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Count to ten when a plane goes down

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Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#101

Post by tzs »

smacktoward wrote: post #37
feld wrote: post #2

Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.

In fairness, it was a different world back then. There were so few people administering computer networks that you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained; and the thing about highly trained people is that they tend to view things like failsafes and safeties as pointless time-wasters. "I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before…

Ahhh....the days of sharp tools, no failsafes, and young programmers or admins.

I recall that time I wrote a batch manager for the VAX 11/780 at Caltech High Energy Physics. It consisted of a program to monitor the batch queue and start jobs as scheduled ("BATch MANager", or "BATMAN"), and a program for users to submit jobs ("Run Overnight Batch INput", or "ROBIN").

The configuration file for BATMAN was stored in /etc/batman.

During development, I occasionally had to "rm /etc/batman". Of course, out of habit, as soon as I typed "/etc/" my fingers would automatically type "passwd", and once I did not catch this in time. Oops. It happened to be a Sunday morning at around 7AM, and I had to call the other admin, who handled backups, to come in and restore that file. He was annoyed.

The second time I did this, he was pretty pissed.

The third time, I fortunately had been working at the terminal we had in the machine room, and managed to shut down power to the machine before the write buffers were flushed, and the file was OK after fsck. I didn't have to deal with an angry co-admininstrator that time. Just angry physicists.

The other admin (Norman Wilson, in case anyone knows him or he reads HN) then made a link named /etc/safe_from_tzs to /etc/passwd to stop my nonsense once and for all.

That worked until the first time I wanted to overwrite /etc/batman instead of rm it.

That led to a cron job that maintained a copy of /etc/passwd in a separate file, and periodically checked to see if it were missing or misformatted, and restored it if so.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#102

Post by analog31 »

austinz wrote: post #47
smacktoward wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it was a different world back then. There were so few people administering computer networks that you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained; and the thing about highly trained people is that they tend to view things like failsafes and safeties as pointless time-wasters. "I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before…

This is very true, which begs the question - why was a 23-year-old summer intern placed in charge of the embassy computer system, or even given access to its central console? He may have have self-taught facility with computers, but I find it hard to believe he'd have much experience at that age with the sort of large, mission-critical institutional computer system described in the article. I wonder if he had a super…

You might be surprised. What I observed during that time was that a lot of, if not most, senior people were clueless about what computers were actually doing. The potential "reach" of that intern might just not have occurred to people.

And we still have national security / diplomacy disasters resulting from relatively low level people having access to vital computer systems beyond anybody's imagination.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#103

Post by lotsofmangos »

jasonwocky wrote: post #74
mikegreco wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go with this line of reasoning, whoever put him in that position should also be fired, and their boss should be fired for putting someone in charge who made such a poor decision in the first place.

The person that should be fired is always the person who has responsibility for the amount of budget represented by the loss. e.g. No intern that needs permission to get a box of pencils from the supply closet should ever be fired for putting a mistake into production that costs a company $100,000. If a company loses $100,000 on a mistake, you look to the person in the hierarchy who manages budgets of that size. It's…

Firing the intern means that the story you just spun to your boss about how this all occurred won't be contradicted by the intern and you might not get fired.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#105

Post by derefr »

btilly wrote: post #98
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another alternative is confirmation fatigue. As in: I hit F6, "Do you want to reboot this?" dialog pops, I hit 'Y', "Do you really really want to reboot this?", I hit 'Y' again. Instead of actually reading what it says, you just instead press F6-Y-Y in quick succession. Modern interfaces sometimes make you type some kind of string to confirm, but most either use a password (like sudo) or some hardcoded string that ev…

I have idly considered addressing that problem when it really matters by asking multiple random questions whose answers need to be some combination of "Y" and "N" to proceed. With the result that you simply cannot engage in muscle memory. Anyone using the app would hate me.

When you delete a github repo, you have to retype the fully-qualified name of the repo you want to delete. I think that's exactly the right level of annoyance: it makes sure that if you're mistaken about where you are, you realize it, and that if you're making a typo, you'll have to make it the same way twice.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#106

Post by mseebach »

mikegreco wrote: post #4

The author states they felt it was appropriate when they were fired. In what world would it be appropriate to get fired for a single, simple, incredibly easy to make mistake? Doubly insane when there were exactly zero safeguards in place to prevent the mistake from being made.

Appropriate or not, it's probably what was to be expected in what I imagine even in 1981 was not the most enlightened HR management regime (the US foreign service). Also, 32 years is a lot of time to wash away the bitterness of having been unfairly fired from a summer job, especially if you, as the author, ended up doing pretty well for yourself.

Also, whether or not it was appropriate is completely irrelevant to the story being told.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#107

Post by jjoonathan »

btilly wrote: post #98
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another alternative is confirmation fatigue. As in: I hit F6, "Do you want to reboot this?" dialog pops, I hit 'Y', "Do you really really want to reboot this?", I hit 'Y' again. Instead of actually reading what it says, you just instead press F6-Y-Y in quick succession. Modern interfaces sometimes make you type some kind of string to confirm, but most either use a password (like sudo) or some hardcoded string that ev…

I have idly considered addressing that problem when it really matters by asking multiple random questions whose answers need to be some combination of "Y" and "N" to proceed. With the result that you simply cannot engage in muscle memory. Anyone using the app would hate me.

Not as much as we hate the person who made the decision to prevent phones/computers from turning on immediately when the battery is empty, even if they're plugged in :P

If I ever meet that person IRL... I might even go so far as to make a tasteless joke about committing physical violence in retaliation for the hassle they've caused me.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#108

Post by grecy »

taylorbuley wrote: post #69
raverbashing wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember how it is on the newer versions, but try using fdisk in an old linux distro and see how many confirmations you get when deleting a partition. Or just the old rm -rf / Older stuff asks for much less confirmations.

No thanks. It makes me shudder to just see this printed in the comments section!

I was leaving my old job and handing in my MacBook Pro. After getting permission from the network guys (who were going to format it anyway) I ran rm -rf / as root.

It was surprisingly boring, taking a very long time to delete all my files (I should have deleted them first). Eventually it got around to deleting fonts, which caused things to render a little strange, but after 60 minutes nothing much had changed and it was still chugging, so we shut it down and went to the bar for my last "Friday night drinks".

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#109

Post by artursapek »

graylights wrote: post #46
baddox wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But typing "rm -rf /" is significantly harder to do accidentally than typing F7 instead of F6.

Not really, a lot of novice unix users are of the habit of removing files with -rf switch. I cringe everytime I see it. The command "rm -rf ~/blue/" is just a single space key from being equivalent to "rm -rf /" with "rm -rf ~/blue /"

More easily, "rm -rf ~" with a premature "Enter"

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#110

Post by rickmode »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #92
smacktoward wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it was a different world back then. There were so few people administering computer networks that you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained; and the thing about highly trained people is that they tend to view things like failsafes and safeties as pointless time-wasters. "I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before…

Another alternative is confirmation fatigue. As in: I hit F6, "Do you want to reboot this?" dialog pops, I hit 'Y', "Do you really really want to reboot this?", I hit 'Y' again. Instead of actually reading what it says, you just instead press F6-Y-Y in quick succession. Modern interfaces sometimes make you type some kind of string to confirm, but most either use a password (like sudo) or some hardcoded string that ev…

I believe UAC works well even when a human always hits OK. The point is to make sure a human is there and trying to do something and not some malicious code.
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