Unix Recovery Legend (1986) • Hacker News Board

Re: Unix Recovery Legend (1986)

#61

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 8:42 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #41

krylon wrote: post #11

> Well, for one thing, you must always remember the immortal words, DON'T PANIC So true. A colleague of mine managed - on his second or third day on job - to delete every single user account in our Active Directory. After an hour, we gave up trying to restore the AD (it was an SBS2008, so no AD recycle bin) and simply restored the entire DC (at the time, our domain only had the one DC) from backup. Surprisingly, most…

Amen. I was a new DBA at a company that used a DBMS which used extent based disk allocation with a default extent size of 16kb. That was a problem on a busy table (which this was), because there was a finite limit to the number of extents that could allocated, but that limit was impossible to predict. The proactive fix was simple. Backup, restore the table in a two hour outage window. I asked for 5 hours, as the prev…

And the SVP?

Re: Unix Recovery Legend (1986)

#62

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Sep 04, 2015, 1:23 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #61

Spooky23 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amen. I was a new DBA at a company that used a DBMS which used extent based disk allocation with a default extent size of 16kb. That was a problem on a busy table (which this was), because there was a finite limit to the number of extents that could allocated, but that limit was impossible to predict. The proactive fix was simple. Backup, restore the table in a two hour outage window. I asked for 5 hours, as the prev…

And the SVP?

Master politician... He made it somebody else's problem.

Funny story is that he forgot to pay the phone bill for one of the call centers, and when they went to walk him out, they found him in a "compromising position" with his secretary in the office.

That company was an unlimited source of material! Good times!

Re: Unix Recovery Legend (1986)

#63

Post by krylon » Sat, Sep 05, 2015, 8:52 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #41

krylon wrote: post #11

> Well, for one thing, you must always remember the immortal words, DON'T PANIC So true. A colleague of mine managed - on his second or third day on job - to delete every single user account in our Active Directory. After an hour, we gave up trying to restore the AD (it was an SBS2008, so no AD recycle bin) and simply restored the entire DC (at the time, our domain only had the one DC) from backup. Surprisingly, most…

Amen. I was a new DBA at a company that used a DBMS which used extent based disk allocation with a default extent size of 16kb. That was a problem on a busy table (which this was), because there was a finite limit to the number of extents that could allocated, but that limit was impossible to predict. The proactive fix was simple. Backup, restore the table in a two hour outage window. I asked for 5 hours, as the prev…

Oh my! And I thought our backup software took a long time to restore the server... (This whole thing happened on a Friday, so 30 hours would not have been that much of a problem for the rest of the company, but I would have had to work over the weekend and spend the night on-site...)

The sad thing about such events is that afterwards, you could go "Told you so", but usually, people will not only not listen, but sometimes will still find a way to blame you for what went down. (In our case, it was our mistake, but we were lucky our CEO took it very well - he has no problem with people making mistakes as long as they are open about it and try to learn from their mistakes. What he cannot stand, though, is people trying to cover their butt and/or shift the blame onto others...)