• Awebb
  • #! Die-hard
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2009-07-23
  • Posts: 2,474

Re: ITT: Biggest blunders of 2012 (so far!!).

Must have been something between eating minestrone despite my legume allergy (two hours in the hospital for me yesterday) and typing "ipconfig et0 down" in the third overtime hour of a total of six extra hours in the lab. I really thought I was inside Vim, when I actually hammered that in Bash. I spent 20mins climbing around in the server room hooking up a nullmodem cable to that computer and the next server I could find and 2 hours and 40 minutes fixing the old DOS database I broke in the process. The women in the lab don't know I broke it, I'm now some sort of a hero. You know? Like a fireman burning down a house to keep his job. Don't code when you're tired.

One good result: All the servers in the server room are now connected via RS232 to a single... let's say terminal server in the closest sense of the word. I used four PCI cards with 4 USB slots each and for each USB port a single adapter with two serial connectors. I managed to connect all the Linux servers with that terminal server, which can be reached via SSH, XDMCP, NX and VNC, so all the severs can be recovered by already open minicom sessions (wrapped in a big tmux sessions) if something like that ever happens again. It might be overkill, but I felt like it was the most sane thing to do.

I'm so meta, even this acronym
  • From: In Front of The Black Gates
  • Registered: 2011-04-26
  • Posts: 5,137

Re: ITT: Biggest blunders of 2012 (so far!!).

Got up, got outta bed,  dragged a comb cross my head...

14 days in and thats about all I can muster..

pneumonia will do that to ya...

Help Fund CrunchBang | #! Quick Reference | Conky/Lua, 18 Music Apps and Cover Art
GMusicBrowser | smxi | Conky PitStop | #! Iceweasel Themes

VastOne's Website

  • Registered: 2011-03-09
  • Posts: 3,229

Re: ITT: Biggest blunders of 2012 (so far!!).

el_koraco wrote:

You gotta write a howto, then you can start cussing.

hahaha big_smile

bash :: @script :: system :: fclean
  • pvsage
  • Internal Affairs
  • Offline
  • From: Section Six
  • Registered: 2009-10-18
  • Posts: 6,003

Re: ITT: Biggest blunders of 2012 (so far!!).

@Vast:  "A Day in the Life"  Not an exact quote, but we'll take it.

Feel better.

while ( ! ( succeed = try() ) );
  • From: United States
  • Registered: 2011-09-30
  • Posts: 138

Re: ITT: Biggest blunders of 2012 (so far!!).

Got a good one.  This morning I was going to burn a DVD-R for my wife.  Well, my dvd writer kept displaying "no medium found" in every dvd writing tool I could find.  Spent hours installing, then uninstalling, every dvd burner I could think of/find.   Tried using command line tools, no go.

Then I spent hours reading forums in Arch linux, debian, crunchbang, etc, for a solution.  Tried adding group optical, changing around udev, ran cat .... read the info on my hardware.  I have burned DVDs with this writer, so I thought "ok, its an older DVD+RW driver, maybe I just need an older kernel."  Spent hours messing with older kernels.   Went back again to the forums.    Thought "Maybe I just got unlucky and got a bad batch of DVDs"  so I tried burning the iso on a windows laptop, bam, worked fine.   So Im thinking WTF.    Went back again to the forums.   Though "maybe my dvd drive is going bad, my primary CD-R drive already had so...."  but I still refused to believe this.   

Finally, an epiphany, the old saying "Just RTFM" hit me, so I went to Dell's website and lo and behold, I RTFM, and want do you know, its a DVD+RW(wasnt even thinking about that) it is capable of reading any DVD, but being an NEC dvd+rw it had NO capability to write to DVD-R's, just DVD+R's and DVD+RW's.    Wasted 8 hours on this, literally.

So RTFM guys, really does save time tongue

Last edited by cphayes0882 (2012-01-20 20:18:18)

Intel Pentium4-2.40GHZ RAM-1008.3MiB CrunchBang Sid Linux-3.2-6.slh.3-aptosid-686