Never in my life I was scared as today.
I recently left a big company to work for a small one as the first internal developer.
Had a small issue in the production server. The fix was easy, just remove a single table entry. And... *drum roll*... I forgot to add a where clause. All orders were lost.
No idea if we had backups or anything, I quickly called the one other IT dude in the company.
He had no clue where are the backups and how to find them.
Having some experience with Nmap, I quickly scanned our network and found a Nas device.
There was a backup, whole VHD backup. 300GB of it, the download speed is around 512kb/s. No way I can fix it before management finds out, but then an idea came to mind. Old glorious 7zip. Managed to extract only the database files, sent them to the server and quickly swapped them. Everything was fine... The manager connected 5 minutes later. Scariest 45 minutes of my life...

Every year my team runs an award ceremony during which people win “awards” for mistakes throughout the year. This years was quite good.

The integration partner award- one of our sysAdmins was talking with a partner from another company over Skype and was having some issues with azure. He intended to send me a small rant but instead sent “fucking azure can go fuck itself, won’t let me update to managed disks from a vhd built on unmanaged” to our jv partner.

Sysadmin wannabe award (mine)- ran “Sudo chmod -R 700 /“ on one of our dev systems then had to spend the next day trying to fix it 😓

The ain’t no sanity clause award - someone ran a massive update query on a prod database without a where clause

The dba wannabe award - one of our support guys was clearing out a prod dB server to make some disk space and accidentally deleted one of the databases devices bringing it down.

The open source community award - one of the devs had been messing about with an apache proxy on a prod web server and it ended up as part of a botnet

There were others but I can’t remember them all

systemd is like: this service/process is throwing warning during boot, so let's wait 120 million seconds and hope the warning magically goes away because fuck you user who wants to get to his desktop. what's why!

What the hell is WRONG with Windows 10. Why does it need so much storage space? I get to only use 219+38.6+13.8 GiB and Windows gets to use 564 GiB of data to piggyback on data and storage space to push nonsense updates to user who do not want them. Use your own fucking servers, MS. I wish this fucking OS burns in hell.

List of things one of my Python projects needs:

- cross-platform IMA/VFD/VHD/VHDX/qcow/VMDK/IMG/DSK/others image read/extract support that doesn't need admin/root privs (so no, can't use dd or mount)
- custom DB format (for speedups when indexing files and retrieving info based on hash) and converter from previous DB format
- GUI or actually good CLI
- massive speedups

kill me now

Me: I want to make all our application directories a separate virtual disk for easy resizeability

Project lead: Why? We have lvm!

I might stab somebody, myself included.

I need help understanding the differences in VM HDD images...
I use VHDs as I can mount them in Windows as the difference in speed doing large copy operations, bidirectional transfer, partition shenanigans, etc. inside and outside the VM is *HUGE*, but what's the difference between VHD, VDI, QCOW2 and VMDK?

tl;dr: azure support are utter bollocks

so about late june-ish, my azure student subscription expired, which i wasn't notified about. but that's fine, surely once it's expired i can get my data back, right?

...right?

i try to download the .vhd file with my nodejs project on, and then contact their support after failing to mount the vhd. i asked them whether they could get my data for me (or at least provide some clear instructions, in case i mounted the vhd incorrectly). instead i was told to do loads of things, creating blobs, making snapshots, etc... all of which did absolutely nothing.

mid-august, i'm still trying to get my data back, when i get a call from, you guessed it, microsoft azure. a manager had told me that all my data had been lost, and that i was eligible for $500 in credit in compensation. i was angry (and rightly so), and refused their offer. i emailed azure support again expressing my anger, for them to tell me that my data wasn't lost...?

come to mid-september, and and i was fed up of waiting for my project. i wanted to finalise the fucker and launch the website, but azure had stalled me for well over two months. i had to put some money towards azure just to start up the vps, zip up the project, transfer it to another vps, and shut it back down.

and that kids, is why i wouldn't ever recommend azure.

ps: yes, i'm backing up files daily from now on