Tag: backups

  1. Let this be a lesson to everyone...

    20 March 2007

    Always double-check what machine you're working on. And always, always make sure your backups are good!

    In the state of Alaska, a sysadmin at the department of revenue accidentally reformatted a hard drive that contained information pertaining to a oil fund account worth roughly $38bus.

    Yep - billions of US dollars.

    For an encore, rather than restore the data for the account from a backup hard drive, he then reformatted the backup drive on top of that - he probably hit the up arrow, changed the device name, and touched it off again. By this time, any sysadmin worth the name would …

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  2. Random knowledge IX.

    25 January 2007

    When all else fails, try doing what you know shouldn't work. I don't care if the docs say it doesn't work, if the FAQ says it doesn't work, if the books say it doesn't work.. try it anyway. Stuff like BIND is like that.

    In trying to get a domain working with BIND, what I wound up doing was changing a record for a single host (www IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) to the FQDN (fully qualified domain name - www.promiseofiris.org. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), incrementing the zone's serial number, and then kickstarting the daemon. Lo …

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  3. Random knowledge IV.

    25 January 2007

    Just because it's usually the one-half teaspoon that falls off the holder and it's usually the one-half teaspoon that fell off the holder that you grabbed out of the drawer doesnt't mean that it's the one-half teaspoon that you really grabbed. Always look before you use measuring implements.



    When a recipe says to use eggs, use real eggs. Four times out of five, Egg Beaters just won't cut it.

    When creaming butter and sugar together (probably butter and anything, I havn't tried yet) it doesn't hurt if you melt the butter in a skillet or frying pan first. If anything …

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