By Andrew SB
“Fail fast, learn fast” has become a bit of a mantra for entrepreneurs these days. While they’re not always as forgiving when their website is down, those of us on the technical side learn from our mistakes too.
We’ve all fat fingered a command or two, but what have you learned from it? Share your stories, not just of your worst sysadmin mistakes, but also of the best lessons you’ve learned from them.
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Over 20 years ago when at lunch we got an urgent call that a production system was down. When we asked what happened, we all laughed out loud because documentation can always be improved.
There was a documented process that sometimes on Unix (this is before Linux) you need to kill the parent process of a command that is either frozen or using excessive resources. A junior staff resource that was learning to become a sysadmin had followed the procedure and learned a valuable lesson.
We forgot to mention that killing init (that is pid=1) is not a good idea because experienced sysadmins automatically know that. An exception that needs to the documented.
I set up firewall intending to close no other ports then the 8047. Well I closed every port but 8047. Obviously SSH session turned down, no HTTP passed in and I should reinstall the server. Luckily it was on Digital Ocean and it was a dev server XD
Deleting things without having backups. I cringe when I think of how often and how much data I have deleted accidentally, with no duplicates anywhere as I desperately scramble around trying to find folders that MIGHT have the content…or having to use Google Cache to retrieve web pages…
Nowadays, backups and more backups is the order of the day. I back-up all websites, databases and files every night…and then to a different location once a week…and then to another location once a month (in folders named for each month and in a parent folder called YEARLY.)
Thank God for rsync.
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