Re: [Hampshire] error competition

On 19/08/11 10:21, Edward Beckmann wrote:
> Hi All
>
> As it's friday and I have just caused my longsuffering sysadmin to moan at
> my stupidity yet again , I thought I would offer a challenge for amusing
> typos or human errors. Examples could be:
>
> who can do the most damage to a system with the fewest number of keystrokes?
>
> what duff error gives the most spectacular failure?
>
> what error can trigger the longest chain of disasters?
>
> I am sure you get the gist ....
>
>
>
> Bonus marks for anyone brave / foolhardy enough to say "I did ..." as
> opposed to "I knew someone who did ..."

Although not in the "fewest keystrokes" category, perhaps this goes in:
"duff error *of judgement* gives the most spectacular failure?" and
"what error *of judgement* can trigger the longest chain of disasters?".

This would have been back in the days of Slackware 2.x at a guess, I
wanted to build something that needed a newer libc version, so with the
naive thought of "how hard can it be?" I embarked on upgrading the core
C library on my (i386!) system.

A long weekend later, I had a working system again, with the fresh new
libc installed - and the software I wanted to build that had started the
whole odyssey....... still didn't build - <thud>!

Live and learn - and give thanks everyday for VBox......

Chris