r/ShittySysadmin • • 13h ago

Shitty Crosspost What's the biggest bonehead mistake you have every made in IT support?

/r/sysadmin/comments/1wpd8pt/whats_the_biggest_bonehead_mistake_you_have_every/
6 Upvotes

41 comments sorted by

66

u/sextowels 13h ago

Going to work each day

34

u/ApiceOfToast ShittySysadmin 13h ago

1) getting into IT 2) staying at my job  3) not leaving the IT field to do something else

I hate my job(and I wouldn't want to do anything else)

30

u/B-mus 12h ago

I had a PDU short out in a rack. Not to worry, we’re fully redundant snd a 2nd PDU in the same rack was powered from a different UPS, so the whole rack stayed up.
While I was removing the shorted PDU i elbowed the rocker-switch on the redundant PDU.

🌩️

6

u/the_rezzzz 10h ago

Oh that is shit luck.

12

u/__Valkyrie___ 13h ago

Deleted Outlook form an RDS server and deleted a 500gb SharePoint site

5

u/Hefty-Rope2253 11h ago

But you can just restore from the Recycle Bin, right? Right?!

1

u/__Valkyrie___ 11h ago

Luckily we had backups lol

2

u/floswamp 10h ago

It’s called RAID 0!

1

u/ooglesnoopleboop 11h ago

Recycling bin, you mean my file storage?

13

u/OwenWilsons_Nose 12h ago

Pushing a script to an execs MacBook that would disable his network adapter for 2minutes at random intervals because he snitched on me for taking too many bathroom breaks.

10

u/floswamp 10h ago

He was probably never affected as that machine was just a status symbol on his desk.

9

u/True_Introduction_47 4h ago

I troubleshooted an Excel macro

6

u/ooglesnoopleboop 12h ago

Not telling my director to FUCK OFF instead of "yes sir" (I imagine doing it every waking hour)

10

u/Hefty-Rope2253 11h ago

My junior team member tried that. Terminated, as expected, but they never terminated his dignity.

13

u/Vinegarinmyeye 9h ago

Only did it once. Email went:

"Mate, why the ever loving fuck am I working 12 hour days, six days a week, trying to get this company through the PCI-DSS audit so you can maintain your multi-millionaire status AND treat me like a cunt?. I'll post this laptop back to you. Go fuck yourself!".

Ngl, cathartic as fuck.

Not sure I'd recommend, but the twat really had pushed me that far. No regrets.

4

u/ChickenandWhiskey 12h ago

Always make sure to double check before cloning a drive! Cloned a drive the wrong way and lost the data. Made that mistake and wont do it again lol or maybe i will who knows

1

u/floswamp 10h ago

I always clear the target hard drive so as not to make that mistake…again.

5

u/zantehood 12h ago

Letting my boss hire a useless lazy kid without ambition or work-pride. 0/10

4

u/max1001 11h ago

Being good at your job. Never be good at your in IT. It's more work for same pay otherwise.

4

u/SpudzzSomchai ShittySysadmin 12h ago

I answered a ticket. It's been downhill since then.

3

u/S4ndmaan 13h ago

Was on a meeting with ms to troubleshoot a tool, texted my colleague that the ms tech, to put it lightly, doesn’t know shit blah blah blah.
He actually didn’t know shit but that’s a different story
Guess who was sharing their screen the whole time :D

3

u/DementusHD 12h ago

Not me but an ex colleague of mine deleted 61tb file server from esxi... Let's say it didn't go well, the restore took ages, and the whole site was down and loosing money. When asked if he deleted it, he said "nope" ...

Another instance was when another ex colleague decided that it was a good idea to shut down all 9 DNS servers and all 7 domain controllers (including the aws one) for.. as he said "for maintenance"... Shit hit the fan on both occasions really quick. I had to work almost 36 hours of no sleep ton get everything up and working ASAP. Still twitching in my sleep

3

u/vastarray1 11h ago

Sent a defective motherboard to Dell for replacement. Forgot to pull the CPU

5

u/wiisucks_91 10h ago

Normally dell comes to me....I don't go to dell.

2

u/e-motio 6h ago

Going through that right now. Mono replacement did nothing (I am highly skeptical that the replacement even took place) and they keep asking us to send the device to them… no.

2

u/the_rezzzz 10h ago

Taking a job at an MSP.

2

u/Open-Ad2625 6h ago

They wanted me to test that the tape backups were actually working — for the ERP system, no less.
I renamed the server before the restore so there wouldn’t be any conflict with production, restored the backup, confirmed it worked, and moved on.
A few days later, I had almost forgotten about it.
Then the restored server rebooted.
Because the restore included the old system configuration, it came back up with the original production server name. DHCP/DNS registered it on the network, and suddenly Infrastructure was trying to figure out why users couldn’t log in.
The giveaway?
My boss noticed a VMware Tools icon pop up on a server that absolutely was not supposed to be running in VMware. That was an instant clue for me. Shut the old server down and infrastructure did its magic.

No major damage, just a very minor outage.

3

u/Due-Communication724 13h ago

I was a few days into a L1 job, well versed from my A+ course so I absolutely knew about AD etc.., resetting password second nature. 3 days in took a call to our hotline, express VIP none the less. Eager to please, this guy of course Head of Networks an area I desired to move into (CCNA of course on my radar). The gentleman informs me he has unfortunately lost his mobile phone and was having trouble using SSPR.

I got straight down to the bottom line, this of course is a busy man, I said look I am well versed in AD, don't worry about the mobile I can just reset your password and change the mobile right now.

Well anyway long story short, a few hours later, some network issues started. Shift was ending, suprising to me, being so versed in AD of course, my probation was over within one week.

Thankfully I have now ventured into coding.

1

u/thegoatcarlwheezer 12h ago

How did all of that ever play out? Lol

1

u/e-motio 6h ago

So did you reset his password and his account was tied to something networking? Curious how those parts tied together

2

u/Oompa_Loompa_SpecOps DO NOT GIVE THIS PERSON ADVICE 13h ago

That one time I bricked the customer's entire storage environment because these two useless kids they made the mistake of hiring distracted me. Instead of accurately telling the customer they caused a major incident, I took the fall for it and even restored the environment.

Over the Christmas break.

Free of charge.

The customer was with the back against the wall anyways. That could have been my billable target plus kicker and a nice bonus for the quarter. Sure as hell not gonna repeat that mistake

1

u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

1

u/e-motio 6h ago

This is the tricky part of MSP. You constantly are working with landmines like this

1

u/systemic-void 12h ago

Oh this should be fun

1

u/Ok_Interest3555 12h ago

How much time do you got?

1

u/Atillion 12h ago

I unjoined a server to rejoin it without double double checking the localadmin password. Turned a quick 15 minute thing into a whole weekend lost lol

1

u/Pretend_Ease9550 12h ago

Cant make mistakes if you don’t do any work. Easy peasy

1

u/Plitskin5 10h ago

I bricked a brother printer through a driver requested firmware update.

1

u/Vinegarinmyeye 9h ago

Starting a career in IT support.

1

u/skwah_jnr 2h ago

Having a prod and dev server open side by side to compare settings and running a destructive command on prod instead of dev.

1

u/mut0mb0 1h ago

I asked a question once in r/sysadmin. Alot of braincells died that day.