Here's an even more hilarious tale from my sysadmin days. I was promoted to that role, after the incumbent guy just quit, without really knowing what I was doing. It came with a decent increase in wages. I had already proved some moxie by reconfiguring the Ultrix OS on a MicroVAX. That was a little disruptive, but the guy's machine was working fine afterwards, and my actions were generating buzz in the office.
So I got my hands on the root passwords for all the office servers. In particular, there was a SPARC 2 that had both "intranet" and external functions. I pored over manual pages for awhile and I discovered this amazing concept called "C2 security". It described security manuals which I could not obtain or read and it promised to tighten up the system according to federal regs. How could I resist?
So I found the SunOS command called something like "C2conv"; I su'd and I ran it. Much to my horror the /etc/passwd file got sort of ripped apart into /etc/shadow (which was a very unfamiliar concept in 1994) and the system became sort of non-functional. Also to my exploding-head level horror, there was literally no such thing as "C2unconv" because it was a one-way conversion. So I had to sort of manually pick through the changes and fix it up before my boss really noticed. And I did get it working again. But I was terrified by that.
Obviously, for our operational network, working with telecoms and large-scale customers who leased T-1s and so forth, we had rigid policies on scheduled maintenance, customer notification, outage windows and so forth. I really had no clue if any of that applied to my sysadmin job and the servers under my care. It was a wild ride during the "dot-com boom", I tell ya.
So I got my hands on the root passwords for all the office servers. In particular, there was a SPARC 2 that had both "intranet" and external functions. I pored over manual pages for awhile and I discovered this amazing concept called "C2 security". It described security manuals which I could not obtain or read and it promised to tighten up the system according to federal regs. How could I resist?
So I found the SunOS command called something like "C2conv"; I su'd and I ran it. Much to my horror the /etc/passwd file got sort of ripped apart into /etc/shadow (which was a very unfamiliar concept in 1994) and the system became sort of non-functional. Also to my exploding-head level horror, there was literally no such thing as "C2unconv" because it was a one-way conversion. So I had to sort of manually pick through the changes and fix it up before my boss really noticed. And I did get it working again. But I was terrified by that.
Obviously, for our operational network, working with telecoms and large-scale customers who leased T-1s and so forth, we had rigid policies on scheduled maintenance, customer notification, outage windows and so forth. I really had no clue if any of that applied to my sysadmin job and the servers under my care. It was a wild ride during the "dot-com boom", I tell ya.