Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2010 12:19:30 +0200 From: "Geoff Galitz" geoff@galitz.org Subject: [CentOS] OT: SysAdmin Stories

I'm compiling a collection of stories from the systems administrator trenches. ....

Thanks!

-Geoff

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Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Germany http://eifel-consulting.biz http://www.galitz.org/ http://german-way.com/blog/

The internet never forgets - it just loses the thread... This request is similar to one a number of years ago, and the result seemed at the time to be worth keeping. Now with the power of google, you might like to search for "The Unofficial Unix Administration Horror Story" thread. The original requests pop up under:-

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.admin/search?group=comp.unix.admin&...

My personal favourite is the one re-posted then by Mark Brader concerning a recovery from "cd ; rm -rf *" as root (and long before the days of root having /root as a home directory). Another anecdote which shows the dangers of creeping featureism runs something like:-

Script started on Mon 07 Jun 2010 09:31:20 AM BST

# rm -i -r * rm: cannot remove `-i': No such file or directory #

Script done on Mon 07 Jun 2010 09:31:40 AM BST

This is waiting to bite the admin today who aliases rm to "rm -i" and feels safe from their own finger trouble until they start to rely on this and reach an environment where the alias has not been set.

Chris Ritson (Computing Officer and School Safety Officer)

Room 707, Claremont Tower, EMAIL: C.R.Ritson@ncl.ac.uk School of Computing Science, PHONE: +44 191 222 8175 Newcastle University, FAX : +44 191 222 8232 Newcastle upon Tyne, UK NE1 7RU. WEB : http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/