![]() They'd been too busy working 50 hours a week doing data entry into the new system. That's when I found out that the office admins, who were tasked with doing backups, hadn't thought backups were important and so hadn't done them for three weeks. After a few minutes of questioning and forensics, it was pretty clear what had happened, so I said we'd have to restore from backup. I arrived on site about 15 minutes later to find one very nervous programmer. But partway through the process, he panicked again and turned off the system during a floppy read. After he started the procedure, the disk was repartitioned and formatted. Up until that moment, all that was wrong was that the boot files had been corrupted - a five-minute fix. So he went through the floppy boot process again, pressed Y and Enter. He took a moment to ruminate and reasoned that if he were very careful, maybe he could use the disks to fix things. They reminded him how important it was to get things back up right away. He fumbled and said he was working on it. and then turned the computer off.Īt that moment, the office admins came in and asked him how things were going. He looked at the screen for a long minute. Up popped a prompt that said "WARNING! Continuing with this procedure will erase the present contents of your hard disk. He again looked at the disks and saw a disk labeled "N2 File system," so he inserted that in the drive and pressed Enter to continue. The system came up and asked for him to insert the file system floppy. He looked through the disks and saw that one was labeled "N1 Boot Disk," so he inserted it in the floppy drive and restarted the system. ![]() He tried to figure out what he could do next and thought, "Maybe I can find the disks for the system and fix this." So he asked where the disks were and the office admins found them in the safe. He restarted the system and a message popped up on the screen: "Failure to boot." At this point, he really began to panic. and turned the system off right in the middle of running fsck. The screen output from fsck, however, can be somewhat frightening if you don't know what it's doing.Īfter seeing a bunch of "Deleting File XXXX" messages go by, Herman panicked. Xenix - being a Unix system - of course started up, discovered the file system had been improperly shut down, and immediately started running fsck to straighten things out. So he flicked off the power switch on the system. ![]() He figured if it worked for his computer, it would work for this one, too. He realized that when he turned off his computer at home and turned it back on, that seemed to cure almost all problems. They didn't want to risk the wrath of their boss. They pressured him more - they just couldn't wait 45 minutes. #PANIC MODE UPDATE#He left a message and went to update the office admins. Herman called me, but I was out of the office for about 45 minutes (this was in the days before cell phones and pagers). Instead, he told his programmer that he should place a call to me to get help. #PANIC MODE HOW TO#Somehow he had forgotten the cheat sheet I had left him that told him how to identify and kill a process. Somehow he had forgotten that there were 15 terminals scattered around the office. Somehow, Dwayne had forgotten that the console had 12 distinct sessions and all he had to do was have the office admins Alt-F key to a different screen. who had been given more extensive training by necessity, even if he didn't want to learn it. The office admins put pressure on him to do something, so he called Dwayne. Dwayne hadn't thought it was important for Herman to have anything but user training for Xenix, so he couldn't really do much. Their boss was exceptionally impatient and demanding, so they wanted to know what Herman could do to help them. They told him that the system was locked up and that they couldn't continue their data entry. [Ever worked with a technology that seemed to defy all logic or simply drove you up the wall? Submit your story to four weeks after the system was up and running, Herman was on-site doing some coding and the two office admins came into his office. ![]() Dwayne, who was running behind on his schedule to get the application done and fully taking advantage of the multi-user system, hired Herman, a college student, to do some coding for him. ![]() The application had been written by a local consultant - let's call him Dwayne - who knew FoxBASE in single-user mode on DOS but didn't know Xenix and didn't really want to. We had a client that purchased a 286-based server running SCO Xenix to run a FoxBASE application in a multi-user environment. Lack of knowledge + heat of the moment = bad decisions I started in the industry in the early eighties and worked as a technical salesperson for a local micro-computer company. ![]()
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