10 Computer Mishaps

Ant writes "ZDNet UK posted Ontrack Data Recovery's 2004 list of the 10 strangest and funniest computer mishaps... Some of them are funny!" My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box thinking that it was just an alpha driver. Of course since this Alpha meant DEC and this was an x86 box, the server barfed pretty hard. Also the time I spilled an 8oz glass of water on my laptop and lost all my email from 1994 to 1999 and my backup was corrupted. That I liked too.

#1 Works!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, freezing a broken hard disk works, really, just don't do it like this. [arrowsmash.com]

Re:Beer

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Close, but here's the actual quote:

Marge: You know, Homey, the E doesn't work on that typewriter.

Homer: We don't need no stinkin' E! "Restaurant Review". No. "Eatery Evaluation". No. Ah! "Food Box"! "Go or no go, by Homer...". No. "Earl...". No. "Bill Simpson"!

Re:My ones

[Aardpig]

On a server I needed to remotely manually replace libc with an older version file from another machine. Ofcause you have to remember to do everything in a single command otherwise if you delete the old version you cannot run anything else. (I am sure there must be a simpler solution to that than take the disk out and do it on another machine).

That's exactly what sln is for. It is like ln, but statically linked, so you can change the libc symlink without the system barfing.

You can fix that

[Mongoose]

I have a beloved Playstation 2 USB kb, which is nearly impossible to replace now. I got coke ( very acidic ) spilled on it and lost all but a few keys.

How do I fix it? Simple, I bought a conductive pen off amazon.com and retraced all the bad traces. You really need to clean with alcohol a lot to make sure you got all that coke off first. It also helps if you have a multimeter to figure out what needs to be retraced and save time. Everyone should have 3-4 multimeters lying around. =)

Re:Arguments becoming options

[Mr Bill]

I think it has more to do with bad scripting practises. A tool to recursively delete all files in a tree is absolutely necesary. But if you use it you should be careful. This problem could have been avoided by adding two dashes to the command:

rm -f -- *

Re:My ones

[Qzukk]

(I am sure there must be a simpler solution to that than take the disk out and do it on another machine)

LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD are your friends. Install the "new" old libc into a different directory, and set up wrapper(s) for whatever program(s) needed old libraries that set those variables to use the right library directory.

Re:Arguments becoming options

[TopSpin]

I know a Novell admin who did basically the same thing. Some system he had to cope with generated a large volume of log output. He wrote a DOS batch script to clean the directory once per day. This ran without a problem for several years.

One day the system was upgraded and the old directory structure changed. Naturally this meant the 'cd' command in that now old and forgotten daily batch job failed, yet the recursive 'del' command functioned perfectly. Goodbye volume contents, hello backup tapes.

Can you count the number of gross and avoidable administration mistakes, boys and girls?

Most serious failures occur shortly after the administrator finishes his first cup of coffee.

Re:#1 Works!

[Ingolfke]

once it warmed up it just vanished from the system...

Yeah, this has to do with the MTC (mean temperature control) settings in the drive. The MTC monitors the average temperature of the drive and adjusts the speed of the drive as the temperature increases or decreases. The point is that at certain high temperature the drive components can actually expand (ever so slightly) and cause friction and physical damage to the drive. When the MTC begins to malfunction it detects the temperature incorrectly and stops the drive at temperatures that will not cause damage. So, the freezer's low temperature, for some reason, can cause the MTC to reset and thereby cause the drive to continue working. This effect may be temporary or relatively permanent. Although once this has occoured you're highly encouraged to purchase a new drive. The MTC is not user serviceable.

Re:My best...

[Thng]

Just off the top of my head from business law a few years ago (IANAL), but preferential treatment can generally apply to any payments of creditors in 6-9 months before a bankruptcy filing.

The theory goes is that management knew it was coming, and taking action to pay off certain creditors ahead of time may be a detriment to everyone after the filing.

So yes, if someone caught wind of this payment and cared enough to raise a stink, this friend could've lost it due to preferential treatment of creditors.

Re:Arguments becoming options

[beeblebrox87]

The * is interpreted by the shell (as `ls` or similar) before being sent to rm. Therefore the command amounted to "rm -f -r bin boot dev etc home lib ...". This recursively removed every other file in /, but the "-r" had already been interpreted as an option rather than a file to be removed, and so was not removed. It was presumably the only writable file left on the system.

Re:#1 Works!

[EasyComputer]

That's it , I quit slashdot forever. Stupid Moderators

Re:My best...

[cdrudge]

It really just depends on the scale. If it was a billion dollar bankruptcy, a $50,000 check to someone is a rounding error as someone above said. But if it was a $100,000 small business bankruptcy, then that is very different. While my knowledge pertains to personal bankruptcy and not businesses, the trustee will inquire as to if there were any large purchases made within the past X number of months. They are looking for hiding of assets or preferential treatment.

I would say in the case of the $50,000, it wouldn't even raise an eyebrow if it was a larger airline. The trustee isn't concerned with nickles and dimes.

For instance, say I have $10,000 and filing Chapter 7 for $25,000. I understandably want to keep my $10,000, but my creditors want the 40% of their money that they could recover. In an attempt to hide that $10,000, I purchase $EXPENSIVE_OBJECT that would fall under the homestead exemption, thus "saving" the money. I could then turn around and liquidate the $EXPENSIVE_OBJECT, hopefully getting the majority of the money back. The trustee wants to know about the purchase of $EXPENSIVE_OBJECT as they can force it to be liquidated or the transaction to be reversed if need be to recover the money.

All payments/purchases though aren't automatically questioned. A mortgage payment or car payment, particularly if the item is being reaffirmed, is generally excluded. Also emergency expendatures, if documented and clearly needed, also can pass. For example, your furnace dies and it's the middle of winter. However, if you spend $5000 on a new furnace and the old one was fine, it will raise suspicion.

Re:My ones

[SailorFrag]

It's called sash. Most of the important commands have a duplicated version built-in if you prepend a hyphen.

There's also busybox, but that's more of a replacement for the standard utilities.

Re:Check Backups!

[gv250]

Err, sorry, dude.

Setting the way-back machine to spring, 1985. It's my second full-time job, at Interactive Systems Corporation.

Our customer, IBM, has hired us to port SysIII to some unnamed, secret computer. Security is tight. Computers have to be bolted to the floor; documentation can't leave the building.

I'm assigned to write the tape device driver. The spec from IBM has incredibly complex rules for rewinding, ejecting, etc, based on minor device numbers.

Being young and naive, I assumed that the IBM System Engineer who wrote the spec knew more about computers than I did. I faithfully implemented the incredibly complex rules, including the EIO-after-EOF and rewind-on-close rules.

The rest appears to be history.

Rob