[rescue] Scotty's advice to Geordi (was Re: Follow-Up : Changing IP address in Solaris 10)

[Mike Parson]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 01:37:00PM -0500, Mike Hebel wrote:
> Someone generated the quantum flux that came across as... Brian Dunbar
>> On Jun 27, 2005, at 1:17 PM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 01:01:31PM -0500, Mike Parson wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mon, Jun 27, 2005 at 04:44:55PM +0000, Peter Corlett wrote:
>>>> In at least two of them, I found
>>>> evidence that the previous admin would break things in odd ways to
>>>> force
>>>> his manual intervention.  Kinda like those movies with the sicko
>>>> parents
>>>> that make their kids sick, just so they can take care of them.
>>>
>>> Didn't Scotty give that advice to Geordi? For those living in a   cave
>>> and
>>> never had a TV, It was the chief engineer from Star Trek, tell it to
>>> the chief engineer in the next generation.
>>>
>>> Geoff.
>>> --
>>
>> I cannot believe that I know this.
>>
>> Scotty told Geordi to pad his repair estimate times so when the
>> device-that-goes-phht-this-week came on line in time for the big
>> finish, he'd look like a good engineer.
>
> Actually it was padding his repair estimates by a factor of four.  "How
> else do you think I keep my reputation as a miracle worker".

Right, and I'm fine with that.  This guy wasn't doing that.

First example I can think of:

He had a cron job that ran once a minute on a box to check that the
locally attached RAID was mounted.  If it wasn't, shut the box down into
single-user mode.

NO ONE knew why.

It wasn't documented other than a single email he sent once saying it
was to 'prevent corruption.'

Of what?

Long discussion with the developers of the software that ran on that
box, no good reason could be given.

Don't remember why, but for some reason, I needed the box online, w/o
the raid mounted.  After about 20 minutes of fighting with it, I found
the cron job that was killing me.

There were other examples, but mostly, I try and surpress memories from
that job.

>> Saving grace - while I remember the episode, I do NOT recall the
>> episode title, air dates, or much of the plot line.  I refuse to try
>> and recover the memory.
>
> "Relics."
>
>> Sending to Geeks - unless someone can tie in Scotty, Geordi or Star
>> Trek to Rescue computers . . .
>
> Actually the episode pointed out very clearly that just because something
> is old does not make it any less useful.  I think that's perfectly OT for
> Rescue.  ;-)
>
> Mike Hebel

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org