I once bricked an NT4 Exchange server, when a insistent manager persuaded me to defrag the information stores OOH. I wrote a batch file, tested it, it worked great. It stopped the services, cleared some disk space, defraged every thing, restarted the services. Job done.
On Friday evening I scheduled the job, and went home. And then the phones started ringing on Sunday when people complained that the Exchange server was down.
On investigation, the NT4 server was very poorly. It blue screened, and resulted in a total rebuild, the raid sets needed recreating, NT4 was reinstalled, Backup exec reinstalled, and restores performed. Nightmare. It took over 36hrs to recover.
The cause: At the start, the batch file did a del *.* in the folder where the batch file was running from. All well and good during testing as the batch file itself was R/O. However, when the scheduler ran the batch file, the parent directory was no longer the folder where the batch file resided, but the instead it was the C:\WINNT\SYSTEM folder. Hence the OS allowed all the unlocked files to be deleted, eventually leading the OS to BSOD and the box to die.
Not my finest moment, but I did get double time for working all Sunday to restore the damn box ;)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
