What's extra frustrating is the previous guy did create a git repo of these types of hacks, but this one doesn't live in it for no discernible reason.

So do you work for Spotify or Zoom?

This is almost exactly what happened to me on Monday, resulting in a fifteen hour day.

My particular jenga piece was an Access query that none of my predecessors had deigned to document or even tell me about... but was critical to run monthly or you had obsolete data embedded deep within multi-million dollar reports.

Thank god I don't work on salary anymore, or I'd be really upset.

Only tangentially related, but "What a elegant house of cards" is an insult i'm going to use someday.

Cron job that evals some base64 encoded string which is actually downloading a script from a personal GitHub repo of an IT guy who left...

Idempotent code/repositories are great - I love making everything as reproducible as possible. Particularly in make where every 'all' type command should have a corresponding 'clean' command. Many times I'll see code bases where they skip defining the 'clean' command... or worse, have no 'all' command to begin with and rely on the developer knowing all the build and environment setup commands...

AHAHAHAHAHAHA you couldn't make this up

We have a couple of those at work. Black boxes that are used.

I'm rebuilding one after it failed on one morning for SQL odbc reasons. And its just a binary that shuffles data around.

Time to restore a whole machine backup to a VM with no network connectivity, and manually pull the command?

Why does this sound like maintaining my nextcloud instance from time to time?

What's a cron job?

Somebody’s having a fun day! /s

Had a similar thing once. Some how, some way, the DBA copied and pasted something wrong. Oracle DB had some odd extra syntax for left and right joins that other DBs didn't (or at least that I'd never seen). My best guess is that he auto formatted out of habit and maybe it took those symbols out.

It took a long time to find that. Because the only evidence something was wrong was that ONE of our customers wasn't being billed for ONE product. Everyone else was fine. Basically they were using it in a very atypical way. The left joins made sure to include them in the billing even because they didn't have whatever was on the right of that join. Everyone else did.

For us it's a task that no one is even aware of and the first issue is the customer saying their data export doesn't work. You had a data export?

I have also mixed up crontab -l with crontab -r. 😔

Let this be a lesson to start versioning your crontabs.

Ah yes, good old dependency.