Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/05/hospital_cat_incident/Open linkView original on communities.azkware.net335
Comments39
This is about as believable as “the dog ate my homework.”
At least I know dogs that would do that...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
FILTHY PRANK
YOU JUST GOT, PRANKED BRO HAHA
I know! That was the most disrespectful part!!
Cats are the masters of the obscure keyboard shortcuts.
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.
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 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.
There are cat cafes in the states too. Usually linked to adoptions.
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
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.
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?
Good to see all the armchair experts have shown up
Inappropriate use of
catWell of course. Cats hate vets.
This is quality
I 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!
If I fucked up like that and a cat was around, I might tell the same story.
The tech had already typed in "rm -rf /" the cat just jumped on the enter key
What a convenient CATastrophe
.@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
That cat's name? "Article 99"
When you need to throw in some more meaningless words to make an acronym work...