mackwinston@feddit.uktoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•People have been cleaning their ears with cotton swabs for years. What other tools are being inadvertently used wrong?
4·
1 year agoCarrier grade NAT. For instance, on our local mobile phone network, thousands of handsets will have the same public IP address.
An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren’t all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g.
ls
)$ ls -l sh: ls: command not found
So he went on over to the system admin’s office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:
# rm -rf / tmp/*.log ^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C # ls -l sh: ls: command not found # stat /bin/ls sh: stat: command not found
A few seconds after hitting return, and the
rm
command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn’t been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.