Id10t Errors - a stupid mistakes thread?

I thought maybe a "stupid mistakes" thread might be entertaining, probably shows my inner child coming out.

Remember the meme about the support person asking "is the computer plugged in?"

So I rarely burn DVDs anymore. The rare time I have tried in the last couple years since I got my current desktop (a surplus engineering workstation), I have been unable to do so. I checked all the obvious stuff like was I in the right groups, etc. Then, each time, I did the unthinkable and put the files onto a thumb-drive and used an old Windows machine to burn them.

Today I looked at the physical drive and on the front I noticed it said "CD-RW, DVD ROM." Oops.

I switched drives with the old Windows machine and unsurprisingly it works fine now.

Goes to show you.

Anyone else brave enough to share their stupid mistakes?

A few years back I felt I was a bit of an expert at PC hardware because I'd been adding drives, HBAs and memory from back in the days when 5 1/4 inch full height floppies and hard drives were the norm and ISA was the main bus and one had to install individual memory chips rather than DIMMs. I'd had a job where I'd done hardware installations of 386, 486 and ultimately Pentium systems adding EISA, MCA and PCI HBAs as well as DIMMs.

So on the job I had after that one the company I was at paid for ISDN so we could do telecommuting with the caveat that we all buy our own home systems. I already had a home system so just needed to connect it. Most of my co-workers however bought the components needed (case, motherboard, memory, CPUs, power supply, drives etc...).

One asked me to assist so I went with him to be sure we got all the components. We took them to his house and put the system together. I connected the power supply to the drives after installing all the components. Despite that we could not get the system to power up properly. On taking it back to the place where we'd bought the components to complain about the "defective" power supply they pointed out I'd not plugged the power supply into the motherboard. D'oh!

On the flip side I once lived in the Caribbean and called a local PC repair company to bring me a replacement monochrome video adapter after I'd done my own troubleshooting of the issue. The guy came out and spent an hour doing his own "troubleshooting" the system and came to the conclusion I needed a new monitor rather than a new video adapter. I pulled the existing video adapter out of the PC and showed him the melted hole in the middle of one of its chips and told him I was fairly certain that was the issue.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <General> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

thankfully i have forgotten my earlier 1d10t errors (actually i think this term is reserved for the most blatant of errors, like forgetting to plug things in, plus then insisting that both customer service and the hardware are broken) - but i will try to remember something from my early linux days. or early computer days.

more recently, here's an elaborate one:
installing radicale, i followed their instructions, creating a radicale user with its home directory being '/' (why i don't know. never blindly copy-paste commands). later i decided i don't want radicale, and uninstalled it. then i also deleted the user, with the -f option to delete everything, incl. its home....

Originally Posted by Lucko666 ... Today I looked at the physical drive and on the front I noticed it said "CD-RW, DVD ROM." Oops. I switched drives with the old Windows machine and unsurprisingly it works fine now. Goes to show you. Anyone else brave enough to share their stupid mistakes?

My story will make you feel better then;

Many years ago now I forgot I already had either the VGA or DVI cable plugged into the video card and monitor and plugged either the VGA or DVI cable in as well, so both of them were plugged in at the same time, to the same video card and monitor - I don't know how I didn't spot it straight away. It's hard to describe what happened graphically speaking, but it wasn't good and from memory it damaged the video card.

Probably my first Id10t error...certainly wasn't the last:

Background...Wang "mini-computer" Disk drives were 18" platters in a cabinet the size of a two drawer file cabinet. Lower disk was fixed, upper disk was removable.

Backup procedure was to dismount the upper disk, mount 1st backup disk, copy "up", mount upper disk, copy "down", mount 2nd backup disk, copy "up", mount 1st backup, copy "down", mount original upper disk. This resulted in a backup of each of the production disks and left the cabinet as it was before the backup.

(You can see this coming, right?) Dismounted upper disk, mounted 1st backup disk, copied "down" -- wiping out the current contents of the production fixed disk with whatever happened to be on that due-for-rotation backup disk. This was a midnight process...the "data processing" guy was not happy about being called out in the middle of the night.

The plus side was that the fixed disk mostlly contained the "static" data...programs, etc, so restoring from the previous day's backup resulted in minimal data loss (but still some). Almost ended my DP/IT career even before it started.

Many years ago I attempted to install a Linux distro to dual boot multi distros...liveCD installer failed, so I made a second attempt and assumed (learned years ago in the Navy that this really means "makes an ASS out of U and ME") the partitions were remembered....yup, wiped out my /home and had to restore a backup ....that was from 6 months prior.

Well, you live and learn. Now I play with different distros on LiveCD's and VM's, and try to backup /home monthly or after important work.

Early March about 10 years ago, I spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon and evening on some new javascript code for my Seconds Calculator page. The new code was to implement daylight savings adjustments independently of older or inaccurate javascript interpreters, for greater reliability. The exact time of the adjustment would depend upon the year entered into the calculation (different rules for different years), the time zone, etc, such that if the site visitor happened to be doing some calculations at the precise time (2:00 am) of the change date, the calculation(s) would auto-adjust on the fly. After extensive testing and debugging, satisfied that all was working properly, I uploaded my new code, and went to bed.

And forgot to set the clocks in my house ahead one hour.

That reminds me of the day I was trying to use the date command to output in a specific format. Rather than doing that I SET the date on our primary backup master for NetBackup to 10 years in the future. NetBackup saw the new date and immediately expired all our backups since the retention dates were no longer than 7 years.

Another id10t moment was back in the day of AT&T & SCO Unix. We did serial terminals, printers and modems on all our remote sites. To setup a serial device one had to edit /etc/inittab then run "init q" to reread it. I did setup of a new printer and typed "init 0" instead of "init q". When I told my manager at the time I'd rebooted one of our customer sites trying to fix a printer her only question was "Did the printer work after the reboot?". (It did.).

One lesson I saw from that and issues by others later is that if you screw up you should always tell someone. Management is much happier knowing the cause of an issue and will generally appreciate the honesty. If you work somewhere that punishes you for a single mistake you're better off getting out as everyone will eventually make one. If no one knows what caused an issue lots of effort will be spent in trying to find it wasting everyone's time.

The number one id10t mistake is "rm -rf *" when sitting root (/). There are 2 kinds of admins in the world. Those who have done that and the damn liars who say they haven't.