[GTALUG] Man deletes his entire company

[Alvin Starr]

On 04/15/2016 04:26 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 02:06:32PM -0400, Kevin Cozens wrote:
>> That is why you test your script and just echo commands like the above to
>> check the script will fill in the details appropriately. The script could
>> also have built a path and stored it in an environment variable then checked
>> the variable contents before use.
> Yep, of course.
>
>> Also, for this to have deleted everything it would have had to have been run
>> with root privileges.
> And it was.
For things like system backups you tend to have to run as root.
>
>> Its one thing for this to happen to a home machine. For a company server you
>> would expect to have more than one backup and never hook up more than one
>> backup to the live servers at a time.
> Of course you should have more than one backup device.  As long as it
> is connected to the live system, it is NOT a backup device.  It is only
> a backup device when it is no longer connected.  Seems this person didn't
> understand that.
Your backup device often has to be connected to the server. I have yet 
to see a backup media the magicaly gets data written to it while on the 
shelf. So once you have plugged in your back up media to backup and  
your backup program runs wild ... your kind of screwed.

>
>> As has been suggested, it is likely a hoax. Perhaps an April Fools joke that
>> someone picked up and ran with not realizing it was a joke.
> I wish I could believe that, but I suspect it really did happen.
> Some people should not be designing and running systems.
>
I kind of think it would be possible to use selinux to insure things 
like backups or system files cannot be deleted by accident.

That would take some work to get right and I believe most systems run 
with selinux disabled.
I know there are more than a few packages that I administer where they 
outright say the selinux must be disabled.

Screwing up backup software is all too easy.
I once worked for a computer company the sold systems to banks and for 
about a 3 month period a bug in the tape driver software was writing 
blank tapes.
It was not discovered till a customer tried to restore something simple.
Fortunately nobody needed to do a real restore of important data.

This company had a number of VERY smart people doing the coding but 
still silly errors crept through.


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