Posted on: March 31st, 2010 by Famous Phil

I’ve spent the last year thinking of ways that I could effectively make a decent April Fools joke.  Unfortunately, I am not a creative person in any aspect and I often end up using the ideas of others to make seemingly creative and innovative progress.  I’ve never let this stand in my way of progress and I never intend to let it.  So instead of doing a prank, I’m going to discuss some “fails” over the past year that I’ve found that I liked for one reason or another.

But first… A few pranks that I was tossing ideas around for but ultimately decided to let go of.  Maybe some year

• Modify famousphil.com to have a “make believe” virus that would appear to infect your browser / computer.  I’m sure that you’ve seen those virus ads on malicious sites, I was considering making one of these, but not nearly as destructive.  I decided against this because users would be required to click ok… and well most users tend to click ok without reading (in my experience).  I didn’t really want to infect or compromise systems with something thrown together in a few hours for something like today.
• Cause intentional intermittent downtime to famousphil.  Of course, with this, readers may become discouraged and never come back and that isn’t good.
• Post an article on a major subject related to server administration that is actually a huge lie with fake commands that actually cause more confusion / damage than it is worth.  Obviously, april fools shouldn’t cause harmful damage so this was out the door immediately.
• Finally: edit all of the servers I manage to make common commands / operations looks like major errors occurred (when they really didn’t).  I considered this, but I’m not in touch with my other staff members as often as I would like, so they might consider it a real emergency and wake me up early on my sleep in day!

So now onto some of the fails of the year that I really didn’t like when they occurred:

• Last June: LXAdmins owner commits suicide after a major web hosting company is hacked and over 100,000 websites are deleted instantly.  It is rumored that this is caused by the owner of this web hosting company stored his root passwords in his GMail account which had a weak password.  A Matthouse  Virtual Server was one of the 100,000 that was affected (although sufficient backups are in place)   More Info
• Exchange 2003 and 2007 Server: I began implementing an Exchange Email system for myself around June.  I remember that when I first implemented 2003, I really hated everything about it.  I then upgraded to 2007 and didn’t really like that, so now I am at 2010 and I really like 2010.  The failure is that I spent well over 100 hours of my valuable time figuring out what I was going to do about email.  I’m still learning a lot about the backend of Exchange.
• My backup system, in December, I looked at my backup routine with a critical lens.  This was obviously outdated and I also was not even backing up half of the data.  I have since found much better methods to backups and they are implemented in the production systems.
• My inability to mount a drive as read / write in single user mode causes a 4 hour server outage.  About a month ago, I rebooted the main web server that hosts 80% of the Matthouse client sites to test my work on modifying the underlying disk partition structure.  It turns out that I was missing a single flag that I blogged about.
• My inability to read the server ID before requesting a complete wipe by the datacenter.  This caused a 24 hour outage around late December, early January.  This fact still sort of embarrasses me to this day, but I doubt I will ever do this again!  Good thing I fixed my backups just a week before this.  Good news is that the backups work perfectly!
• Last December, I was grading exams for my job as a Teaching Assistant with a few other TAs.  I was asked to generate a key for the other graders since I wrote a section of problems.  I should know the answers to my own problems… but for some reason I made a slight mistake and that propagated onto a little over 60 exams before it was caught.  It took another hour to fix.
• Last Failure: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5.1 Daylight Savings Time option missing: I use a custom built version of this Windows version that omitted the daylight savings time.  Because time shifted ahead a few weeks ago, I actually missed an appointment to figure out what I need to do in terms of classes.  My phone shifted correctly, but the times in my calendar never adjusted themselves, so I ended up doing it manually after discovering I was exactly 1 hour late for my appointment.

Obviously, I’m not perfect, but I do find that I learn from my mistakes quickly.  Hope you enjoyed reading a few of my biggest failures over the past year.  My next blog is going to deal with sound wave analysis and the “Loudness Wars”, but I need a bit more research before I jump into the topic.

Tags: april fools, fail
Posted in Student Life
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