Oh I think all of us at some time have entered a command in the wrong terminal. But rarely do they have such a dramatic and difficult to recover result.

At least Clint's other office was not 2000 miles away...

Luckily for Clint this wasn't terminal for his career...

Even so, I bet his trousers were a bit shiTTY...

on that command to toggle the port.

Must be something in his regomised name.

I'll get me coat

I guess you're running to the Eastwood...

He doesn't want his coat; he wants his poncho.

But then he'd have been regomised as "Null" or "None"?

Guess the "punk" didn't feel too lucky after that !

I hope the network outage didn't cost his employer a packet...

I spend a whole lot of time managing network equipment remotely, and i've had my fair share of "well, better grab my car keys" moments.

Recently i was managing a network containing 5 netgear switches. The customer didn't want to pony up for stackable switches, so i ended up having to go through each switch manually to make some changes to the trunk ports.

They had about 15 non-consecutive VLANs, so i essentially had to enter a comma-separated list of them, twice. Once the list of "allowed" VLANs, and once the list of tagged VLANs. Our management network was untagged over the trunk ports. Guess who forgot to remove VLAN ID 1 from the list of tagged VLANs on one switch?

I'm not completely sure why this messed up the network as bad as it did, the other VLANs should've kept working without problems, but a short car drive was required either way.

Usually when i lock myself out it's a bit more boring, just small errors when configuring WAN settings.

Instead of a second pair of Cisco boxen, Clint* might been wiser to go for another vendor with an obviously different CLI. Juniper or... Huawei ;). I recall the latter's new enterprise switches around the turn of the century were a fraction of the price of the US vendors. Presumably why so much fun has been had pulling them out later.

On hosts I *always* include the hostname (via $(hostname --short)) in the $prompt/$PS1 especially for superuser accounts. Some who ought to know better when replacing a running machine have the new machine with the same hostname *and* on the network but with different IPs. Plenty of scope there for "les culottes chocolate" (brown breeches.)

* the cinematic references abound " do you feel lucky punk ", or " a fist full of dollars " as well as " for a few dollars more " and not forgetting " the good, the bad and the ugly " each of which could apply quite generally to any of the large IT and network kit vendors but perhaps without the "good."

cisco 6509 was a chassis switch, yes it was L3 & also you could install a firewall module, redundant supervisors etc etc.

proper beast with its woeful blocking backplane as its achilles heel.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/switches/catalyst-6509-e-switch/model.html

firewall module

https://www.networkstraining.com/cisco-firewall-service-module-fwsm/

cisco 7600's where the routers,

along with the old school HP laser printers, the 6500 series would be still operational post the apocalypse.

Pretty sure the 6509 supervisor engine featured routing, so it could be used as a router

IIRC it was the replacement for the CAT5xxx and RSM (router switch module), to perform inter-vlan routing and switching.

When the stuff you are managing is remote youdont get the luxury of nipping across the road to fix it.

before doing any thing, save the config.

next do a reload in 5.

when the inevitable happens you just wait for the box to reload into its saved config.

juniper has its commit confirmed equivalent which just reverts the config instead of reloading the box.

Clint (in all caps) can be used to get past basic word filters. Just sayin'

Ah, the days when you had 40 terminal windows stacked around two 17" CRTs... and being an old-school *nix guy it was focus-follows-mouse, not click-to-focus.

The paranoia over accidentally sending the command to the wrong system was legendary. I spent several hours writing scripts and terminal config files so that dev systems were green themed, QA/test orange and production red. Used various kludges and hacks to get them to pick up when I had a root shell open and invert their colors too.

One of my colleagues though I was being overly silly, and I admitted that I mostly did it because I wanted to find out if I could and if it made a difference (and if I could make it look cool into the bargain, compared to the "vanilla microsoft" look of the desktops belonging to people NOT admitted to the inner circles of systems administration and therefore not provided with a "real workstation" at their desks)...

Until the day that same colleague sent a shutdown command into prod rather than dev and asked me for copies of how I did it.

And the ones who say they haven’t are either lying of have never worked on a production system.

It is a standard interview question round here, we all know you will have done something stupid but how you behave after doing said stupid thing is what is important.

Personally honesty is the best approach, own up before someone finds out it was you and you tried to hide it.

"It is a standard interview question round here, we all know you will have done something stupid but how you behave after doing said stupid thing is what is important."

And just as important is the reply a candidate gives. Same league as "whats the biggest mistake you ever made".

If a candidate replies that they have never inadvertently shutdown the wrong server / device interface Im instantly suspicious. Liekwise if they claim to have never made a mistake, they are either fibbimg, or I wonder how they would respond when they do make the inevitable mistake.

when I learned the acronym really means Fall Down Drug Inducing when I tested between 2 buildings and didn't realise the fibre vendor had mis-built the connectors on one end. the server was live, but the disk network was dead...epicfail on our part!