Emacs FTW
Back in the 90's and early 00's I was sysadmin at a place where one of the devs had had the only copy of the source for several utilities on his laptop. Which he dropped in front of a bus. Hard disk was unrecoverable.
A year or two after that, we needed to move a certain server to a different subnet. The server happened to be a sort-of-LDAP-thingy used for every single user login for all customers. The devs dutifully hunted through all source code to find any place where it had been hardcoded and make the program use config files or arguments instead.
And on the night when we did the move, we discovered that the RADIUS server source had been on the bus-crushed laptop, *and* had a hardcoded IP address. No client was able to login at all.
I ended up editing the binary in Emacs, and instead of entering the new IP address, I used a hostname that we could then enter into /etc/hosts. We found a few more bits of software where I had to do the same, though the others didn't have quite as large an impact...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
