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Admin
R.B.: "I informed you thusly."
Admin
The real WTF, of course, is how someone -- presumably the Expert Project Manager -- got a one-year, 28-user demonstration license of any Expert Team Collaboration Software.
Admin
"license"
Admin
I've noticed that, even though the articles are being recycled, the easy reader versions are not.
Admin
Been there, done that. Years ago, when SharePoint 2007 was the newest shiny, our CIO wanted to set it up to play with. Well, the server (with either Dev or Test in the name) was stood up, and slowly grew to be something more than a play thing.
Fast forward to where our SAN was running out of space, and this 'unused' dev/test server was deleted. To add insult to injury, the evening it was deleted we also shuffled a bunch of other VMs around the various datastores to get empty space grouped together. That caused a huge volume of logs to be written which then rolled over and overwrote the delete action of the SharePoint server, so effectively w/out backups it looked like the server had never actually existed.
Definitely a seared in memory telling our CIO and his entire department that all their documents were gone. I also remember our boss saying, "I hope your next boss manages things better..." and not knowing if he meant he thought he was being fired, or we were... (Luckily nobody was.)
Admin
That is totally ridiculous. Before de- or re-provisioning any server one should yank the ethernet cables, wait a few days, and see if anyone complains. After that, just in case, one could take a look at the non-system files, by date, and see if there's a lot of recently dated files. Might want to copy them to tape, just in case. If you're lazy, just backup the whole damn server to tape. Inexcusable. Whoever is responsible should be immediately fired.
Admin
Is that Ronly Bonly Jones Jr.?
Admin
Isn't it ironic that requesting a terminal server ends the project.
Admin
That was my feeling as well, the two WTFs were that the PM asked for the tools he needed to get the job done and was denied them, and then when he implemented a workaround the admins destroyed his work through stupidity.
Admin
These are great points. The three big lessons: 1) give what is asked for by those you entrusted with the project, 2) any test setup should actually be set up as if to be used long term (or with a specific cutoff-or-conversion date scheduled), 3) when reprovisioning, don't wipe before double checking. So, why does pretty much all of the story sound so typical?!
Admin
At least here the HPC wan't the actual problem.
Addendum 2022-06-15 14:01: *wasn't
Admin
Ronly Bonly Jones? I first saw that story in Readers Digest .. must be 60 years ago
Admin
Been there, and been close to there more times than I care to count... Show up at a customer site, find a critical business system running on an "unofficial" box... yikes!
Admin
Got a folder named tmp or temp? Have a file or folder called test? A machine named Temp Dev? If you care about the data on it, you should have a backup of it somewhere safe. Sysadmins looking for space or a free machine can smell those.
Admin
"Turn it off for a bit and see if anything bad happens."
I live by this rule.
Admin
Even worse, have a directory called "scratch" or "not_backed_up" or "volatile", and soon it will contain a significant amount of business-critical data...
Admin
Things are always better the second time around.