54 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
# Scary sysadmin Halloween stories
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- **期号**: SRE Weekly Issue #248（2020-12-13）
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- **作者**: Dean Wilson
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- **链接**: https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/scary-sysadmin-halloween-stories/
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## 简介
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I shouldn’t enjoy reading these so much… got any of your own to share?
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## 正文
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# Scary sysadmin Halloween stories
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Gremlin recently ran a small twitter hashtag challenge called “#talesfromtheNOC” where people were invited to share their scary sysadmin stories. Reading through of the entries I was reminded of one slightly less than welcoming environment that led to a lot of learning, frustration and trepidation. I’ve captured my posts here.
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## Opening Volley
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I was hired as the new sysadmin at a financial services company and had no hand over as my predecessor had apparently ‘left on short notice’. On my first day the CTO and I took a trip to the colo to check the asset register against the running machines.
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After unlocking the back of the first rack I gave the door a little tug
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and it didn’t budge. “It sticks sometimes. Give it a decent pull.” said
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the CTO helpfully, so I put a *little* more force behind it and yanked
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the door open. Luckily the company never skimped on cable tie quality so
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I managed to pop out every individually tied to the rack door(!) power
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cable in one swing. It took a moment for us to realise what had happened
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as dozens of fans were suddenly silenced…
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I later learned more about the meaning of ‘left on short notice’ and found a number of other little presents over my first few months in that role.
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## The second incursion
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Same place as the previous story: I plugged the KVM into the management
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machine and was greeted by a full X-windows session. Unusual but not the
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first time I’d seen it. I logged in, decided to see if the previous
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admin still had access and ran `visudo`. The process seemed to hang and
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I paused for a few moments to consider what was going on.
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Shuddering slowly to life on a heavily underspecced machine was a full
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install and process of Eclipse with `/etc/sudoers` open. `$EDITOR` was set to
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`eclipse`. What kind of person does that? A
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[MONSTER!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7X3LYGV_N8&t=40)
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## Saboteur Strikes
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To finish the ‘trilogy of twattery’ the same person used to leave a
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sendmail m4 file on the machine that DID NOT generate the running `.cf`
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file. So if you didn’t move it out before the machines rebooted the
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daemon regenerated its config and you came up with broken mail servers.
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That was made slightly more annoying coupled with the booby trapped power cabling previously mentioned.
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It was a very long first day.
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