On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Digimer linux@alteeve.com wrote:
Under the category of "learn from the mistake of others..."
About eight years ago, I was working on a program with tight deadlines. I'd worked through the night, only catching an hour or two of sleep in the office.
The next morning, one of the servers remounted it's file systems read-only. Being a small shop, I decided to just take the server down to run a quick fsck.ext2. In my sleepiness though, I typed 'mkfs.ext2'.
When people say that "root" is god, well, no one asks god "Are you sure?".
Way back in the stone age, I was a sys admin at my university, working the graveyard (i.e., backup) shift two days a week and an occasional Sunday. On Sundays, we did the full backup and restore, but we switched out the disk packs (I said this was a long time ago) so we never lost more than a week's worth of data at the time. Well, almost never....
My last Sunday there, I accidentally reinitialized all the disks after the backup but before I had switched them. Then, I realized what I did, switched them anyway, and reinitialized them again, then did a full restore.
Everything would have been fine if the file system hadn't crashed that Friday afternoon....
This was on a Xerox Sigma 7 (I'm dating myself).
UNIX horror story: 24 years ago, I was working on a development system (i.e., nothing critical on it) and my latest build didn't work the way I expected, so I erased it with an 'rm -rf *' - except that I was in the root directory at the time, not my build directory. By the time I realized what I had done, it was too far gone to recover, so I wound up reinstalling the whole system. No harm done (I did things like that sometimes on purpose, when it was *my* machine involved), but I don't do 'rm -rf' of anything any more without double-checking where I am FIRST, even if the default "-v" is set.
(unsigned confession)