Your worst ever gaffe?

lookitsjonno

lookitsjonno

lookitsjonno

Soldato
Joined
10 Sep 2003
Posts
5,020
Location
Midlands
Today whilst investigating a minor magento issue for a customer I decided to resursively chown the /var directory to the apache user whilst logged in as root. Clearly I never meant for the starting '/' to be there, and safe to say the webserver didn't like it :o I feel so stupid, d'oh.

Thanks to adz on here for putting up with me and helping getting it sorted :)

What's your worst?
 
installing antivirus software with firewall whilst logged in via remote desktop to one of our servers at a remote site.

yes, yes, it seems pretty obvious now, it just didn't click at the time until I got a black screen
 
Same as you buddy. The classic chown -R in the root directory to kill a server. Its one of those things that you will never do again though; the cold terror that spread over me when when I realised was horrible.
 
Deleted about 50 million transaction records stretching back over 8 years. The realisation of what you've done after wondering why the SQL query is taking so long to execute is the worst feeling in the entire world.

Thank fully there were backups so we only lost about 20 minutes worth of data, plus about 3 hours downtime.

Needless to say, my name was mud.
 
I once deleted a directory in /tmp only as soon as I issued the rm -rf ./* command did I realise I was not in the correct putty session and I had just deleted of one the production web servers document root. Luckily I was able to copy it from another server before anyone noticed!
 
Last edited:
One of the first client sites I did some years ago went really well, until a few weeks down the line they mentioned their site wasn't appearing in any search results.

When I checked, I noticed I still had

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

in robots.txt, which I had copied over from the dev site by mistake.

Yes, I felt like an idiot.
 
Working on for a Glass & Plastics company (Windows, upvc doors etc), I was working on a page for one of our sites, whilst at the same time slagging the boss and the company off to a friend over MSN.

About for months later the boss recieved an email from a customers who claimed that he might have a disgruntled employee working for him! And sent him the link to the page I had been working on.

And there in part of a list of specifications for some French Doors was half of my conversation about the boss and the company. I had somehow managed to C&P part of the conversation into the page.

He was not a happy bunny.

In my current job I designed and put together our pricelist. It was proof read by at least 3 people (so I am not totally to blame!) but I managed to get the company's telephone number wrong on the front cover! 5000 copies were ordered and delivered!

To be fair the boss was amazing about it, I had only been in the job for about 3 months.
 
jozza800 said:
I managed to get the company's telephone number wrong on the front cover! 5000 copies were ordered and delivered!
Click to expand...

I did something similar, when I first set up in business for myself I got a load of marketing literature printed up and a new business phone line.

I spent loads on buying customer lists and did a big postal mailshot as well as traipsing round local businesses handing out the leaflets.

One week went by.....nothing, 2 weeks......nothing. I was gutted, couldn't understand why, out of thousands of enquiries sent, i'd had zero calls.

Only then I noticed the contact number on the literature wasn't actually the new No BT had given me :mad:

I even phoned it hoping to ask whoevers number it was to give out my number if they got any enquiries but it was a duff number.

Great way to waste the little cash I had to start my business!
 
Deleted our entire online store DB (in dev). Only about 2 weeks worth of work that I annihilated :mad:. It was all my work though so I fixed it, but I can't stand redoing something I've already done.
 
For a while my Facebook profile pic was an image of my naked rear end, until that is someone at worked pointed out to me that as an admin of works Facebook page, it displays the profile pic in the sidebar. So yeah, for about 6 months my arse was on works Facebook page. I just laughed down the phone when I was told. I change it back occasionally ;)
 
When I very first started working with SQL, I ran an UPDATE statement without a WHERE clause - 1000's of records updated to incorrect values.

Luckily a colleague knew that the data I destroyed was stored else where in another DB, and we rectified it before anyone noticed!

Everyone makes mistakes, but I've never bloody done it again!! **Touches wood**
 
Not mine, but I used to work as a field tech at a startup wireless ISP that had to reboot all the cell sites each night (No idea why). It was a manual process, taking about a couple of minutes per site. It was only coverage for a couple of citys, so 1 person did it manually each night.

Note - Each site required some fairly intensive "set up" interaction with the back end servers.

Anyway, one bright spark decided to write a script to do it automatically. It worked great - every site rebooted. All at once. Instant DDOS attack on the back end servers. No idea how they got the cells back up in the end. However, I'm willing to bet that when he realised what he had done, a little bit of wee came out...
 
not really related to Html/Graphics or programming however,

we have a raid server with 24TB of backup storage in Raid 5 Didn't think we would need a UPS Had a powercut & the device lost the RAID config & all was lost... Now we have a 1.5KW UPS & 3x more backups of important data.

Wasn't to good...
 
I've not had any MAJOR irreplicable screw ups. I do however work on a website that has 6 million members in 1 year. We often work directly on the live site as a consequence of our development environment.

It's not uncommon to sometimes bring down a page for a couple of seconds. I think I had a parse error the other week -_-...

It's more the fault of the environment we work in than the developer. We work flat out more than 125% of the time. Features get built the same day they are conceived.
 
I spent a fortnight installing Zencart and updating / customising it (bear in mind I have no php/sql experience at that point, i am not a web designer of programmer) and then managed to kill the SQL database. I though "Backups? Who needs em!)

Start again. At least this time I was quicker at it . . . .

Always back up site and database before I even start fiddling now!
 
In my first gig there was no development environment, and all changes were made on live. After a few weeks of doing this, I put my foot down said this is insane and started work building a dev environment. I took a dump of the live database structure, and imported it into the dev server I'd created, but this error'd out for some reason with only half the file imported. I dumped the database, and went to impor... "HOLY CRAP THAT WAS LIVE DATABASE".

After possibly the longest 10 seconds of my life, I fessed up and asked for a restore. Customers couldn't manage their hosting for 1-2 hours.

I've been exceedingly paranoid ever since. :P
 
I backed up my website (I am a humble casual user) and proceeded to setup for wamp.... little did I know that I had opened the live phpmyadmin and proceeded to change the url to localhost.

My mate noticed an hour later when he went to do a blog post. I was shaking lol but realised what I had done lol.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom