Stupid questions asked by my users
What's wrong with my computer?
One user turned his own personal Laptop upside down while it was turned on (in windows)..The Hard drive did
not crash there and then but he did have some disk trouble later on.....
How do I tilt my monitor?
can you clean the keyboards?
Can you please explain how the different parts the computer work?
What does the disk do? (from a guy who has been using a computer for about
two years....)
Do I type C: to change to the C drive? (this is from a guy with a PC
on his desk for over a year......)
Can you download a driver for a soundcard from the internet for me? (This was
for his home computer..)
One guy,for whatever reason,printed out config.sys,enboldened by this
achivement he prints out mouse.sys expecting a text file-it is ,of course,
a binary file which makes the printer (a laserjet 4SX) wet itself causing
it to print 4 characters per sheet...He did not realise his error until
about 60+ pages were printed.....
User came to me saying "I lost my file etc..",I wander on over..Transpires
said user was looking for the file within word for windows..For a hour..
User did not know about the search option in file manager..User had only been
using windows for at least three years ...
"I can't log in..Could do it yesterday..." Transpires luser was "loging in" in upper case on a unix machine..
One guy decided to print out the content of the enviromental variable
$SHELL-this contains the path to his shell,which is a binary program.
Result is about 40 pages of rubbish was printed before we could stop
it.....
Received a phone call from a guy who had exited from microsoft word without
saving his file-wanted to know how he could get it back.......
People moving PC's without turning them off...One guy who did this managed to
destroy a network card in the process....
I really really really REALLY hate people asking me questions about their pc
at home-expecting me to know the error messages produced by a BIOS written ten
years ago......
My father overheard this little gem in a Tandy shop...
"Well,IBM don't write softwear......"err,os/2? Anyway that was the manager...Mmmm...
UNIX-Wierd,wacky and wild.....
Windows woe...
Something silly happened some time ago-I help run a Sparc 1000E along with some smaller
Suns-one of the smaller suns(called Fred) has /usr/local/bin on it,which all the
others mount by NFS.I came in one morning to be greeted with the cry "FRED is SLOW!!",
taking a look I see that NFS deamons are hogging the CPU..After much playing around,coffee etc
Fred is rebooted-only for the problem to return...On another sun using a program called
traffic I see that 1000E and fred are spraying out packets to each other like crazy-okay we though reboot the
1000E-as we asked all our users to log off we found that two PC's had hung in windows which when rebooted
solved the problem...Nobody told us that the PC's had hung!!
Moral PC's + windows +solaris = trouble....
SparcArray Trauma.
Once upon a time it was decided that Solaris 2.4 on the 1000E should be upgraded to 2.5.The 1000E has a nice
fat SparcStorage array attached to it which has all out user files on it..One fateful day we upgraded
and all seemed to be going well until the machine rebooted-and LO! it said that it could not see the Array-cold
sweat time..After a lot of hassle we recovered the array-here are the sequence of instructions... (by the
way I do not except any liability if you are mad enough to try this and something nasty happens..)
Stage one-create Small Rootdg Group
Prerequsists:-Install Solaris,install volume manager,reboot.
Create a 2 cylinder rew partition on a disk
Do not run VXINSTALL
set initital VM operating mode to disable.
- #vxconfigd -m disable
- #vxdctl init
- #vxdg init rootdg
- #vxdctl add disk c0t3d0s7 type=simple
- #vxdisk -f init c0t3d0s7 type=simple
- #vxdg adddisk c0t3d0s7
- #vxdctl enable
- #rm /etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db
stage two mv_rootdg_data_to_datadg
- vxdiskadm (need to temporarily import original rootdg to temp disk group)
- xvdg -tfc -n temp_dg import 81818006.1025.p4m-ods
- xvprint to display disk group info...
- we now need to start volumes which we want to recover
- #vxvol -g temp_dg start mart1
- #mount /dev/xv/dsk/temp_dg/mart1 /martinsf
you can now use backup etc to back up files....
We will now move all the volumes which have data on from the original rootdg,create another diskgroup
and put the volumes in there....
- #vxdisk list |grep temp_dg make note of disknames and c?t?d?s numbers
- #vxprint -ht -g temp_dg make note of volumes you want to move to the new disk group
- #vxprint -hmQq -g temp_dg maer1 {any other volumes]>/tmp/movers
- #umount /martintf
- #vxvol -g temp_dg stop mart1
- #vxedit -g temp_dg -r rm mart1
- #vxdg -g temp_dg rmdisk disk01 disk02
- #vxdg deport temp_dg
- #vxdg init new_dg disk01=c2t0d0s2
- #vxdg -g new_dg adddisk disk02=c2t1d0s2 [add other disks on the same line]
- #vxmake -g new_dg -d /tmp/movers
- #vxvol -g new_dg init active mart1
- #vxprint -ht -g new_dg
- #mount /dev/xv/dsk/new_dg/mart1 /martintf
- edit vfstab to mount new volume
- coffee
Something similar occured recently-a power cut happened which ,of course,caused all our unix machines
to reboot(UPS's are a rarity)-the big sun is not protected(no cash when we bought it) so it and the Sparc
Array went down.When the sun came back up,it could not see the sparc array (which can take some time to power
up),so the sun reconfigures itself without the array...Shutting down and doing a boot -r did not help...
My Worst Mistakes...
Confession time...
My worst one so far was deleting a unix kernal from a Sco machine.Lucky for me the machine was on
its last legs (dying hard disk) so I guess it might have been a form of euthanasia.....
- Back to the first page...
- Back to the sysadmin page...
Last Updated 24/10/96 by Ian