Colleagues IT Blunders

[DiscoStu]

Disco: don't worry. It wasn't u then! :-)

Umm, ok...

[hyperD]

And the Personnel bint that sent a 5Mb email attachment to "Everyone" in the said same global organisation that shutdown the entire company email service for a day!

[snaw]

Once knew a chap who kept a long, rambling text file of all his strange sexual fantasies and what he'd like to do to various female colleagues.

As this was under his username, he thought nobody else would ever be able to access it.

Sadly for him, he hadn't reckoned on a particularly evil systems programming team.

It still makes me cringe for the poor stupid bastard

Reminds me of my last gig, one of the developers put photography down in the company home page about you/hobbies section , including a link to his website for photos etc. Except his portfolio was all pretty much leather/pvc clad, hogtied s&m type stuff.

Think it got quite a few hits that website ...

[DiscoStu]

And the Personnel bint that sent a 5Mb email attachment to "Everyone" in the said same global organisation that shutdown the entire company email service for a day!

Doing desktop support years ago I had to go and look at a laptop whose hard drive had mysteriously filled up. After some investigation it turned out the local mail file was something like 5gb in size.

I was slightly scared when I had to go and tell the head of marketing that sending out 300mb video attachments to e-mails probably wasn't the best way of sharing them...

[up4it]

I know none of us would ever make any blunders! :-)

[Moscow Mule]

A guy on a support team managed to bring a minor clearing bank to it's knees a couple of years ago.

Basically fubar'd the iSeries so nobody could sign on. If you were in already it was ok, but starting a new session - no chance.

I think the total bill for the day was around £250000 - the cash management team were doing sums on paper and sending SWIFT messages manually...

[The Lone Gunman]

I cost one of my early companies a fortune when I was permie and training.
I was asked to add a field to a data record. I looked for the first "filler" as all records were the same size and padded to the end.
I added my new field there.
Ran the script to add it to all on my test system. Checked and it was added proper like.
My boss then came to me and said release it. I said I had not tested it but it went anyway. He then told me to do the same for the customers mirror site for another business.
Next day client goes spare as they can not access ANY records on their database.

Turns out that the access key was kept at the end of the record and I had pushed it off the end.

I was a novice and should have had better suporvision. I possibly still should.

[Sausage Surprise]

When I was permie (about 7-8 years ago) sent a contractor to pick up a duff server from a client site. Instead of picking up the "dead" one from the foyer he asked where the server room was and promptly unplugged and walked out with the live domain server for 20,000 workstations.

[hyperD]

When I was permie (about 7-8 years ago) sent a contractor to pick up a duff server from a client site. Instead of picking up the "dead" one from the foyer he asked where the server room was and promptly unplugged and walked out with the live domain server for 20,000 workstations.

[bogeyman]

As a lad, I brought (not once, but several times) a production mainframe to it's knees by 'testing' various utilities and 'exits' I was developing.

In those Wild West days, we had no test machines or LPARs. If you wanted to do risky testing, you stayed late (very late) and re-IPLd the machine if it crashed.

I didn't want to stay late, and was supremely confident in my s/370 assembler skills, so I was testing some utility or other I had made in the middle of the afternoon. I was nearly done, but decided to do some minor optimisations.

I submitted the job to compile, link and execute the thing (which ran in supervisor mode) and suddenly - the silence was deafening.

Seems I'd overwritten the ASCB (Address Space Control Block) chain - a very important data structure in MVS.

To make matters worse, this particular mainframe was a kind of real-time information service, serving financial data to a good many City of London dealing rooms (1000's of subscribers).

Rather than shytting myself, I decided to front it out. The operators took a stand-alone system dump and re-IPLd the system.

Irony of ironies, I was the sysprog called upon to investigate the system dump and determine the cause of the problem.

I concluded it was some kind or 'weird, intermittent hardware issue' and our semi-resident Amdahl field engineer agreed - and suggested we upgrade the CPU.

Everyone was happy!