HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: imtst@icarus.lis.pitt.edu (I-Ming Tsai)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Why the NFS got stuck on the ypbind ?
Date: 10 Oct 92 01:00:04 GMT
Followup-To: comp.unix.admin
Organization: University of Pittsburgh
Originator: imtst@icarus.lis.pitt.edu


Hi:
	We have a DEC 5000/240 running Untrix 4.2a. Here is a question
	about YP and NFS.

	The manual says Yellow Page should before NFS stuff, we did that.
	and it worked fine before. But after a crash recovery our machine
	got stuck in the /etc/rc.local. It showed the following when it boot:

            .......
	    checking quota: done.
	    savecore: checking for dump ... dump doesn't exist.
	    routed
	    RPC port mapper: portmap
	    ypserv
	    rpc.yppasswdd
	    ypbind
	    NFS daemons:

	    ypbind: server not responding for domain "telecom", still trying.
	    ypbind: server not responding for domain "telecom", still trying.
	    ypbind: server not responding for domain "telecom", still trying.

   
	I solved this problem by boot it to single user mode, comment out
	the YP lines in /etc/rc.local, then boot the machine again. After
	it boot to multiuser mode, I started the YP manually, everyhting
	works fine. 

	Why the NFS got stuck on the ypbind ? Can I change the order to be
	NFS first in my /etc/rc.local and get a smooth reboot ?

        Thank you in advance !!

---- Ming -------- ( part of the /etc/rc.local is shown below .....) --------


/bin/hostname ******
/bin/domainname telecom
/etc/ifconfig ln0 `/bin/hostname` broadcast 130.49.255.255 netmask 255.255.0.0
/etc/ifconfig lo0 localhost
.....
echo -n 'RPC port mapper:'					>/dev/console
[ -f /etc/portmap ] && {
	/etc/portmap ; echo ' portmap.'				>/dev/console
}

# YP stuff here ....
if [ -f /etc/portmap -a -f /usr/etc/ypserv ]; then
        /usr/etc/ypserv ; echo 'ypserv'                         >/dev/console
fi
if [ -f /etc/portmap -a -f /usr/etc/rpc.yppasswdd ]; then
        /usr/etc/rpc.yppasswdd /etc/passwd -m passwd DIR=/etc ;
        echo 'rpc.yppasswdd'                                    >/dev/console
fi
if [ -f /etc/portmap -a -f /etc/ypbind ]; then
        /etc/ypbind ; echo 'ypbind'                             >/dev/console
fi

# NFS stuff here ....
echo -n 'NFS daemons:'						>/dev/console
[ -f /etc/mountd -a -f /etc/portmap -a -s /etc/exports ] && {
	/etc/mountd -i ; echo -n ' mountd -i'			>/dev/console
}
[ -f /etc/nfsd -a -f /etc/portmap ] && {
	/etc/nfsd 4 ; echo -n ' nfsd'				>/dev/console
}
[ -f /etc/biod ] && {
	/etc/biod 4 ; echo ' biod'				>/dev/console
}
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 00:05:07 GMT

jimh@pacdata.uucp (Jim Harkins) writes:

>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.

Is this original, and do I have to assign credit when I quote it ? ? ?

The same thoughts occurred to me in 1948 when Harry Truman beat Tom Dewey.

I was listening on the radio to the election results in Kingsport, TN, after
having driven through Eastern KY and Eastern TN, seeing the washing machines
and (perhaps) refrigerators on the front porches, with the various automobiles
set up on stacks of bricks/rocks in the front yards, with the operable vehicle
in the driveway.

(In the same election, the crook Virgil Chapman beat the statesman John
Sherman Cooper in the election for senator from Kentucky.)

Similar thoughts occurred to me at the time, and time to time thereafter.
I think Harry Truman's Korean Police Action (it was never given the status
of being called a "war") was just as bad a mistake as the Viet Nam thing
(foisted on us by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson).  (Why are all of these
things begun when people of that party are in presidential office?)

Disirregardless, I have faith in the American electorate (and juries, etc.).

Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: frank@krill.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Frank Flesland)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: University of Bergen, Norway
Disclaimer: TIMOO
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 92 14:40:18 GMT

Okay, my own little mistakes..

One of our machines was away, so I moved its disk to another machine
so the files were accessible. Unfortunately I had forgot that they used
different versions of SUN OS... One ran 4.1.1 and the other 4.0.3.
These had different versioins of the file system (to support bigger
systems etc.) When I mounted the partitions, it worked fine. BUT - next
time I booted the machine, fsck complained about some files, and refused to
continue booting. I tried running fsck by hand, and was surprised about
all the files that were corrupted, but told fsck to fix them..

After a while I thought the disk was beyond help, and then it hit me..
Different file system types! SUN had made a conversion program, but
now the file system was so messy that it wouldn't do anything...
I tried rebooting from the messy disk (to run fsck, old version), but
discovered that one of the files 'fixed' was /bin/sh...

THe soloution was that I got in as myself, changed /etc/passwd via
FTP form the outside, and performed a couple og other tricks to get
the system up to date. (Need I say that there was some kind of problems
with the backup tapes too. Media errors or something...)

------------------------------
More fun:
  A friend, workin as root, tried to be extra careful when terminating a
runaway background command. Instead of killing the process, and risk killing
the wrong process by a typo, he used "kill % 1"....

When i was a novice to Unix, I made my first shell script something like
this:
#/bin/sh
# "foo" does something
doo
.....
doo
....

and put it in my ~/bin, and ran it...
This was on a Pyramid, that luckily had a limit on processes pr. user.
I haven't tried this on other systems.....

----------------------------------------------------------------
Frank		"Share and enjoy!"     - Sirius Cybernetic Corporation
From: pd@x.co.uk (Paul Davey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 9 Oct 92 18:11:30 GMT
	<JDELL.92Oct7181207@benazir.mit.edu>
Organization: IXI Ltd.
X-Disclaimer: This is not the view of IXI Ltd unless explicitly stated.
X-Copyright: The author asserts the right of paternity in this message.


How about the following (true) story which I used to tell system
administration trainees.

A friend of mine went to upgrade the Unix on a customers machine.

Before he arrived one of the users decided to backup all the
application data to save time.

Before doing this he decided to delete an application specific
directory called ``&saved&'' which contained old and unwanted files.

So: The user typed (as root) ``rm -rf /&saved/&''

(He knew you had to escape the ``&''s.)
(You know what he did wrong I hope.)

When my friend arrived the whole filesystem was (needless to say) empty.

Oh well says he, let's restore the backups...

(Yes they had made backups with cpio regularly.)

The first physical tape of the backup restored OK, but subsequent
volumes would not read.

It turned out that for 2 years the backup script had been giving
messages of the form as each tape was filled.

  Write error on archive
  Reached end of medium on /dev/tape
  If you want to go on, type device/file name when ready.

Cpio had failed to write the volume header on all but the first tape.

Morals:
	1) Unix is unforgiving if you make a mistake.
	2) Don't ignore any sort of error message
	3) Check that your backups read back (at least occasionally)

Happy Ending:

	My friend was able to dd in the backup tapes and recreate the
volume header from the actual data with a specially written C program.

--
    Regards,			IXI            Internet: pd@x.co.uk
	Paul Davey		Vision Park    UUCP:     pd@ixi.uucp
				Cambridge      Bang:     ...!uunet!ixi!pd
 "These are interesting times"	CB4 4ZR, UK    Tel:      +44 223 236 555
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5542 alt.folklore.urban:25483 rec.games.int-fiction:527
From: boyd@acsu.buffalo.edu (Daniel F Boyd)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,alt.folklore.urban,rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: Floppy Disk Labels
Date: 12 Oct 92 20:47:01 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: State University of New York at Buffalo/Comp Sci

In article <1992Oct7.203555.12778@unet.net.com> jrs@zippy.unet.com 
(John Switzer Frame 3.0) writes:
> I think it was Persoft Communications who shipped their software with a
> take-off on the typical disk jacket that showed all the things that you 
> shouldn't do to a disk (expose to heat, magnetic fields, touch the disk 
> with your fingers, etc.). The Persoft jacket, though, included pictures of
> someone eating a disk, putting it in the toaster, etc. This was back in 
> 1985 or 1986. 

The original packaging for the Infocom game "Planetfall" had a disk
jacket where the stuff on the back of the disk sleeve read something
like:

(Picture of a disk being bent)
No
Nicht
Nidni-nik*nik

(Picture of a disk with a magnet)
Never
Nie
Phruka-nik*nik

(Picture of a disk being touched in the read-write hole)
No
Nicht
Nidni-nik*nik

(Picture of a disk being inserted into the computer)
Insert Carefully
[something in German]
Nik*oopxi-dazi

(Picture of a disk next to a thermometer)
        45 F -- 96 F
        10 C -- 25 C
    15,000 Q -- 25,000 Q


Helpful of them to translate it into 'alien' for us...
-- 
Daniel F. Boyd -- boyd@cs.buffalo.edu         -a +X -x -e -m -S -F"> "
----------------------------------------------------------------------
((lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))) 
 (quote (lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x)))))
From: philip@haas.berkeley.edu (Philip Enteles)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 10 Oct 1992 06:09:19 GMT
Organization: Haas School of Business, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: haas.berkeley.edu

As a new system administrator of a Unix machine with limited space I
thought I was doing myself a favor by keeping things neat and clean. One
day as I was 'cleaning up' I removed a file called 'bzero'. Strange
things started to happen like vi didn't work then the compliants started
coming in. Mail didn't work. The compilers didn't work. About this time
the REAL system administrator poked his head in and asked what I had
done. Further examination showed that bzero is the zeroed memory without
which the OS had no operating space so anything using temporary memory
was non-functional. The repair? Well things are tough to do when most of
the utilities don't work. Eventually the REAL system administrator took
the system to single user and rebuilt the system including full
restores from a tape system. The Moral is don't be to anal about things 
you don't understand. Take the time learn what those strange files are before
removeing them and screwing yourself.


Philip Enteles				Network Administrator
philip@haas.berkeley.edu	University of California, Berkeley
510-642-4436				"Shake your hand,,,,Shake your hand"
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: TCOM@SCSMTA.SWITCH.CH (TCOM)
Subject: File System Journalizing
Organization: SWISS ACADEMIC NETWORK
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 11:02:52 GMT
X-News-Reader: VMS NEWS 1.22


We are using Interactive Unix SysV Rel 3.2 (ISC Version 3.0) and 
had a few Kernel Panics within
the last few weeks. We are developing a critical application on this machine
and do not want to loose any data during a crash. Is there any File Journaling
Software that would prevent data from loss?

What other possibilities are there?

Thanks a lot for your help in advance!

Kind regards,

Beat Erb

from foggy Switzerland...

Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: dinicola@itnux2.cineca.it (Attilio Dinicola)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: Laboratorio di Fisica Computazionale, INFM. Trento Italia
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 17:33:16 GMT

Once upon a time...
I was mor'ing somethin at the system console, ultrix os under me!

I wanted to press a ^L and, unfortunately, the nearest ^P suspended

system activities: a console mode prompt appeared.

So, I pressed:
	res
Thinking .. resume .. but res became restart and the system
rebooted destroying all processes.

	Naturally, Murphy was in front of me and some batch jobs were 
	running since four or five days before. WERE .. RUNNING!

	#############################################################


	Just use abbreviated commands!
--
Attilio Dinicola, C.d.C. Fac. di Ingegn., loc. Mesiano, 77 38050 Trento, Italia
tel. 0461+881975 / 881919  fax. 0461+881999
Internet addr.     dinicola@itnux2.cineca.it   (dinicola@130.186.12.2)
Decnet addr.       ITNING::DINICOLA            (37.72::DINICOLA)
From: jona@iscp.bellcore.com (Jon Alperin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Floppy Disk Labels
Date: 8 Oct 92 20:41:04 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Bellcore

|> 
|> 	Person comes in, confidently requests one of our CD-ROMS. I
|> sign it out, person comes back saying they can't get it to read.
|> I head over to see what's wrong. Person says, "No, over here."
|> 
|> 	CD has been inserted into the 5 1/4 drive of another PC.
|> 
|> 	This wrecked the drive. And apparently this happened twice more.
|> 
|> 
|>                                  Sea Wasp

 knew a couple of people who put the CD's in teh CD-ROM drive without using
a carrier...they wanted to play their music CD's through the earphone jack, and
assumed that disks worked the same way their home stereo did....


-- 
Jon Alperin
Bell Communications Research

---> Internet: jona@iscp.bellcore.com
---> Voicenet: (908) 699-8674
---> UUNET: uunet!bcr!jona

* All opinions and stupid questions are my own *
From: npm@dale.cts.com (Nancy Milligan)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 14 Oct 92 22:13:22 GMT
Organization: Titan Linkabit
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]

After 8 years of system administrating, I've had more than my share of
horror stories.  But the ones from the early years were the scariest,
and now the funniest.

Way back in the mid-eighties we had this awful looking Motorola machine
with a Bernoulli disk that ran some ancient version of System V.
I used to torment that poor machine, 'cause I didn't know any better.
One day we ran out of room in the root file system so I deleted this
big file called "unix"...

Another time I was messing with /etc/gettydefs and I managed to
screw up the console so that everytime you pressed a key on the 
console it would change baud rates.  That made logging in a real
challenge.

I'm so grateful my friend and mentor, Drake Coker, was always
on hand to straigten out my messes.


And then there was a time when I was a newish system administrator.
Kind of a hot shot too.  Most everyone was impressed with my experience 
and prowess.  Until one night at about 3:00 a.m. when I was
installing a new disk drive on a machine that already had one, and I
newfs'd the wrong disk.

Ha!  I'd nearly forgot about this one.  I wrote a program to
compress or delete stuff in various directories, like /tmp, depending
on the contents of a configuration file and the age of files that it
found.  I wrote it, ran it, debugged it, wrote the configuration file 
and installed the bugger in crontab.  

About three days later almost every file on this machine had been deleted or
compressed.  Apparently I got distracted by something while I was writing 
the config file, and the entry that was supposed to be for /tmp said /.  
Boy, did I feel like an ijjit.

Just because I have God-like powers doesn't mean I can't be a fool.

--
Nancy P. Milligan 				npm@dale.cts.com
Titan Linkabit					cts!dale!npm
3033 Science Park Road
San Diego, CA 92121
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5558 alt.folklore.computers:15068
From: james@dlss2 (James Cummings)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 13 Oct 92 00:57:08 GMT
Organization: RedRock Development

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.
 |
 |I called up the person who handled backups, and he restored the password
 |file. 
 |
 |A couple of days later, I did it again!  This time, after he restored it,
 |he made a link, /etc/safe_from_tim.
 |
 |About a week later, I overwrote /etc/passwd, rather than removing it.
 |
 |After he restored it again, he installed a daemon that kept a copy of
 |/etc/passwd, on another file system, and automatically restored it if
 |it appeared to have been damaged.

	Hmmm.....you were either a very good friend OR he was an unusually
easy going sysadmin.  I think I would have fixed the problem by DELETING
YOUR password entry and changing root password....probably the later on
the FIRST occurance.

	All this just to remove an old spooler directory???
From: robjohn@ocdis01.UUCP (Contractor Bob Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 14:51:34 GMT
Organization: Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma

Another horror story (mine this time)...

Cleaning out an old directory, I did 'rm *', then noticed several files
that began with dot (.profile, etc) still there.  So, in a fit of obtuse
brilliance, I typed...

    rm -rf .* &

By the time I got it stopped, it had chewed through 3 filesystems which
all had to be restored from tape (.* expands to ../*, and the -r makes
it keep walking up the directory tree).  Live and learn...

And another...

After changing my /etc/inittab file, I was going to kick init by sending
it a HUP signal to tell it the file had changed.  Unfortunately, I missed
and the 1 became a Q... kill -q 1.  Large systems die in interesting ways
when you lose init!

But the best (IMHO)...

We had an operator lay a book on the console keyboard, throwing the console
into system monitor mode.  This stops the system clock, which locks every
session dead in it's tracks. At that time we had over 100 user sessions
running.  Most of our inbound lines are essentially modem lines on a very
large "rotor".  After their session hung for a minute or so, many users
disconnected and called back.  They got connected, but received no login
prompt (the system was in a sort of suspended animation).  Little did they
know that they were now on a different port than the one they just abandoned.

A call to the computer room soon identified the problem, and the operator was
given the commands to resume normal system operation.  As near as we can
figure, somewhere around half of the users had disconnected but the system
didn't notice because it never saw carrier drop on those ports (being dead).
New, different users had now connected to those ports.  We received several
semi-confused user calls, realized what had happened and invoked the magic
"/etc/shutdown NOW" command.  The procedure (should this ever happen again)
will be to manually panic the system and reboot.  I also surgically removed
the keycap from that particular key on our terminal - you have to work to
press it now!

Bob Johnson, Systems Administrator
Tinker AFB, Oklahoma
From: cnar08@vaxa.strath.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Secure Console
Date: 16 Oct 92 17:15:55 GMT
Organization: Strathclyde University VAX Cluster

We have several SUN Sparc stations also linked to PC's so that
maximum no. of people can use them.

Sometimes people keep graphic files which are called from 
their .logout file to display pretty pictures on the console
when they log out.The problem is when they forget that they
are logging in from a PC and the picture is displayed on 
a console on which someone else is logged on.

Is it possible to prevent people from doing this by making
the person logging on the console as the owner,so that only
he can display things on the console.

Mahmood Akbar
Industrial Control Centre
University of Strathclyde
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5509 alt.folklore.urban:25414
From: technews@iitmax.iit.edu (Kevin Kadow)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: Floppy Disk Labels
Date: 12 Oct 92 03:40:13 GMT
Organization: Technology News, IIT, Chicago, IL

The magnets used as latches are often very weak, and the only reason they hold
is that the magnetic field is (focused? enhanced?) by the steel catch to which
it is attracted.

	I've never been able to destroy a disk with a magnetized item, the
only way I've found to wipe out the info is to use an eltromagnet powered by
alternating current.

-- 
             There's a fine line between clever and stupid.

technews@iitmax.iit.edu                           kadokev@harpo.iit.edu
                         My Employer Disagrees.
From: rsj@wa4mei (Randy Jarrett)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 03:28:26 GMT
Organization: Amateur Radio Gateway WA4MEI, Chamblee, GA

Here's one that will show that you shouldn't work on a system
that you don't thourghly understand.

At my "previous" employer I was instructed to install a new
(larger) disk drive in a RS/6000 system. Since a full backup
of the system was done the previous day I just looked at the file
systems vi a df to see which were on the drive that I was replacing.
After this I did a tape backup of these filesystems, ran smit and
did a remove of these filesystems.  I then installed the new disk
and brought the system back up.  When I ran smit and when I was able
to do the installation of the new drive and setup the file systems
I was figuring that this was going to be an easy one. WRONG!!  I was
aware that you could expand filesystems under AIX but was not aware
that it would expand them 'across physical drives'!!! I first 
realized that I was in trouble when I went to read in the backup tape
and cpio was not found. I did an ls of the /usr/bin directory and it 
said that the file was there but when I tried to run it it was not
found. and of course when I went looking for the original install tape
it was not to be found....


Randy

-- 
Randy Jarrett  WA4MEI 
UUCP  ...!{emory,gatech}!wa4mei!rsj   | MAIL: 54 Patterson Rd.
PHONE +1 404 822 4073		      | Lawrenceville, GA 30244
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: bill@bilver.uucp (Bill Vermillion)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories
Organization: W. J. Vermillion - Winter Park, FL
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 21:57:12 GMT

In article <1992Oct14.000507.9232@trebor.uucp> root@trebor.uucp (Bob Stockler) writes:

>The same thoughts occurred to me in 1948 when Harry Truman beat Tom Dewey.

Speaking of that, has anyone noticed the ad in Infoworld that re-writes
history for those not familiar with the events of that time.

They are trying to push their 'reprint' services.

The lead line on the add says "When the story is good demand a reprint" -
or words to that effect.

There is the classic picture of Harry Truman holding up the newspaper,
and in RED print the headline reads "TRUMAN DEFEATS DEWEY".

Those who were around (Bob) or those who know history, know that one of
the major papers printed a headline that read "DEWEY DEATS TRUMAN",
because the votes hadn't been tallied and the paper went with the
inaccurate prediction of the vote.

Truman was photographed holding up the paper the next day - and the
original photographs shows the newspaper with "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN".

Sort of implies that Inforworld will rewrite the review to make you
look favorable if you order a reprint :-)


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