Dave decides to move some plugs...

The first build machine for FreeBSD was ref.tfs.com, before FreeBSD 1.0 was released, and for a while afterward. It was housed in one of the labs at a former employer. I was one of a handful of people who know about this surreptitious hosting set up which was not freely known by most people, including upper management. This must have been around 1993 or 1994.

Once in a while I'd get a call to kick ref in the head as it would wedge on occasion. I wasn't the first line of contact, but more than a few times I went to reboot it and make sure it came up clean.

During one of these downtimes I decided to reroute the power cable as it had obviously been installed by a software guy, probably Julian or Rodney. At any rate, I managed to accidentally unplug an external disk array which was connected to a Sun server which brought a rather large European bank project down. Turns out it was connected by a three power strip daisy chain, which is not exactly best practice. I hadn't realized what had happened until we were in a rather heated meeting of our sysad group. Some folks thought it was a power glitch, some folks thought it was sabotage, everyone was angry. I decided to hold back instead of speaking the truth, which of course is that if a server is _that_ important, take an extra two minutes to route the power cables properly. That's why we have these things called extension cords, or the handy power outlets below the false floor.

I never copped to it because by the time I realized I'd done it, things were blown way out of proportion and nobody would have believed I hadn't hid it intentionally.

Did I feel bad about it? Nah. It wasn't one of our older SunOS boxes based on BSD, it was one of the newer Solaris boxes based on System V. Good riddance.