Screwed up..

Wow..I made a pretty large mistake today, causing an outage for an entire building. Talk about losing credibility among co-workers. The sad thing is, I have been the star of this job, fixing problems a lot of these people couldn't fix......but this one thing has got me getting "the look" from people.

Great..what a way to start the day. Gotta say I'm pretty bummed I didn't pay more attention. Thankfully it was a quick fix, but still..it shouldn't have had to be fixed.

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Comments

nicklauscombs

keep your head up, everyone has to have a bad day every now and then

vCole

nicklauscombs wrote:

keep your head up, everyone has to have a bad day every now and then

+1 for this. Relax, people will forget about it by next week.

meadIT

My boss always tells me that "every 'oops' cancels out ten 'atta-boys'" which, unfortunately, is very very true.

Mrock4

I'm a perfectionist, and live by my reputation of doing quality work, and doing it in a timely manner. It just sucks, because I felt like a gained a lot of ground up until this point, gaining everyone's confidence. For what it's worth, the customers we service prefer me hands down, but..I think it's best to be held in high regard by your co-workers, versus customers.

I appreciate the words guys. It was really a lack of attention.

Here's what went down:

Was checking a switch that was supposed to have port security enabled, and *normally* we use the last port for uplinks..it was the first port instead. Needless to say..port security blocked the uplink port for that building. Definitely should have been more attentive. I was trying to be proactive, but it backfired.

seuss_ssues

Read your Sig

C'est la vie.

Mrock4

ahhhh I hate you. I knew that'd come back to bite me in the azz.

vsmith3rd

seuss_ssues wrote:

Read your Sig

+1 on that. Hey, its okay to take the attitude of striving for perfection, as long as you understand that mistakes are human nature. NOBODY is perfect, particularly the folks giving you the "look". Move on, because you can't change the past, so why dwell on it. You mentioned that you wanted to be proactive. Continue to do that. Reliving this mistake is reactive, learning and moving forward is proactive.

snadam

vsmith3rd wrote:

seuss_ssues wrote:

Read your Sig

+1 on that. Hey, its okay to take the attitude of striving for perfection, as long as you understand that mistakes are human nature. NOBODY is perfect, particularly the folks giving you the "look". Move on, because you can't change the past, so why dwell on it. You mentioned that you wanted to be proactive. Continue to do that. Reliving this mistake is reactive, learning and moving forward is proactive.

Yea man, Pobody's Nerfect....

Id say take it in stride and keep moving on. They are bound to forget once you fix a system critical error that only you can resolve.

sprkymrk

Mrock - I have done FAR WORSE than that... Just to give an example (and I'm not going to record my biggest mistakes here for posterity either) how about trouble shooting something, being 100% positive that by replacing a $6,000 piece of equipment not including labor costs that the problem will be solved, only to have the exact same problem after replacement?

Well I made a quick recovery, called in someone smarter than me and got it fixed right the second time, but yeah it was embarrassing...

dynamik

Breaking things and making mistakes is a great way to learn! How do you think I got so good

Don't worry about it. Go back to doing what you normally do, and everyone will forget about it before you know it.

You should have just been like, "Damn switch was acting up. I got it all figured out though."

undomiel

Well on the plus side at least you aren't that guy who locked out all network functionality with overly zealous ipsec rules!

tiersten

I onced moved /lib on an AIX box by accident. The system wasn't very happy about that. Thankfully I managed to move it back without having to shut down the thing but lots of users and developers were wondering why nothing worked

supertechCETma

everybody gets their day in the barrel.

shednik

It happens everyone makes mistakes, just make sure you don't do it again

Ahriakin

Shut down the WAN interface on a remote router...

tiersten

Ahriakin wrote:

Shut down the WAN interface on a remote router...

If its a Cisco then the reload in <minutes> or reload at <time> feature is awesome for cases like this

KGhaleon

Are you that tech from Web dude vs. Sales guy?

SrAtechie

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

NetAdmin2436

Oh yeah? I uninstalled IIS from my exchange server. Whatever you can do, I can do something twice as stupid.

manny355

+ 1 on what "Fade..." said

It will be old news by next week and especially when you fix something else...

What i've found in IT is you're only as good as the last thing you fixed...and that lasts about a week before they are back to asking you what you do all day...lol

networker050184

I have done quite a few things like this in my time. People will forget as long as it only happens once in a while.

I have done the old shut the WAN port like Ahriakin stated. I just told them that it locked up and needed them to reboot. They were all MS admins on site so they were used to needing to reboot things and didn't think twice about it

My coworkers razzed me a bit, but everyone makes mistakes.

undomiel

My stupidest computer moment ever. Almost too embarrassed to mention this one. I wrote a script for moving some back-up files from one computer to another then do some clean-up. I'm sure you can see where this is going. This clean-up involved specifically a del /q /s *.*. I tested the script from the command line, it worked just fine, so I scheduled it. The script started running and right then I realized that there was one thing I had forgotten to take into account when scripting the clean-up. The clean-up is being done relative to where the script is started. So as a scheduled task it is starting from the C:\Windows directory. I aborted the script as swift as possible but the damage was done. Fortunately nothing that totally prevented the server from booting or even from operating normally. It still needed a repair done to fix up add/remove windows components and anything relying on the .net components. On the plus side I now thoroughly analyze where a script is actually working.

So that one may make tiersten and netadmin2436 feel a bit better.

vsmith3rd

I think its cool that guys responded with mistakes they've made. It should ease the stress you may have felt. I would include mine too, but I don't have enough work responsibility yet to really cause havok on a system wide scale. But my day will come.

TechJunky

Atleast you didnt do rm -rf /

I wouldn't know anything about that....

Umm.. Yah...

royal

networker050184 wrote:

They were all MS admins on site so they were used to needing to reboot things and didn't think twice about it

gojericho0

i changed the ip on the wrong interface before and made the office a remote island

can't say i never gave them a free vacation

snadam

I have accidentally made data unavailable via NTFS permissions to all users once before...and when I mean data, I mean all of it. And when I mean users, I mean all of them

bjaxx

snadam wrote:

I have accidentally made data unavailable via NTFS permissions to all users once before...and when I mean data, I mean all of it. And when I mean users, I mean all of them

Guilty as charged with you Snadam. Told them I was practicing best security practices.

Mrock4

I appreciate it ya'll..it does help a lot. I spent the day busy as hell, and got a ridiculous amount of work completed. Made a lot of customers happy, so that feels better. To be brutally honest, I've been doing this job a minute (not nearly as long as some of you), but I thought I was just incredibly forgetful or something. It helps to know that others have made some pretty wild mistakes too. I guess it happens to the best of us!

UnixGuy

Wow

it's not just me today lool

Today for the first time, I caused a production system for travel agency to crash !

I went to change one hard disk that's mirrored under Solaris Volume manager , I didn't check for the metadb, because I assumed the idiot who configured the system distributed them evenly. Unfortunately, I caused the system to crash, it took me 15 minutes to get it back in production