I could never switch webhosting services because no one but Glenn (Netspace) would tolerate my ability to break everything consistently (and hog huge amounts of their bandwidth with my Ani DiFranco lyrics site). And always through what seems to be a quiet, calm, non-intrusive tasks. It’s not like i’m writing scripts that are getting out of control, or anything.

Today, i needed to find a few emails from my 2002 mail archive. So, of course, the first thing i do is gunzip. Well, i’m too close to my quota so it barfed. I wanted to untar it to find out what i had destroyed in the process. Couldn’t untar in my directory so i moved it to /tmp (forgetting that i should move it to /var/tmp instead). tar -xvf and it pukes. I think it’s all corrupted, but really, it just used up all of /tmp. Oops. So, i sent a message to see what i had done wrong. Yet, apparently, my abuse of /tmp caused a bunch of processes elsewhere on the system to fail and eventually caused a httpd process to spiral out of control and hog everything else on the system.

::sigh:: What’s a girl to do?

Of course, last time, a small glitch in my .procmail crashed the entire box continuously. OOps.

My favorite was that at Brown, i used to be able to crash the main file server by printing. Of course, they sysadmins there responded by creating a printing script which basically said “if uid=’dmb’ { break; } else { print(); }”