Tech Confessions?

[Fur]

* I once ripped out a NiMh battery pack from a toy car that had no charger, found a loose USB cable somewhere and thought I could make that battery pack charge. I spun the wires together (according to color) and plugged it in. What happened next was a short circuit and I almost fried a motherboard lol.

Sounds like an Etherkiller

I rarely write unit tests. I know I should and it would make troubleshooting easier but I can never be bothered to.
I only use 4 or so fingers for typing. My coordination is awful.
I used to despise GNU/Linux as a desktop OS because I considered it clunky and half-baked. This opinion was based on my experience with default XFCE on Debian.

[RedBullAddicted]

Guess I told this before. Sure I did a lot of stupid things but this was the worse. When I just started out as a network consultant I was at a company that got a new iSCSI network consisting out of 4 HP Procurve switches. They had a HP storage system which caused problems and for this reason, they ordered a storage professional to fix their issues. While the storage professional tried to do his job he blamed the network for being the reason of the problem (Its always the networks fault.) The guy changed something on the switch configuration and suddenly the network crashed. They unplugged one of the four switches and everything was good again. The storage problems weren't fixed but at least the network was up again and the storage professional said, the switch would be broken and as soon as they have a working one everything should be good. I didn't know anything about the story when I was ordered to check the defective switch. So I went there, checked the switch and as you may have guessed, the switch was working like a charm. The customer asked me if he could plug it back in and I, without thinking about it too much, said yes, sure.. go ahead. After the switch was online again the network broke immediately and none of the 300+ employees was able to work anymore. I will never forget that feeling. Was close to a heart attack. We unplugged the switch again and it took me more than 1 hour to restore all services. Since this day I know what a broadcast storm can do in a virtualized environment. It takes down all machines cause they can't see their boot and data volumnes on the storage anymore. Its like you would pull out all hdds from a running server After everthing was restored I had a closer look at all switches in that iSCSI network and found out that the idiot of a storage professional disabled spanning-tree on one of these switches. What can I say.. the company never ever asked for me again

[Axon]

This is one of the best threads I've seen in a while.

-I have started crying when verification link for facebook didn't work 

Damn boy? WTF 

[Pak_Track]

This is one of the best threads I've seen in a while. :DDamn boy? WTF 

Another one I just remembered:
My laptop recently broke down. It just so happened that that laptop also held my porn collection, in an unprotected folder The next day, I found out that my dad had taken the laptop away for the tech-guy in his office to fix and I had a mini heart-attack. By some miracle, the collection wasn't found

You got any, Axon?

[mushinz]

This is one of the best threads I've seen in a while. Damn boy? WTF 

Yeah man, I was like 13 years old adn all of my friends were on facebook and my fucking link didn't work, don't know why but it didn't so I started crying and sked my dad for help but he was 30 something when it was the first time that he had seen the computer so he wasn't very helpful 

[0E 800]

• I dont ever wear a static bracelet.
• I sometimes neglect to remove the power cord from power supply before I upgrade memory/cpu
• If you dont know what Memory or a HD is, then you wont know what I replaced yours with.
• Runs updates on production server with users logged in.
• Reboots production server with users still logged in.
• Tries logging in with credentials left on recovered hard drives.
• Installed floppy drive with power cord in reverse order.. made the floppy smoke.
• Downloads Disney movies on neighbors wifi.
• Suspended and removed from academy for installing keylogger on 85% of faculty computers. -- Shouldn't  have added it to autoexec.bat

[Kulverstukas]

* Whenever I find/get a memory medium (flash or hard drive), first thing I do is try to recovery anything that is possible to recover. Got some really juicy stuff that way.
* I used to buy used hard drives at the flea market for cents so I could recover something from those and possibly get something valuable.
* Found a flash drive on the street, it was ran over with a car. I assembled it and it still worked (however prolonged data storage on it tends to corrupt some files, good for data transfer tho...) and I recovered around 8 gigs of private photos and other data and it only was a 4 gb flash drive.

Confession bear anyone?

[Pak_Track]

I lol'd at the last one

[Darkvision]

@pak_track on the PSU--uhh they sometimes do that for a variety of reasons, but unless you installed the powercord backwards(which would require a hammer) or flipped the voltage switch on it then its not on you

anyway lets see good gaffs huh? Damn i have a "recent" one lets start with it:
-while installing slackware i hit a prompt(after instillation) that i thought was asking me for a password, as i didnt remember setting one, i though i had fubar'ed the install and so reinstalled it not realizing thats not what the prompt was until after i got back to the same point. oops.

-on one of my old laptops i couldnt figure out why it kept crashing, i checked EVERYTHING. While talking to a fellow IT about it he goes "have you checked to see if its overheating?" *facepalm*

-once while i was swimming at my parents house i needed to make a bunch of phone calls to set up a party. So i got out, proceed to call everyone and set it up, then got back in the pool. Roughly a half hour later i go to get out and i hear this weird screeching sound from my pocket. Evidently cellphones dont like chlorinated water.

-While building a monster machine for someone, i ordered a beast of a CPU heatsink/fan that fit every processor...except the one that was in his system.

im sure i have more but these are whats on my mind atm i guess.

[Pak_Track]

-While building a monster machine for someone, i ordered a beast of a CPU heatsink/fan that fit every processor...except the one that was in his system.

Dead socket, or RAM clearance?

[Kulverstukas]

* When I was introduced to computers, I learned that batch was some command line voodoo stuff and tried to do something at home. Created a fork bomb and thought it was godlike. Shown it to my friends and they wowed at it so we tried to sent it over to some of the friends through skype and see their reactions.

* Used to be a heavy Runescape player.

* When a desktop computer was powered on, I pulled the box out from under the table to insert a mouse plug and saw the switch on the PSU that said 110V, the switch was set on 220V. Without thinking twice I slew the switch and the PSU produced fireworks with a lot of smoke.

[Pak_Track]

You've got 220V in Lithuania?

[Kulverstukas]

You've got 220V in Lithuania?

Heh yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country#Table_of_mains_voltages_and_frequencies

[shome]

Oh wow. Way too many to list. I sure have enjoyed the provided stories thus far though.

* When I was around 12, I would port scan hundreds of subnets at a time from my home AOL Dial-up and go to sleep, thinking I was like Matthew Broderick from Wargames trying to find 'Protovision'.

* I downloaded several 'Punters' back in the day for AIM, and 'punted' friends off-line. One kids parents came to my house demanding I 'broke' their computer.

* I convinced all of my friends that 'Server.exe' will open port 27374 and/or 37331 on their machines to connect them to a new wealth of porn. Needless to say, I infected myself in the process, lol.

* I bought the first edition of 'Hacking Exposed' when I was 13 years old, and was reading about arbitrary code, and race conditions, before I even knew what UNIX was. Needless to say,  17 years later, I am still a big fan of this series of books and authors.

* I have had more microsoft windows woes as a kid, between all of my batch file writing, deleting autoexec.bat, thinking it was a 'virus'. I once got my membership to the boys and girls club removed for "breaking" all the computers lol.

* I once wrote a windows .NET "HELLO !" message in High School, and it went to every machine in the building.

* In 8th Grade, I saw the computer had it's IP Address written down right on it ! Imagine that ! I even remember it. It began with a 10.0.0.0 range. I was very upset that this machine would not even respond to a ping from my house though ? I was pretty discouraged.

In closing,

Let's just say today, my mistakes are at a much higher capacity. 

EOF

[HexEngineer]

My list is endless
1. When I was really young (4-5 years old) me and my dad(who doesn't speak English), we were trying to start a game for hours(2-3 don't remember) at all my mum come home and start it for us.
2. When I was about 8-9 years old I decided that I'm hacker, downloaded VB 2006 and stared crawing the web for topic such us "vb 06 malware", "vb 06 worm" of course I didn't know what a for loop is but I was downloading source codes and modifing them and for some reason I always fucked up the OS installation, for that time I thought that those who can reinstall Windows are the best hackers on the world, sadly soon I understood that my mom can do it too(after she tryed to use the PC).
3.When I've find the BIOS I set password to it, I was unable to remove it.
4. I've used IE until 2008(could you imagine this )
5. I tried to infect somebody via skype somebody from USA don't remember his name I think he was pedo anyway I didn't know that AVs detect trojans nor what a port is, useless to say that I failed.
6.Before 5 years I tried to hack the skype of my girlfriend, I tried to guess the password of the mail used to create skype, sadly the mail was by her mother and I blocked the mail for 48 hours (too many login attempts)=D
there are many more