Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

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.

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

I mean for all we know it might have been cat /dev/random > /var/lib/mysql/whatever.

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.

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 err on the side of "this is bullshit" but... have you met cats?

My cute little booger has gotten it down to a science that she can even get into my keyboard tray when I have my desk in standing mode. Leap up, grab on my belt, and leap into the tray so fast that I don't even realize why my hands feel fuzzy. And if I am sitting? That is easy mode.

Which leaves a little ball of fur with four paws, a nose, and a tail, finding ways to get the best possible shortcuts. And mashing even more as you gently try to pull her out and she has decided your enter key is the best thing to hold on to and rip off.

And if you work from home... or just around cats in general? You are either locking them out every time you do any work or you are just rolling with it.

Similarly, if they are using a fancy management interface (or are just sickos who are obsessed with emacs shortcuts): I have genuinely been shocked by how easy it was to update a config and reboot a server.

Like I said, I think this is a bullshit excuse. But, depending on setup, it is very possible. And is mostly solvable the same way you prevent your own fuck ups.

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.

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

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...