It could have been as simple as some accidentally doing a "shutdown -h" instead of a "shutdown -r".... g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind. http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home. Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies. ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes. http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_!

On 04/17/2013 02:22 AM, David Griffith wrote: An old UNIX admins' joke...or an interview question: Q. "What's the difference between 'kill -1 1' and 'kill 1 1'?" A. "A trip to the office at 2AM." -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: Okay, hands up all those who have ever done 'rm -r' as root from / Confession: ONCE, on a SunOS system I was loading for a customer. http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/pricelist.html Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/

The one I stupidly did before was when tired and teying to delete some hidden (.directories) from a user folder which led me to the rm -rf .* nugget which picked up on . And .. Obviously after seeing it change to another user directory and start blowing that away also I cancelled it and realized my error. The one I've heard of but never did was I guess userdel with the argument to delete the users home directory. I've read the horror stories when the user was an admin or lazily set up and their home directory was /. The command works as expected :-) Another more funny one was a unix admin who was leaving for another job. He was on his bsd box at his desk and shuttong everything down but he forgot he had sshed into our mail server so his shutdown command which curiously seemed to be taking its time was sitting there and he freaked out when he realized the mistake. He was quite apologetic making sure it didn't look like a disgruntled last move. - John -----Original Message----- From: Mike Loewen <mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us> Sender: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.orgDate: Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:36:56 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts<cctalk at classiccmp.org> Reply-To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Subject: Re: computing the old way On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Dave McGuire wrote: Okay, hands up all those who have ever done 'rm -r' as root from / Confession: ONCE, on a SunOS system I was loading for a customer. http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/pricelist.html Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://sturgeon.css.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/

On Apr 16, 2013, at 1:37 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Well, unless your DNS server has crashed for some perfectly valid reason. Say, maybe, the janitor bumped into the server rack and accidentally ejected a hot-swap drive and caused a kernel panic. I've heard of that happening (to companies who subsequently either got rack doors or stopped letting the janitors clean the server room). - Dave

On Tue, 16 Apr 2013, Cory Smelosky wrote: Out of the different cdrom drives I've disassembled... dust and dirt, faulty solder joints, bad electrolytics, failed laser diodes, and poor quality leaf switches. The leaf switch issue was particularly fun as I had a school with dozens and dozens of Goldstar branded cdrom drives that would spontaneously and randomly eject their trays. It turned out the plating on the switches was crap and when the switch wouldn't reliably register that the tray was closed, the drive would eject the tray. Had they either plated the contacts properly or had better switch debounce logic the drives probably would have been fine. In the end, we replaced them all and I kept a half dozen around to tinker with.

Bad motors, spindel and pickup-moving are another common problem. Those motors are really cheaply made and look like the sort of thing you'd find in a toy. -tony

On 4/16/2013 10:19 AM, Cory Smelosky wrote: Servers tend to get lost. We put up a new wall 15 years ago, and the all the severs I think were moved. Ben.