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Comment on Ask HN: What was your worst typo?

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I went through countless change control meetings, my part being a change to the DNS primary file. Being a smart-ass, I used a curses based editor (nedit) instead of vi for this special occasion. I missed a semicolon.

DNS was down for the company for a while. Being a trading company, I don't know if I cost them or saved them money in bad trades, but traders are bookies. They make money on every bet. A buddy just fixed it for me once it was found out.

NOTE: This is what we should have done and spared those countless change control meetings.

Problem is that some genius before me (no kidding!) set up zone transfers by copying (rcp/scp) the primary file to the secondaries, defeating their ability to take over for the primary. They broke as well. I left before that issue was addressed (or not addressed)

In another job, I did run the find command with rm, and of course, the path ended up being /. Yes, it did try to delete /vmunix, but it was running. In any event, there was a Makefile or a copy lying about. No need to BART home for the backup tape. This was on the department file server and mail server. No downtime.

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