Sun lusers and stop-A.

[reddragdiva]

Stop-A is the Vulcan Nerve Pinch on SPARC systems. It's much more dire than Control-Alt-Delete. It's like hitting 'reset' except the system is only mostly dead afterwards and can be brought back to life. Just.

Sometimes, foolish people teach even more foolish people that it exists, and suggest it's a good idea when things seem to have locked up. This is pretty much never the case.

The user in question called in a ticket saying he couldn't see the outboard disk pack. Moreover, he was not pleased that responding to this ticket took over 18 hours (I was away ill on the day he called), and opined that we had some problems to overcome in our responsiveness.

Close questioning (oh, what a lovely phrase that is) revealed that he had done stop-A, boot; the disks in the disk pack were inconsistent (the same thing that happens when you kill Windows without shutting down properly), and he didn't have the root password to run the fsck (Unix equivalent of Scandisk), so he just told it to boot without mounting them at all. Then he called us.

"WHO told you about stop-A? WHO said this would be a good idea?"
"I - I - don't recall ... I, er, read it somewhere."

A likely story. In any case, the fear of God has been reinstalled in the luser in question.

It's down to direct, personal, hands-on reinstallation of religion. One luser at a time.

I have another work rant brewing, but it will be fully developed by tomorrow evening. Suffice to say that I am deeply displeased this evening and expect to be even more displeased tomorrow.

Photo update: First public works of camera up: Deathboy and Spermwhale band photos. Just the bands, people shots to come later.

Comments

If at least it'd work when I need it..

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

..I'd attach keyboards to my Suns. But since Murphys Laws still hold true, it doesn't.