Data Centre meets Vacuum Cleaner Post: 303014244

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The Lounge War Stories Data Centre meets Vacuum Cleaner Post 303014244 by Don Cragun on Thursday 8th of March 2018 04:25:31 AM

03-08-2018

Registered User

Many years ago, while I was working at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on adding POSIX-conformance into SunOS 4.1, I was making changes to the OS and utilities during the day and running complete builds of the system overnight (starting a build just before I left work in the evening). This worked fine for several weeks until one Monday night when the system died at about 8:30pm killing the build-in-progress. There was no core dump, no indication of any hardware problems, and restarting the build when I got to work Tuesday morning completed normally (taking a little over three hours to complete).

The same thing happened the next three days in a row, with the system always dying sometime between 8:20pm and 8:40pm.

I decided to stay at work late Friday evening to see if I could figure out what was causing the crashes. I went to the bathroom at about 7pm so I would be sure that I could be at my computer by 7:15pm and would be able to stay there until I found out why my computer was dying every night. When I got back to my office five minutes later, I found that my computer had been unplugged by a member of the cleaning crew so he could plug in the vacuum cleaner they used to clean the hallway and offices where my office was located. (The way my office was arranged left a power strip close to the hallway while other offices in my area had their power strips in less accessible locations.) I unplugged the sweeper, plugged my computer back in, and waited for the cleaning guy to come back to my office.

I found out that:

the cleaning crew comes in an hour and a half earlier on Friday that they did Monday through Thursday,
they got a new vacuum cleaner on Monday with a cord that wouldn't reach from the plugs in the conference room to the other end of the building, and
unplugging a computer is inconsequential to a janitor if doing so allows him to sweep the carpets at the end of the hallway.

Don Cragun

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userdbck

userdbck(1M)															      userdbck(1M)

NAME

       userdbck - verify or fix information in the user database, /var/adm/userdb

SYNOPSIS

       [file]

DESCRIPTION

       verifies the information in the user database reports inconsistencies, and fixes problems.

       If no options and no arguments are specified, reports all data corruption problems in all files in

       If the option is also specified, each reported problem is repaired.

       If a file argument (hex 00-ff) is specified, only that file in the directory is verified.

   Options
       The following options are recognized:

	      Verify attributes.  Information in
		   is  used  to report any attribute that is not valid, not allowed in the user database, has an invalid value, or is allowed only
		   for a local user and the user is not in

	      Normally when the user database is disabled (see
		   userdb(4)), immediately exits without verifying or repairing the database.  The option overrides this and forces to	verify	or
		   repair the database.

	      Verify user names.
		   User names found in the database are reported if they do not exist in any of the repositories defined in This option could take
		   a long time on a system with many users.

	      Repair all data corruption problems that are found.
		   If this option is not specified, problems are reported but not repaired.

   Notes
       Only users who have read and write access to can run

RETURN VALUE

       exits with one of the following values:

       success: no inconsistencies were found
       inconsistencies were found and fixed
       invalid usage
       database is disabled; see
	  userdb(4)
       inconsistencies were found but not fixed,
	  because the option was not specified
       a problem was found that could not be fixed

EXAMPLES

       In the following example, all problems in the user database are reported but not repaired.

       In the following example, all problems in file are reported and repaired.

FILES

       user database
       security defaults configuration file
       security attributes description file

SEE ALSO

       userdbget(1M), userdbset(1M), userdb_read(3), security(4), userdb(4).

																      userdbck(1M)