Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#1

Post by voxadam » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)
www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#2

Post by rntksi » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

>Well one time I was installing a minimal base system of Linux on a friends PC, so that we would have all the necessary utlitities to bring over the rest of the stuff. His 3 1/2 inch disk was dead, so when had to get the 5 1/4 inch version of the boot/root disk. Too bad that version, having to fit in 1.2M instead of 1.44, didn't have tar

Heh ... I wonder how many years forward will people stop knowing what a 3 1/2 and a 5 1/4 disk is

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#3

Post by kloch » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

I love this. It takes us back to a time when administering a Unix system was a Big Deal. Partly because they were rare and expensive. But also they were truly multi-user with dozens of people logged in at any given time.

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#4

Post by pmontra » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

rntksi wrote: post #2

>Well one time I was installing a minimal base system of Linux on a friends PC, so that we would have all the necessary utlitities to bring over the rest of the stuff. His 3 1/2 inch disk was dead, so when had to get the 5 1/4 inch version of the boot/root disk. Too bad that version, having to fit in 1.2M instead of 1.44, didn't have tar Heh ... I wonder how many years forward will people stop knowing what a 3 1/2 an…

As in "You 3D printed the Save icon!" ?

https://logosatwork.com/you-3d-printed-the-save-icon/

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#5

Post by cstross » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

This takes me back to roughly 1993.

I was in a department running on a mix of Wyse green-screen terminals and, later, X terminals, when we got a budget upgrade that would roll out actual individual PCs -- 486s running SCO Open Desktop -- to everyone. (This was not cheap, it cost about £4000 for the hardware per seat, although the software was free because, er, this was back in the day when SCO was a respectable UNIX development house rather than a serial litigation zombie, and we were SCO's techpubs department).

Anyway, the editors, who were techpubs management (and thereby stronger on the management than the tech side of things), got their workstations before anyone else. And one of them thought, "ooh goodie, my very own UNIX system!" And proceeded to do "sudo chown -R me:me /" (substitute their username and group for "me") all over the root filesystem.

It's amazing what breaks when every shared library suddenly belongs to a random user, isn't it?

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#6

Post by jlv2 » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

I vaguely thought I posted in this thread back then.

Back in 1984/5, I had a directory in my homedir called "etc" for of miscellaneous stuff. One day I thought: that's a bad name, I should remove it. I errantly typed "rm -rf /etc". Thankfully I got a "Permission Denied" error. Except, I then did the obvious override, "sudo rm -rf /etc" (1). This was on a VAX 11/780 with about 50 undergrads doing project work on. The command ran for a while and then I heard moans out in the terminal room, as the system crashed. It took us about 3 hours to restore from backup tape.

(1) I used to have to explain what "sudo" was, because this happened before we posted it to USENET, and before it was ubiquitous on systems.

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#7

Post by butterfi » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

I thought I would find these funny and instead they just made me anxious. I mean, they are funny, I guess I just have PTSD from years of Unix administration.

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#8

Post by drewg123 » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

jlv2 wrote: post #6

I vaguely thought I posted in this thread back then. Back in 1984/5, I had a directory in my homedir called "etc" for of miscellaneous stuff. One day I thought: that's a bad name, I should remove it. I errantly typed "rm -rf /etc". Thankfully I got a "Permission Denied" error. Except, I then did the obvious override, "sudo rm -rf /etc" (1). This was on a VAX 11/780 with about 50 undergrads doing project work on. The…

When did it become ubiquitous? I first got root privs via sudo on a *nix system in 1991 or so, and I remember it being widely deployed even then.

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#9

Post by DonHopkins » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

At least he didn't have to install Solaris on Sun executive's workstations.

Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006186

http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html

The Day SunOS Died

    "Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
    ATT System V has replaced BSD.
    You can cling to the standards of the industry
    But only if you pay the right fee -- 
    Only if you pay the right fee . . ."

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#10

Post by whartung » Tue, Dec 21, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

Worst thing I ever did was cross hard mount NFS volumes across two machines.

With a hard NFS mount, the mount will hang until the other machine responds.

When we had to power cycle the two servers, they would not come up as they were deadlocked waiting for each other. That was exciting.