Sponsored Content
Full Discussion: Prize of being an Admin
The Lounge War Stories Prize of being an Admin Post 302651131 by bakunin on Tuesday 5th of June 2012 04:05:40 AM
Old 06-05-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by hedkandi
..dont get me started on the 1st level support guy whom renamed a system to a single numeric value of "2" His excuse was that he wasn't aware what uname -S does in UNIX..last I checked he's still there
Well, in my last project i had such a colleague too: Once, the storage guy (also an AIX expert) wanted to do some performance tests. He created an empty LUN, imported it as hdisk device and wrote to this device directly using dd. His point was to not let the file system drivers mess up his measurement.

So far, so logical and absolutely correct. Now, enter the idiot: he saw what the storage guy did and us discussing the results. Three days later a productive system broke with some strange errors and was unable to boot again. The disks in the rootvg were damaged to an extent that even the PVID and the LVCB (partition information) were missing. It transpired, that he did "performance tests" too. But because he didn't really understand what the storage guy was doing, he didn't get himself a new and empty disk for that, but used the system disk to overwrite the first physical GB with hexadecimal zeros. Well, the disk was mirrored and the system would have survived that - but doing thorough work he did it on the second system disk too. Guess what happens, when both copies of a mirrored disk are destroyed.

We would have been able to restore the system pretty quickly using an mksysb from our central NIM server - unfortunately he had used not only the production system but this very system, our centralized software repository for all the AIX systems - for his "performance tests" too (along with a couple of other systems, but we found that out later). Most systems boot only very slowly from nulled out boot disks....

This guy is there in in systems administration for more then ten years now and this was not even the first time he did something this idiotic. Go figure.

bakunin
 

6 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Solaris

fresh admin

hi everybody i'm just recreuted as UNIX system admin... please tell me from where do i have to begin... best regards (8 Replies)
Discussion started by: hmaiida
8 Replies

2. Solaris

Tape Admin

Tape: Need tape library help please. Need to configure a remote admin card in the L100. Anything helpful.....thxs (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: uwinix77
2 Replies

3. Post Here to Contact Site Administrators and Moderators

note for admin

i left a message for admin in the wrong thread.. it is in the what is on your mind thread since i can't move it or delete it.. i thought I would mention that I meant it to be in this thread.. sorry about the mistake.. thanx for your patience moxxx68 (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: moxxx68
3 Replies

4. What is on Your Mind?

Windows Admin switching to *nix Admin

I'm currently a Windows admin and have wanted to jump ship to the *nix side for a while now. I've been studying both through an lpic level 1 manual as I have time (focusing on debian), and a solaris 10 cert book. The problem is I only have a handful of hours a week to study, and my current job... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: bobwilson
3 Replies

5. War Stories

Prize of being an Admin - Part 2

I was reading this thread of admin_xor Prize of being an Admin and thought will share this experience of mine which is kind of opposite to what he did - I didn't tell anybody what happened :D We were porting one of the subsystem from Solaris to Linux. As part of that we developed many wrapper... (23 Replies)
Discussion started by: ahamed101
23 Replies

6. What is on Your Mind?

Regarding Admin life either as DBA or UNIX Linux admin

I am planning to choose my career as Unix/Linux Admin or a DBA. But I have come to know from forums and few admins like the job will be 24/7. I have few questions on that. Can we get "DAY" shifts in any one of the admin Job ? Can't we have shift timings in any company ? Eventhough the... (7 Replies)
Discussion started by: Jacktts
7 Replies
btextract(8)						      System Manager's Manual						      btextract(8)

NAME
btextract - Extracts the file systems from tape in single-user mode in memory SYNOPSIS
/usr/sys/bin/btextract DESCRIPTION
The btextract utility is a shell script that restores file systems from tapes that contain the bootable Standalone System (SAS) kernel. The SAS kernel is created using the btcreate utility. You can perform a DEFAULT restore or an ADVANCED restore operation. A DEFAULT restore is used by system administrators who want to duplicate the customized system on more than one machine of the same hard- ware platform type. When you perform a DEFAULT restore, you cannot specify which disk partitions to use for the restore operation. Instead, the btextract utility restores file systems using the disk partition information gathered during the btcreate session; all exist- ing information is overwritten. Note To perform a DEFAULT restore, the disk configuration of the system you backed up must be the same as the system you are restoring. During an ADVANCED restore, you are prompted to enter the name of the disk partition where the file systems are to be restored. Note During an ADVANCED restore, the btextract utility assigns the b partition of the root disk as the swap partition. A file system which is more than 100% full cannot be restored in a partition of the same size as the original partition. During the restore of the UFS file system, the /sbin/restore command adds a new file named restoresymtable. The presence of this restoresymtable file can make the restored file system larger than the source partition size listed in the /sbin/disklabel output. For example, on the source system, the disklabel shows the target h partition to be: h: 86758 1212416 4.2BSD And the ufs file system is as follows: Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/dsk8h 83812 83786 0 112% /bootable The file system is 112% full. This file system cannot be restored on the target file system of 86758 (512-blocks), as the following file is created by the /sbin/restore command. -rw-r--r-- 1 root system 27368 Jul 2 09:33 restoresymtable The command /sbin/restore creates a restoresymtable file that exceeds the 112% range. The solution is to use a partition of about 86996 (512-blocks), about 3.8% larger than the actual file size. USING btextract To use the btextract utility, place the system in a halt state, initialize the system, then boot from the tape as follows: >>> init >>> show dev >>> boot -fl "nc" MKA500 In the previous example, the show dev command provides the device name under BOOTDEV and MKA500 is the BOOTDEV. Once the initial boot is complete, the shell invokes the btextract utility. If you created a /usr/lib/sabt/sbin/custom_install.sh script during the btcreate session, the btextract utility invokes the custom_install.sh script before exiting. See the btcreate reference page for more information. You also have the option to label disks using your own disklabel script. If a customized disklabel script is not present, the btextract command will label the disks in the usual manner. A customized disklabel script has the following restrictions: It must be located in the /usr/lib/sabt/etc directory. It must be named custom_disklabel_file. After the btextract utility completes, you must shut down the system, then reboot the system from the restored disk as follows: # shutdown -h now >>> boot DKA100 In the previous example, DKA100 is the BOOTDEV. RETURN VALUES
Success. An error occurred. FILES
Log of the btextract process in memory Copy of the btextract process on the restored root file system Script used to customize the restored image A custom disklabel file read by btextract SEE ALSO
Commands: addvol(8), btcreate(8), df(1), disklabel(8), lmf(8), mkfdmn(8), mkfset(8), newfs(8), restore(8), sh(1), vrestore(8) btextract(8)
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 11:32 AM.
Unix & Linux Forums Content Copyright 1993-2022. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy