A Functional Warning

The main point-of-sale server is down with corrupted files, and a dozen and a half stores are offline. We’re on the phone with tech support for a while, and they determine that the most likely fix is a restore from backup tapes, a four-hour process. But there’s a special function that might rebuild the corrupted files. Maybe. If it doesn’t, well, we’ll have to do a restore from backup. But that’s the only other alternative, so we’ll give it a go.

We’re used to this system having some very dangerous functions that let you really screw yourself over, and undocumented flags that have to be set before they’ll actually run. And that is the case for this function, too. We have to go into a special administrative panel to get to it at all, and know what to type in. There are options to be set for it to do its thing, and an undocumented flag to get it to actually run. And then, at the end, we hit Run, and one last warning comes up:

“We recommend that you do not run this function, even if we told you to.”

It does fix the problem in a matter of a few minutes.