What were you worst computer related mistakes made?

[P5-133XL]

I'm sure we have all made mistakes. Here are two old ones that stick out in my mind. Feel free to add your own stories.

1. I had purchased a dozen very expensive SCSI HD's for a customer build. I unpacked them and placed them on a card table where I promptly kicked out a leg and watched them all fall onto a concrete floor. Boy was I unhappy. Couldn't return them (My fault) and they were universally dead. I just had to eat the $25,000 loss and reorder the HD's.

2. I was hired to change the file structure of a flat-file database for a collection agency. To make it convenient, I made a copy of the database with no data then I transferred it home. Next day I went back and copied the modified empty file back replacing the active database. I knew I had made a major mistake the instant I hit enter. The only thing that saved this from being a major disaster was that I had made a full backup the previous day so all they really lost was one days worth of work which could be updated from paper records. The company did not have any other backups ...

 

[ddrueding]

The one that had the largest consequence and was totally my fault was accidentally shutting down a server I was remotely managing. I was in San Francisco, it was in Austin. The Austin office didn't have any employees at that time, so the closest person we could trust to fire it back up was me. Flew out, hit a button, flew back. The delays ended up stalling the opening of that facility by a couple days, costing tens of thousands.

 

[Mercutio]

Well, I've definitely dropped a case of hard drives but I think my biggest and most costly mistake was bothering to get an academic degree to work in IT. Not just because I had to pay off student loans but because I skipped out on the .com boom and the opportunity to move to San Fransisco in the mid-90s.

 

[jtr1962]

It's not of the same magnitude as the mistakes you three made but one time a potential customer asked me for a data sheet for some component I was considering using in a project for them. At the time I had the hard drive from my sister's PC in my machine to scan it for malware. Her PC was booting very slowly and otherwise not working. Yes, I did find lots of malware which I got rid of but the hard drive also had some dirty stuff courtesy of her (soon to be ex) husband. To this day I don't know how it happened but when I went to attach the data sheet to the email my browser went to my sister's hard drive right in the folder with the dirty stuff. It's worth noting that I save most of my data sheet files using the component number, such as LM324.pdf. Well, for some reason I thought I was in the right directory with my data sheets because a lot of the files had similar numbers, like 78M64.jpg or 45F31.avi. However, I soon realized something was strange because I didn't recall ever seeing part numbers like this, so I attempted to find the correct folder. Thanks to Murphy's Law in action, I first accidentally attached one of the files to the email, and then realizing my mistake, intending to remove it, I hit "send" instead. Even worse, the person I was sending it to was female. Needless to say, I never heard back from that client.

 

[sedrosken]

^ Woah.

Yeah, my worst mistake that was totally my fault would have to be frying a mobo because I used the wrong kind of power supply (regular ATX PSU on one of those older Dell mobos that used a differently wired ATX plug). In my defense, at the time, I didn't know Dell did those kinds of things. Dick move, Dell. Dick move.

So yeah, compared to some of your guys' screwups mine was relatively minor, but I have a lot of life in me yet so I have many more opportunities to botch one thing or another ahead.

 

[ddrueding]

...and an oldie but goodie.

Back in the day my dad bought a mobo/CPU upgrade for the home computer. 386/33. The cool part was that the motherboard supported both 386 and 486 CPUs, so we could upgrade the CPU some day when the price came down. The downside was that, when putting a 386 CPU in one of these boards, it was physically possible to put the CPU in rotated 90 degrees (normally key pins are blocked to prevent such errors). Within seconds the plastic the socket was made of melted the CPU to the rest of the board, destroying both.

 

[LunarMist]

A $3000 scanner killed by a stupid firewire card.

 

[Handruin]

One mistake I made years ago when I was doing hardware alert management testing with software. The idea is you cause an alert on the hardware (somehow) and the software is supposed to detect it and dial home with an alert (via modem). One of the devices I was testing was a $60K SAN switch (this was 2002 where FC SAN switch equipment was and still is, hell-expensive). One of my test cases was to stop a 10K RPM fan from spinning within one of the two power supplies inside the switch. There were no exposed wires or connectors to stop the device so it looked like a job requiring a blunt object. I went in and looked at it and decided to ask my boss how he thinks I should stop this fan before I made a bad decision. He said, "stick a pen in it" and handed me a BIC balled point pen. I went back out to the lab and stared at the SAN switch for a couple minutes and figured if I were to stick this BIC pen into a metal bladed fan spinning 10K RPM, I'm going to be showered with ink and plasticy parts. So I improvised and found a Phillips-head screw driver and stabbed that bastard right in it's slot. What I saw next scared the crap out of me as the fan stopped in a harmonic blast of disgusting noises along with lots of sparks and smoke. Given the moment of my stabbing, I must have gone a little too far and not only stopped the fan but shorted out the wiring in the PSU.

The good news is I got my hardware alert detected and my test case completed. The bad news is that switch forever remained in an alert state with one of its two PSU's failed.

 

[Mercutio]

Going with the pure computer-related mistakes:

1. Using "wall" (write all) as a demonstration command for something ordinary users wouldn't be able to do on campus UNIX systems. What I didn't know was that my student account had been granted some extra powers because of my duties as a lab manager. Everyone who was using a UNIX system on campus (some four or five thousand people) saw me send a message that just said "Poop." People were a wee bit annoyed.

2. I managed to misconfigure sendmail to create a recursive message transfer loop. I did the work on a Friday and it wasn't noticed until Monday, but the end result of it was that everyone in that office hit their mail quota, had many thousand messages to delete and couldn't get any actual mail until I got back over there to fix it. Which took a while. I'm pretty sure that was the day I needed to deploy qmail instead.

 

[fb]

I've had a few oops moments. Once I formatted the wrong disk - my main storage drive. But I could recover most files.

Another time I truncated a database table by mistake. The good news was that I had the table opened in another tab in the server manager, and the table only contained ~40 rows of data so I could restore the data manually.

 

[Bozo]

When it comes to screwing up computer stuff, sometimes just getting up in the morning was a mistake.
My 'office' is in the basement. I had a Supermicro motherboard laying on the desktop running without a case. I left my office to fiddle with my model trains. My wife came downstairs and ask me what was burning. I looked into my office and there was smoke coming off the Supermicro motherboard. Before I could disconnect the power, the smoke alarm went off which triggered the whole house alarm system , which triggered the moron at the monitoring station to call the fire department BEFORE she called our house to verify we actually had a fire, which triggered the sirens to start at the fire house. (volunteer fire company) Fortunately the moron regained her composure and called the fire company and stopped the trucks from coming to the house although we did get a visit from the fire chief just to make sure everything was okay.
There's never a dull moment at our house.

 

[LunarMist]

I'm sure we have all made mistakes. Here are two old ones that stick out in my mind. Feel free to add your own stories.

1. I had purchased a dozen very expensive SCSI HD's for a customer build. I unpacked them and placed them on a card table where I promptly kicked out a leg and watched them all fall onto a concrete floor. Boy was I unhappy. Couldn't return them (My fault) and they were universally dead. I just had to eat the $25,000 loss and reorder the HD's.

2. I was hired to change the file structure of a flat-file database for a collection agency. To make it convenient, I made a copy of the database with no data then I transferred it home. Next day I went back and copied the modified empty file back replacing the active database. I knew I had made a major mistake the instant I hit enter. The only thing that saved this from being a major disaster was that I had made a full backup the previous day so all they really lost was one days worth of work which could be updated from paper records. The company did not have any other backups ...

That reminds me, what would Eugene and Davin say their largest mistake was?

 

[Bozo]

Erasing (not having a backup) the Storage Review database.

 

[Tea]

Learning everything I know from Tannin.

 

[LunarMist]

Well you are aging a bit there. (8)

 

[LunarMist]

Erasing (not having a backup) the Storage Review database.

Yes, and that was just a bit rhetorical. :rofl:

 

[snowhiker]

My worst "computer related mistake" was NOT making one. By that I mean waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to upgrade my computer because the "latest and greatest" was just around the corner and just a few months out. Because of that I was still running an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ in 2013.

My fear of making a mistake was my greatest mistake.

 

[Mercutio]

Look at it this way: You have an Athlon 2600 that's still technically useful some 10 years after you bought it.

 

[jtr1962]

My worst "computer related mistake" was NOT making one. By that I mean waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to upgrade my computer because the "latest and greatest" was just around the corner and just a few months out. Because of that I was still running an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ in 2013.

My fear of making a mistake was my greatest mistake.

I'm the same way. I'm actually glad PCs have more or less plateaued as far as speed goes. It makes the decision to upgrade much easier knowing you won't be able to buy a system twice as fast for the same price in six months.

 

[mubs]

There's nothing wrong in using a machine till it's useful (!). The last two machines I built were used for 7 years (still going when I gave it away) and 6 years (it died). It indicates you selected good components and built the machine properly. :cheers:

 

[Chewy509]

Just did it... (This is certainly not the worst, but the most recent).

Rather than erasing the external backup drive I use (was reformatting the drive to change the filesystem being used), I accidently deleted the mid-tier/near-line copy of the data! (I use a tiered system - live/active data on the OS drive (sda), a large HDD (sdb) for not-often used data, music/videos and storage area for backups of the wifes laptop and the live/active data, and an external drive for off-line backups (sdc)).

Thankfully, 8 hours later, I had finished restoring the backup from the external HDD, and only lost 2 CDs that I had ripped to FLAC, and the last backup of the wife's laptop... Grrr.... (remember, double check /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc before issuing unmount/mkfs)...

PS. This was at home, not work...

 

[Tannin]

Hiring a technical assistant by the name of (I had better not say).

 

[mubs]

She's going to pour hot tea on your head when you've dozed off in the armchair.

 

[time]

Rather than erasing the external backup drive I use (was reformatting the drive to change the filesystem being used), I accidently deleted the mid-tier/near-line copy of the data!

Is that you, Davin?

 

[Tannin]

No, not Tea. Tea is brilliant. Not that she'd say so herself, of course. Well, not more than two or three times every ten minutes.

 

[LunarMist]

Is that you, Davin?

:rofl: IIRC from Tim, Davin copied the bad file over the backup.

 

[snowhiker]

Rather than erasing the external backup drive I use (was reformatting the drive to change the filesystem being used), I accidently deleted the mid-tier/near-line copy of the data!

I have a friend that was just starting his IT career and was working for a medium sized magazine publisher (they have 6-8 mags under one umbrella) and the head IT guy was formatting a new array. When the format was complete he realized that he has formatted the PRODUCTION SERVER'S drive array and not the new array. According to my friend all hell broke loose. Vice Pres of publications was screaming his head off how he wanted his data back NOW!!! Editors and writers of various mags were screaming about lost work, etc, etc, etc. The most current backup was a (few days? or a week?) old. Poor guy fired instantly after the data restore.

So yeah. At least it wasn't work related Chewy.

 

[blakerwry]

When the +4 12v connectors first came out, I used an adapter cable that came with the motherboard to allow it to connect to a standard ATX power supply's 4-pin molex connectors. Unfortunately, the cable was cheap and I wasn't paying close enough attention and plugged the molex connector in backwards (shouldn't be possible due to keying). End result was that the motherboard and all the T1 cards (the box had several) were destroyed. Delayed the project and cost several $1000's.

Of course, I've partitioned the wrong HDD or deleted the wrong database, etc, etc. Backups, even if not the most recent, have saved the day in these events.

 

[Santilli]

Not checking the specs, and under the hood on Apple G3's. 140 Watt ps, in a 3500 dollar computer? Then trying to add a 4 drive SCSI raid.

Dell: buying one.

Took 6 months to figure out that the computer I had had disabled two of the four ide channels, so setting up a 4 drive raid was impossible. 3g's for that POS?

Buying an Apple laptop for 1400, and, to get what I needed to do, ended up spending 4 grand.

Also 32 mb of ram for 1300 dolllars in 1995. 6 months later same chip was 200 dollars....
Appl strikes again...

Not continuing to date the secretary from Hitachi who was SOOO good. She got scared when I started law school.
Can we say kinky?

 

[LunarMist]

I thought it was the four Maxtor 5120 drives in RAID 0 on the Promise controller.

 

[Handruin]

Not checking the specs, and under the hood on Apple G3's. 140 Watt ps, in a 3500 dollar computer? Then trying to add a 4 drive SCSI raid.

Dell: buying one.

Took 6 months to figure out that the computer I had had disabled two of the four ide channels, so setting up a 4 drive raid was impossible. 3g's for that POS?

Buying an Apple laptop for 1400, and, to get what I needed to do, ended up spending 4 grand.

Also 32 mb of ram for 1300 dolllars in 1995. 6 months later same chip was 200 dollars....
Appl strikes again...

Not continuing to date the secretary from Hitachi who was SOOO good. She got scared when I started law school.
Can we say kinky?

 

[Bozo]

Dell: buying one. :cheers:

 

[Bozo]

Another reason not to buy a Dell.

 

[Santilli]

It was two promise controllers;-)

Money wise, the others cost more, and, I still was able to use the drives.

Buying computers for top dollars, where the makers cut corners I find REALLY offensive.

Apple limiting their bus to 73 mb sec, vs. the full standard, near 133 mb/sec.

Dell charging 3 grand, and not revealing that they have blocked two of four ide channels?
REALLY?

The original Mac 145 or something, had likewise common functions blocked, requiring going to a 540C. Also, spending 4 grand and not being able to upgrade the processors was a bit of a big deal as well.