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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

#51

Post by [deleted] »

Karellen wrote: post #42
sitinaud wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That fact that he wasn't too concerned about having accidentally reset all the computers in the building suggests that he may not have had an appropriate temperament/attitude for a sysadmin managing critical systems.

Or, you know, he had a perfectly good reason to think that accidentally resetting all the computers in the building at that time would not be a problem: "Not long after I arrived in my office, I received a call from a secretary in the Agriculture Department who liked to play a computer game before her workday started. Her favorite game had a bug that regularly froze her workstation. [...] I realized that I had mistak…

[deleted]

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#52

Post by njharman »

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.

In the world of bureaucratic need for scapegoats.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#53

Post by dade_ »

feld wrote: post #2

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

Two servers side by side. Broken KVM that only switched the monitor. The screen was Windows NT, but the keyboard in front of the monitor was connected to another server running OS/2. Ctrl-Alt-Del The Windows screen did nothing, but the sudden hard drive activity on the OS/2 server told me what I needed to know. Not thirty seconds later, I had visitors. I was around 21 at the time, so yeah... Experience.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#54

Post by jonreem »

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 /"

On any modern system it's actually "sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root" and then entering your password while staring at the command.

"rm -rf ~/blue /" will not come close to deleting / unless you are in the habit of running every command as sudo, even ignoring the presence of --no-preserve-root

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#55

Post by megablast »

marbletiles wrote: post #18
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.

The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…

Also, the situation where somebody has to be fired.

I imagine that someone wanted someone's head, so whose head should it have been? They guy who wrote the system couldn't be fired, he was in a different company. And maybe a macro has been assigned to that key, so it wasn't his fault anyway.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#56

Post by svachalek »

baddox wrote: post #36
marbletiles wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world where you know you that a) you have an incredibly powerful key with no safeguards at your fingertips and b) you might be in a breaking news situation and nonetheless you go for the key right next to the dangerous one carelessly enough that you miss? Think about it: Unix is equally as "insane". If you're the guy on the console who meant to clean out some crap dir and accidentally typoed "rm -rf /" and then c…

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

The / key was right next to Enter on a lot of old keyboards. It was quite easy to type 'rm -rf /tmp/garbage*' and have a simple fumble turn it into 'rm -rf /'. I mean, there's this guy I know, he did that once.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#57

Post by efnx »

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…

Even allowing for the era, providing the opportunity for a possibly disastrous effect to take place due to someone dropping the keyboard or knocking it with their elbow is inexcusable. Accidents happen - they should be minimized and steps should be taken towards quick recovery but they should be expected.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#58

Post by viraptor »

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…

> you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained

No amount of training can prevent something like this. It's like today's browsers where the tab can be closed with ctrl+w and the whole window with ctrl+q. It doesn't matter how many times you've done it and how used are you to the position of the 'w'. One day you will close the whole window by accident.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#59

Post by raverbashing »

feld wrote: post #2

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

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.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#60

Post by eru »

patio11 wrote: post #41
jpatokal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the American Embassy, which follows American work culture. Also, in Japanese companies, it's basically impossible to fire people. They can, however, be assigned to a desk in a windowless room and be given nothing to do for several years, until they take the hint and "voluntarily" quit.

c.f. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/business/global/layoffs-il... Suffice it to say that I am aware of situations created by a societal expectation of lifetime employment which make the above article look positively sane. (And I recently learned that, in some cases, what I had assumed was just an ironclad social contract actually is legally enforceable , which blows my mind.)

Not true. See correction to article.
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