HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: bill@bilver.uucp (Bill Vermillion)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: W. J. Vermillion - Winter Park, FL
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 14:28:28 GMT

In article <39448@unix.SRI.COM> greep@Speech.SRI.COM (Steven Tepper) writes:
>This may not exactly fit the "administration horror story" category, but...

>At one place where I worked, someone had set up cron to delete any
>file named "core" more than a few days old, since disk space was
>always tight and most users wouldn't know what core files were or care
>about them.  Unfortunately not everyone knew about this and one user
>lost a plain text file (a project proposal) he'd spent a one lot of
>time working on because he called it "core".  This was around 1976,
>when Unix was still considered exotic and before bookstores carried
>entire sections of Unix books.

It probably was just a matter of timing.  Sooner or later he would have
done somethig to dump core in his own directory, and the results would
have been the same.  Well almost - he would have file but not what he
expected.

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bill@bilver.oau.org  bill.vermillion@oau.org
                - bill@bilver.uucp 
                - ..!{peora|ge-dab|tous|tarpit}!bilver!bill

Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: sherwood@fenris.space.ualberta.ca (Sherwood Botsford)
Subject: Re: Who's got files open on /dev/xxx
Organization: University Of Alberta, Edmonton Canada
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 17:25:19 GMT

I guess I didn't make myself clear.  
aardvark mounts /dev/sd1a as /home
aardvark exports /home
badger,cougar,et all mount /home.

JRandomUser is working on badgar.  His home directory is  
/home/jru.

If I'm on aardvark, and type 
lsof /dev/sd1a 
I only get entries for processes running on aardvark.

If I explicitly ask for NFS files
lsof -N
I get all the NFS files that aardvark has open from other  
servers.

> sherwood@fenris.space.ualberta.ca (Sherwood Botsford)  
writes:
> 
> 
> >A while back someone was looking for a tool to find what  
> >files were open on a device.
> 
> >The answer came back: lsof seemed to be the recommended  
> >choice.
> 
> >However lsof doesn't handle nfs files.  e.g.  I'm on a  
> >server; suddenly the disk goes snake.  I want to know  
what  
> >process is doing this.
> 
> It doesn't? Could have fooled me (unless I misunderstand  
your question):
> 
> csh       11873   vanepp  cwd    DIR    18,   5        
6656  84022 /staff2 (catacomb-e2.sfu.ca:/staff2)
> 
> This is one line (that happens to be my home directory)  
from the lsof2B (beta)
> version running on a Silicon Graphics machine. /staff2 is  
NFS mounted from 
> our Auspex file server. It is possible the non beta lsof  
doesn't find this
> (but then it didn't run on the SGI's either). The same  
thing works on a Sun.
> fuser is another way to find the same thing on the SGI,  
but it doesn't seem
> to work on the Sun.
> 
> On the same SGI as above.
>  
> fuser catacomb-e2.sfu.ca:/staff2
> 
> catacomb-e2.sfu.ca:/staff2:    11873c   12960c   12960    
12744c    5098c    5098   12516c   11946c   11946   25274c    
12749c   12959c
> 
> 
> Peter Van Epp / Operations and Technical Support 
> Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada

--
=> Sherwood Botsford                    
sherwood@space.ualberta.ca <= 
=> University of Alberta         Lab Manager, Space Physics  
Group <=         
=> tel:403 492-3713                             fax: 403  
492-4256 <=         
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: pete@tecc.co.uk (Pete Bentley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 19:42:33 GMT
Organization: T.E.C.C. Ltd, London, England
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5

David J Dawkins (djd@csg.cs.reading.ac.uk) wrote:
: About a year back, I was looking through /etc and found that a few 
: system files had world write permission.  Gasping with horror, I went
: to put it right with something like
: 
: dipshit# chmod -r 664 /etc/*
: 
A similar thing happened at a place a used to work 3 or 4 years back.  
The guys next door had just got a Sun 3/360 (or some such) to host a 
VME-bus image processing system - none of them knew much (or cared 
much) about Un*x and so early on a student on loan to them got a 
space in the wrong place and did
pillock# chmod -r -x ~ /*
with the same results (system in single user, refusing to run any commands
or go multi-user).

As it happened
a) This was a government establishment, and so the order for the QIC tapes
   for backups had not yet been approved, hence no backups...
b) The install script for the kernel drivers for the image processing stuff
   had not worked 'out of the box', and so the company had sent an
   engineer down to install it.  I hadn't been around when he came and
   built their drivers, and they hadn't a clue what he had done.  So,
   there was no way to rebuild the drivers without another engineer call
   and because of (a) there were no backups of the driver...Anyway, a complete
   reload was therefore out of the question.

These were the days before SunOS on CD-ROM.  In the end I managed to get
the thing up by booting from tape, installing the miniroot into the swap
partition and booting from that.  This gave me a working tar and a 
working mount, but no chmod.  Also no mt command.  Also at this time 
very little of my Un*x experience was on Suns, so I had no idea of 
the layout of the distribution tape.  Various experiments
with dd and the non-rewinding tape device eventually found the file on
the tape with a chmod I could extract. chmod +x /etc/* /bin/* /usr/bin/*
on the system's existing disk was enough to make it bootable.  After that
I sat the student down with a SunOS manual and let him figure out the
mess and correct the permissions that had been todged all over the system...

Pete.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
From: russells@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell Street)
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 19:01:10 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Auckland, New Zealand.

I have not seen one yet about machine generated logs going crazy,
but here is one I had to fix just this morning:
	
Ultrix (for VAX) has this nice little hardware error logger that
records things like "Your NFS Server has died but I am still trying",
and "I just found a bad block on your swap partition" etc.
It also logs when a file system fills up completely.

So when I came in this morning a user's session had crashed while
he was replying to mail and emacs had spent the night quietly
filling up the root partion (where /tmp) was.

Once it had filled /tmp the error logging deamon starting
filling /usr with messages about / being full!  By the time
I found the offending process the error log file had grown
to 6Meg!

Trimming this file in gnu-emacs was not a pretty sight either :)
Have you ever seen a 16M gnu-emacs process? (On a MicroVAX???)

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Russell Street (russells@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz)
	Listeners are requested to make the necessary adjustments

 

	

Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5463 comp.lang.perl:6450
From: jfh@rpp386.lonestar.org (John F. Haugh II)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: New user scripts?
Date: 9 Oct 92 13:19:06 GMT
Reply-To: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F. Haugh II)
Followup-To: comp.unix.admin
Distribution: comp
Organization: River Parishes Programming, Austin, Republic of Texas

In article <Bvt24K.7CG@cen.ex.ac.uk> gordon@dcs.exeter.ac.uk (Gordon Watson) writes:
>Anyone got a good script for creating new users,
>preferably in Perl?  We use the old p/d nu program,
>mixture of C and csh - not very easy to change.

Go find the Shadow Password Suite.  The patches that are due out this
week allow the {user,group}{add,del,mod} programs to be run on machines
that DON'T include SVR4 shadowed passwords.
-- 
John F. Haugh II           [  TSAKC  ]       UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh
Ma Bell: (512) 251-2151    [ DoF #17 ]            Domain: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: vulture@carrion.cc.ic.ac.uk (Thomas Sippel - Dau)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Re: TIMEZONE Question
Keywords: timezone
Date: 15 Oct 92 11:39:00 GMT
Reply-To: cmaae47@cc.ic.ac.uk
Organization: Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine

In article <Bw2wsF.Fpy@news.udel.edu>, walt@diusys.cms.udel.edu (Walt Dabell) writes:
- Got a quick question to which I need a quick reply...
- 
- I am going to be using a machine in one timezone and need to coordinate the
- updates to a db (ingres) on a machine in another timezone. I was going to
- put them both on GMT, but after reading some documentation I have come to
- the assumption I dont need to, that UNIX will take care of timezone conversions
- for the file creation dates. 

For its own purposes - yes. when those times are delivered, either local time
or UCT can be reqwuested, so make sure you always request UCT. For file 
modification dates, for example, UCT is stored in the inode, but the ls
command displays local time.

I do not know whether ingres does it always correctly, though you can 
always hope.

The other thing you have to watch is that when you set the time, you either
tell the date command that you specify UCT (some date implementations do, 
some don't have that), or make sure the TZ variable is correct for the place.

                                  Thomas
-- 
*** This is the operative statement, all previous statements are inoperative.
*   email: cmaae47 @ cc.ic.ac.uk (Thomas Sippel - Dau) (uk.ac.ic.cc on Janet)
*   voice: +44 71 589 5111 x4937 or 4934 (day), or +44 71 823 9497 (fax)
*   snail: Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
*   The Center for Computing Services, Kensington SW7 2BX, Great Britain
From: nickp@BNR.CA ("Nick  Pitfield", N.T.)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories
Date: 9 Oct 92 12:22:08 GMT

Greetings,

The following horror story occured only last week....

One of my colleagues had been itching to get into sys admin for some time,
so last week he was finally sent on a 5-day sys admin course run by HP in
Bracknell..

On the following Sunday, he decided to try out his new found knowledge by
trying to connect and configure a DAT drive on one of our critical test
systems. He connected the cables up okay, and then created the device file
using 'mknod'.

Unfortunately, he gave the device file the same minor & major device numbers
as the root disk; so as soon as he tried to write to this newly installed
'DAT drive', the machine wents tits up with a corrupt root disk....ho hum.

Regards.


	Nick Pitfield.

/==============================================================================\
|| INTERNET  : Nick.Pitfield@x400gate.bnr.ca                                  ||
|| VOICE     : ITN - (590) 4476 : BT - +44 628 794476                         ||
|| SNAILMAIL : BNR Europe Ltd, BNR Park, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 4AG, UK.   ||
|==============================================================================|
|| "More than high performance, more than just a spark,                       ||
||  More than just the bottom line, or a lucky shot in the dark."             ||
||                                          "Marathon" (Rush - Power Windows) ||
\==============================================================================/
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5658 comp.sys.sun.admin:7259
From: gavin@asis.unimelb.EDU.AU (Gavin Trigg)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Re: TIMEZONE Question
Keywords: timezone
Date: 15 Oct 92 05:01:37 GMT
Followup-To: comp.unix.admin

walt@diusys.cms.udel.edu (Walt Dabell) writes:

>Got a quick question to which I need a quick reply...

>I am going to be using a machine in one timezone and need to coordinate the
>updates to a db (ingres) on a machine in another timezone. I was going to
>put them both on GMT, but after reading some documentation I have come to
>the assumption I dont need to, that UNIX will take care of timezone conversions
>for the file creation dates. Is this right or should I put them both on GMT??? 

>If it makes any difference, one machine will be in Australia and the other
>in Delaware (ie. international date line crossing).

>---
>         __________________________________________________________
>         Walt Dabell  KD3GS (302)645-4225  walt@diusys.cms.udel.edu  
>                  U of Delaware / College of Marine Studies
>                      700 Pilottown Rd. Lewes, DE 19958

Ingres stores its dates in GMT and converts dates/times on input and output to
the local timezone.  Provided that the timezones are set correctly and you
don't have a version of Ingres with the timezone problem (they are documented
in the release notes) you can leave the machines on the correct time.

Try the following SQL command on each installation to see whether they are set
correctly.  Here is the information for a machine in Melbourne (GMT+10hrs).

select date_gmt('now'), date('now')
Executing . . .


1992_10_15 05:05:33 GMT  15/10/92 15:05:33
Gavin Trigg	Internet: gavin@asis.unimelb.EDU.AU
		Telephone: +61 3 344 6003 	Fax +61 3 347 4803
Data Base Administrator, Information Technology Services (ASIS),
The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia.  3052.
From: pbh@earl.cam.bellcore.com (Operator Paul B. Hart)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Hooking PS printers onto TCP/IP network
Date: 12 Oct 92 18:56:58 GMT
Distribution: comp.unix.admin
Organization: /bdfs/users/pbh/.organization

Has anyone has any luck attaching PS printers to a UNIX TCP/IP network.

We are trying to give our directors PS printers in their offices.
They currently have only X-Terminals thus have no machines in their
office to attach the printer.  I have seen various attachments for PC
based networks (including supporting SW) to place the PS on the net,
but not for UNIX based platforms.

We are Sun based WS, X-terminals and several flavors of SYS-V mini's
and Mainframes (Pre-release 4).  

I hope to find a way we could attach the PS printers to the network in
their office, and thru their X-terminal is would look like any normal
printer?

Thanks in advance for help,

Paul Hart
MTS
Bellcore
From: jfh@rpp386.lonestar.org (John F. Haugh II)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Detecting logout of User
Date: 8 Oct 92 13:09:31 GMT
Article-I.D.: rpp386.21689
Reply-To: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F. Haugh II)
Organization: River Parishes Programming, Austin, Republic of Texas

In article <1992Oct7.151512.12308@unix.brighton.ac.uk> mre1@itri.bton.ac.uk writes:
>I want to detect when a user finally logs out of a machine
>so that I can perform some file sorting routines. I only want
>to do this when the user finally logs out of the machine, not
>when they quit a shelltool or application. 
>
>Any suggestions of what I should be trying to detect ?

You didn't give the O/S version, so it's pretty hard to get
that answer.  About the best you can do is find the login shell
entry in the /etc/utmp file and wait for it to disappear.  That
isn't an easy trick in a windowing environment.  On the other
hand you could take the conservative approach and just use

	if [ `who | grep $USER | wc -l` -eq 0 ] ; then
		sort your files
	fi
-- 
John F. Haugh II           [  TSAKC  ]       UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh
Ma Bell: (512) 251-2151    [ DoF #17 ]            Domain: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
From: grant@unisys.co.nz (Grant McLean)
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 02:36:45 GMT
Organization: Unisys New Zealand
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]

One of my customers (who shall remain nameless) was having a problem with
insufficient swap space.  I recommended that he back up the system, boot
off the OS tape, repartition the disk, remake the filesystems and restore
the data (any idiot could do this, right? :-) ).  I also suggested that if
he wasn't confident of achieving all this, we could provide a skilled 
person for a modest fee.  Of course he was fully confident so I left him 
to it.

Next day I get a call from the guy to say he'd been there all night and
he'd had all sorts of funny messages when restoring from tape.

Eventually we tracked his problem down to the backup script he'd been
using.  It was a simple one liner:

  find / -print | cpio -oc | dd -obs=100k of=/dev/rmt0 2>/dev/null

This was a problem because:

  1) His system had two 300MB drives
  2) He only had a 150MB tape drive
  3) The same script was being run every night by a cron job
  4) All his backups were created by this script

(In case you haven't worked it out, the dd is to speed up writes to tape
but it has the unfortunate side effect that CPIO never finds out about
the end of tape.  Because the errors were going to the bit bucket, they
never knew their backups were incomplete until they came to restore from
them).

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when he explained to his boss
that the data was gone and there was no way of getting it back.

I haven't heard from the guy since then.  Hmmm ...


Grant
-- 
===========================================================================
Grant McLean            |                   | EMail:     grant@unisys.co.nz
Unix Support Specialist |                   | Phone: (GMT+12)(64 4) 4984558
Unisys New Zealand Ltd  |                   | Fax:           (64 4) 4711953
From: jlf@zenon.inria.fr (Jean-Louis Faraut)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 14 Oct 92 09:02:56 GMT
Organization: INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis (Fr)

In article <1992Oct7.120246.16981@multix.no>, aras@multix.no (Arne Asplem) writes:
|> I'm the program chair for a one day conference on Unix system
|> administration in Oslo in 3 weeks, including topics like network
|> management, system admininistration tools, integration, print/file-servers,
|> securitym, etc. 
|> 
|> I'm looking for actual horror stories of what have gone wrong because
|> of bad system administration, as an early morning wakeup.        
|> 
|> I'll summarise to the net if there is any interest.
|> 
|>   -- Arne
|> -- 
|> //  Arne Asplem    //  Office:    Gjerdrums vei 12, N-0486 Oslo, Norway  //
|> //  Multix A/S     //  Phone/fax: +47-2-950800 / 950790                  //
|> //                 //  Email:     aras@multix.no                         //
|> //  NUUG Chairman  //  Email:     aras@nuug.no                           //

Yes, I've got one for you: I tried to use the Sun automounter :-)

	[jlf]
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: barr@pop.psu.edu (David Barr)
Subject: Re: Detecting logout of User
Organization: Penn State Population Research Institute
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 92 23:05:07 GMT

In article <157.7506@incc.com> jerry@incc.com (Jerry Rocteur) writes:
>In article <1992Oct7.151512.12308@unix.brighton.ac.uk>, mre1@itri.bton.ac.uk (Mark Evans) writes:
>> 
>> I want to detect when a user finally logs out of a machine
>> so that I can perform some file sorting routines. I only want
>> to do this when the user finally logs out of the machine, not
>> when they quit a shelltool or application. 
> 
> In your /etc/profile put:  
>
> trap "......" 0
>
> Where ....... is a command or script file, stick this at the top of
> your /etc/profile and document it so the next guy knows what you're
> up to.

This won't for for shells that don't use /etc/profile.  (Of which
there are very many)  Plus this will be totally useless under many
windowing systems that may spawn multiple login shells.  (xterm -ls)

--Dave
-- 
System Administrator, Population Research Institute    barr@pop.psu.edu
Emacs is a fine operating system, but I still prefer UNIX. - Tom Christiansen
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5496 comp.unix.programmer:4924
From: fpb@ittc.wec.com (Frank P. Bresz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: How to write a make dependency to remote rcs code
Date: 11 Oct 92 15:40:42 GMT
Followup-To: comp.unix.admin
Distribution: usa
Organization: Westinghouse, ITTC, Pgh, PA.
In-reply-to: eggert@twinsun.com's message of 10 Oct 92 00:45:05 GMT


In article <bjBKAj98@twinsun.com> eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes:

=>jeff@BofA.COM (Jeff Tate) writes:

=>>Can I construct a makefile that, when run from the ~Project directory, will
=>>check out rcs files that are not already locally present?

=>RCSDIR = /usr/rcs/Project/xx/yy/zz
=>SOURCES = a.c b.c c.h d.y et cetera

=>$(SOURCES) :
=>	co $@ $(RCSDIR)/$@,v


Well if you have GNU Make or a make that supports vpath you can do the
following :

vpath %,v ~rcs/Project/xx/yy/zz

This basically tells Make to find ,v files in the directory you specify.
--
Frank P. Bresz  |My opinions are mine, WEC pays big money for official opinions
fpb@ittc.wec.com|"I knew Thomas Jefferson, he was a friend of mine" Ron Reagan
uunet!ittc!fpb  |Member: League for Programming Freedom (LPF) | STOP Software |
+1 412 733 6749 |For more information on the 'LPF' send mail  |  Patents Now  |

Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: rheiger@renext.open.ch (Richard H. E. Eiger)
Subject: Re: How to delete hard link to a directory?
Reply-To: rheiger@renext.open.ch
Organization: Olivetti (Schweiz) AG, Branch Office Berne
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 12:40:58 GMT

In article <1992Oct09.231632.16967@trebor.uucp> root@trebor.uucp (Bob Stockler)  
writes:
> ange@aspect.UUCP (Ange Hampton) writes:
> 
> >where wd is a directory. How do I delete it? 
> 
> Have you tried going to that directory and doing an "ls -i" to find
> the inode number of that directory, then doing:
> 
>    find . -inum NNNNN -exec rm -r {} \;
> 
> where "NNNNN" is that inode number?
> 
> If this works, let me know.  I've never tried it (or had the problem,
> but might).

I guess that's not what you really wnat to do! The command above, if it works,  
would recursively remove the directory to which the link is pointing to.

I find it difficult to understand how your user got to create a HARD link to a  
directory to begin with. This is usually not possible. Anyways, if it is a hard  
link, the only method I could think of is to write a program to get rid of it.  
This program would probably delete the link in the inode (decrement the link  
counter if it isn't 1 already) and remove the newly created linkname directly  
in the file representing the directory in which the link was created.

Good luck

	Richard

--
                         
    ___           _____2
   /   )  /  /   /        Richard H. E. Eiger
  /_ _/  /__/   /__       Ing. Informatik HTL
 /\     /  /   /          Unregistered NeXT fan
/  \   /  /   /_____      rheiger@renext.open.ch (NeXT mail welcome)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin