Re: I'll never root again...

From: Travis Casey (efindel_at_earthlink.net)
Date: 12/30/04

  • Next message: Cyberdyne: "Re: Securing BIND DNS" 
    Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 04:00:16 GMT

    Moe Trin wrote:
    > 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).

    Yep. With the exception, of course, of when you *want* to remove a huge
    group of files... ran into a problem the other day at work when our
    spamassassin/virus filter server stopped processing mail. Turned out that
    some bozo out there had gotten infected so badly that his/her/its system
    was spewing about 10,000 viruses per day at us. We were keeping the last
    seven days of virus emails in case our Inspector General's office wanted to
    look at any of it as evidence for an investigation or anything, and it had
    filled the disk up.

    Set Postfix to just refuse connections from that network so we didn't have
    to deal with all that garbage, but first I had to delete a ton of files.

    > 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.

    Whoops. That's part of why it's good to use scripts for things like that...
    in addition to eliminating repeated typing, double-checking the list of
    usernames before you run the script can eliminate a lot of potential goofs.

    >>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.

    Yep. That's the difference between wiping out your own files and getting
    someone to restore them, and someone else wiping them out and restoring
    from a backup... people in the first instance are usually grateful. In the
    second... well, that's why we have locked doors to our sysadmin area. :-)

    >>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.

    I picked up the trick of having a cron job that writes partition tables out
    to a file in /etc every night from a former boss. I also invented for
    myself the trick of backing up /etc on all our machines at work to tar
    files on one central machine... that way I've got a more convenient backup
    of the config info on all of them. If you lose the root partition, it's
    nice not to have the chicken-and-egg problem of having to restore it before
    you can find out what was where on the machine. 

    -- 
ZZzz   |\      _,,,---,,_     Travis S. Casey  <efindel@earthlink.net>
       /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)
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