Bone-Headed IT Mistakes

snydeq writes "PCs preconfigured with stone-age malware, backups without recovery, Social Security numbers stored in plain view of high school students — Andy Brandt gives InfoWorld's Stupid Users series a new IT admin twist. Call it fratricide if you will, but getting paid to know better is no guarantee against IT idiocy, as these stories attest."

How About...

[ferrellcat]

Deleting hundreds of thousands of White House emails, and not having a backup?

Funstuff, and on topic too...

[Lonewolf666]

http://thedailywtf.com/ [thedailywtf.com]. Even if some of the stories are probably made up.

My bigest boneheaded move

[Anonymous Coward]

I was new to the whole *nix thing but had been let loose as root on all the boxes at work. Someone suggested I could/should create a script to customise my environment so that I could run it when I logged on. Problem was I named the script "df" (my initials) and then promptly decided that it needed to go in to the /usr/bin/ directory. Yeah - now you know why I posted anonymously. :-D

Re:Don't forget the all too common: Giving yoursel

[Broken scope]

See your mistake was believing that you actually had a "trusted IT friend".

My favorite

[hal9000(jr)]

Not as major is the Infoworld examples, but I still to this day sometimes forget to set-up a virtual interface when configuring a cisco router. This little command me more often than I care to admit:

telnet 192.168.1.1
cisco-router$ en
cisco-router$ config t
cisco-router(config)# int g0/1
cisco-router(config-if)# ip address 10.1.1.1 mask 255.255.255.0
Connection Closed

Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

What to do...

[thatskinnyguy]

Database take a dump? No backup of the transaction log? Fear not! With just two easy steps, your life will be back on track:

1. Update Resume`
2. Leave Town!

used to work with a guy

[gEvil (beta)]

I used to work with a guy who did the "useless backup" thing. He set up an automated backup system that encrypted the files to tape. It ran fine for a long while. But when we had a server failure and needed to recover from the backup tapes, he couldn't remember what the decryption password was. All he could do was sit there saying "I remember that it was a good one." I just wanted to smack him...

Re:Funstuff, and on topic too...

[eln]

Ah yes, the Daily WTF: the Penthouse Forum of the IT world.

Re:Don't forget the all too common: Giving yoursel

[bsDaemon]

Clicking on a link that my trusted IT friend sent me...

Would that one be directly responsible for your current career as "posting on slashdot in the middle of the day?"

Daily WTF: "I'm Sure You Can Deal"

[steveha]

This one really wasn't the IT staff's fault, so this is slightly off topic, but this is my all time favorite Daily WTF story.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Im-Sure-You-Can-Deal.aspx [thedailywtf.com]

steveha

My personal fav

[hedley]

I could not access my mbox, the file was gone. Soon a co-worker stopped by... same... mbox gone. 2+2 together a quick visit to IT. "Hello, did you do anything to the company mbox's?", IT: "Oh yes, I observed they took up a lot of space on the disk so I *removed* them all"!

H.

Re:My bigest boneheaded move

[Cro Magnon]

Could have been worse. At least your name wasn't "Richard Morton". Imagine the havok a script with those initials would do!

Re:Funstuff, and on topic too...

[PitaBred]

"Made up"? It's so refreshing seeing an optimist in this day and age ;)

is email down?

[jdinkel]

It's ironic that just this morning I received an email from a user with just this line:

"are we able to get email right now?"

I resisted the urge to reply back with "no."

Re:Printer Friendly Version

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Sorry, I have no mod points to offer you at this time, please accept this following post's attempt to draw more attention to your funny/informative post as a substitute.

Re:the Daily WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's one in video format:

  http://www.yikers.com/video_data_center_worker_owned.html

If you skip ahead and see the server on the floor you've skipped a bit too far.

Re:School boneheadedness

[Collective 0-0009]

Ah yes... my first social engineering... getting into the grading program at school. All the teachers knew I was the guy to ask about computers (even though I wasn't really that big of a geek in school). So it was really pretty easy to confuse a teacher about which password to give me (system/app - but either is still bad to give to a student). I prevented a few of my buddies from failing English that year.

Biggest bone-head ever

[FranTaylor]

One of my co-workers once decided to install a beta version of Windows NT on the company's Novell file server, which EVERYBODY used for EVERYTHING. He did this in the evening when noone would notice and then he left for two weeks' vacation!!! I have never in my entire life met a more arrogant SOB. The entire company was down for over a day as we restored the server from a backup.

The boss refused to fire him (out of a cannon), so we filled the entire volume of his office with computer boxes. We went up and over the drop ceiling to deposit the last few boxes so he could not even open the door. When he returned from vacation, it took him a whole day to figure out how to get the boxes out.

Re:Printer Friendly Version

[shrikel]

While I agree with your sentiment, you are overly exaggerating their distraction level. To be more fair, you should have formatted your post like they did:

I

[Do you like things that start with "I"? Take our IT IQ test!]

don't know

[For more stories about people not knowing things, check out "Stupid user tricks" and "More stupider user tricks"]

what you're talking about

[Are people talking about you behind your back? Read our "Top 10 reasons to be paranoid" and find out]

. Those text

[If you enjoy reading text, you might enjoy "Stupid hacker tricks" and "Stupid hacker tricks 2: The folly of youth"]

ads

[Is malware putting your system at risk? Take our Network Security IQ Test]

weren't irritating

[Is your job getting on your nerves? Check out "The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT" to see how much worse it could be]

at all!

PHB Edicts

[PPH]

Back when I used to work for a major aerospace manufacturer, we had an interesting incident:

We had a production control system hosted on a series of HP-UX servers. The IT department had just reorganized, placing a new (inexperienced) manager in charge of our systems. One day, all the servers went off line. As the factory ground to a halt, I managed to log in to one via telnet. It seemed to be up, but many functions were failing. I traced the problem to: no /tmp directories remained on any of the systems. I contacted the on-duty admin. with his tidbit of information. She informed be that, "as ordered by management, all /tmp directories were to be removed." Apparently, the new boss had read somewhere, that /tmp was for storage of "junk". He deemed the storage of "junk" to be an inappropriate use of company resources and, to prevent it, all /tmp directories were to be removed.

Re:Printer Friendly Version

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, NEITHER of those sentences is correct. I'd have thought you could get one right, at least.

Re:Biggest bone-head ever

[shakah]

Speaking of Windows NT beta versions, best I saw was a Q/A lab with over 100 Windows boxes. All the boxes were mistakenly installed/configured over the course of a few days with a beta (or trial) version of Windows 4.0 which timed-out after 180 days (I think) with a "blue screen of death" (no licensing issue, the tech just grabbed the wrong CD and kept using it) . All was fine for quite some time until boxes stared BSOD-ing one-by-one -- once we realized what happened it was kind of humorous to watch them fail one after the other.

Re:used to work with a guy

[MaxInBxl]

Haha nice one!

Reminds me of this sweet old lady in the printng industry who regularly would back up newer versions of custom publishing software on a CD (smart move). Surprised that the same CD was still being used after a while a cursory check showed that the back-up procedure was quite simple: "I just drag the program onto the CD and and let it write the data". That's how you end up with a CD full of "links" (from the desktop) to the actual executable file!

Re:My bigest boneheaded move

[tuffy]

While working as a student computer lab attendant, a fresh-faced new user once asked me what the rename command was on the SunOS boxes. He told me he'd already tried "rn" and "rm", and now his files had disappeared.

I'm sure he learned something new that day.