We had this saying: "If you fix it before anyone realized it was broken, you didn't break it."
The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
91–100 of 130 posts
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#92If you locked out everyone today, many would assume they had been laid off. Some of them would have other jobs before the login problem was fixed.
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#93I was taught to: 1. Write your WHERE clause first 2. Return to the beginning of the line to finish writing the statement 3. Check your statement 4. If it looks good, then -- and only then -- add your closing semicolon Having said that, once during my second week at a new company, I plugged in an ethernet cable to an APC UPS, so I could set up networking on it. It shut down production. Why? APC makes (for that model a…
I will typically do something like this when writing SQL in an interactive tool: SELECT * from table WHERE id = 12345 and once that's giving me the selection I want, insert the update statement into the middle: SELECT * from table -- UPDATE table set c1 = v1, c2 = v2 WHERE id = 12345 Then, accidentally running the entire buffer doesn't do anything destructive, but selecting the query from update to the end of the sta…
True, thought I didn't include the lookup first, it is how it happens in practice. Also, we use the mysql client, so semicolon is a must, and I would avoid anything that let you submit the statement without it...that's your safety net.
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#94I was working on an old old old "ERP" system written in D3 PICK. It's a database, programming language and OS all in one with roots in tracking military helicopter parts in the 1960's. I was working on it in the mid-2000s. It had SQL like syntax for manipulating data, but it was interactive. So you would SELECT the rows from the table that you wanted, then those rows would be part of your state. You would then do UPD…
>It's a database, programming language and OS all in one with roots in tracking military helicopter parts in the 1960's. I was working on it in the mid-2000s.
A friend of mine worked for a company repairing transmissions on drilling platforms. To say it was a specialty shop is an understatement. However, they had been in business for 40 years. While not a computer system from the 60s, theirs was a custom written solution from the 80s running on a DOS 286 PC. It was stuck on the top shelf of a closet with a UPS. The developer had long been "permanently" unavailable for at least a decade, and they were too scared to loose the data in having it rebuilt. I asked how scared, and the answer was "it's the only computer in the building with a UPS". I'm laughing at the insanity just retelling the story
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#95My chooosen database explorer is Dbeaver. Horrible name but great app. You can set colours for local/test/prod servers and a red colored tab will scream at you to be cautious. And with red color every edit will pop up an "are you sure?" question. And autocommit is off. I sorta stopped making unrecoverable mistakes.
My chooosen database explorer is Dbeaver I just checked it out, and it looks promising. Con: There are too many licensing options. I'm not even sure which one I would need. Pro: They'll send out an invoice, like a real company. I work for a billion-dollar healthcare company, and if your company only takes PayPal, or Venmo, or something else that makes it look like two guys in a basement, it'll never get through our p…
As if two guys in a basement couldn't send out an invoice
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#96"All of your colleagues have done something dumb. Don't be afraid to tell us when you make a mistake. We all remember our first screw up and will be happy to help." Never have truer words been spoken. As I tell all the new juniors at work doing sysadmin type tasks, everyone has deleted the production database at least once. Mistakes will always happen, it's how you deal with them that defines how good you are at the…
It’s also a measure of how well management does in response. We were transferring a software production repository from one machine to another, Lord knows why, when a junior admin I was supposed to supervise had arrived a half hour early and started the operation without me. He got the source and destination arguments reversed in the file transfer; we were using DD for this one part of it. Management reacted pretty w…
I did something like this once my senior year of high school. I was using XCOPY to copy a copy of Counter Strike: Source that someone had placed on the U:/ drive, but reversed the order of arguments so that instead of copying it to my desktop, I copied everything on my desktop to the directory.
For whatever reason, we had write access to that directory, but not deletion. I had to get the teacher to delete it for me.
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#97Ah yes, the old lack of 'where' clause.
Did much the same, but only on my own system (thankfully!) and yes, I had an up-to-date backup MySQL dump on hand.
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#98pfft rmdir . /s /q only to notice what I am in the wrong folder, way up in the hierarchy. And repeat the same error years later when the batch file failed to cd to the destination folder. Added if %CD% == %DESTDIR% to avoid that problem.
lol thanks.
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if your SELECT matched no rows, the state would be empty > UPDATE and DELETE are perfectly valid actions even without a state Some may call this a fun quirk :) but I'd call it a horrible mistake in the design of the system! It should have been conceptually obvious to the designer that an empty set of rows is a perfectly valid state and is fundamentally different from "no state".
At university I had to use a programming language to do some specific calculations. It was obviously designed by someone who had not taken any courses in formal languages, compilers and algorithms. It had a fun quirk, the final result would change depending on which names you used for your variables. When the phd student guiding our lab session told me to not use underscores in my variable names, I thought i'd humor…
I remember when I was an intern at a large telco company, and an older woman who was VP of something or other called me into her office to answer some questions about what parts we needed based on supplies I had just inventoried.
I told her one, and she didn't recognize the part number, so she said she'd look at the distributor's website. I watched her go to google.com, type in the url, and then I "helpfully" interrupted to explain that the address bar was where urls went, and that google was for searching for other things. She proceeded to click the "view cached version" in the google results, and told me that distributor's website was down and this was her workaround.
I learned a lot from that job. Including when to keep my mouth shut!
Re: The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet
#100One day my colleague was wondering whether RegEdit used some private API for renaming keys or just copied + deleted them. "Try a rename with a big tree, see if it's still instantaneous" I helpfully proposed. But what's a really big tree? How about System\Windows? The rename completed instantaneously - "told you it's a private API" I said happily, just as the machine crashed in twenty ways at once.