Twitter Thread: Panicked Network Admin's Fail Threatens Future Of Pixar

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mattstaff
Jul 27, 2020 5:00 PM EDT

This poor network admin must've been drenched in panic sweat after this fail. Sounds like a true waking nightmare. 

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  • 01
    Text - Vicki Boykis Follow @vboykis This is the most terrifying page l've read all week. From Creativity, Inc. by Pixar's Ed Catmull.
    via @vboykis
  • 02
    Text - CHANGE AND RANDOMNESS 161 A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our my- thology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we'd been hit with a series of three smaller, random events-the f
    via @vboykis
  • 03
    Text - To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those ma- chines, there is a command-bin/rm -r -f *-that removes every- thing on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what's coming: Somehow, by accident, some- one used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, eithe
    via @vboykis
  • 04
    Text - Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. "Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 mas- ter machine!" he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: "Please, God, just pull it out *s last as you can!" The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work-90 percent of the f
    via @vboykis
  • 05
    Text - system tonight. We'll only lose half a day of work." But then came random event number two: The backup system, we hadn't been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place spe- discovered, cifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed quite real. Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality beean to sink in, the company's leader
    via @vboykis
  • 06
    Text - months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she'd set up a system that copied the en- tire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This-our third random event-would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her com- puter, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in
    via @vboykis

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