in retrospect…

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have you ever done something stupid that costs your company millions of pesos worth of data??

if you have, then you prolly know how this computer technician in Alaska felt when, after formatting a hard disk, found out later on that it contained $38 billions worth of accounts of applicant information for an oil-funded sales account… it still wouldn’t have been so bad except for one thing: the daily backup tapes were unreadable!! :o

so, their final approach was to recover from another source of backup… they turned to the most unlikely source of information: paperwork consisting of application forms, birth certificates, and proof of residence stored in more than 300 cardboard boxes, costing the Permanent Fund Dividend Division more than $200,000 to re-enter everything over a period of 4 months to re-enter everything using 70 people working overtime…

i remember my biggest mistake when i was first starting out in network administration… this was way back in 1998 when i was given the task of deleting unneeded directories in a server… i was just supposed to delete the contents of the /tmp directory in a Linux server, but i didn’t look where i was at the time and simply typed in rm -rf * denoting delete all thinking that i was where i was supposed to be… you know what happened next, right?? no?? well, when the prompt was supposed to return after a brief period of time and it didn’t, i suddenly realized my mistake and immediately hit the off button of the server…

obviously, i was at the root directory, and the command proceeded to delete ALL the directories one-by-one… fortunately for me, it did it alphabetically… and since the /home [where the most important user data were in] was right in the middle of the list, and i was able to turn it off at the right time, it was saved… i simply re-installed Linux, and it was like no one knew what happened… **whew**

after that time, i was very conscientious of the things i do in a server, most especially if i was deleting something… even if it was just a file… and that was the turning point of my career in administering Linux servers…

anyway, whatever happened to that computer technician??

Ciao, sweeite…

Tags: [ computer | technician | Linux | humor ]

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Posted in Blogging, Humor, In the News, Internet, Linux, Work