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My proudest hack and the hack I'm most known for both happened at the same company. My proudest (and also maybe least proud at the same time) was writing a BAS

My proudest hack and the hack I'm most known for both happened at the same company. My proudest (and also maybe least proud at the same time) was writing a BASH script that was able to successfully replicate a complex server environment that had been previously built by contractors for an essential service that we needed to re-deploy, both for growing regions, but also to resolve a possible security issue due to how the contractors had deployed it. I had to basically reverse engineer every aspect of the service, built a deployment backend that I triggered, and did all of it in a fully-automated way that would break in known manners if it failed. That script went on to be used to deploy the entire service globally to ~12 regions on hundreds of servers. The thing I'm most known for in that company was when I was working night-shift support and a customer called in with a server that had one of the drives fail on a Windows box, and apparently had decided it was worth saving $1/mo to not have backups. Because it was night-shift and nothing else crazy was going on, I decided to delve deep and I managed to get things back up by rebuilding their partition table by hand in a hex editor and avoiding some specific bad blocks so we could copy the data to a second drive DCOPS temporarily installed in the server, then we reinstalled the box and I migrated all their data back and brought their website back up. It took me around 9 hours, and at the end of it, the customer called in to complain about how long their site had been down, gave me the whole spiel. I had ended up staying late, so handed things off to the most senior person on the next shift that had a chance of understanding what I had done, and when I got done transferring the call I walked up two floors to talk to them directly to warm handoff and could hear the customer screaming through their headset from 3 cubes away. I became a legend for doing the most thankless task anyone had ever done for a customer in support.

dementis 4y ago
I basically have done the same thing on both occasions except the first one I have oddly done multiple times. One of the occasions still felt like I wasted all of my time and effort too because it was for a custom HPC environment(I was performing a major OS upgrade that also involved getting a lot programs to work on a 64 bit OS when they were originally written for a 16 or 32 bit OS) that was trashed within two months after the environment was fully up and running. The client not only bought new hardware(after repetitively telling me they wouldn't have a budget to do that for a couple of years) but also pulled a 180 on the decision that certain Opensource tools could be used within the environment after a code review and approval process was completed. Did you try to recover the corrupted windows partition table first using either Testdisk by CGSecurity or Hiren's BootCD? If it was on a UNIX or Linux file system that sort of thing can be recovered a lot easier thanks to alternate superblocks and the ability to basically copy the partition sectors from another disk that is the same size with the same partitioning thanks to the dd command.

dementis 4y ago

I basically have done the same thing on both occasions except the first one I have oddly done multiple times. One of the occasions still felt like I wasted all of my time and effort too because it was for a custom HPC environment(I was performing a major OS upgrade that also involved getting a lot programs to work on a 64 bit OS when they were originally written for a 16 or 32 bit OS) that was trashed within two months after the environment was fully up and running. The client not only bought new hardware(after repetitively telling me they wouldn't have a budget to do that for a couple of years) but also pulled a 180 on the decision that certain Opensource tools could be used within the environment after a code review and approval process was completed. Did you try to recover the corrupted windows partition table first using either Testdisk by CGSecurity or Hiren's BootCD? If it was on a UNIX or Linux file system that sort of thing can be recovered a lot easier thanks to alternate superblocks and the ability to basically copy the partition sectors from another disk that is the same size with the same partitioning thanks to the dd command.