A four-hour system interruption in September at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri has been attributed to a cat jumping on a technician’s keyboard.
a technician was reviewing the configuration of a server cluster, their cat jumped on the keyboard and deleted it.
This sounds like bull shit for many reasons.
- A review can be don’t in read only mode, using something like cat (ironically). People who bring up an editor to look at a file drive me nuts.
- Why does he have config files open with jumpy cats around.
- Managing the config manually instead of through some kind of automation tool.
- There is no way in hell a cat jumped on a keyboard, fucked up the file, saved it, and closed it. If the file wasn’t saved, he could close it without saving. If it was saved, but the program was still open, he could undo, and even if it was closed, he should have know where he was at in the file, so fixing it shouldn’t take 4 hours.
- Generally when to change a config, the cluster isn’t going to just start using it without reloading something. Did the cat do that too?
This could be a case of the reporting not being 100% accurate though. I could easily see some cat-like typing going unnoticed in the wrong kind of config file mangling a config for a critical process and requiring recovering a server (or, say, a remote firewall >_>) from backup.
If he was at the keyboard when it happened, he surely would have know there were changes made that he needed for correct, right?
I err on the side of “this is bullshit” but… have you met cats?
My cute little booger has gotten it down to a science that she can even get into my keyboard tray when I have my desk in standing mode. Leap up, grab on my belt, and leap into the tray so fast that I don’t even realize why my hands feel fuzzy. And if I am sitting? That is easy mode.
Which leaves a little ball of fur with four paws, a nose, and a tail, finding ways to get the best possible shortcuts. And mashing even more as you gently try to pull her out and she has decided your enter key is the best thing to hold on to and rip off.
And if you work from home… or just around cats in general? You are either locking them out every time you do any work or you are just rolling with it.
Similarly, if they are using a fancy management interface (or are just sickos who are obsessed with emacs shortcuts): I have genuinely been shocked by how easy it was to update a config and reboot a server.
Like I said, I think this is a bullshit excuse. But, depending on setup, it is very possible. And is mostly solvable the same way you prevent your own fuck ups.
I taught my cats not to go on the keyboard. Took a while, but now two of them are very carefully stepping around it, and the third kinda does, but easily forgets when she gets excited.
Just consistently moving their paws off the keyboard when they try and go there, use “bad” voice, and putting them on floor if they continue. And “a while” was almost a year.
I’m allergic to cats, so I try not to spend too much time around them. Even if I wasn’t allergic, having a cat getting into everything would drive me insane. If it jumped on my keyboard one time, that would pretty much be in. Banned from the office. I’d be a terrible pet owner.
I love cats and would like to have one but I don’t because I also like to not have my things moved around or messed with at the whim of a bored animal.
I wish there was a way to have cat friends rather than pets, so they could come visit and I could let them in for a bit if it’s a good time and then they go off and do their cat things elsewhere.
Japan has cat cafes, you can have some coffee and hang out with a bunch of cats. They have things like this with a bunch of different animals actually.
There are cat cafes in the states too. Usually linked to adoptions.
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You talking about government systems here. Most were built before safeguards were a thing.
My wife works for a tax authority and she still has to use a green text on black background terminal with keyboard only interaction to review people’s taxes. Being one keystroke away from blowing away a database is not surprising.
Many of your points are good, but 4 is pretty weak. I have left my personal laptop for 20 minutes to come back and find that the cat has put me into airplane mode, opened a hexadecimal calculator I didn’t know I had, written a complain to Microsoft that only didn’t send because of airplane mode (error popup and all), opened my family recipes, edited my family recipes to include actual text-symbol emojis among other garbage, and recorded the whole thing as a… Gamer Clip???
She does this routinely.
I disable my work laptop keyboard before I even LOOK away from it, I don’t want to find out how much damage she could push to production.
Cats are the masters of the obscure keyboard shortcuts.
recorded the whole thing as a gamer clip
FILTHY PRANK
YOU JUST GOT, PRANKED BRO HAHA
I know! That was the most disrespectful part!!
It says the technician was reviewing a config. I can only assume that means actively reviewing it. The cat shouldn’t have had 20 minutes to screw around. With 20 minutes I get it, but not what should have only been a few seconds.
If he left his desk, he should lock his workstation or disconnect the keyboard, like you mentioned, as I’m sure this isn’t the first time the cat went for the keyboard.
Guy was changing config, got up to get coffee, cat walked across keyboard, tech didn’t notice what the cat did and saved and reloaded?
Or config was in some gui and not from a bash terminal?
I always open up files in Vim because I can work with text much better than cat or less or whatever else.
But also I use git. For everything that is important.
dG seems a lot more likely to be hit by a cat.
But then she won’t exit Vim, so no harm done
Alright,
dGZZ.I need a video of a cat playing twister on a keyboard right now
Good to see all the armchair experts have shown up
Well of course. Cats hate vets.
This is quality
If I fucked up like that and a cat was around, I might tell the same story.
What a convenient CATastrophe
The tech had already typed in “rm -rf /” the cat just jumped on the enter key
This is about as believable as “the dog ate my homework.”
At least I know dogs that would do that…
I do have a fear of something like this happening and do not let my cat into the room when I’m working for this reason though.
I could believe it.
Trust it’ll be used as justification for RTO
One time my dog actually did eat my homework and I informed my teacher that he’d never believe the truth.
He said it actually happened to him once too and let me redo it. I’m lucky as fuck.
.@csolisr @old_ghost @PeachMan This whole tragic story could have been avoided if they had just implemented the CTD and XCAT signals laid out many years ago in the DL-232 specifcation by this visionary engineer. http://www.lyons42.com/humor/dl232.html
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Yeah, anybody in IT knows this is bullshit. I guarantee these people had several holes in their processes, didn’t properly back things up, and have been accidentally losing data for YEARS. Somebody recently noticed it, so they decided to blame a cat.
I’d wager on manager that decided to do something on the server.
Fuck the cat landed on my keyboard typed
sudo rm -rf / --no-peserve-rootand then pressed enter.Yeah John blame it on the cat !!! We all have intrusive thoughts but don’t follow them through!!!
I mean for all we know it might have been
cat /dev/random > /var/lib/mysql/whatever.The cat is at fault in this one, though.
He told the truth, not his fault the media doesn’t know there is a other form of cat.
Inappropriate use of
catI typed a really long comment in Memmy last night and my daughter bumped my hand, causing the reply window to swipe away and all my work was gone.
So “same,” basically, I guess.
Well, you don’t typically type out a whole server config in one go. You shouldn’t be manually editing it on a target host to begin with…
Actually you should never be “typing a really long” anything in a browser or an app. They’re unreliable. Use a saving editor and when you’re done, copy the final over.
Basics, people!
Veterans Health Information System Technology Architecture Imaging system
When you need to throw in some more meaningless words to make an acronym work…
That cat’s name? “Article 99”
