Comment by hnlmorg

Ive taken entire web farms offline due to an unexpected expansion of a command on a Cisco load balancer.

The command in question was:

    administer-all-port-shutdown 

(Or something to that effect —it’s been many years now)

And so I went to log in via serial port (like I said, *many years ago so this device didn’t have SSH), didn’t get the prompt I was expecting. So typed the user name again:

    admin

And shortly afterwards all of our alarms started going off.

The worst part of the story is that this happened twice before I realised what I’d done!

I still maintain that the full command is a stupid name if it means a phrase as common as “admin” can turn your load balancer off. But I also learned a few valuable lessons about being more careful when running commands on Cisco gear.