HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: jimh@pacdata.uucp (Jim Harkins)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories
Organization: Pacific Data Products
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 23:01:46 GMT

A friend of mine admins an RS6000 for a state college.  The weekend before
the fall semester started the Powers That Be decided to physically move the
system to a different room.  She stayed late friday night, moved the machine,
and then it wouldn't boot.  I was in Sunday afternoon looking at it, wouldn't
boot for nothing.  Monday morning, first day of classes, an IBM rep comes in
and reformats the hard disk without telling her.  Turns out this was the
machine all the professors were doing their class plans on.  So not only
couldn't they have them printed out, but when school started monday morning
the teachers discovered they had lost all the work they'd done in the week
before school started.  Seems she never did backups because the teachers
always bitched about how slow the system was when she did, and she hadn't
learned about cron yet (I told her about that one).

In her defense, she'd only been using the RS6000 for less than a month before
this happened.  She didn't know UNIX.  She hadn't had any training.  She
still had her regular job to do.

To make things worse, when she called me monday night she was in tears as
she told me how she had to personally visit all the professors and tell them
their work was gone.  I blurted out "Stupid of you not to make backups".  Here
she is looking for a shoulder to cry on and I go and tell her the same thing
everybody from the department chair on down to the janitor had been saying.
Oops.

The moral?  If you appoint someone to admin your machine you better be willing
to train them.  If they've never had a hard disk crash on them you might want
to ensure they understand hardware does stuff like that.  I also found out
she was unplugging and plugging cables all over the place without powering
down the system.  Her hardware knowledge was essentially "this thing goes into
the wall, then the lights blink".

jim

-- 
One of the great ironies of our time is that voters with brains are
greatly outnumbered by voters without brains, yet somehow the
intelligent fail to perceive that not everybody thinks the way they do,
thus they fail to argue persuasively for their points and then are
surprised when the majority makes dumb choices.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Harkins                         [ucsd|uunet]!pacdata!jim
Pacific Data Products               jim@pacdata.com
--------------------------------------------------------------

Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: mfraioli@grebyn.com (Marc Fraioli)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 21:01:41 GMT

Well, here's a good one for you:

 I was happily churning along developing something on a Sun workstation,
and was getting a number of annoying permission denieds from trying to
write into a directory heirarchy that I didn't own.  Getting tired of
that, I decided to set the permissions on that subtree to 777 while I
was working, so I wouldn't have to worry about it.  Someone had recently
told me that rather than using plain "su", it was good to use "su -",
but the implications had not yet sunk in.  (You can probably see where
this is going already, but I'll go to the bitter end.)  Anyway, I cd'd
to where I wanted to be, the top of my subtree, and did su -.  Then I
did chmod -R 777.  I then started to wonder why it was taking so damn
long when there were only about 45 files in 20 directories under where I
(thought) I was.  Well, needless to say, su - simulates a real login,
and had put me into root's home directory, /, so I was proceeding to set
file permissions for the whole system to wide open. I aborted it before
it finished, realizing that something was wrong, but this took quite a
while to straighten out.
-- 
Marc Fraioli
mfraioli@grebyn.com	        	(So I'm a minimalist...)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: rkh@ucs.att.com (Bob Halloran)
Subject: Re: xargs (Was: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !)
Organization: AT&T Universal Card Services, Jacksonville FL
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 16:09:25 GMT

In article <ASH.92Oct15085053@ulysses.mr.ams.com> ash@ulysses.mr.ams.com (Alan Harder) writes:
>In article <168.28180@incc.com> jerry@incc.com (Jerry Rocteur) writes:
>   In article <FISCHER.92Oct12004045@steiner.iesd.auc.dk>, fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars Peter Fischer) writes:
> >- xargs places file names one after each other <whatever file1 file...
> >  which means you can have trouble with large file lists as all files
> >  will not be acted upon
>
>But if you use the -n<number> argument to xargs, then the command is
>executed <number> times with one argument each time.  Then you don't
>have a problem with the parameter list being too long.

I'm sure you got your wording twisted by accident; the -nX argument
invokes the command ONE time for every X arguments that are selected.
But the idea, of course, works out the same; just many fewer processes
being fired off this way.

	Bob Halloran
	AT&T Universal Card
	Jacksonville FL

	rkh@ucs.att.com
Any similarity between opinions stated here and AT&T's 
  corporate opinion are purely coincidental.

"How can you tell a politician is lying?  His lips move..."
	-- M-m-max Headroom
"Read my lips - no new taxes" -- George H. W. Bush, 1988
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: root@trebor.uucp (Bob Stockler)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: Bob Stockler
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 01:24:12 GMT

rca@Ingres.COM (Bob Arnold) writes:

>Morals:
>	2) Don't do backups to floppies.

Once, Tandy Xenix had the largest installed base of *NIX systems extant.

My friend, mentor and guru Bob Snapp and I undertook to write a systematic
backup set of shell scripts do what the *NIX programs then available would
not do:  make a reliable compressed Master Backup, and reliable compressed
incremental backups (so 'cron' could do it) to available 8" floppy drives.

We've never found that our programs failed.  Now, on SCO *NIX systems we
prefer CTAR.  We've never found it to fail either.

Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: Amherst College, Amherst MA
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 13:00:26 GMT

In article <92287.142239FFAAC09@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be> Paul Bijnens <FFAAC09@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be> writes:

>In article <168.28180@incc.com>, jerry@incc.com (Jerry Rocteur) says:
>
>> - xargs places file names one after each other <whatever file1 file...
>>   which means you can have trouble with large file lists as all files
>>   will not be acted upon
>
>Read that manual page again please: xargs limits the number of arguments
>in different ways (number of args, and total number of bytes).  There
>is NO problem with large file lists, it is designed to handle just
>this kind of problems.

I'll believe my eyes before I believe the man page, thanks.  xargs
has a history of barfing on long argument lists.  (Thank heavens we
installed GNU xargs, to get around this.)

-- 
____ Tim Pierce                / "You are just naive and repressed because
\  / twpierce@unix.amherst.edu /  penis envy is here and it's now and it's
 \/ (BITnet: TWPIERCE@AMHERST) /  all around you." -- Neal C. Wickham
From: eb@felix.Sublink.Org (Enrico Badella)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Software distribution and configuration control in a mixed environment.
Date: 13 Oct 92 07:20:23 GMT
Organization: Soft*Star s.r.l, Torino, Italy

Hello,

I've been just put in charge of a large network composed mainly of
DOS and OS/2 PCs with LANManager, some MACs, a couple of VAXs and finally
some good old Unix machines; one of these is equipped with HP OpenView.
This machine also acts as a server to all the PCs and is in a protected
environment.

What I must do is find a way to supervise and keep under control mainly
those damn PC because thier users tend to mess up the configurations
(CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT) and load different type of junk.
For this purpose I'm looking for ideas on how I could check the configuration
of my PC at boot time and eventually replace the bad configuration
on the fly downloading it from the the reference machine.

I have been told there is some object in the MIT Athena project that does
this. If this is true can someone tell me the name and if it is covered
by export restrictions like kerberos?

Thank you.

-- 
Enrico Badella				Internet: eb@felix.sublink.org
Soft*Star s.r.l.			          eb@icnucevx.cnuce.cnr.it
Via Camburzano 9			Phone:    +39-11-746092
10143 Torino, ITALY			Fax:      +39-11-746487
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: hillig@U.Chem.LSA.UMich.EDU (Kurt Hillig)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 92 13:47:54 EDT
Organization: Department of Chemistry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Distribution: na

Just so nobody get the impression that you can only screw up
U**X systems....

Several years ago I was sysadmin for the department's VAX/VMS system.
One day, trying to free up some space on the system disk, I noticed
there were a bunch of files like COBRTL.EXE, BASRTL.EXE etc. - i.e.
the Cobol, Basic, etc. run-time libraries.  Since the only language
used was Fortran, I nuked them.

Three weeks later, a visiting professor came over from Greece for a few
weeks, mostly to do some calculations on the VAX.  He got in on a Friday
morning, and started work that afternoon.  About 7 PM I got a call at
home - he'd accidentally bumped the reset switch (on the VAX 3200, it
was just at knee height!) and it wouldn't reboot.  I went back in and
took a look, and the reason it wouldn't come up was that the run-time 
libraries were missing.

I ended up booting stand-alone backup from tape, dumping another data
disk to tape, restoring an old system from tape, copying the RTL's,
then restoring the data disk from tape again - all with TK50's.  Took
me until 3 AM.

-- 
Kurt Hillig
Dept. of Chemistry                     khillig@umich.edu
University of Michigan         hillig@chem.lsa.umich.edu
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1055
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Subject: Re: Teaching System Administration (was "Re: temparary superuser")
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 04:00:31 GMT

In article <1992Oct10.174548.25676@mccc.edu> pjh@mccc.edu (Pete Holsberg) writes:
>=>I've been getting some requests to develop an introductory systems
>=>administration course here at the college. There's no lack of material,
>=>but I'm really puzzled for what to do for the "hands on" part. 

>=Do you have any 386/486s?

>None that can be spared to be UNIX-only machines.

If you've got the disk space, put unix on one partition, DOS or whatever
you need on another.  There are some boot managers around that let you
chose which partition to boot from, or you can just fdisk between uses
or make the dos users boot from a floppy.  Dell's unix gives you a
few seconds at start-up to interrupt and specify a different partition
to boot - maybe some others do that as well.  I'd recommend having a
reasonably fast way to do a complete restore, though, in case things
get totally screwed up, but you need that anyway and it isn't difficult
if you are networked.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5471 comp.periphs.scsi:4911
From: nessus@media.mit.edu (Douglas Alan)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.periphs.scsi
Subject: Exabyte 8500 drives and Sony P6-120MP tapes
Date: 9 Oct 92 22:33:29 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Kate Bush and Butthole Surfers Fandom Center

We've been using Exabyte 8500 tape drives and Sony P6-120MP tapes
(cheap video-grade tapes -- not expensive data-grade tapes) with no
problems for a couple years now.  Other brands of tape *have* given us
problems, however, so we have religously stuck to the Sony tapes.
Unfortunately, Sony has apparently changed its video tapes somewhat
and the P6-120MP has changed to P6-120MPf (notice the "f" on the end).
I have rumors that for Exabyte usage, these new tapes are not nearly
as reliable.  Does any one have any experience with these new tapes
that agrees or disagrees with the rumor, or know if the old variety of
tape is still available?

|>ouglas /\lan
   MIT Media Lab
   Systems Programming Group
   <nessus@mit.edu>
From: greep@Speech.SRI.COM (Steven Tepper)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 17:28:31 GMT
Organization: SRI International

> But the stories told now are more folklore than real horror. Having read
> 2 Stephen Kings this weekend I beg everyone to tell more interesting
> stories, about demons, the system clock running backwards, old files
> reappearing etc !

I once had problems with files that mysteriously refused to stayed
changed for very long.  It was a PDP-11 Unix system that had crashed,
and I brought it up single-user.  I would change some file and it
would stay changed for a minute or so but then revert to its earlier
state (contents, protection mode, etc).  What happened was that the
write-protect switch on the disk drive had gotten bumped into the "on"
position but the device driver failed to report any write errors.  As
long as the data stayed in kernel buffers the changes "took", but they
would disappear once the buffers were reused and the system had to
reread the disk.

-greep
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.sys.mac.system,comp.sys.mac.misc
From: butler@quest.comm.mot.com (Jim Butler)
Subject: Re: Mac to Unix Printer
Reply-To: butler@quest.comm.mot.com (Jim Butler)
Organization: Land Mobile Products Sector, Motorola, Inc.
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 22:10:27 GMT

In article <1992Oct16.153240.25059@informix.com>, paulwo@informix.com (Paul Wolmering) writes:




> i need the ability to have a MAC print to a unix postscript printer over
> ethernet. the unix postscript printer is attached to a sun. 
> 
> is there any public domain software out there that works well?
>
> if not, any suggestions for $$$$ packages?
>



	Paul,

	Check out the shareware program CAPv6.0 (Columbia AppleTalk Package).  
It's discussed regularly in comp.sys.protocols.appletalk.  It allows one to 
access Unix printers from Macs, Mac printers from Unix, set up AppleShare 
volumes on Unix machines, and a host of other things.  I'm running it here on a 
DEC w/ Ultrix OS; it works well on a Sun too.

	Good luck,

	Jim

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Butler                            | Internet: butler@Quest.comm.mot.com
Motorola, Inc.                        | FAX:   708-576-3240
Land Mobile Products Sector Research  | Phone: 708-576-5962
Schaumburg, Illinois USA              | X.400 email: CJB006
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: rheiger@renext.open.ch (Richard H. E. Eiger)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Reply-To: rheiger@renext.open.ch
Organization: Olivetti (Schweiz) AG, Branch Office Berne
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 12:53:10 GMT

In article <1992Oct9.100444.27928@u.washington.edu> tzs@stein.u.washington.edu  
(Tim Smith) writes:
> I was working on a line printer spooler, which lived in /etc.  I wanted
> to remove it, and so issued the command "rm /etc/lpspl."  There was only
> one problem.  Out of habit, I typed "passwd" after "/etc/" and removed
> the password file.  Oops.
> 
[deleted to save space]
> 
> --Tim Smith

Here's another story. Just imagine having the sendmail.cf file in /etc. Now, I  
was working on the sendmail stuff and had come up with lots of sendmail.cf.xxx  
which I wanted to get rid of so I typed "rm -f sendmail.cf. *". At first I was  
surprised about how much time it took to remove some 10 files or so. Hitting  
the interrupt key, when I finally saw what had happened was way to late,  
though.

Fortune has it that I'm a very lazy person. That's why I never bothered to just  
back up directories with data that changes often. Therefore I managed to  
restore /etc successfully before rebooting... :-) Happy end, after all. Of  
course I had lost the only well working version of my sendmail.cf...

	Richard
--
                         
    ___           _____2
   /   )  /  /   /        Richard H. E. Eiger
  /_ _/  /__/   /__       Ing. Informatik HTL
 /\     /  /   /          Unregistered NeXT fan
/  \   /  /   /_____      rheiger@renext.open.ch (NeXT mail welcome)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: dwj@sactoh0.sac.ca.us (Daniel W. James)
Subject: Re: temparary superuser
Organization: Sacramento Public Access Unix
Distribution: usa
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 92 12:41:38 GMT

In <1992Oct5.195216.8790@polari> trevord@polari.online.com writes:

:)	I'd try logging in as root from the Login: prompt and
:)	hope your sysadmin was nice and had <enter> as the
:)	password.  

Eh?  What kind of system would possibly set-up this way?  The only reason I
can think of for not having a root password is if i am the *only* person
who will ever use this system, and there is some strange need for me to be
in multi-user mode.

I don't think this even needs to be a consideration of security.  This
system I run is fairly safe from hackers, but that doesn't mean I want
users to have access to every resource that I have available.  As mentioned
before, some unknowledgeable user might just execute 'rm -rf /' just to see
what the parameters mean.
-- 
____________________________________________________________________________
Some folks try to multiply from sunrise to  |  ccpoabt!dwj@sactoh0.SAC.CA.US
Sunset--leave behind more of their kind so  |...!pacbell!sactoh0!ccpoabt!dwj
no one will forget             -- Level 42  |          dwj@sactoh0.SAC.CA.US
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5592 comp.sys.sun.admin:7203
From: rambhask@bobcat.ent.ohiou.edu (Rambhaskar J. )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Administration and Maintanence Charges
Keywords: $$, Admin, Charges , Install, Backups , network
Date: 13 Oct 92 18:42:36 GMT
Organization: College of Engg. & Tech., Ohio University, Athens, Ohio
Originator: rambhask@bobcat.ent.ohiou.edu

Hello Netters,
	
	I am looking for some information on how much
one is charged ( $$ ). Our's is an University Set up with
Sun3s, sparcs, SGIs, NeXTs, Intergraphs, Pc's and Macs most
of them in Network.
I would like get an approx. amount chargered for
	1) Installation

		a) Software (Both OS and Third party)
		b) Hardware
		c) Network ( Cable pulling,etc)
		d) Os configurations
			like Kernel, mailer, etc
	2) Network  access
	
	a) Filesystems
	b) Printer Sharing
	c) telnet,ftp
	d) Mail,etc

	3) Maintanence
	a) backups
	b) Updating software,etc
	c) Adding users

I would really appreciate any kind of information in this regard

Thanks in advance
 Ram
--
Rambhaskar J.
Asst. Sys. Administrator,
College of Engg. And Tech.,
Ohio University, Athens, OH
45701.
rambhask@bobcat.ent.ohiou.edu
From: robjohn@ocdis01.UUCP (Contractor Bob Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Floppy Disk Labels
Date: 8 Oct 92 14:50:45 GMT
Organization: Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma

ahd@apollo.sunquest.com (Arthur H. Dyer) writes:
>the document was intended for novices, and they were grateful for being taught
>that you should assume _nothing_ when dealing with beginners.

A friend of mine is a systems manager with a chain of retail stores.  They
sent out a mass update a while back on 3.5" diskette to all of their stores.
The instructions said "Insert diskette into the disk drive".  About 10%
didn't remove the little plastic envelope first, which then became stuck in
the disk drive.  So, learning their lesson, the next update had instructions
to remove the plastic envelope from the diskette.  But some of the disks
weren't shipped with the little plastic envelopes.  Yes, it IS possible for
a user to pry apart the plastic housing on a 3.5" disk.  The trouble calls
came when the next step told the user to grasp the diskette with their
thumb on the label and insert it into the disk drive with the label up.

Users are scary.

Bob Johnson, Control Data
Tinker AFB, Oklahoma
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,news.software.nntp
From: tdphette@mke.ab.com (Thad Phetteplace x4461)
Subject: Re: NNTP via dialup link
Organization: Allen-Bradley Co.
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 13:46:27 GMT

elitman@nxstep.com (Eric A. Litman) writes:
> I have been commissioned with setting up a limited newsfeed for a site
> with minimal available resources. What I would like to do is allow the
> users at the site to open a dialup connection to an internet-connected
> machine and emulate a real NNTP connection using perl scripts.
[ context deleted... ]

If you have a dial up connection and all you need to run over it is a News
feed I  would recommend using UUCP.  The hooks are already in most news
packages and you won't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make it
work.  Here at AB we have a Internet connected News server that uses NNTP
for its main feed and uses UUCP to feed other sites.  It works great and
wasn't very tough to set up.

--
Thad Phetteplace
Network Systems Analyst, Allen-Bradley Co.
Phone: (414)382-4461
Email: tdphette@mke.ab.com

The opinions expressed here are entirely my own and not that of my employer...
I am not a slob, I am simply doing an experiment in domestic entropy!

Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5587 comp.unix.wizards:4298
From: kerry@mtk.uucp (Kerry Allman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Modifying an editor
Date: 13 Oct 92 16:15:05 GMT
Article-I.D.: mtk.1992Oct13.161505.25923
Organization: Mannesmann-Tally Corporation

I'm not sure this is the correct place for this posting, but I figure it's
a start and may eventually get me to where I want to be, so bear with me.

I have a MIPS box running Sys V, and I have a 3rd party software package 
which needs an editor as part of its package.  They suggest that vi(1) be 
used as the editor.  However, I want to use this package in a way that a 
user can log into the system, get a menu display instead of a prompt and 
get access to an editor to enter data.  I don't want the user to be able 
to read in any files or write the data anywhere else except within the 
context of what the software package expects.  The vendor is not in 
the business of writing editors and says either use vi(1) or cat(1).  
The hassle with cat(1) is that you can't edit the text once you've 
passed the end of line.  The hassle with vi(1) is :r or :w is available 
and could allow an unscrupulous person access to information I don't 
want them to have.

So the question is this:  Is there a way do 1.) disable some of the
functionality of vi(1) to merely inserting/deleting text and moving around
in the file; 2.) obtain some other editor that will do what I want; or 3.)
somehow modify cat(1) to allow for some very primitive editing.

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

Kerry Allman
Mannesmann Tally
Kent, WA 98032
mtk!kerry
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5520 alt.folklore.computers:15038
From: broadley@neurocog.lrdc.pitt.edu (Bill Broadley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 15:13:11 GMT
Reply-To: broadley@neurocog.lrdc.pitt.edu
Followup-To: comp.unix.admin
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

On a old decstation 3100 I was deleting last semesters users to try to
dig up some disk space, I also deleted some test users at the same time.

One user took longer then usual, so I hit control-c and tried ls.
"ls: command not found"

Turns out that the test user had / as the home directory and the remove
user script in ultrix just happily blew away the whole disk.

ftp, telnet, rcp, rsh, etc were all gone.  Had to go to tapes, and had
one LONG rebuild of X11R5.

Fortunately it wasn't our primary system, and I'm only a student....

-- 
Bill				1st>	Broadley@neurocog.lrdc.pitt.edu
Broadley@schneider3.lrdc.pitt.edu <2nd 3rd> 	Broadley+@pitt.edu
			Novell, AFS just say NO!