[GTALUG] Man deletes his entire company

Mauro Souza thoriumbr at gmail.com
Fri Apr 15 13:52:25 EDT 2016


Another almost as destructive operation is the chmod -R...

One day my boss ran chmod -R firebird:firebird . while thinking he was on
/var/lib/firebird. He was on /, ran a cd /var/lib/firebird, mistyped
something, and shot the server. He was explaining to me why Firebird was so
awesome, and did't realized the command took way more time than it should.
When I noticed where he was and told him, he jumped for the keyboard but
pressed ^C after chmod finished. Phones started ringing... It was a very
long weekend...

On those days, we had only one beefy server hosting everything: Web, mail,
cvs, a couple databases for several clients, NFS and FTP, LDAP, DNS, and
almost everything you could install on a Linux circa 2002. Everything
except, well, backup...


Mauro
http://mauro.limeiratem.com - registered Linux User: 294521
Scripture is both history, and a love letter from God.

2016-04-15 14:46 GMT-03:00 Digiital aka David <digiital at gmail.com>:

> I will admit to doing that once when I first began with Linux. Not a
> biggie had nothing on that system I wanted. I didn't realize I was in the
> root directory.  Lesson learned.  Always double check the path :)
> On Apr 15, 2016 12:41 PM, "Alvin Starr" <alvin at netvel.net> wrote:
>
>> Most of us have made that same mistake but without the disastrous results.
>>
>> "rm -rf" is a very big gun with a hair trigger. So its easy to shoot
>> yourself in the foot with it and because its so big you may not just lose
>> your foot but a leg or two.
>> Sadly this guy was looking down the barrel when he oops'd.
>>
>>
>> On 04/15/2016 12:28 PM, Stephen wrote:
>>
>>> The mind wobbles ....
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/man-deletes-entire-company-running-bad-line-code-article-1.2601239?cid=msn
>>>
>>>
>> --
>> Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (905)513-7688
>> Netvel Inc.                   ||   Cell:  (416)806-0133
>> alvin at netvel.net              ||
>>
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