I guess naming my field Airpark'); DROP TABLE Notams; -- was. bad idea

IT 101 - I'm trying to remember an occasion when dealing with live data that I didn't have a "path of retreat" - and that's if there was some reason I couldn't run through it on a test system first, to be certain.
 
What happened to a test environment BEFORE live deployment? What happened to IQ, OQ, and PQ? The operative word there being "Quality."

Oh wait. Government. Contractors. Accountability?
 
1. best thread title ever!
2. why assume the DB was relational?

Horror story…..I worked (successfully) on converting a small subset of the JAD database (jeppesen aviation database of everything in the known world) to relational. The JAD wasn’t relational, not network, not hierarchical, not anything known in the industry, or the known universe, a definite homegrown muddle. But it worked for all thr apps. I guess you could call it the original NoSQL.

But that was 15 yrs ago, and I have no clue what it is now.
 
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Can you say LPTA?


For those not in the business that’s Lowest Price Technically Acceptable.
 
And to throw a commercial case, QuickBooks online has no capability to checkpoint or backup prior to an operation so you can undo. 0.
 
jsstevens said:
Can you say LPTA?


For those not in the business that’s Lowest Price Technically Acceptable.
Click to expand...

of course, the trick is to know what is technically acceptable.

and, also, for LPTA to actually be an appropriate acquisition choice.
 
“Investigators so far found no evidence of malicious intent or a cyberattack.”

Of course not. No need. Why risk committing murder when your victim is committing suicide?
 
If this was the result of SQL injection as the thread title implies, that would be technical incompetence. But by all accounts it's just bad policies and procedures - in other words, poor management.

C.
 
Sundancer said:
IT 101 - I'm trying to remember an occasion when dealing with live data that I didn't have a "path of retreat" - and that's if there was some reason I couldn't run through it on a test system first, to be certain.
Click to expand...
You aren't living if you've never modified code as it was executing and serving the needs of tens of thousands.
 
Sundancer said:
IT 101 - I'm trying to remember an occasion when dealing with live data that I didn't have a "path of retreat" - and that's if there was some reason I couldn't run through it on a test system first, to be certain.
Click to expand...

There's been a few occasions when pushing code I've had to admit to myself that my best "path of retreat" is simply quitting my job and letting someone else mop up the mess :). Sometimes you just need to Leeroy Jenkins your way through the deployment and hope for the best.
 
The worst typo I've ever made was on unix, trying to clean up all the document files. Our word docs were in a drive shared with windows. So, I was getting all fancy and wanted 'rm -r *.doc' and recurse through all the subdirectories.

Quiz - who can tell me what 'rm -r * .doc' does instead?

Not the worst thing I've seen though. Someone else in my office once got confused between being in a production system and being in a dev system and dropped the oracle database. On a live, real time system.
 
bflynn said:
The worst typo I've ever made was on unix, trying to clean up all the document files. Our word docs were in a drive shared with windows. So, I was getting all fancy and wanted 'rm -r *.doc' and recurse through all the subdirectories.

Quiz - who can tell me what 'rm -r * .doc' does instead?

Not the worst thing I've seen though. Someone else in my office once got confused between being in a production system and being in a dev system and dropped the oracle database. On a live, real time system.
Click to expand...
That’s exactly why whenever I’m using rm -rf with any wildcards or fancy piping trickery I do it with ls first, especially if running it with sudo!
 
A couple jobs ago I had “always use a WHERE clause” written on the whiteboard.

To this day when I write a DELETE * FROM mytable... statement, I type the WHERE clause first.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
What’s the first indication that you’ve used rm -rf / ?


rm:busy
 
bflynn said:
The worst typo I've ever made was on unix, trying to clean up all the document files. Our word docs were in a drive shared with windows. So, I was getting all fancy and wanted 'rm -r *.doc' and recurse through all the subdirectories.

Quiz - who can tell me what 'rm -r * .doc' does instead?

Not the worst thing I've seen though. Someone else in my office once got confused between being in a production system and being in a dev system and dropped the oracle database. On a live, real time system.
Click to expand...

At one of my jobs, they put the full email address in the name field of the /etc/passwd file so mine would look something like:
ron:*:58:33:Ron Natalie <ron@brl.arpa>:/home/ron:/bin/sh

One of our guys decided to grep for his own entry. Unfortunately, he was root at the time when he did this:

grep <howard@brl.arpa> /etc/passwd

The worse I ever did was to shutdown the wrong machine because I was logged in remotely somewhere else and forgot which was which. I had to hike across the compound to reboot the one I shutdown by mistake.
 
flyingron said:
At one of my jobs, they put the full email address in the name field of the /etc/passwd file so mine would look something like:
ron:*:58:33:Ron Natalie <ron@brl.arpa>:/home/ron:/bin/sh

One of our guys decided to grep for his own entry. Unfortunately, he was root at the time when he did this:

grep <howard@brl.arpa> /etc/passwd

The worse I ever did was to shutdown the wrong machine because I was logged in remotely somewhere else and forgot which was which. I had to hike across the compound to reboot the one I shutdown by mistake.
Click to expand...
Oh dang! I can see it but wow! I joined a non-unix shop that built device drivers for unix for one of their products. I beat on the developers until i got them to stop working as root and only SU when they had to install or deinstall the drivers. Took a while...
 
flyingron said:
The worse I ever did was to shutdown the wrong machine because I was logged in remotely somewhere else and forgot which was which. I had to hike across the compound to reboot the one I shutdown by mistake.
Click to expand...
Been there, done that. The datacenter was several states away. Thank goodness for DRAC cards! Too bad *I* didn't have access to the DRAC. It was embarrassing, but had no impact. My design philosophy is that you should be able to walk through the datacenter randomly tripping over and pulling out power and network cables; Ops should know it's happening, but end users should never know it happened.

Come to think of it, I think the last time I set foot in a physical DC was... ummm... very early 2000s, and that was a "poke your head in the door and look around" tour. My current gig is 100.0% cloud; we have not a single physical server. I've tried to be sad about that, I just can't manage to get there.
 
flyingron said:
The worse I ever did was to shutdown the wrong machine because I was logged in remotely somewhere else and forgot which was which. I had to hike across the compound to reboot the one I shutdown by mistake.
Click to expand...
But did the velociraptors get out?
 
No, we were into more catastrophic stuff than that. One April 1, I put a message into the mail system that read:

Your mail could not be delivered for the following reason: Slight weapons mishap at BRL.

People kept calling me and asking if that was legitimate.

It was almost as satisfying as putting "You might have mail." in /etc/motd. When I ran the computer center at Rutgers University, I told a student if he made that entry that someone would show up within 15 minutes to tell us that he didn't have have any mail.
 
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