[rabscuttle385]

The first time we ran the program in production, it overwrote the root filesystem, making our powerful Sun box with 28 processors and 28 gigs of memory worthless.

Was the application running under an account with root privileges, or was the root file system open to accounts with non-root privileges?

We immediately went into disaster recovery mode, and brought up production on the UAT server. Of course, the first thing they did was run the same program, which wiped out that machine as well.

ROFL

[proxy_user]

No, it was a bug in Solaris. It just produced a core dump bigger than 2 gigs when it failed, so Solaris interpreted the size as a negative number and wrote it backwards in the filesystem.

The Sun guys said oh, you should have installed the OS patch for that.