Colleagues IT Blunders

[SandyDown]

I was working with this real dork one time, and got access to his home directory, so I reckoned it'd be funny to watch his face when he discovered I'd wiped it all out. I know that's what Jesus would have wanted me to do.

It's all good now though, I'm his boss and father of his children (He doesn't know, poor soul).

[NickFitz]

In my last permy job I wrote a new intranet and CMS for the European Sales & Marketing division of a global corporation. To avoid disruption I had to go down to one of their UK offices on a Sunday afternoon to install it.

The permy IT chap who'd been persuaded to earn some overtime showed me to the server room, where a nice shiny new server was waiting for me to install my app on it. I asked him what the Administrator password was, and he scribbled it on a Post-It note and left me to it. I spent a couple of hours getting everything deployed and tested and getting existing data in there, and left.

A few weeks later, I was back to patch a couple of bugs and a different chap took me to the server room. I told him I'd forgotten the admin pasword, although I remembered it included some certain sequence of letters.

He went pale, and asked me how I'd got that password; "Oh, Dave gave me it, but I forgot to keep the Post-It" I cheerfully replied.

He asked me to wait while he set up an admin account for me on the specific server I was working on, explaining that the password Dave had given me was, in fact, the AD Domain Administrator's password for their entire EMEA network

[HairyArsedBloke]

Many years ago I did a brief consult for a pharmaceutical company. They were so up tight about security that the PC I was allocated was unusable so I worked on my laptop instead, but the PM got a bit narkey and told me to use the client’s network. So I had to figure out what was wrong with the PC and inform them what was wrong and get it fixed. I asked for the admin password for the box to sort it out myself but I was told that I couldn’t have it because, amongst other reasons, it was also the global domain admin password.

During my rummaging around on the machine I found that they had left the unattended.ini file on the machine. I opened it and found that it had the administrator password in plain text. I tried it on the local machine and it worked, so I fixed my problems. Then I tried it on the domain and it worked so I logged out quick. After about an hour I got curious and when to the departmental trustee and asked if he had the file on his machine. He did, and when he opened it and scrolled down his face went pale. I walked away wetting myself with laugher.

On the way back to my desk I got collared by the PM and he made me tell all. We checked his machine and it was the same. Of all the machines we check everyone had the domain password in plain text in a file in the root directory.

I was so glad to leave there. They were worse than any bank I’ve been at.

[OwlHoot]

In my last permie job ten years ago (God how time flies!) I worked with a complete nutter with an alarming habit of deleting files he didn't know what were for.

Nobody could figure out what possessed him to do it, or why he hadn't been sacked after the second or third disaster (although he was quick witted and efficient with things he did understand). But I reckoned it was some kind of compulsive urge to keep things tidy, or a reckless gambler's instinct.

Anyway, our department spent most of the time at customer sites, and Dave (for that was his name) went a step too far when he deleted the customer's Informix SE database, knocking out their entire operation for a couple of days while they recreated it.

It was so disastrous the local paper ran an article, and the company MD banned Dave from ever attending the site, or working on any product they would use.

However, Dave was the only person who knew half the software, and had to be kept on yet again, and after a while to attend the site. But each time anyone who looked like management, and once or twice the MD, appeared Dave literally had to run and hide! Once he was almost spotted, but just before the MD entered the office he had time to dive under a desk. It was surreal (like the length of this post - sorry!)

[chris79]

Not really a blunder, but I was once in a meeting with two rather good looking women a bit older than me. As I got up at the end of the meeting a cable from their laptop had sort of snaked itself around my leg whilst I wasn't keeping an eye on it, and as such as I got up and pulled away from the table it brought the laptop with it as well which then smashed on the floor. To make matters worse it was their own personal laptop, not a company laptop..

[moorfield]

delete * from trade

in prod rather than dev

that was funny (not)

bladdy permies

[Paddy]

I worked for a County Council and the IT boss insisted that his user account must have Supervisor rights and his home directory should be at the top of the file structure because he was the most important person in the IT Department. He decided to delete his files and directories, thus deleting everyone else’s home directory, shared directory and data.

[Badger]

Whilst in Kiev implementing Sun Accounts on the Co's Server the cleaner unplugged the server so she could vacuum, twice.

The bright side of that gig was inadvertantly eating horse.

[scooby]

crontab -r

was a mainframe analyst at the time, learning Unix, preping for a major re-write and update of the crontab and batch, was experimenting on the test system. L on a mainframe meant lose, so didnt want to use that one

the crontab disappeared, but wasnt fussed as it was test, it was 4pm and i wanted to go home. i'd just copy it over later. however, the changes where made in test to the crontab, and it went into testing later that night and it all ran well for the next week!

however, two days later, the major government client was on the phone screaming as no batch had run for 2 days! i kept my mouth shut and was lucky that no sys auditing was in place. took another 36hrs to fix...
needless to say, i moved away from Unix and 4mths later went in to mgmt!!!

[Chugnut]

Trying to demonstrate the AIX at command to a colleague. I decided to type: -

ls | at now

Absent-mindedly thought it would list the files in the current directory, immediately. The penny didn't drop in time that the output of ls would be scheduled instead...

I was in the script directory.

A Prod database got shutdown, Dev and Test database backups started, batch jobs attempted to run, blood drained, undercrackers at risk, you get the picture. Lots of kill process commands got issued sharpish.

Feel just thinking about it. I'm not a DBA any more.