I may have mentioned that my company is in the process of moving over to a new domain. We're using a very cool tool called CMT for Domains to help me in this process. During the testing and move over to the new domain I've been copying groups from the one NAB to the other so users don't see any differences with their access. CMT gathers all the groups and then I click a button and it copies all groups to the new domain. Sounds easy enough but I realized replication kept kicking in on the new domain before the groups could finish copying. So I whined to the Sr.Admin that I thought that was causing me issues. He said I could temporarily disable replication if I wanted to see if that sped the process up. I looked out there and decided I really didn't want to do it his way. I'm not sure why, but apparently sometimes I can be stubborn for no reason at all. So, on my own, I decided that if I just went out and deleted all the groups in the NABs and then copied it would have the same desired effect. And I was copying all the groups back in so it shouldn't hurt anything, right?! (In my defense I've been popping Laffy Taffy since 8am and spent about 2 seconds thinking about my grand plan before actually deciding that surely that would work just as well. Not an excuse, just stating the facts.) I'm sure there's several admins reading this now and shaking their heads because they know what I'm about to say next. No, I didn't realize anything was amiss until I realized that I couldn't access the admin server anymore on the new domain. Then I realized I couldn't access any of the servers on the new domain. I calmly turned to the senior and asked what would happen if I deleted all the groups. He laughed and explained that without localdomainadmins and localdomainservers we would like have pretty serious issues. The next few moments went something like this....
Me: "Oh...."
Him: "Why?"
Me: "Um...."
Him: "Why do you look like you might cry?"
Me: "Um... well.... "
Him: "Oh God, is that what you did?"
There was much laughing at my expense as he came over and bailed me out. We stopped domino on the admin server, pulled names.nsf from last nights backups and copied it over, ran fixup and updall from the command prompt (which was neat... I've never done that before either) and started domino again. The happy ending is all the groups are back in place and we can access our servers again.
My Sr.Admin sent me the following link and told me to read for a little while and then go home for the day instead of "helping" with anything else today.
He said it all while still laughing at me, but I decided my punishment should also include explaining to everyone that you can delete all the groups in a domain and still call yourself and Administrator as long as you can fix it before anyone notices. I hope anyone else new that might be reading this can learn from my mistake. Your Welcome.
3 comments:
If you're not screwing things up now and then, you're not trying new things often enough.
In 1987 I decided to save space on my 16 megabyte external hard drive (a device the size of a shoe box) on the Leading Edge IBM XT clone I was using.
I used pkarc (Phil Katz's replacement for arca who eventually sued him for the use of the .arc extension, which lead to PKZIP) to archive directories recursively.
I included my util directory which of course contained pkxarc -- the unpacker. I had to drive to a friend's house to get a floppy with pkxarc on it.
Doh!
We all appreciate your courage to share this experience. Rest assured that ALL of us have done similar. I'm sure I have on more than one occasion, but my selective memory prevents me from recalling it. I'm sure I've remembered the lesson, I just don't remember the mistake.
Hopefully you will inspire others to be equally open with their experiences.
First off thank you for mentioning CMT For Domains. Secondly, welcome to Administration. We have all done similar things.
I remember the day that I discovered that exit will take down a Domino server. I was trying to ping another server in the domain with a DOS window. Well I decided to exit the dos window by entering Exit at the DOS command and executing the enter key. For some bizzare reason the DOS window didn't disappear.
I then looked at the Domino Console and saw everything shutting down. Then the Managers flooded the server room.
I was quite lucky in that our server console would suddenly just disappear. No RIP file, no log entry, nothing to indicate why. Well I used this to my advantage... The Managers asked "What happened?"
I replied, "The damn thing just crashed again!" (Note to self: Don't use Exit on the Domino Console any more)
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