• Anonononymous (unregistered)
    That is, until he tried to add a user that pushed the text file length over the limit for the database column.

    Does this mean Dave was importing the entire text file into a single column?

  • Raphe (unregistered) in reply to Pooma

    Floccinaucinihilipilification (sic?) is "a thing of no use", thus spawning a new class of words which are what they mean - meanomaticpayees if you like. It's also very hard to spell [/quote]

    If your Latin was up to speed, the spelling wouldn't be a problem:

    Flocci- = as a tuft of wool -nauci- = as a trifle -nihili- = as nothing -pili- = as a hair ification = the act of making

    So I'd define it as "valuing something as four times worthless"

    captcha: how xevious!

  • Jim Bob (unregistered) in reply to Dan

    me and jeff atwood from coding horror sit around and night and play with each others c0cks he loves it, he is the catcher

    captcha: stinky just like my c0ck after it comes out of jeff atwood

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    And try typing that fast when you've got four pints of HSB inside you ....

    Horndean Special Bitter?

    Rich

  • bramster (unregistered) in reply to Ed
    Ed:
    Two things about this site:

    Fix the line wrap in Full Article mode

    Make a cookie or whatever so the site comes up in Full Article mode when I come back tomorrow.

    Thank you!

    Are you trying to justify the use of hyphenation?

  • (cs) in reply to ozyman

    Bowie P. here. :)

    You're actually right, it was my fault for not knowing my environment well enough.. But be easy on me, tho -- The re-write/anonymization of the article omitted that this was my first quasi-"real gig", and I was barely out of my teen years at the time. :) I fell into the trap most newbie sysadmins fall into...You end up spending so much of your time putting out fires that you dont think to fix the underlying problems.

    Was a fun job, tho, if not nerve-racking. $12.50/hr for a student job! :)

  • (cs) in reply to Anonononymous

    Yup.

    The NIS database binary was built from a text file. He had a group named "@all", and the list of users that belonged to that group was some slop like "@all=davep,mikeh,sallyj,robertog,............. on for about 1-2KB or so.

    I cant remember what the field width max in DB2 was at the time. It was either 1 or 2KB.. But either way, his gonzo group definition line caused the build to fail, and his script pushed the munged NIS database across both buildings.

    What was more wonderful, was the fact that people who were already logged in at the time, but kicked off jobs before I could push a corrected NIS database ended up launching long-duration jobs on the cluster just with their UIDs pinned on them -- no user names -- None of the researchers could tell their work apart.

    Clusterf*ck. Literally.

  • (cs) in reply to SomeCoder

    This was 10 years ago.. While not unknown to syadmins at the time, Perl wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is now. Knowledge of shell scripting was expected, but that was about it.

  • (cs) in reply to tfug
    tfug:
    "This guy's kind of a dick, thought Bowie."

    Ding ding ding, it's Bowie Poag!

    Bowie, why don't you tell them about the tube top.

    The tube-top incident didn't occur until about 3 years later. Beyond that, the details are thankfully very foggy. :)

    Who drew that thing originally, anyway? :) Caleb or Bill?

  • Eur.. Anonymous (unregistered)

    Ummh. Blut Aus Nord rules.

  • (cs) in reply to bpoag

    Was the fix to change how the database actually worked, or just convert the column to a BLOB or equivalent?

  • (cs) in reply to Random832
    Random832:
    Was the fix to change how the database actually worked, or just convert the column to a BLOB or equivalent?

    Neither.

    Dave's Perl script managed the contents of a text file. The text file is full of user and group definitions. Theres a command thats part of the yptools kit that builds an NIS database image from this text file. The resulting binary would consequently be pushed across the network via yppush.

    The build command failed because the text file Dave's script wrote simply concatenated user names onto an existing single-line group definition. After a couple years, the definition of the "@all" group ended up being several thousand characters wide. Eventually, that single line grew too large for the builder to encapsulate into a single field in DB2. (DB2 had a field size limit of 1 or 2KB at the time, cant remember which)

    The fix was to declare a number of smaller groups as part of the main group. i.e. instead of @all=user1,user2,user3,user4,user5, it became @all=@all1,@all2,@all3, and then @all1 contains user1,user2,user3, @all2 contains user4,user5,user6, and so on. Just breaking the definition out into chunks small enough to make the NIS database builder program happy.

    What made it worse was the fact that the NIS/YP was a Solaris thing as I recall.. But our NIS/YP master was AIX, and the NIS slaves were Irix. An added layer of complication I really didn't care much for at the time. :)

    Sometimes I wish WTF didn't re-write submissions. It would save alot of post-hoc explanations and "dehhh, u shud have used perl and teh goggle 4 angswers!!" solutions for a problem that occured over a decade ago. sigh We didn't have snappy 10-second Google cookbook answers to rely on back then. It was RTFM or die trying. :)

  • Christophe (unregistered) in reply to wk2x
    wk2x:
    It's the story of Dave and Bowie, and a labyrinth of wtf-ridden code.

    Ground Control to Major WTF...

  • (cs)

    hey didn't have a backup scheme before? Cool, thought Bowie, expectations are low.

    That line was the best... what better way to say "Hope they don't find out how little I actually know about being a UNIX admin!"

  • tfug (unregistered) in reply to bpoag

    Bowie, Nick still has the pics of you wearing a tube top. An orange tube top showed up to at least one TFUG meeting.

  • (cs) in reply to Tias
    Tias:
    real_aardvark:
    Turns out that everybody else, up to and including the company's owners, were indeed down the pub. In fact, they'd all done a pub crawl. Not for beer: just looking for me. (I hadn't mentioned where I was going, but they were pretty sure it was one of the twenty or so pubs in town.)
    Wait, you were drinking during work-hours? Is that, uhm, cool over there? Cause if it is, I'm moving to england!
    During lunchtime -- during lunchtime. I realise that this would be quite a shock to you puritans over there. (It did involve a couple of nice Barnsley lamb chops, though, so you can add clogged arteries into the mix.)

    And, trust me, you don't want to move to England. Nice place to visit; excellent beer; lots of history to go and explore. And the beer's great (although it takes some time to get used to). Seriously underfunded companies with twat managers, though.

    Save up. Visit. Do not stay.

  • (cs) in reply to Rich
    Rich:
    real_aardvark:
    And try typing that fast when you've got four pints of HSB inside you ....

    Horndean Special Bitter?

    Rich

    I believe so. The brewery is (or was, in 1990ish) in Hampshire. So that sounds about right.

    On a totally unrelated note, the only time I've cleared the whole pool table from scratch was after 20+ pints of HSB.

    I'm not saying it's magic. I'm just saying it's worth a try.

  • (cs) in reply to Mike Dimmick
    Mike Dimmick:
    real_aardvark:
    And what's this about DB2, for Chrissake? Are we adding a DBAdmin WTF to a multiple SysAdmin WTF?

    Unless this is some highly weird IBM implementation, NIS/YP uses Berkeley DB. Now that is a WTF in itself. A proper database would have either applied all the changes or rolled them all back.

    I've just spent six months trying to make Berkeley DB sane, and man do I agree with you. I don't expect ACID semantics. On the other hand, I don't expect "error 22" to pop up all the time.

    How naive I was.

  • (cs) in reply to DaveAronson
    DaveAronson:
    real_aardvark:
    (Not Unix, but VOS, which is similar in some respects.)
    Wow, someone else who's worked with VOS. I've even used it at THREE different jobs (though #1 was as a consultant to the company of #2)....
    Hah! Only three jobs? I grew up with VOS. It's imprinted itself on me. It was the perfect match of multics-based OS with fault-tolerant hardware. I even wrote half of the stupid GUI interface that people demanded.

    I miss VOS. I miss the transactional, indexed file system. I miss the fact that it didn't really need a SysAdmin ( I just did that in my spare time).

    I miss VOS.

  • bpoag (unregistered) in reply to rawsteak
    rawsteak:
    hey didn't have a backup scheme before? Cool, thought Bowie, expectations are low.

    That line was the best... what better way to say "Hope they don't find out how little I actually know about being a UNIX admin!"

    Part of what Jake omitted was the fact that this was my first "real gig".. :) I went in prepared for something alot more fierce.. I was kind of happy the environment was fairly laid back. Nervous? Yeah. Inexperienced? Definitely. But clueless? No.. Just wet behind the ears. :)

  • bpoag (unregistered) in reply to tfug
    tfug:
    Bowie, Nick still has the pics of you wearing a tube top. An orange tube top showed up to at least one TFUG meeting.

    Lies! Damned dirty lies! :)

    Tell Nick i'll kick the pickle out of his ass if he keeps it up. :)

  • I Like Pie (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    And, trust me, you don't want to move to England. Nice place to visit; excellent beer; lots of history to go and explore. And the beer's great (although it takes some time to get used to). Seriously underfunded companies with twat managers, though.

    Save up. Visit. Do not stay.

    On the plus side, we get far more holiday than the US and our employment laws mean you practically have to kill someone before you can be 'fired'. 'At will' employment doesnt exist in the UK.

  • Erik Madsen (unregistered)

    So who's the putz here? Dave or Bowie?

  • Mitchell T (unregistered) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Mitchell T:
    And this by one of the companies "best programmers".
    Did they become one of the company's best ex-programmers? Please?

    Sorry to bust your bubble, but no. They continued coding even after that, and more "bugs".

    Nobody listened to my warnings. So I moved on. :)

  • PDK (unregistered) in reply to Michael Brecht

    Don't, i know people like that. They win at life by working somewhere that rewards them for being screw-ups.

    captcha test:gygax.

    i miss d&d, the only good gygax (you heard me)

  • Bowie (unregistered) in reply to valerion

    Not quite. :)

    Bowie here. Maybe I can clear up a few things in the story.

    This was a 3-hour-a-day part time student gig, and the Dave I was replacing was a full-time employee. This was my first "real gig", in that it was the first job I figured what I knew about system administration matched what the job required me to do. I wouldn't have taken the job if I felt unprepared for it. Inexperienced? Definitely. But not unprepared.

    Practically every day from the instant I got in, to when I left, I had people at my door..There really wasn't any time to "sit on my backside". :) My job was basically to keep things running, no matter what.. I didn't have the experience back then to know to make the time up front to ensure the system(s) under my care were stable.. I was up to my neck in triage work, and couldn't really see past it.

    In retrospect, 12+ years later, that's the first thing I would have told my boss---Whether he liked it or not, full audit. Full audit of every manual procedure, check out the working state of the boxes, map it all out, see if our ass is covered backups-wise, the usuals. Not "throw yourself in the middle of the mess and try to keep the plates spinning", which was my approach at the time.

    That's the biggest lesson I learned.. Not the default cell width of a DB2 database, or the intricacies of NIS/YP. The lesson learned is, "Trust the prior admin, his word, and his code about as far as you can throw a Buick."

    I hate Star Trek, and I hate Star Trek analogies, but....It's not Kirk's fault if Picard fucks up. :)

  • Bowie (unregistered) in reply to tfug

    pix or it didn't happen. ;)

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