[rescue] The best 'rescue' workstation

[Barry Keeney]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Wes Will wrote:

> "But WHY is this so screwed up?  All I want is a XXXXX!"
> "Because the manager of this department won't admit when she doesn't know,
> but makes something up on the fly without asking.  She says you have to
> jump through four more flaming hoops before we can tell you, 'no.'"  Policy
> by whimsy.

  Okay, this reminds me of this one Luser who lost a years worth
of data ($100k-$200k of computer time, maybe more) and blamed the
system admins for delete it. I was one of the admin team at the 
time.

  Our first comment to him was.... "Why didn't you copy your
data off the system?". He grumbed something about still needing
it on the system.  We kinda let that one go. We got out of the
meeting and when to look for a cause. After about 3-5 minutes 
we found, in his command history, "rm -rf directory/ *". 
(notice the space before the "*")

  What joy we had telling his manager how HE deleted his
data and didn't follow the rules on data storage and backups.

  We hung around long enough to hear the unhappy noises 
starting coming out of the managers office just after the 
Luser was called in for a "chat". :^)

Barry Keeney
Chaos Consulting
email barryk at chaoscon.com

"Rap is Square Dancing gone terribly, terribly Wrong...."