[CentOS] OT: SysAdmin Stories

Sun Jun 6 22:20:01 UTC 2010
Dominik Zyla <gavroche at gavroche.pl>

On Sun, Jun 06, 2010 at 03:06:18PM -0700, MHR wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Digimer <linux at 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)

I had quite simmilar experience, but I typed `chown -R user:group' /
(instead of ./). Now I'm also checking it for few times and I learned to
use `.' instead of `./', :)

-- 
Dominik Zyla

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