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Ask HN: What's the most entertaining story of a technical mistake you've made?
We all make mistakes and sometimes looking back at those mistakes can provide a good laugh. I'm curious to hear stories others might have.
My favourite is from when I was in grad school and I connected two network interfaces from the same subnet onto a virtual bridge. This effectively meant my box was repeating all traffic on our lab's subnet. I was trying to debug my own network problems and was puzzled why I was getting duplicate ping replies. I left for class and figured I'd debug it later. Halfway to my class I finally clued into my mistake and rushed back to the lab. One of my labmates asked me if I was having Internet problems. I secretly reached under my desk to pull one of the two network cables and said no and we all got on with our day :)
- p0d 6y agoOne day I went from my office to my comms room to fart and didn't notice the nice young lady follow behind me seeking technical support. I can still remember her smiley face turn to shock as she breathed in the foul air. That day I went from IT legend to dirtbird.
- m33k44 6y agoYou bloody not only owe me a keyboard but the whole freaking computer!
- Rincevant 6y agoI love it. Good evening.Kelolette. Im hungry A LOT !!! KIMCHI AGAIN
- gtirloni 6y agoExecuted a DELETE command on the users table without a WHERE clause. This caused a major outage at a very large US telecom. Luckily, our DBAs were quick to restore it. This was in 2001 and doing postmortems wasn't common back then.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ianpurton 6y agorm -rf . Was trying to delete files in a folder but had root access to a prod server in another window. Wiped out a server that was supporting around 20 traders. Went to the backup tapes and restored that server from a previous day's backup. No one ever noticed.