Screw ups you've done

in the spirit of Google's recent blunder

[wheel]

In the spirit of Google defining 100% all sites on the internet as having been infected with malware, let's hear your biggest screw ups.

I've done a few, but one that sticks in my mind was trying to turn off my computer. I had a console open at a command prompt (I run a linux desktop) and issued the shutdown command. Threw on my coat and went home.

Turns out that I was logged in to my webserver at the time and had shut it down instead of my desktop. IIRC I had to call the datacenter to get it turned back on again.

[grelmar]

Dumb: Not paying attention to where I'd set up a DLT/HD degausser. I just wheeled it out and fired it up, because I only needed to kill one hard drive. It was just a tad close to a mass of routers. 1 dead hard drive. 5 dead routers and switches.

Dumber: It set up some VMs for remote broadcast overseas on a Friday (the event was slated to start Sunday afternoon our time). I got bored after lunch on Sunday, so decided to check if the VMs had spun up, found out the gateway that controlled the VMs had died a miserable death the night before, and nothing had imaged. Spent the rest of the day re-imaging and getting things working so the client could get at least half the day on the VMs. Why so dumb? Never, ever check your servers on a weekend when someone else has the support pager. It's their problem. Let them waste their weekend.

[mcavic]

Never, ever check your servers on a weekend when someone else has the support pager.

Reminds me of a couple of weeks ago. I did Windows updates on a voice mail server, and rebooted. It came back up fine, but I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't answer calls anymore. Turned out the phone company picked that moment to screw up the digital trunks. Not my mistake, but still, it reminds me of how much I hate rebooting a mission-critical server unless I know enough to completely rebuild it myself.

[Bethlk]

Many moons ago when I was dumb enough to think I knew what I was doing..... I cleaned up unused stuff and deleted anything that was called shell or shell32 ! Yep the whole thing was dead when I was done. Now that I AM smarter, I pay someone to clean up my computer when it needs it lol ;)

[Pfui]

~ Years ago: Laptop suddenly made a loud, metallic ping sound, like that of a pinball machine, and acted erratic. Figured, 'if in doubt, restart,' so I did -- to nothing but endless metallic grinding. Of course, I'd used one of the now-obliterated partitions to store backups. (Note to Self: Don't do that.) DriveSavers said the platen looked like it'd been shot by a rifle.

~ Years ago: Used Fetch (FTP; Mac) for site management (in addition to command-line). Selected a handful of files in a /subdir, clicked delete, looked away for a bit. Looked back, horrified: Fetch had jumped up a level to /public_html and was rapidly deleting away. Thank goodness for tape backups. But even now, using years-newer versions of the OS and app, before I click Delete I pause, fingers poised to Quit.

~ Last month: Crafted a dynamic robots.txt. All bots retrieved A-OK. Yay! Didn't notice for a week or so that ALL engines were getting the 'plain' version: Disallow: / . Not fun finding Google's Webmaster Tools reporting atop the "URLs restricted by robots.txt": [mymainclientsite.com...]