Re: Favourite Urban Myth

Do Unix admin fiascoes count? I once had an SA do "# chmod -R 700 /dev" because he thought someone was inappropriately dinging something there. Can you imagine how many things break when /dev/null is unwritable and unreadable? And when /dev/vx/rdsk/... (with a database on raw devices) are not readable or writable by Oracle?

The same fellow also once changed oracle's UID and the dba GID and did a chown oracle:dba on all of oracle's directories and files - without telling anyone or shutting down the instances running on the server. Oracle hung - suddenly it did not own any processes or semaphores! ("ipcrm" is not the preferred method of shutting down oracle!)

My own most embarrassing fiasco occurred many, many years ago - when I was fairly new to Unix. I created a shell script named "rm" which did "rm -i $*" You can imagine what happened the first time I ran it - processes were spawning faster than I could kill them, even with a script... It was admin by BOB time. (BOB=Big Orange Button.) Fortunately, it was on a development server!

Don Granaman
[certifiable OraSaurus]

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Wednesday, April 10, 2002 10:53 AM

> On Tuesday 09 April 2002 20:03, Deshpande, Kirti wrote:
>
> Well Kirti, if you're going to morph this thread into stupid DBA tricks...
>
> We had one young fellow working for us that was new to unix. He had
> just discovered that he could run a job in the background via '&' at about
> the same time he was assigned the task of recompiling all of the files
> for an entire application.
>
> You can probably guess the rest. ;)
>
> About the time he started bragging about how "quickly" he was able
> to recompile all of the code, we were all headed to the server room
> to find out why our dev server was suddenly so slow...
>
> Jared
>
>
>
> > We had one dba who (by mistake) issued a 'chown -R oracle:dba' followed
by
> > 'chmod -R 750 *' from the '/' directory while logged in as root.
> > Fortunately, it was a server with no production databases on it, just a
> > couple of Development databases. She never new what a '#' prompt was.
She
> > is long gone but such memories linger for ever ;)
> > It took a while for the SA's to let Oracle DBAs get root privileges
after
> > that episode.
> >
> > And in my previous job, I had a junior DBA who tried to kill a
background
> > job (%1) with 'kill -9' as root. The problem was, he forgot to put in
'%'
> > before the '1' .... and then came to me stating that the Server does not
> > respond anymore :( while I was talking to the Customer who had beaten
him
> > to place a trouble call about 'the database just hung-up'..... Is there
a
> > Darwin Award for the Living (DBA)? =;)
> >
> >
> > - Kirti
> >
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
> --
> Author: Jared Still
> INET: jkstill_at_cybcon.com
>
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-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
-- 
Author: Don Granaman
  INET: granaman_at_cox.net

Fat City Network Services    -- (858) 538-5051  FAX: (858) 538-5051
San Diego, California        -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists
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