What was your biggest project Disaster? We are asking e14 in our Join, Share & Win Competition

God bless that extinguisher guy.

Hello everyone...!

Hello Everyone Good morning 

Good morning and welcome to element14.

Are you planning on going ?

Dave, I just belly laughed in the office and had 3 people turn around to look at me.  ya got me! 

Mine had to be when I used to work as a technical manager for a chain of "high end, high production" music venues. 
At that time I had a theatrical pyrotechnics license and was setting up a few rows of fountains that would rain down "safe" shower of sparks.
(think: When the boyband get to the key change in the song and they stand up off their stools) 


I had set the venue up, ordered two boxes of 12 pyrotechnics, attached them to the rigging, inserted the resistive igniters and made it safe while I set up the rest of the venue for the evening.  The promotions manager passed by, spotting the second box of Pyro's, asks me to "Go on phil, throw those up as well, and we will cover the cost"

At that point I rig a second run and wire them together with minimal functional understanding of Resistance in a Parallel Vs Series circuits.

The real educational moment had, of course, to come at the countdown of "5 4 3 2 1, Happy New Year!" when the small pyro technics detonator didn't have enough ampage to ignite the multiple rows on cue. 
Leading me to pull the cables out, untwist the pairs, and set them off at  00:01 and 00:02 respectively. Happy new year, I guess :) 

I took a short trip down memory lane and came up with a command attribute that tested my resolved as a system administrators in the *nix world. The scenario was this. The maintenance exercise is being done remotely. Access to the corporate network and it computer systems if from the comfort of my home some distance away from the office.

It is five hours into a six hour maintenance window that started at midnight to reduce the impact the upgrade would have on users. The software upgrade that was tested in development didn't go as planned during the production implementation. After an hours on the phone with the software vendor's tech support looking for a fix, a back-out of the upgrade is the only option. 

That back-out has taken a few hours. A final reboot is all that is required to erase the failed nocturnal exercise. "shutdown -r now" is CLI required command but I type a "shutdown -h now". Both will result in a blank screen. One command reboots the system and the other halts the system. To restore a halted system you physically have to push the power button on the front of the equipment.

Lets just say, I exceeded the maintenance window before the system was restored. That evening and the fallout is etched into my memory. It was my go to story when mentoring new administrators on consequence of actions.

Ah the dreaded -h -r mistake. In my current distribution there are aliases named reboot and poweroff which have saved me quite a few headaches

I cut my teeth with the text editor ed and still use vi. I could not keep up with aliases updates across systems. A coworker's alias file compensated for his poor spelling, fixing commands he knew he always spelled wrong. Come to think of it, that was on the VAX system.