News: 1591600507

in the rain next to an abandoned mansion. We decided to go in to spend the night. Later that night my partner found a secret passage leading underground, while an electrical storm raged outside. Naturally we went down. There we found a coffin. After a short discussion we decided to open it. Contained within was a vampire and a thumb drive. The vampire and my partner both perished.

Should I plug the drive into my personal computer or a company server?

Only if you've got the cage with the bird in it.

Should I plug the drive into my personal computer or a company server?

What a question?! Obviously, you plug it into the personal computer of that colleague of yours.

If they allow you physical access to the company servers, they probably WANT you to plug it in there.

Let your conscience be your guide.

Was the coffin surrounded by Das Blinken Lights? Any chance the vampire answered to the name 'Richmond'?

Enquiring minds and all that...

Was the vampire throwing chairs?

Did your dead partner have a laptop you could use?

Ah but then you have to choose the correct wording in your warning-before-you-proceed message.

Consider a Win2k system that detects errors in your filing system, and it helpfully offers to "repair" it for you.

"Yes", this naive person clicked.

Cue a screenful of helpful lines reporting what it found wrong.

Cue a 30GB disc fragged into same-sized chunk with helpful names such as filexxxxx,frag where

1 < xxxxx < infinity

Yes, definitely naive in believing the "warning-before-you-proceed" message.

Cue a 30GB disc fragged into same-sized chunk with helpful names such as filexxxxx,frag where

That sounds like FAT to me. Never had such calamities with NTFS, except that time I was using a slightly faulty drive (with early onset dementia).

In any case, what was the alternative (to pressing 'yes, fix it')? As I recall, with FAT chkdsk would produce those files when it found clusters marked as used, with no directory entries pointing to them. If the original directory entry happened to be in a now-deleted directory, the cluster containing that directory could very well have been overwritten and since released. Pretty much a fool's errand to piece it all together.

OTOH, IIRC each cluster entry (in the allocation table) would point to the next cluster. So chkdsk could've checked "is the next cluster in use by a different file by now..?" and made a more educated guess. If caught early, the next cluster would most likely still be intact. I'm a bit surprised that chkdsk did not do that for you. (you mentioned the files all had the same size, presumably reflecting the cluster size)

OK, asked differently: Was there any chance that you would have researched this deeper, used a different computer to download a better tool and done this properly? (basically the original disk should've been put in forensics read/only mode to not corrupt it further)

Yes, FAT. As I said : naive. I thought M$ had provided a seemingly useful tool, and I was not officially in IT support.

Not so naive that I had not backed up all my data after previous uses. Not so true of the other users of that same computer (a data collection machine, off network to reduce response latency).

Live and learn :-)

I can honestly say no, I have never just run a script or piece of code without having an idea of what its *supposed* to do. Whether or not it actually did what was expected is a slightly different story.

But on the printer front, back in days of old, someone crossed out a note in a shift hand-over that said "DON'T print the output from this particular stock control run". No-one on the evening shift questioned it, so when I came in on the nightshift we just plodded on. Queue several thousand pages of fan-fold paper (printed on an old LP3000 printer - those of you old enough to remember will know what a pain in the proverbial that can be stacking paper). What a fun shift that was (only 2 of us in that night). The meeting with the Ops Manager was also a hoot when I pointed out what had happened and that it wasn't my fault.

Presumably secured with a small deposit.

Sure I have, but never on a networked machine.

Of course, if someone I know emailed me with a touching romantic executable message in the 90s, I guess I'd run that at work just to see what it was as well.

A friend worked at a large bank which decided to send a mailshot to their most important (i.e. wealthy) clientele. Due to an error in the script that resulted in each of these people receiving a letter addressed to "Dear ,"

Ah-huh...

[1]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dear-rich-bastard/

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dear-rich-bastard/

I did on one occasion use a provided script on a database running on a VAX 11/780. Knowing it would take a long time to provide the relevant analysis I left it running over the weekend, Monday morning I found 3 boxes of fanfold printer paper on my desk so around 5,000 pages. I hadn't noticed that log switch in the script was turned on so it had printed every analysis action before finally giving the summary I was after, the operators just assumed it was deliberate and allowed the print to complete.

I wasn't short of scrap paper in the office for the rest of my time in the role but couldn't take it home to reuse as it was Government data (albeit very low level).

"I hadn't noticed that log switch in the script was turned on so it had printed every analysis action ..."

A loooong time ago, in the days of punched cards, a friend of mine did a project at uni. Unfortunately he hadn't formatted the output properly. So, instead of using all 80 columns of a card his program only used one, massively increasing the number of cards needed. Apparently after his program had gone through the third box of cards, the operators cancelled his job.

Similar vintage a friend got the Fortran control characters wrong so it threw a new page instead of a new line. To make matters worse when he was taking it home on the back of his motor-bike it unfolded itself behind him.

A long, long time ago in an East London outpost of the University of London I took a Fortran 77 module (course). The computers used were BBC Micros with 32 bit coprocessor attached via the Tube (interface, not the mass transport system or TV show). It ran a multiuser system with some sort of per user access privileges. One day I noticed that someone who should have know better had left without logging out–or rebooting, which was the quicker option in those days of ROM based OS's. I couldn't resist "playing" with the higher access privileges...after a bit of tinkering I discovered "add student" did what you might expect and a couple of "test" users with mature, innuendo free, names such as Ivor Biggun were added. At the end of the session I decided to undo my actions and tried "delete student" unfortunately it turned out that this deleted the login credentials of students. Queue swift exit...

... 'Are you sure you wish to proceed?' ...

I now add multiple prompts, each detailing precisely what is about to happen. This usually triggers the following sequence:

1 System prompts 'Are you sure you wish to proceed?'

2 User enters yes / clicks proceed

3 Repeat 1 and 2 until no more prompts

4 System produces hourglass

5 System removes hourglass.

6 User wonders what happened.

7 User wonders what the prompts said

8 User rings support to ask where their files / database have gone.

9 BOFH orders more carpet and quicklime.

Worked for Rank Xerox on the Euston Road many years ago - the ground floor was basically the print 'room'. Remember the huge printers. Later worked for a well known Telecoms provider who ran a number of chain printers churning out bills...such a sweet sound...

Amdahl had a largish printing facility just off Central Expressway in Sunnyvale (Cupertino?) in the 1980s. Virtually every mainframe print-job generated within the company, world-wide, was printed at said facility, and then next-dayed to whatever office had requested the print job. They had several gawdawfulfast channel attached printers, and a fleet of trucks delivering & sending out paper. Was awesome to watch in full-swing, if you had adequate ear protection.

However ... it sounded daft then, and still sounds daft now.

... no, I have never run a script without first understanding what it did ... at least not on production systems, nor personal systems that were important to me. Same for strange executables.

There is a reason for test systems. This is one of them. Anybody who doesn't understand this concept shouldn't have a level of access that can cause damage. They are quite simply not trustworthy.

As long as they do it on their own, personal system it comes under the heading SEP.

There absolutely is. Except that there are companies that can't be arsed to have one. And I still have to go in and create functionality on the production server, because they need that functionality. So I go and code in production. Extra carefully.

Even then, I have had the odd phone call or abrupt face-to-face with a guy who asks me why did the mainframe do this supplementary job ? I answer "because I was told to put this file there".

Cue much anguish about how he needed to go and sort the mess out on his side. And now I have to continue coding without being able to actually test my code because if I do, I've just learned that another system will take that as a cue to go and do its thing, which nobody told me was going to happen.

You live and learn. That's life.

He should just think himself lucky that the normal response didn't kick in when it just did a quick hour glass change.

I've known many who would just sit there trying it again and again, presumably expecting something different or more enlightening to happen at some point. I think the record I've seen is something tried 25 times.

Tbh yes in Notepad++ if I find some, I have come across a lot especially if a system with software has been migrated several times.

Actually found some very helpful bits nosing around batch files from near enough 2000!

Way back when in the days I was coding MS-DOS machines for image processing, I wrote two (harmless) programs that simply trapped interupt 9 (keyboard), discarded keyboard input, and did nothing except blink the screen and say the computer has crashed. Only a hard reset worked. I called these two variant HANG.EXE and CRASH.EXE. Everyone had to try them at least omce

Int 21H, function (AH) 9

One of our developers wrote a windows service which polled a database once a second, and if for some reason it didn't get the answer it was looking for, he set it to send himself an email. Unfortunately, he didn't put in any code to see if it had already sent a previous email.

He deployed the code on a Friday afternoon (a big no-no in itself).

Later on the Friday evening, some other part of the project wrote an incorrect value into the database. So his bit of cheap and nasty code started sending error emails, once a second.

I got paged on Sunday morning because our SpamTitan spam blocker had finally had enough, and got a bad case of indigestion with 140,000 emails in its queue. It took me a while to identify where all these emails were coming from, and kill the offending service.

The developer was given a royal bollocking on Monday morning.