I am so the master of fucking things up

One knack from my past life as an Information Systems Technical Wizard that I haven't lost is my ability to fuck things up in new and exciting ways. Some twenty years ago when that way my actual job title (see card) I managed to find a way to cripple a System/38 that IBM thought was impossible. Lucky for them we were just across the street so they could come over and see it with their own eyes. It took about three days working around the clock to fix it.

I was the master of the worst case scenario. If not causing them, then at least imagining them. It's too bad I totally flipped out in Melbourne because I was coming up with stuff for insurance software that either would have been one of those "hindsight is 20-20" deals if I hadn't thought of it beforehand, or an event with the parameters I foresaw came to pass during the design & prototyping phase.

This time around I managed to disable FTP and telnet while trying to get fucking SMTP to work. That takes talent. Especially since I wasn't intentionally doing anything with FTP, telnet or any of the ports associated with them. OK, I was doing stuff with port 25, and one can telnet to port 25, but I don't normally telnet to port 25. The only TCP stuff I fooled around with was, to my knowledge, having to do with SMTP.

Gaaack!

I don't even know if the last change I made is what hosed it, as I had to reboot my PC because of an unrelated problem. Any of the numerous changes I made to xinetd- and SMTP-related configuration files and scripts could have hosed it.

Fortunately HTTP and MySQL are unaffected, which means all the Crazy Meds stuff is unaffected.

This all happened yesterday. I was too fried to do anything about it then. I opened a trouble ticket for an ID-ten-T keyboard issue this morning. I hope it's resolved soon.