Re: I'll never root again...

From: Moe Trin (ibuprofin_at_painkiller.example.tld)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 18:53:51 -0600

In article <i57tqc.3ul.ln@lostthoughts.org>, Travis Casey wrote:

>I did that with a simple "rm -rf .netscape-cache". Or, I should say, I
>tried to. What my fingers actually typed was "rm -rf . netscape-cache".
>So the system started recursively removing my home directory... and the
>first I noticed it was when I got a little message along the lines of
>"netscape-cache: no such file".

Ahhh, memories. There is no computer as fast as one that is executing
a fumble fingered disaster. You can't possibly _believe_ that a 386SX-16
can remove files faster than a 3.6 GHz Xeon - but it can, and does (unless
the Xeon is doing an 'rm -Rf /' in which case it might be a dead heat and
tied with a Cray).

>If I'd been root and made a mistake like that, I could have accidentally
>removed something vitally important to the system. As it was, I had to go
>to the head sysadmin (I was actually a junior sysadmin there at the time),
>admit my embarrassing mistake, and ask him to restore my home directory
>from the nightly backups.

When I was a young tape monkey, one of the senior admins came by to ask
if the nightly backups were safe. Seems a junior admin was deleting old
accounts (including the home directories) following a end-of-semester
departure of student interns, and (you guessed it) she fumble fingered
something, and wiped an entire drive on one of the NFS servers.

>When you have nightly backups, something like that's no fun, but generally
>isn't super-critical.

Sure, we had good backups (another point - have you verified that your
backups are usable?), but about 200 people lost all the work then had done
that morning. The restore was completed by lunch, but there were people
with pitchforks and buckets of tar looking for the admin who made the
mistake.

>If you're like most home users, though, and don't...
>well, it can be very, very bad.

Do you have a hard copy of the partition table on your drives? Most
backups don't include that. That can be a joy too.

        Old guy

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