10 Computer Mishaps 898
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! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:#1 Works! (Score:4, Interesting)
What did help was taking the cover off and physically holding the arm in place so the head couldn't jump back and forth. Drive worked well enough to get data off after that.
It should be noted that this solution was simply a result of getting really pissed off at the drive because nothing else would work.
Re:#1 Works! (Score:4, Interesting)
ad10: 76319MB <MAXTOR 4K080H4/A08.1500> [155061/16/63] at ata5-master UDMA100
ad12: 76319MB <MAXxo`yk.@#l2fv9!..3u> [155061/16/63] at ata6-master UDMA100
ad14: 76319MB <MAXTOR 4K080H4/A08.1500> [155061/16/63] at ata7-master UDMA100
Re:#1 Works! (Score:3, Interesting)
It had a broken interface pin as well, so it was quite an adventure making the sucker work long enough to recover the user's documents.
Re:#1 Works! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
MTC... (Score:5, Interesting)
(Every IDE hard drive actually has the drive controller electronics bolted to a circuit board on the bottom of it. That's why the "IDE interface" is such a basic thing on your PC, whether it's integrated onto the motherboard or is a seperate PCI card. Most of the real work is done on the drive's electronics.)
With some malfunctioning electronics, you can manage to keep them working properly as long as you keep them cold enough. (One of the old tricks for troubleshooting bad parts in TV sets and the like was to selectively spray them with a can of compressed air, chilling them temporarily.)
Re:#1 Works! (Score:5, Interesting)
Had an old NT box that I had used long ago as a domain controller at home (don't ask). Sucker had been running a long time not doing much other than acting as a logon & print server when the power went out. When the power came back and I went to start everything back up, the BIOS saw the drive, but it never spun up and I was left with the 'operating system not found' message.
The drive was pretty old (Seagate 3.5 gig, I think) and there wasn't any really valuable data on it (or I would obviously have backed it up), but I wanted to at least boot the box one more time to see if there was anything I wanted to recover. I put the drive in a ziploc and stuck it in the freezer for like 20 minutes. Took it out, hooked it back up (leaving it in the bag to try to prevent as much condensation as possible), and it spun right up.
Turned out there wasn't anything of any real interest on the drive, and it refused to ever spin up again, but I can vouch for the fact that this does indeed seem plausible.
It depends on what's wrong with it. (Score:5, Interesting)
True and it wasn't just Quantum (Score:5, Funny)
Re:True and it wasn't just Quantum (Score:5, Funny)
I think we can close the thread now, as that's the funniest thing we're going to see on Slashdot today.
Move along, nothing else to see here...
Re:True and it wasn't just Quantum (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, gee, thanks for that visual. Now I'm gonna have it stuck in my head the rest of the day.
Isn't orking cows illegal in most states?
Re:It depends on what's wrong with it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:#1 Works! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:#1 Works! (Score:4, Funny)
How can I delete my account?
You can't. The system needs to keep track of the users, so accounts are permanent. Don't sweat leaving unused accounts hanging around. It doesn't hurt anything.
Answered by: CmdrTaco Last Modified: 6/13/00
Re:#1 Works! (Score:5, Funny)
Sell it on ebay
My ones (Score:5, Funny)
My personal ones:
A friend in the office had to install identical 2 machines with linux. Step 1: Install linux on one machine. Step 2: Install the hard drive from other machine into the computer. Step 3: 'dd' one disk over to the other one. Step 4: Scream as you did it the wrong way round and overwrote your newly installed disk with blank disk garbage.
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)
Leaving a computer under the desk but pushing it back as far as it would go so the back board of the desks fully covered the fan hole. It got very hot after a day and then burned out the cpu and powersupply in one go.
Inserting a K6-3 into an older board which I didnt want to replace. The board had jumpers with markings for the CPU voltages 3.1, 3.0, 2.9, 2.8, 2.7 and followed by 2 unlabelled jumpers. The chip wanted 2.6v core supply (I cant remember the details) so foolishly I assumed the other two jumpers were the lower voltages for which there were no processors at that time. I was wrong and a puff of smoke appeared as my lovely new 450MHz executed its first and only operation.
Checking if the IDE cable worked itself loose without moving the computer from its place and leaving it turned on. So I am reaching round the side and blindly feeling around for the cable and I suddenly feel something like an electric shock (which turned out just be accidentally touching the cpu fan blades). I very quickly remove my hand snagging it on one of the many sharp pieces of metal sticking out of old cases. It was quite cool to be able to see my muscles moving around as a huge piece of skin flopped open exposing the tendons in my hands.
Re:My ones (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My ones (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My ones (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:My ones (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My ones (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My ones (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My ones (Score:3, Informative)
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:My ones (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My ones (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My ones (Score:5, Insightful)
Mixed bag, but don't read in any circumstances where you can't afford to laugh out loud and squirt coffee through your nostrils.
Re:My ones (Score:4, Interesting)
Our main system was a BSDi box that handled user authentication and POP3 email. Since he had to deal with signing up users in the office while I worked my day job, I showed my buddy how to add and edit users on the system.
So one day he calls me and tells me that users have started complaining that they can't login. I start looking around and finally figure out the problem after some questioning.
That day he was bored, so he decided to "clean up" the passwd file. There were some deleted users removed from the file, so the uid's were no longer in sequence. He merrily went through and renumbered them all so that they'd be in sequence in the file.
The good news is that the user's mail directories were named after their username, so I could quickly use that as a reference to recreate which UID went with which username originally.
In the summer of 1994, I was trying to fix a broken Compaq while working in an authorized service center. Generally, Compaq would credit us with 1.5 hours labor for a bad motherboard and usually it only took me 30 minutes to replace one. In this case, it was taking forever.
I replaced the motherboard, but it wouldn't power up. After a little fiddling to double-check everything, I decided the new motherboard might be DOA and replaced it with another new one.
Same result. Now I wondered if something else was wrong, like the power supply, since I couldn't even get any POST codes out of it. Still, the fans spun and such, so it was getting at least some power.
So I hooked the power supply up to another machine. Worked fine, so I put it back. Still dead. At this point, nothing but the power supply, motherboard, cpu, ram and video card were connected, so I tried it without the video card. From previous tests when it first came in, I knew the cpu and ram were ok. Still nothing.
Finally, I grabbed another new motherboard and plugged it into the power supply without even bothering to put it into the case. Started up just fine with me standing there holding it in the air.
So relieved, I shut it down and put the new motherboard in the computer, asking myself what the odds were of having two DOA motherboards in a row.
Apparently pretty slim, since once again I turned the computer on and got nothing. Pulled the Motherboard back out and held it and it worked fine again. Put it back in, got nothing.
At this point, I obviously decided it was something with the case and went looking. Sure enough, there was an extra small metal clip that was supposed to help attach the motherboard to the case that had come loose and then wedged itself into a corner. It was in just the right position to make contact with a couple of the solder points on the motherboard, shorting them and causing the motherboard to shut itself down immediately without even POSTing.
One removed, the whole thing worked fine. Later, I tried the original motherboard and it also worked fine, so somehow that clip worked it's way out while it was running.
Re:My ones (Score:4, Insightful)
It amazes me that every single Linux distro doesn't just come with statically linked
Modern HDDs have oodles of space. Wasting a few extra megs in exchange for an almost-worst-case recoverable installation seems like a no-brainer to me.
Of course, I can (and do) install exactly such statically linked utils as my first task after a new install, but I shouldn't need to... Not to mention, many of the basic Linux programs take a whole lot more than just passing a "--enable-static" to the configure script or passing in an "LDFLAGS=-static".
Re:My ones (Score:4, Funny)
Turns out her case was one of those that has the floppy sized hole and the actual drive goes on the inside... except that her computer had no drive, so she would put the disks in and they fell into the case. I found 19 disks inside of it.
I was rather hard for my and my brother to keep a straight face until we were done fixing it (taking the disks out, selling and installing a floppy drive) and she was out of the store..
Re:blood will short your circuits, too (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My ones (Score:3, Insightful)
Toilet Trauma (Score:5, Funny)
It must have had problems dumping his log file. It was probably stuck in the backside cache...
Re:Toilet Trauma (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Toilet Trauma (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Toilet Trauma (Score:5, Funny)
It started out mild, using the common phrase "taking a dump of the database." Of course, I found this funny, but it escalated.
I'd come into work and have my boss ask, "Would you take a dump this morning before you get started on
The end-all comment was in a meeting when we were told, "Managment wanted me to let you all know that we're not taking enough dumps. Every day, each of us needs to be sure to take at least one dump..."
I still wonder if anyone else found it as funny as I did.
Re:Toilet Trauma (Score:5, Funny)
As a student, my one moment of joy in a long and boring lecture course on databases was when the lecturer brightly said, "Alternatively, you can take a dump every night -- and then process the massive log you've produced".
Peter
Re:Toilet Trauma (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Toilet Trauma (Score:4, Funny)
Long story short- don't do this with your gf's jeep, with no doors and with only a lap belt with no shoulder harness. I left an expensive (at the time) monitor in pieces in the middle of an intersection after a particularly quick turn.
Dull dull dull (Score:5, Insightful)
The first item on the list takes the piss out of some guy for putting a HD in the freezer in an attempt to get it to work, when that is well known for sometimes working in temporarily resuscitating dead drives, if the death is due to a mechanical fault.
Also, the link for page two seems to keep taking me back to the first page in Firefox.
<insert misc comment about
Bah. Humbug.
Re:Dull dull dull (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know. My dad had bowel cancer and had to have half of his colon removed (He's 100% recovered, btw!). We always say that he has a semicolon now, and that they did a really half-arsed job of the operation.
Those jokes never get old.
Re:Dull dull dull (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dull dull dull (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dull dull dull (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me guess..the rest are strange?
Re:Dull dull dull (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because this "article" is really an advertisement in disguise.
Remember when... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, yes I do (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes, yes I do (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. I believe they call them "editors".
Format disk before use (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Format disk before use (Score:4, Funny)
Beer (Score:5, Funny)
Marge: You know Homer, the "E" doesn't work on that typewriter
Homer: We don't need no stinkin' "E"! Ok, "Food Box: Go or No Go" by Homer..no, Earl..no, Bill Simpson!
Re:Beer (Score:3, Informative)
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"!
You can fix that (Score:3, Informative)
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:Beer - cleanup (Score:3, Interesting)
No E? No problem (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void [wikipedia.org]
my mishap (Score:5, Funny)
Delete from Users; where ID=1;
Re:my mishap (Score:3, Interesting)
I use and recommend PostgreSQL, but that particular company was big on using MySQL for everything, including financial transactions.
Taco, Taco... (Score:5, Funny)
My best... (Score:5, Funny)
One day, frantic call from my friend: "can you come with me to $AIRPORT, $AIRLINE's mac is down (I was the Mac expert then). Seems that $AIRLINE is running it's whole fleet management software on ONE computer.
We get there, and the VICE-PRESIDENT OF FINANCE is waiting for us at the receptionist desk. He hands my friend a $50,000 cheque!!! We go look at the macintosh, and I cannot do anything, the hard-disk is totally molten...
We get out of the airport and rush to the bank to have the cheque certified.
The next day, $AIRLINE filed for bankrupcy...
Re:My best... (Score:3, Insightful)
The unique spelling of "check" - i.e. "cheque" would suggest this took place outside of US Bankruptcy jursidiction.
Re:My best... (Score:3, Informative)
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:My best... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Installing a modem at age 12 (Score:5, Funny)
I had no idea what I was doing so I called up the Hayes support line. I told the support guy I wanted to install my new modem but needed help.
He asked me if I had my computer's case off, to which I replied yes. He then told me to go ahead and plug the modem into one of the free slots.
Zap! OUCH! Poof!
He neglected to tell me to turn off the computer.
Hey, I was 12... leave me alone.
For those of you who are worried, some how, both the computer and the modem survived and I eventually got it installed and working.
Re:Installing a modem at age 12 (Score:3, Interesting)
I dit everything "almost" ok, unplug IDE cable, unplug DC cable, take out old HD and install new HD... everything smooth
After that I decided to install the old HD as a slave disk, again just install HD, plug IDE and plug DC cables...
Then, turn on the computer and whoops, old CD not working... after trying with some jumpers configurations and *here i go* different way of connecting the IDE
Re:Installing a modem at age 12 (Score:3, Funny)
Just what is it about theses that inspires people to never back them up? The Murphy Field around those things must be tremendous!
Fortunately, for me, my father had backup of his thesis in floppy disks ...
Wow. He must be the only one to ever do that. I'm impressed.
Well this one takes the cake. (Score:4, Funny)
I was cleaning roster shat out of my keyboard for the next 2 weeks. Smelled good as well. At least it was not in my beer I guess.
Re:Well this one takes the cake. (Score:3, Funny)
Oh ho ho! (Score:4, Funny)
Beer + Keyboard (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Beer + Keyboard (Score:5, Funny)
ps. a roommate of mine (long time ago) used to p in the sink cos the John was way down the corridor, and one night, took a wrong turn and p'd in the back of the telly instead... woke him up...
#1 computer mishap... (Score:4, Funny)
Arguments becoming options (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Someone ran rsync with -r at the end, intending to do something recursive. This option was treated as an argument, causing a file called -r to be created. This was done in / on an HP-UX workstation.
2. Two years later, someone wrote a script to be run from cron that would run as root then change to a directory containing data files, erase them, and create new ones. This directory of data files was NFS mounted on the workstation in 1 above. Many, many other filesystems were also mounted on this workstation, all rw, all as root.
3. Some time after that, someone rebooted the workstation. Not All of the NFS mounts came up, so when the script in 2 ran as root and did not check to make sure the destination directory existed, it was not able to cd and ran in /
4. The script executed "rm -f *", intending to delete the data files. Unfortunately, the file called -r was still in / and was included in the argument list. Rm of course interpreted this as an option, so the command became "rm -f -r (everything else in
5. 3 and 4 happened on a saturday night when no one was around, so no one noticed all of the data disappearing until Monday, when it was all gone.
6. Several people had a very, very long day. Actually, several long days. A few weeks, actually.
Can you count the number of gross and avoidable administration mistakes, boys and girls?
Re:Arguments becoming options (Score:3, Funny)
Is the answer, one... not running Microsoft Windows?
Bye karma... it was nice to know you.
Re:Arguments becoming options (Score:3, Funny)
A coworker of mine did a similar thing on a production machine with rpmbuild. This was about 9 or ten years ago, but I think the command they used was something like this:
rpmbuild -bb --build-root / specfile
Don't ever use the --build-root switch unless you really know what you are doing. The build-root directory is a temporary directory where the package will be built and installed before it is packaged up into an RPM. The first thing RPM does is to clear the build-root directory to make sure there are
Re:Arguments becoming options (Score:3, Informative)
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 yo
Re:Arguments becoming options (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Always check the syntax of your commands before executing them. 'man rsync' would have been helpful.
2. Don't run things in '/' as root unless you need to. (Hint: most of the time, you don't need to)
3. Don't export filesystems as rw with root squash turned off unless absolutely necessary (hint: most times it's not necessary)
4. If you are going to mount things via NFS, add them to the fstab.
5. Add some error checking in your scripts. Changing from
cd
rm -f *
to
cd
would
Re:Arguments becoming options (Score:3, Informative)
rm -f -- *
Re:Arguments becoming options (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially when UNIX shells provide paranoia flags for preventing exactly this kind of disaster:
Now any failing command in a script started like that will cause the script to bail. This should be your standard way of writing a shell script.
The only commands allowed to fail will be those that are the condition of an if or while statement, or are part of a command-chain using the short-circuit operators && or ||.
Further, any POSIX-compliant command has an "end of options" indicator, --. Sure, it's annoying to type on the command line, but when you're writing a script to run unattended, you need to protect it against anticipated situations.
It's not as if having the "remove" command be called "rm" was the cause of this problem.
Really, the use of wildcards in script that run unattended is just dangerous... if you're doing it, re-code.
Like this:
If you need to nuke subdirs too, that's easy--if you do it separately:
Anyone who doesn't get heart palpitations when writing rm commands to be run by a script as root is either inexperienced or unimaginative.
Ask the guys at Apple who had to pay for forensic recovery of customer's hard drives when a badly-written rm command in an early iTunes update clobbered hard drives because it didn't handle spaces-in-filenames.
Re:Arguments becoming options (Score:3, Insightful)
turns out , they were headlights of a 18 wheeler, who would have thunk ? Now there's an example of a catastrophically badly designed headlight system for a 18 wheeler.
Re:Arguments becoming options (Score:3, Informative)
Smashed hard drive (Score:4, Funny)
It was a dying drive, didn't need it anymore. So we had fun! The platters made a nice spiral in the air after I broke the spindle off...
I'm sure 99 % /.'ers have better stories... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to agree with first posters... these aren't very good stories. But, thinking maybe it's phishing for better stories, I'll byte:
I once created an extremely complex script, crafted lovingly to do something at the time I'm sure I thought important. As always I incrememtally built and tested, assuring myself of one more self-anointed masterpiece. Finally, finished, as an afterthought...
I inserted a variable to point to a directory node below which I would clean up all of my work (even though I knew I had no need for the variable and would never tweak it). It was such a simple addition. No need to test.
Fired up the script, it ran a couple of seconds, I was prepared to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Hmmmm, I don't remember ANY of the test runs running so long. Why is the hard drive light flickering so much? And why still? And why so long?...
Yeah, the
command worked perfectly. Except I defined the variable initially as: cleanupdir=dirname
So, everything was lost except for the frigging "masterpiece".
Undaunted, (I'm no idiot, golllll!), I calmly inserted the QIC backup tape with my prerun backup.
No, wait!, I'll not be caught with that error again! I quickly edited the only remaining file in my tree of files, the offending script and smugly fixed the rogue spelling. I hadn't been working in this industry this long without knowing how to take safeguards!
Now, twenty minutes later, my script fixed... my files restored... let's try this again. Yeah... something about the chronology of fixing the script, then restoring the broken version over it from the backup tape. At least I proved the error was replicatable. So, I am an idiot afterall!
disclaimer: this happened over ten years ago, so I'm a bit short on exact detail of the snafu, but it really did happen. And, even though I repeated my idiocy, the fact I had the backup tape at all with only the one error to fix in the script saved my butt... so not all was lost in the lunacy.
Watercooling 'Mishap' (Score:5, Funny)
After he pulled the pipe out of the pump I distinctly remember 'hearing' the sound of water hitting a fan followed by 'seeing' that the pump was pushing water upwards-straight into my graphics card fan which was very effectively 'flicking' water over the rest of the PC.
PCs are hard to break, and after 2 days drying out it worked fine.
NB: this happened three times and after the third time and the purchase of my x800 xt I moved back to fans
Re:Watercooling 'Mishap' (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe you should have just stopped inviting that guy over?
Re:Watercooling 'Mishap' (Score:3, Funny)
Where there's smoke... (Score:5, Funny)
Rather than try to diagnose the problem at her desk we usually just replaced the drive and checked it out back at the lab. We removed the existing drive and plugged in the replacement. Because the floppy mounting was rather tedious we didn't completely mount it until we were sure it worked so my buddy held on to it while I powered up the machine.
Now what I haven't mentioned was that the power plugs in this particular brand of PC did not have a "notch" on them like modern PCs and we weren't paying attention to it so when we plugged in the drive we put the power plug on backwards.
When we powered up the machine smoke began pouring out of the floppy drive as my friend began screaming, "Turn it off, turn it off!".
When we realized our mistake we got a new drive and installed it correctly. When we left, the secretary (already cautious of computers) was now almost terrified by the PC on her desk.
The day I learn ice cream and laser writers.... (Score:3, Funny)
I was working on my science fair project on that system (best darn looking presentation seen at a science fair in those days) while licking away at a vanilla ice cream cone I had (flat bottom cone). I set my cone down on the top of the printer and got distracted (when outside to play some bball I think).
I came back 2 hours later to find the ice cream cone had collapsed and done a noise dive into the paper feed area.
My parents well...
When F%#@k was heard around the world... (Score:5, Funny)
A few years back when I was into doing computer mods, I had recently put together what I though was a pretty great rig, a BP6 with dullie 433mhz overclocked to 500mhz each, with dual golden orbs, 16mb voodoo card, etc... so this was done awhile ago...
Anyway after finishing my master piece, I notice it was housed in a beige box. This simple would not do! So I spend a lot of time designing a custom case design. It involved special glossy paint, three sepreate masking jobs to have overlaying geometric inverse colors (Silver and Black mostly), and fitting my computer handle (that I have used for the last, oh 15 years or so) into the design also inversing the lettering as it crossed geometric boundries (only one). It also took several coats. Anyway very complex and well thought out (or so I thought).
I was all proud of my rig, and when one of buddies came over I made sure to show it off.
His ONLY comment was 'Who is "DartVain"'?
My favorite mishap (Score:3, Funny)
I do not know if this is actually a mishap or not, but it is one of my favorite stories. Sometime about 10 years or so ago, during high school, a friend of mine was building a computer. I do not actually recall if it was for himself or not, but I believe it was a 486 25 or 33 mhz or so.
He just couldn't get it to work at all, and asked if I could stop by and help him out. When I got there, the machine would power up, and the power supply fan was spinning just fine.
I recall I started with easy things like reseating the memory, reseating ISA cards... When none of that worked, I disassembled the whole thing and put it back together. Same symptoms as before. He tried similar things, same problems.
I was sitting staring at the machine... And I saw the problem. I told him I knew exactly what was wrong, but I told him I shouldn't tell him, and I should let him find it himself.
I did end up telling him... The power supply voltage was set to 220 instead of 110...
My Best Computer Mishaps (Score:5, Funny)
Again, tech support. Salesman's laptop comes in won't boot. Reason: buggy porno screen saver. We remind scared, contrite salesman "not to install unapproved software on company machines."
Worked in a power plant for a few years. Tape drive caught on fire from being caked with coal dust. While it was still flaming, I grabbed the drive by the parallel cable and whipped it into the middle of the parking lot where it could burn without catching anything else on fire.
Also in the power plant. Guy calls in to say his monitor is "rainbowy". Turns out the CPU underneath the monitor is filled with coal dust which clogged all the fans. The CPU was burning hot and was cooking the monitor. I literally burned my hand on the CPU case.
We had a support contract with HP, who was charging us upwards of 100 dollars for replacement network cards (this was years ago, but was still excessive.) We were testing some machines with 3Com cards we got at Best Buy, even though if HP found out, they wouldn't support those machines. One day, the ENTIRE network goes down. Nothing will bring it back up, until someone happens to yank the power strip connected to the new machine with a 3Com network card in it. The network IMMEDIATELY comes back up. I don't know why a 3Com network card would bring down an entire network, but it DID.
This isn't a mishap, at least not for me. I was initially hired to be an operator on the company's HP-3000. Within about a week, I had written automated scripts to literally do 90% of my job. The rest of the time I just looked at web pages and slept. I figured out that I could lie down by my desk with a screwdriver and sleep on the floor by my CPU. If anyone came by, I just started removing screws from my CPU case like I was working on it. I was behind two locked doors, so I had plenty of time to react when I heard the door latch. I loved that job. The computer mishap here was that they were paying me.
A coworker injured his penis. (Score:5, Funny)
For some reason he thought he could repair it, and so he proceeded to open the hard drive up. None of us were there to witness it directly, but somehow he managed to get the very strong magnets close to his penis. They stuck together, crushing a portion of of the bottom of his manhood.
So he rushed in, blood all over and crying, and we were dumbfounded. We got him to the hospital, and then we couldn't help but have a good laugh over his folly. He returned for about a week or so after he recovered, but left soon after that.
A VAX cockup of epic proportions (Score:5, Funny)
However, this is a very interesting cockup, and the author wrote the story well:
Re:A VAX cockup of epic proportions (Score:5, Interesting)
The day I killed TWO pcs... (Score:3, Funny)
OK, this was very late (2:0am) and I was EXTREMELY tired - DON'T mess inside pcs at 2:00am, especially when tired...
I decided to install my shiny new Zalman Super flower cooler [quietpc.com] into the kids computer as it was in the living room and quite loud. I had to remove the memory to install the cooler, which I did without a problem. When I was re-installing the memory, I noticed that the cooler fins were fouling one of the memory sticks, in fact I had to kinda bend some of the fins out the way to get the memory in. Somehow, the fact that the memory was touching the cooler fins didn't register as being significant...
I turned on, and BANG!
OMG! I realised what a VERY stupid thing I had just done...
What did I do next?
well, I had to determine what parts had blown...
Memory? CPU? Mobo? so of course, I decided to test the easiest thing first, so....
I took the memory stick out that had been touching the fins..... and installed it into my primary computer!!! (All rational thought had obviosuly looong gone!)
I turned on my main machine - nothing. OK, I thought, that memory is bad. I'll put the original memory back in my primary machine...
Turned on, NOTHING!
At this point, the full horror of what VERY VERY VERY stupid things I had just done hit me. I looked closely at the memory I blew up, and there was an actual hole burned in it and several melted tracks...
I ended up replaced two motherboards, two cpus and 4 memory sticks - I just didn't know what parts were safe and didn't want to risk blowing anything else up. I know that I definetley killed the CPU, memory and mobo on the first computer, as each had melty-burney bits on them - in fact, there was quite an impressive hole in the cpu!
The zalman ended up in the trash too...
Upside was I got two much faster systems. It was a very expensive mistake.
Burning hardware (Score:5, Funny)
At another job, I had spent a couple of weeks installing fiber optic routers and cabling to all of my servers. Turned it all on, configured the networking, and was congradulated by my boss for a job well done. Less than 24 hours later, I was showing the higher ups the new hardware when we heard a cracking noise and smoke came rolling out of the cabinet with the routers in it. After putting out the fire we found that an old IBM mainframe (Model 3033) we were going to remove soon was to blame. The bottom of the coolant reservoir had rusted out and dumped a few hundred gallons of water under our computer room floor. The water pooled under the router cabinet and shorted out the socket that the cabinet PDU was plugged into. We later found out that the spot that the cabinet was placed over was originally going to have a drain there that was omitted during construction. That was a quick $100,000 down the drain (pardon the pun).
Computer Screw Ups (Score:3, Funny)
I loved the hell out of that machine, even wrote some very nice system utilities using the CLI. But over the years the system went from async terminals to everything over TCP/IP using the Pacer terminal emulator on a Mac.
But there still were a few async connections to things like DG printers, etc. Of course over the years nobody bothered to remove out of service cables or wires so the back of the machine was a literal copper rats nest.
One day I decide I'm going to clean the mess up. As I'm pulling old wire out I suddenly hear the console beeping. Beeping on those consoles wasn't generally a good thing. I look around the corner at the screen and see "volume hansel dismounted" followed by every other system volume. Uh oh!
I go around front to the SCSI array and see the power is off. Toggle the switch, nothing. Around to the back and the breaker isn't tripped. Power cord is plugged in, etc.
Now the boss comes flying into the computer room. You can tell he's upset by the giant red knot that appears in his forehead whenever he's stressed or angry.
Turns out the power was connected via a twist-lock Hubbel connector. Somehow I had backed it off a half twist which was enough to break current to the device.
Once I got power back on I just re-mounted all the volumes. Of course the outage had tanked a couple of jobs running so I caught flak for that.
My Biggest Booboo (Score:3, Funny)
It's the first morning of the pilot-to-production phase, and we're all sitting in the datacentre at our terminals, bringing the whole system online for the first time. I'm personally familiar with PC-based terminal emulators, not the fancy X-Windows stations that the client has on their premises. So, once we get everything finally up and running (and it's taken us about 2 1/2 years to get here from concept stage), I start exploring the settings on my X-Windows station. (Anybody remember CDE, and how... bizzare it is to configure, contrasted with KDE or Gnome?)
I'm fiddling around with settings, trying to create application shortcuts to fire up sessions with servers just the way I like, when at one point I get the message that a reboot is required for changes to take effect.
I issued the standard "sync; sync; shutdown -r now" command -- and just after I hit I realized that I had been typing into an xterm session ON ONE OF THE BACK-END SERVERS -- not the local X-station!
Well. The backend server goes down, and when the event-collector picks up the unavailability, it starts up alarms and red flashing lights (I kid you not), and also starts paging people (including myself, ironically).
I'm stunned, and terrified, for I've just brought down a system that had been operational for only 3 hours after being in development for 2 1/2 years.
We eventually get the server back up and running, and afterwards, the ProjMgr (from the prime vendor) drifts over to me and quietly mentions that I had a strange expression on my face earlier that day. We look at each other, and then he says it "must've been a s/w fault somewhere" before wandering off knowingly. (Whew!....)
Moral of the story #1: NEVER work in root/superuser accounts when you don't absolutely need to.
Moral #2: Use color-coded xterms to indicate which systems & what access-levels you are working with!
Giving a New Meaning to "Ops Puke" (Score:5, Funny)
Twenty-or-so years ago, I was a young airman maintaining the Transportable Ground Intercept Facility-II (TGIF-II) at Metro Tango, a site located about 10 klicks north of the former Hahn Air Base (now Frankfurt-Hahn International Airport) in Germany. TGIF-II was used by Air Force and Army intelligence operators to intercept communications from the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. The operators sat at "collection positions," computer keyboards used to "gist" (transcribe in shorthand) the transmissions they listened to through their headsets.
One morning, as the operators entered the facility and began their pre-mission checks, an Army E-4 sat down at Position 11, close to our places at the maintenance terminal. He didn't look well, and sure enough, within a few minutes he promptly barfed his breakfast onto the keyboard in front of him.
He apologized and we said hey, no problem, get yourself to sick call dude and we'll clean up the mess. Thanks to mil-spec, the WWW III-grade circuit board under the keypad only required a quick rinse in the sink and a few hours to air-dry before it was reinstalled and the position checked good.
One of our civilian contractors was ex-Army, and when we told him the story, he got pissed and said "That guy did it on purpose - he's trying to get kicked out." We looked at the contractor in disbelief. Why the hell would anyone do something like that? But we were Air Force guys and had no clue to what lengths some people will go to escape the Army.
The next day and another mission, the operators filed into the facility and took their places to begin their pre-mission equipment checks. The same guy sat down at Position 11, looked at the terminal for a minute, and blew chunks into the keyboard. The kicker was the little grin on his face after he deposited his stomach contents into the keyboard.
The guy apologized again (still with the grin on his face) and excused himself from the facility. We disassembled the keyboard, washed, rinsed, dried and re-installed. To his credit, they guy didn't eat much either morning.
We don't see the operator for several days, but within a week he returns, sits down at Position 11, and within three minutes regurgitates on the keyboard. This time, we tell him to get the hell out and then we call his duty section. We explain what's happened and tell them since they keep sending the guy back to work, it's THEIR turn to clean the abused circuit board. They send a warrant officer (I guess he was the only technician-type the Army had) to whom we hand over the circuit board.
The next time I see the E-4, he's on the site's Goon Squad, folks assigned to jobs outside the compound while they await administrative or disciplinary action. He's driving the military-issue Volkswagen 9-passenger van used to shuttle workers between the site and an overflow parking lot a quarter mile down the road. It's winter, there's snow on the roads, and my boss, an Air Force master sergeant, and I are on our way to the main base to run errands on our lunch hour. The E-4 slams the van into gear, hits the gas, and power-slides down the small two-lane road, fishtailing back and forth as my boss yells at him to stop. I'm sitting in the back seat and in the rear view mirror I can see that little grin on the E-4's face.
Looks like our contractor was right after all. . .
Sqeaky disk drive (Score:3, Funny)
Ahh, the memories.
Those were funny? (Score:5, Funny)
Here's a much better story: my inlaws called in yet another computer-induced panic. Sis was crying, mom locked herself in the bedroom, and dad was in a frenzy yelling at us about his computer and wanting us to come fix it (a four hour drive). The problem was that the computer would not print and the home phone stopped working. We politely told him that we weren't going to travel 8 hours to fix his printer, and he really needed to call the phone company about his phone line.
2 days later the phone guy showed up and unplugged the printer's USB cable from the phone jack.
Always mount a scratch monkey.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Stonewolf
Read on....
Subject: Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
Date: Wednesday, 3 September 1986 16:46-EDT
From: "Art Evans"
To: Risks@CSL.SRI.COM
In another forum that I follow, one corespondent always adds the comment
Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
after his signature. In response to a request for explanation, he replied somewhat as follows. Since I'm reproducing without permission,
I have disguised a few things.
My friend Bud used to be the intercept man at a computer vendor for calls when an irate customer called. Seems one day Bud was sitting at his desk when the phone rang.
Bud: Hello. Voice: YOU KILLED MABEL!!
B: Excuse me? V: YOU KILLED MABEL!!
This went on for a couple of minutes and Bud was getting nowhere, so he decided to alter his approach to the customer.
B: HOW DID I KILL MABEL? V: YOU PM'ED MY MACHINE!!
Well to avoid making a long story even longer, I will abbreviate what had happened. The customer was a Biologist at the University of Blah-de-blah, and he had one of our computers that controlled gas mixtures that Mabel (the monkey) breathed. Now Mabel was not your ordinary monkey. The University had spent years teaching Mabel to swim, and they were studying the effects that different gas mixtures had on her physiology. It turns out that the repair folks had just gotten a new Calibrated Power Supply (used to calibrate analog equipment), and at their first opportunity decided to calibrate the D/A converters in that computer. This changed some of the gas mixtures and poor Mabel was asphyxiated. Well Bud then called the branch manager for the repair folks:
Manager: Hello
B: This is Bud, I heard you did a PM at the University of
Blah-de-blah.
M: Yes, we really performed a complete PM. What can I do
for You?
B: Can You Swim?
The moral is, of course, that you should always mount a scratch monkey.
There are several morals here related to risks in use of computers. Examples include, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it." However, the cautious philosophical approach implied by "always mount a scratch monkey" says a lot that we should keep in mind.
Art Evans
Tartan Labs