I've just had a support call assigned to me for something I fixed months ago. Upon investigating it seems someone else has managed to overwrite a directory with versions of the files from last summer, wiping out about 5 bug fixes I'd implemented for that part of the site. They've done it on development and production. God knows how.
What makes it worse is we're hoping to implement our source control procedures in the next week or so. If this happened then, it would be a 2 minute job to fix. As it stands it looks like the rest of my day could be taken up with this now.
Apologies if this is really boring for most of you, just wanted to vent a little bit.
You've got my sympathies. Hubby is an Industrial Maintenance guy, and he had a similar problem at one company he worked for. He went to fix a machine on his line, and at the same time redid all the settings and parameters--got the machine to 97% efficiency, far beyond what it had done previously. He got praised for it at a meeting--so of course someone decided to 'improve' on his adjustments, and blew the efficiency completely. Butch had to work for hours to redo the settings...and then made a map of the parameters (This was a machine bigger than a VW Bus with a lot more moving parts).
After a couple months of having to redo the settings almost weekly, the engineering dept. decided to 'set up the machines properly for optimum efficiency' and Butch finally threw up his hands in disgust (engineering took precedence over Maintenance).
They never did get close to 97% agian...at least not by the time that Butch moved on to another job.
Well we have lots of backups, but they're only useful if we know when the files were overwritten. It now seems it might be a bigger problem than first thought...
CHasR wrote:... just think of the beautiful, dark, rich , full-bodied, creamy, foamy pint (or whatever floats your boat) awaiting you at the day's end.
At the moment I'm thinking a cigarette, a curry, bottle of wine and 5 or 6 episodes of Firefly (got the box set the other day) while lying on the couch.
chrisoff wrote:Turns out I was looking for the files in the wrong place...
That's just reasearch, and you were successful... you (finally) found them!
anniemcu
--- "You are what you do, not what you claim to believe." -Gene A. Statler
--- "Olé to you, none-the-less!" - Elizabeth Gilbert
--- http://www.sassafrassgrove.com
chrisoff wrote:I've just had a support call assigned to me for something I fixed months ago. Upon investigating it seems someone else has managed to overwrite a directory with versions of the files from last summer, wiping out about 5 bug fixes I'd implemented for that part of the site. They've done it on development and production. God knows how.
What makes it worse is we're hoping to implement our source control procedures in the next week or so. If this happened then, it would be a 2 minute job to fix. As it stands it looks like the rest of my day could be taken up with this now.
Apologies if this is really boring for most of you, just wanted to vent a little bit.
this is the sort of thing that makes me want to go out and chop wood or plow a field and make all these weird technological maze-like tasks go away. All you'll get for your trouble at that task is eye-strain and chair hemorrhoids. The shining sun and sweet breezes will continue without your witnessing while you poke at a keyboard. it sucks. Sympathies, lad.
this is the other side of tech support from a person who needed to receive quality support. i did this a few years ago at work. the place where i work developed a brand new program years ago. i was briefly involved in the initial stages and never used the program again until......my boss and his secretary both quit at the same time. she didn't like him, she gave them 6 months to get rid of him, they didn't, so she quit. he knew he was down the tubes without her because she did everything for him, so he quit. i was the only person left who had ever used the program so they told me to start using it again.
after a couple of months of doing stuff, the computer and the finance people came to visit me together. i had caused a check for $1 million dollars that was meant for an agency to go to a little old lady. they caught this after the check was mailed and they managed to reach the lady to tell her not to cash the check. they asked me nicely to never do this again. i said ok.
the next month, they came to visit me again. this time, it was a check for $500,000. they asked me not to do this again. i said ok but i also asked them what i was doing that was causing this. they said that they'd have to check into this. well, they found out and came back and told me that i wasn't following procedures. well, i still had my notes from the initial stages of this program. i was following the last procedures that i had, so they had to retrain me. seems the support people didn't realize that i would need to be retrained.
the one nice thing about all of this is that the agency that was supposed to receive those checks had to wait for them to be re-issued. this agency had fired me a couple of years earlier to save money and hire somone cheaper.
Rose tint my world. Keep me safe from my trouble and pain. 白飞梦
There is something that I've seen bite my fellow engineers at least twice that I know of, maybe more that I don't.
Since some of you are into Linux / UNIX / *ix, I'll post it here, with a bit of explanation for the rest.
*ix machines are set up a bit like Windows boxes, with a nested directory structure, except that in Windows you start at C:\, and in UNIX you start with true root / . Just like you have C:\WINDOWS, you have system directories in UNIX named /etc, /usr, and /var. In Windows your own directory where your documents are might be callled C:\Windows\Documents & Settings\YourName\My Documents; in UNIX your home directory would be /home/yourname.
Ok, just like in DOS or Windows at the command prompt, if you are in a directory, you can use . to refer to your current directory, or .. to refer to the directory one level higher. So far so good?
The reason this works in UNIX is because there are two "files" in each directory which aren't really "real files," that set up that relationship for you. You can see them with the long directory listing command ls -al :
A further pecularity that both worlds share is that you can "hide" a file from a regular file listing by making its name start with a period, like this: .settings . And in both, you can do pattern-matching with the * character (called a "splat"), so that a* refers to all files that start with the letter a, b* is all files that start with b, and so on.
Now here's the question, boys n girls:
Lets say you have three users with home directories under /home, like this:
/home/user1
/home/user2
/home/user3
And you are working on a problem for user3; for some reason, there are some hidden files in his directory that he doesn't own.
No biggie, you think, I'll just set them back to his account, so as the superuser you issue a chown (change owner) command like this:
/home/user3$ chown user3 .*
A few minutes later, you get a frantic phone call from user1 and then from user2: "User3 owns all of my files?!?"
Ok, why did it happen?
If anybody posts the right answer over the weekend, I'll crown you the Official C-n-F Geek of the Day. If nobody posts it by Monday I'll post it myself.
Hrm... I should be able to answer that one as I worked almost exclusively with Unix when I was a Lackland, but that was years ago. I've forgotten much of it, along with a lot of the specifics of command line in general.
*goes to brush up on his command line knowledge*
"Yes... yes. This is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... This Land."
They've done it on development and production. 
Been there. Done that. 
you'll never get the work done so I'd better leave it go! 
Good luck!!
