A keystroke away from Doom.

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 18 Oct 2013, Scott Sullivan wrote:

> So, I just discovered crontab -r.
>
> While working on a new cron job, I wanted to check what I had done for my 
> personal user account on my personal server. I login, type crontab -e, or so 
> I had though until I didn't get the editor. On a standard Qwerty Keyboard, 
> the 'e' and the 'r' are right next to each other. '-e' edit, '-r' deletes 
> the users crontab, and of course I typo'd it.

Yes it has always amazed me that the crontab command was written this way 
given that qwerty keyboards were standard in those days, as now.

I keep a copy of personal crontab entries in crontab.bak thusly:

crontab -l > ~/crontab.bak

Hmm, now I think abouut it, I should put that in cron ;)

> Small things like this can make or break your day, and stresses that 'RAID' 
> is not a back-up, and the importance of having back-ups! Most of you know

Yes indeed.  Well said.

> I want to thank Hugh for his inspiring 'War Story' posts. It was those that 
> made me think to post this little Gem. What are your worst keystroke stories?

Here's a couple:

(1) I once spent many hours writing a script for my personal use only to 
accidentally delete it rght after I had finished.  While I do backups 
nightly these had not run yet.  I was so annoyed with myself I stayed up 
late rewriting the script, which I completed it about half of the time of 
the original.

Morale: Take a copy as soon as the work you've done is worth saving - not 
once you are done.

FWIW I already knew this moral but managed to ignore it on this 
occassion.

(2) One night I was up late working on a problem.  I stayed up late 
working on this because I was stuck trying to solve it.  The problem was 
that the database backups were not restoring properly, and as we all know 
a backup needs to be tested to be a good backup.  The developers were 
loading real data in preparation for launch so I had to get this working 
soon.

I was dumping the database to run another restore test and I put the 
redirect around the wrong way.  In my tired state I thought I had 
over-written the database. My stress levels went up rather suddenly.  I 
assessed the situation and confirmed that I had not in fact damaged the 
database.  This reminded me of another important moral I ostensibly 
already knew but wasn't following:

Moral: Don't do sysadmin when extremely tired.  It will only end in 
tears.

Meta Moral: If you know a 'best practice', follow it.

Cheers,

Rob

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