoring it in its "original" position, overwriting many important files in the process. D'Oh!

Luckily, this place had a fantastic backup procedure in place, no work was lost and, importantly, the guy who discovered the problem was the backup guy and was discrete...

Lesson learned: Just because you know something similar to what you are working on does not mean you know the thing you are working on!