Current Events > A bit of advice for people going into networking or system administration

(+) Yeah! (+)

Change the right click paste in putty or whatever terminal software you use so that it brings up a context menu giving you the option to paste instead of just pasting when you right click.

This is one of the most stressful things that can be done accidentally.

If you have a bunch of stuff copied to clipboard and you right click on accident, you're at the mercy of whatever is in your clipboard. The terminal software will paste the entire contents of your clipboard and send it to the device you're connected to via telnet/ssh.

If you have config commands in your clipboard, you risk overwriting some or all of the current config on the device you're connected to. You'd better hope you have configs backed up if this happens.

At my old job, one of the network engineers took down a large company's entire worldwide network by accidentally pasting a bunch of lines of config into their core firewall.
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did he keep his job?

oh no i just assumed gender
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Kombucha posted...

did he keep his job?

oh no i just assumed gender

Yes
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Is it cool if I picture you as some slick computer wizard sidekicking to Bruce Willis and trying to stop terrorists from uprooting the fabric of American society? Because I kind of already do.
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The bigger issue is that carriage returns in your clipboard are accepted by the terminal at all.

That's really stupid.
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Frostshock posted...

The bigger issue is that carriage returns in your clipboard are accepted by the terminal at all.

That's really stupid.

That's done by design so that you can paste configs into devices if you want to. If you're trying to set up a replacement device, it's easier to take the old config and paste it all in than it is to re-type the config line by line.
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yeah, amazing tips for any IT job.


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HighOnSolar posted...

Is it cool if I picture you as some slick computer wizard sidekicking to Bruce Willis and trying to stop terrorists from uprooting the fabric of American society? Because I kind of already do.

lol, that's cool with me
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I mean...I guess? If you have configs in your clipboard, you should be careful not to right click in putty. Like it's your job and a mindset you need to have since you're touching sensitive stuff all the time.

Doesn't hurt to change it, but it does encourage a lazy/nonchalant mindset that shouldn't be there.

But I do see the value in it.
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Knowledge_King posted...

I mean...I guess? If you have configs in your clipboard, you should be careful not to right click in putty. Like it's your job and a mindset you need to have since you're touching sensitive stuff all the time.

Doesn't hurt to change it, but it does encourage a lazy/nonchalant mindset that shouldn't be there.

But I do see the value in it.

The problem is that right clicking to paste is something that is commonly done intentionally. It's easy to paste in the wrong thing even if you mean to do it and it's easy to accidentally right click when you don't want to. Having to take that extra step to actually paste helps reduce the possibility of breaking stuff accidentally.
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I hate console commands in general. Enter does this, right click is paste, just what the fuck man?

Ive hardly ever done shell scripting and similar stuff, but it annoyed me.
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