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by marcosdumay 3499 days ago
Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?)

I've been one for a short while, and get to play devops from time to time. When I see a machine so broken that it can't give me a tty, it's time for a reboot (if last command caused it - actually don't remember it ever happening), full reinstall, or trash. I won't lose any time recovering it. If there's some important log on the disks or anything, mount the disk on another machine.

Now, I've recovered a broken machine plenty of times at home. I've edited files with sed and pipes because I broke every other editor available. I have never actually edited the memory with sed, but I could if I had to. But all that is at home, where it's fun to create a crazy configuration, and totally not fun to throw things away. It's fun, but completely unproductive.

1 comments

> Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?)

Before then I was an sysadmin for a little while, but I don't really see what difference the role makes. I've never had a job where I didn't at some point need to deal with a legacy serial console of some sort misrouted through incompatible aggregators, etc, in order to deal with a networking problem and/or auth problems.

The idea that I would blind reboot a system in a failure mode I can't diagnose is not something I would normally consider until I've exhausted all means and only if I know a fair bit about it. I'm sure some of my colleagues did things like that as some were developers with relatively little system knowledge, but only a few were stupid enough to mention losing failure data through laziness to senior staff.

> It's fun, but completely unproductive.

? If I had a page for you should have diagnosed and every time you hit a swiss cheese failure with that attitude than I wouldn't use computers at all anymore.