Celebrating SysAd Appreciation Day: SysAd Fails!

On July 31st, 2015 we celebrated System Administrator Appreciation Day.
You’re online, your computer is up and running and your network is secure? You must have an awesome system administrator (or as we call them, SysAds). Most businesses would be surprised at how much work goes into the technical operations of their business behind the scenes: the IT department are not just there to reset your password when you inevitably forget it!
It’s important to show appreciation for the team keeping us all online around the clock; without the world’s SysAds we would be faced with the nightmare of managing our own technology and it’s safe to say that the business-minded don’t always find the transition into technical territory to be so easy.
This year’s SysAd Day fell on July 31st, and we celebrated by digging a little deeper into the community. We invited SysAds from all corners of the globe to share their fails with us. Yes, that’s all the embarrassing moments they’ve endured in their capacity as technical extraordinaire. Here’s a snapshot of what they shared with us:
Lima3Whiskey
“I had to install Linux via CD instead of from a kickstart like normal, due to the version of the distribution that was requested. I was unable to log in to the system via SSH but could log in from the console just fine. I checked the access config, I was listed. I check the password, it was correct. I reset the password multiple times. I rebooted the box… Multiple times.
After spending all day it occurred to me: the firewall is normally disabled by kickstart… This was installed from CD… Wow.”.
Ethan Hall
“In the late ‘90s as a tier 2 engineer helping a client troubleshoot traffic on a core internet router, I inadvertently entered “debug ip packet” which debugged *every* packet that came through the router. Typically it would have crashed and rebooted the router, with only a 15 min outage. But we had just upgraded the CPUs; so it just ran, locked me out, and killed all regional traffic. We had to fly a tech there to power cycle the box.”.
Anonymous
“I was moving to a new SSD server from HDD VPS. All background checks completed, ready to move. My internet connection dropped suddenly while transferring files to my new SSD server via Rsync. I thought I was doomed as all sites were down and clients were still calling. It was already nearly dawn…
I fell asleep in my desperation but woke up the next day and realized the sites were all up, except for a few things I had to fix within the next 2 days. VPS.NET support team got my back!”
Ty N
“In early 2000, after the fright of Y2K had passed, I was working for a small start-up in Dallas, TX where we had to make backups using those one-hit-wonder ZIP drives. The company had training materials, screenshots and Word documents that were stored on the server. Lack of a budget for better backup system and overall time it took for backup to complete made the task almost impossible. Then the ILOVEYOU virus came and wiped all images away, including ones from the networked ZIP drives. Facepalm!”.
DRW – OUR WINNER!
“During a crunch time rush job for a patch that needed to clean out a directory I left a script path without quotations for a windows path that had spaces in it. It worked on my test machine, but failed during the push to 8000 workstations and as part of a login script ran
del /F * from c:\
It ran for about a day and got a good hunk of the enterprise. My boss stood up for me because of how rushed it had been and how there hadn’t been time for proper testing. I don’t forget that anymore.”.
As you can see, there were some pretty facepalm-worthy moments going on behind the scenes at a few businesses over the years! Thankfully these guys were able to use their tech-pertise to put things right and carry on the smooth running of operations.
As part of our SysAd Day celebrations, we picked a lucky winner from the above entries and gifted them with a Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD, equipped with a 1TB capacity. Our selected winner was DRW, whose SysAd fail had our very own SysAds squirming!
Got a shameful SysAd story to share? Send us a Tweet @VPSNET!