RE: OT - Getting fired for database oops
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 09:53:32 -0400
Message-ID: <6AFC12B9BFCDEA45B7274C534738067F174B4AB7_at_AAPQMAILBX02V.proque.st>
Ouch!
rm -rf / ....how many ways can that one bite you? Honestly, sometimes I think rm needs an option like: rm -rf -yes-i-know-i-specified-rf-and-yes-i-know-im-about-to-specify-the-root-directory-and-yes-i-know-im-logged-in-as-root-do-it-anyways /
Maybe then, this particular calamity's frequency would be reduced.....
-Mark
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Goulet, Richard
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 9:43 AM
To: stephenbooth.uk_at_gmail.com; oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: OT - Getting fired for database oops
Well, I'll give you all a good one to laugh about. Regrettably it's only marginally about Oracle. We had an HP tech in on a Sunday morning to install, configure, etc... Service Guard. He and our resident Unix hack worked away at it all day, with a couple of hardware mess-up's along the way. Now the HP tech had wisely placed a number of configuration files in a /temp directory. At the end of this long day he went to delete the saved config files and very absent mindly typed "rm -fr /".
They spent a majority of the night restoring the system from tape, the hard way & called me at 3AM to start & check out the database. The Service Guard install was deferred to another weekend.
Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA
PAREXEL International
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Booth Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 8:08 AM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: OT - Getting fired for database oops
On 05/18/2009, John Hallas <John.Hallas_at_morrisonsplc.co.uk<mailto:John.Hallas_at_morrisonsplc.co.uk>> wrote:
I do know of a DBA who deleted the test database ready for a refresh from production. The 578 datafiles took a long time to delete but slightly longer (36 hours) to recover once he realised that he was logged onto production.
Something very similar happened in one of my past jobs. A consultant DBA at a customer site (employed by the customer through an agency) trashed the main production finance system at 17:00 one Friday, thinking he was dropping the QA one ready for a restore from the production backup over the weekend. I then had to spend the entire weekend restoring the production system and rolling it forward (this was a 23:55 by 7 (i.e. 5 minutes permitted downtime a day) system, fortunately weekends were slow and there was provision to cache transactions locally then apply them as a batch, unfortunately the total transaction for the weekend amounted to about the average for 10 minutes transactions on Monday morning so getting it fixed for Monday was vital), plus restoring the QA system.
The company got a £1.8 million fine for the outage - government supplier etc
Fortunately we were able to get the system back by the early hours of Monday morning so losses were minimal (about £1million, pocket change for this organisation).
He kept his job though
I suspect that the DBA who trashed the database would have been sacked but from what we could tell from some forensic unpicking of events, phone logs, statements from people on site at the time and CCTV footage he spent about 30 minutes trying to fix it, phoned his agency for 10 minutes, cleared his desk and left for destination unknown. When contacted his agency denied any knowledge of him.
The key lessons we learned from this were:
- Don't use the same passwords on production and QA (OS and Oracle).
- For any regular destructive jobs (e.g. deleting datafiles to clear down QA ready for restore from prod) have a pre-written script that is only on the server it's needed on rather than using a manual script.
- When you've broken a mirror from a 3 way stack to back up from, consider not resilvering until the last possible moment (had this been the case here we could have restored by resilvering from the detached copy to the other two 'disks' and rolling forward on the logfiles, total downtime less than 3 hours).
We did try to get the customer to agree to us doing the trashing of the database as part of our restore process on the Saturday but they insisted on keeping control of the process and that it be done by their own staff.
Stephen
-- It's better to ask a silly question than to make a silly assumption. http://stephensorablog.blogspot.com/ | http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenboothuk | Skype: stephenbooth_uk Apparently I'm a "Eierlegende Woll-Milch-Sau", I think it was meant as a compliment. -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Mon May 18 2009 - 08:53:32 CDT