Fun At Work

Work is not always this adventurous but I am not complaining. Today I encountered something that I thought was really funny. There are 300+ UNIX servers here that we have to take care of and the time on all of them is local. Yea right! that is what I thought. I was on a server today that appeared to have the wrong time. Obviously I haven’t encountered this before because the time is kept up-to-date using cron. The time was suppose to be in GMT on this server but I changed it to CDT without noticing. The other administrator comes to me and says

“did you change the time on this server?”
“Yes, the time was messed-up”
“…Time on this server is in GMT”
“$*&$@%..”

You would think that changing the system time wouldn’t do much harm, but some of these servers are running mission critical applications.

 

AIX Quirk

No OS is without its quirks. I had to struggle on and off for a couple of hours to get TCP/IP up and running on an AIX system to no avail until I figured out the problem was nowhere near where I thought it would be; such is life. The much user-friendly smitty didn’t help either, it would give me an odd error every time I tried to bring up TCP/IP:

A nameserver already exists

Needless to say, I have never seen this issue before. After much head banging against the monitor and smashing the keys on the keyboard, I felt a light bulb lit on top of my head. I thought to myself “What If..”. To much surprise my hunch was right; smitty was trying to write the new nameserver IP address to the file /etc/resolv.conf, which already existed there. The command executed flawlessly after manually removing the existing line from the file. From the error above it seems like smitty is trying to create a nameserver, which kept throwing me off.

Do you have any UNIX oddities to share? Feel free to comment.