Be Excellent To Each Other

Oh cock.

Any of you guys heard of Deep Freeze? It's software that returns a PC to 'frozen' state when it's reset, wiping any changes, files or malware in the process. It's very useful for keeping student pcs free of stuff and we use it extensively.

I loaned 3 laptops to the Music department for use in exams on friday, not know that they were frozen. The students sat the exam, saved the file to the desktop and returned the laptop to the invigilator. When I've come to retrieve the files, I had a horrible, heart in the mouth moment when I realised that the files had gone. For good. No getting them back without some pretty heavy duty forensics software.

Fuck. Really sorry to hear that. On the plus side, it wasn't an important subject, and only a BA.

Oh noes. But why aren't they saving exam stuff onto the network somewhere?

I hate that feeling though, when you know you've fucked someone's day/week up. I've only had it once or twice and each time was a lesson learned but

Because I told the invigilator it wasn't necessary. I've done fucked up here and there's going to be some seriously pissed off students.

Being networked during an exam is a big no-no, surely?

I once sent about 20,000 blank emails out. That was a good one.

There's a thread in this, reckon.

I don't know. I've no idea how things are done these days for exams and stuff but surely you could just have access to a file server but no internet.

Oh man. Bin the laptops and say that they were stolen.

Spent quite a while last night trying to synchronise the time on two servers (a web server and a DB server) before realising that the time I was taking from the web server was actually being generated by the client

You totally changed time?


OMG Davpaz, that's a particularly bad one Shit.

You reset them? Or do they reset themselves?

Either way, fucking hell.

Wouldn't someone in the IT department be able to help?










Sorry

They reset themselves. Deep Freeze is voodoo magic. You can wipe the hard drive and it'll reappear on a reboot.

It destroys the file header and the reference in the allocation tables, so unless you know exactly which cluster the file started in, you'll never get it back.

I tried.

Have you told anyone about this yet?

Yes. I'm cripplingly honest.

What file format are you looking for? Can you do a block level search for #?JPG#? or whatever it is and find the first block that way?

Chances are they might be contiguous if the FAT is wiped every time...

It's worth a try. I'm going to have to install software to do it though, right?

There's a chance that could wipe the files

Install software on another machine, then add the disk from the buggered machine to that machine as an extra disk?

Crikey DavPaz, you have my utmost sympathies even if I can't provide any advice. That's just the most awful feeling isn't it when you know you've proper done fucked up on something like that.

If you didn't know the laptops had the freeze software on them, how could you be responsible for it?

Thanks man.

I'm going to abort. The admin guy has already told the students affected. But then he did send me this



I think I love him.

It's an important lesson for the students to have learned anyway.

'Geordies are thick'.

I think this might work. Any file recovery software will look for unlinked files like this. There's no way Deep Freeze wipes the drive itself, or reboots would take hours. Personally, I'd pull the drives, mount them read-only in another machine, and run a util over it.

I think my biggest error so far was in my last job. Only person on shift in the IT department of a warehouse with probably 400-500 staff. I was doing some maintenance on some files (think it was basically copying files away, running reorgs on them and then copying them back) when I took the main company product file and overwrote its corresponding index file with it. This meant than most of the warehouse programs stopped working immediately and various phones in the office started ringing. None of us were really trained to get out of messes like that so it was always a late phone call to the bloke who knew everything about every system who was basically the sysadmin and getting him to talk me through rebuilding the index which, considering we had a big product range supplying books to WH Smith, CDs to HMV etc, took a couple of hours I think, meaning lots of people having to work late because of me.

On the plus side, the next day it was agreed that the stuff we were doing daily was too easy to cock up and scripts were written to automate things where possible.

In the current job, the worst I've done is shut down a main server when intending to log it off, but that's easy to blag your way out of.

My biggest fuckup caused a £5k re-print at work. Something to do with CMYK, overprints and colour separation, I forget the exact details. Either way: oops! Haven't made any major mistakes since then, fortunately.

I once managed to copy a database onto our test server for mucking about with and through a spectacular brain fart copied it onto the wrong machine. Even the prompt "this file is currently in use, do you wish to overwrite it?" message wasn't enough to halt me, and I overwrote the live server for a store with test data.

One of my juniors got a divorce after we spent a particularly fun week auditing a car dealership.

There's a longer version of that waiting to be told...

(Could a kindly mod maybe move the posts over from the Nay Thread?)

Sorry, a what?

You might want to delete this message as well

And this one, they are of no relevance.

Not as shit as this one though.

I once burned a whole oak tree down (a very impressive, very old oak tree) by setting fire to some litter at its foot.

A Backtrack livecd booted into forensics mode (doesn't mount anything unless you tell it to) & PhotoRec have worked for me in the past... but then I was just pissing around with a shitty old computer to see how it worked & if I could use it, it wasn't anything important that I was trying to recover.

Not me but my uncle.. he was cutting a piece of wood that was bent under stress (he didn't realise how much) when it cut through, it sprang back and knocked out his daughters front teeth.

I can't imagine how bad he must have felt after that.

Haha!

Seriously though, were they just baby teeths? Hope so!

aww crap DavPaz that sucks mate, sorry to hear it. Its horrible when you get that ohh shit feeling.

When i was doing a contract for Mellon Bank i managed to shut the trading floor for over a hour with a serious patching fuck up, i was told that a set of switches were now redundant and to tidy up the patch cabinet, unfortunately for me i took the dick who told me at his word and didn't double check myself, so i happily went at it like a gorilla....wrong cabinet. Luckily for me i had the email which proved i was unpatching and dismantling the correct cabinet as far as my team was concerned but still should have double checked the information, what takes 15 mins to unpatch took a very frantic bit of work to get it back up and working. That was my rookie lesson learned, never trust information unless i have double checked it.

Nope, adult teeth... years and years of reconstruction later and they're sort of sorted. But still, nasty.

Eek!

Wheee, I did that. Set a PC's IP address to the same as the subnet default gateway on the trade floor. Oops.

Oh god, this. I got good at avoiding it when hopping on networks until printers started getting an IP address as well and I kept knocking them offline instead.

Heh, last time I did that was in high school. One of the BBCs on our ancient network was a Master, and I always tried to get that one, because it had some nifty extra * commands.
So as usual we nerds rushed in as soon as the bell went and I grabbed the machine, and instinctively hit ctrl-break, to be met with the satisfying berrrr-bleep!

And also a cry of "nooooooo!" from the computer studies teacher who had just gone to hang his jacket up after sitting at that machine all lunchtime, typing in a long and detailed *word document.

Oops.

Should be, but oddly, I was networked-up during my A-level exams, which I took on a computer. (Which caused a computer crash during an A-level exam, annoyingly. Cue tedious exam board bureaucracy...) I guess the techies are my college couldn't be bothered, or something. Not that an Internet connection would've really helped had I been some unethical cheat-type person, as I was being watched constantly by two people.

All cancelled freight trains go into what we a "bucket" incident where all trains of a certain type (Freightliner coal trains, DBS container trains, etc) go.

I needed to retrieve said bucket on our system to add more cancelled trains to it. However, "recover incident" is immediately below "merge incidents" on the dropdown menu, and so without thinking I selected merge, typed in the freight bucket's incident number and pressed enter.

And as I pressed enter, immediately realized what I'd done. I'd only gone and merged a colossal signal failure from Hammerton (near York), affecting trains all over the UK... into a bucket for cancelled DBS steel trains.

Several panicked phone calls later and I was talking to a counterpart in York (who had wondered what had happened). He made a new Hammerton signal failure incident and I then spent the rest of my shift separating the trains (hundreds of em) out and putting them back into the correct incidents. Whew!

It's possible to make much the same mistake with the mod control panel

is much worse, though.

I was doing a job at a large pharmaceutical company many years ago; a night survey. The guy I was with from the site invited me to take a peek around their spangly new CHP turbine control suite, knowing that I love all that shit, though I had no business to be there and it wasn't part of what I was doing.

The place was a mass of warning lamp panels and computer screens, all carefully monitoring and controlling the huge steam turbine units that powered and heated the entire site and more importantly, its manufacturing processes. I tip toed around in awe. After about five minutes, I turned round to speak to one of the technicians and felt something touch my bum. Immediately I heard the turbines slow and every red lamp screeched into action... 'hmmm, is there a problem here, guys?'

Unfortunately, there was. I had hit the emergency all-stop override with my arse. Not good.

So far WTB is most worst.

Oh, I dunno. Tree murder is bad, but knocking out your daughter's front teeth?

OUCH