Accidentally wiped an app's directory? Hey, just play the 'unscheduled maintenance' card. Now you're a hero
- Reference: 1620631805
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/10/who_me/
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We skip back a few decades this week, to 1990 and the misadventures of "Terry", a student of computer science at a US state university.
To make ends meet, Terry had a side gig as IT support for the College of Law. "We were running a network copy of WordPerfect 5.0 on a Banyan VINES server running either Windows 3.0 or QEMM as appropriate for the application manager," he recalled.
[2]
[3]
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Two names to conjure with. These days it is hard to remember the dominance of [5]WordPerfect (now owned by Corel). While version 5.1 was arguably the pinnacle of the DOS incarnation of the product, 5.0 turned up in 1988 with all manner of enhancements, including improved graphics handling. Using it required commitment – no helpful menus for the faint-hearted here – but it did the job when it came to churning out documents.
Banyan VINES, on the other hand, was a network operating system. And it was with the network that our hero was to come severely unstuck.
"One of the legal assistants contacted me with a specific issue related to their WordPerfect instance and I was happy to help," Terry explained.
[6]Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably
[7]Don't cross the team tasked with policing the surfing habits of California's teens
[8]You want a reboot? I'll give you a reboot! Happy now?
[9]Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into
"Unfortunately, the problem resisted fixing over the phone so I went down the hall to check things out.
"In the course of troubleshooting I found that the user had run out of drive space so proceeded to delete the contents of the temp directory."
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A common enough occurrence and a common enough solution. However, as the deletion proceeded Terry noted the background noise in the office had… changed. Become more… agitated.
He thought nothing of it. He had work to do and focused on the task in hand. Sadly, that focus had not included considering the prompt on the screen. Rather than the user's temporary directory, he'd dropped into F:\WordPerfect\ and blithely wiped its contents.
The noise level was increasing.
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Belatedly gathering his wits about him, Terry realised that all eyes were turned his way. Not because anyone knew about the silly thing he'd just done, but because he was IT and so would obviously save the day.
"The staff were very happy that I was in the office when the problems went down," he said, "and a furrowed brow gave me a moment to run back to the server and trigger a restore of the directory from tape."
His supervisor raised an eyebrow as Terry burst into the server room. "I'll explain later!" our hero cried as he rushed back out. "Some unplanned network maintenance had temporarily restricted access to the application," he said by way of bullshit explanation to the front office.
"Unplanned network maintenance" possibly involving the word del and likely an asterisk or two.
Terry eventually confessed his misdeed to his boss, who gave him kudos for deflecting the issue. However, "he did not advance my name for a data migration project needing summer staff. So the good and bad are routinely mates."
Judging by our mailbox, accidental deletions are more common than management realises. Less frequent are the mental gymnastics required to turn an act of inadvertent villainy into a shining example of IT heroics. Tell us all about yours, with an email to [12]Who, Me? ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
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[5] https://winworldpc.com/product/wordperfect/50-dos
[6] http://www.theregister.com/2021/05/03/who_me/
[7] http://www.theregister.com/2021/04/26/who_me/
[8] http://www.theregister.com/2021/04/19/who_me/
[9] http://www.theregister.com/2021/04/12/who_me/
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When I was young and only had a PC with DOS on floppies, I had the clever "idea" of copying all data to a RAM disc and then copying back at the end so everything was nice and fast. If you ran out of memory then you'd need to delete a bit - of course I managed to del *.* in the wrong directory and deleted the DOS disc.
Luckily by this point I'd learnt to not touch the original disc and to only use a copy.
Doing chroot development work.
All the dev boxes were in use - Manager told me to use the build server.
Couple of days in and I cleared out my chroot jail:
`rm -rf /bin /usr /etc`
Yep, I accidentally added the `/` to the start of each path...
Took me about 1 second to realise that the command was taking too long, by which time most of bin had gone...
"to screw up completely requires a computer..."
On a remote site , i borrowed a colleagues laptop and needed to get / update some files on laptop for the job at hand .
I thought a Robocopy / MIR might do the trick nicely.
The thing with /MIR is if you dont get your path exactly right every file in the destination folder becomes the enemy.
A sinking feeling was rapidly growing as a saw an unexpectedly large amout of deletions scrolling past.
The thing was ripping through the win\system32 folder like a cancer, gutting the OS.
After a hasty Ctrl-C the machine managed to stay alive for few minutes like a wounded soldier riddled with bullets, before passing away.
I was pretty red faced as we knocked off for the day. I bought the after work pints and rebuilt the machine next day.
Re: "to screw up completely requires a computer..."
Would have taken all night if that was OS/2 1.3 and then the path diskettes
Re: "to screw up completely requires a computer..."
That's why you should always write to a log and use the /L switch with robocopy. Check the log carefully, then remove /L and run the robocopy job for real.
That would have taken all night if it was OS/2 1.3 and all the patch disks
The more things change the more they stay the same...
Recently installed a beta client for a certain game launcher (yes, I have a gaming rig, I've got a few macs and two servers at home. Don't judge me) and discovered it wouldn't start... No problem I'll just uninstall and reinstall...
Yeah, no...
This started an hour long tearing through various locations, cache directories and regedit before finding that CC cleaner (I was getting desperate by this point) deleted the recycle bin by default removing a folder I needed for the actual solution (uninstalling via a cached msi).
Got it sorted with some file recovery magic but still far more buggering around than a game client should ever require.
Gimp icon because I must be to continue to pay them money for this crap...
short cuts can be bad for your health
I had a colleague using VM/370 and filelist - where it would display a screenful of files, and you could type a command in front of each filename
He had E for edit, BR for browse and ER for erase. When the command finished it would change the first letter to * so BR became *R
I remember watching him, type BR to Browse the file, and realising he needed to edit it, he typed E and the file disappeared. He said "that's strange - it often does that"
I asked if he used "ER" for erase - and he said "ah yes - that would explain it". I suggested he rename er to ERASE. I was amazed he had never taken the time to find out why his files kept going missing.
I seem to remember borrowing a PC (possibly a new-fangled 286!) from school one summer holiday when I was about 8 or 9, and doing some "tidying up"... which possibly involved the use of "format c:"
It didn't have any immediately deleterious effect until after I switched the machine off if memory serves, at which point it became completely apparent that I'd buggered it up big style - or that's how it looked to me at the time. I think the head teacher managed to reinstall everything from floppies and saved the day.
I remember that same gut wrenching moment of terror on only one other occasional: I was, for $reasons, merging two NDS trees within a school (one admin and one curriculum). I'd done the merge, and then started updating the ADMIN server from Netware 5 to 5.1 (again, $reasons - it was working fine, I should have left it be...) and somewhere through the install there was an option to either leave the disks as they were or format them. No prizes for guessing what I managed to do! I had backups, so nothing was lost except a bit of extended downtime, and I've learned to read things a bit more carefully since then, which is no bad thing.*
*Unless you ask me to check a document over, in which case I've a tendency to notice all of those little things you'd rather I didn't.
Late eighties, early nineties maybe... a TV and radio newsroom using Basys to handle all the scripts... ten to six... user needed to be restarted. No problem.
But it turns out there were two similar commands, one of which restarts a single user and one of which restarts the complete system. Guess which one I remembered?
Newsrooms are good at swearing, but it all fired up before the critical six o'clock.
Ah!
WordPerfect 5.1 - definitely the pinnacle of word processing. Everything since has added for over function - well I'm an old grouch and that's my opinion!!
Accidental deletions are more common than management realises. Really? [Fill in Eastern European expletive of your choice]
It's not exactly what I call «accidental deletion» but deletion nevertheless: for at least a half a year we have recurring situations with Microsoft Word and Excel files. You open the file again after someone else edited it and what you see is your last version but not the other persons' more recent changes. Lucky you if you notice the issue.
Don't know if its Sharepoint or the Office suite or something else and neither do I care. It's just a bloody cock-up.
hah, did a del *.* in the root of a DOS 3.30 workstation once.
Fun times.
IIRC DOS 6.00 and higher will ask you the location of COMMAND.COM if the system booted up and the command interpreter was missing. Not so with DOS3.30 and others, you get the dreaded "Bad or Missing Command Interpreter. System halted" message.
Which requires trundling off to find a boot disk, boot that up, and copy COMMAND.COM over (plus other gubbins like AUTOEXEC.BAT and/or CONFIG.SYS and other drivers).
At least it was simple to fix such mistakes back then.
One more interesting thing to note is that all DOS messages have been formatted for a 40-column screen, due to the existence of CGA monitors.