SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code.
By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers.
Mr Marsala wrote on a forum for server experts called Server Fault that he was now stuck after having accidentally run destructive code on his own computers. But far from advising them how to fix it, most experts informed him that he had just accidentally deleted the data of his company and its clients, and in so doing had probably destroyed his entire company with just one line of code.
The problem command was "rm -rf": a basic piece of code that will delete everything it is told to. The "rm" tells the computer to remove; the r deletes everything within a given directory; and the f stands for "force", telling the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files.
His backups were also mounted at the time. That's a nightmare scenario, right there.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @10:30PM
The novice user fired up some long-forgotten text editor on one of his documents and typed 'edit'.
e - selects everything
d - deletes current selection
i - enter insert mode
t - the letter 't'
(Score: 2) by devlux on Friday April 15 2016, @10:33PM
I have in fact had this happen to me.
Completely wiped out a text document while trying to type.
Not really fun when it's your thesis, and everything is stored on floppies.
Guessing it was harder to delete punch card backups though? Anyone have experience with that one?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @11:35PM
Guessing it was harder to delete punch card backups though? Anyone have experience with that one?
We have to schedule time to run our programs... My time has finally come to compile (onto tape), and I'm carrying several stack of freshly punched cards. An intern carrying coffee takes a corner and slams into me, cards explode into the air in slow motion I see weeks of my life flashing before my eyes. My glazed expression is broken by the visibly shaking intern's squeak, "Oh crap! I'm so sooooo sorry." He frantically begins picking up the cards. I slowly turn and walk away, still holding a few handfuls of coffee stained punched cards. "Meet me at my desk. You're going to learn how to punch cards. Don't bring coffee."
The guys who were running their program ahead of me turn look at each other. I hear a whispered, "YES!" They must have needed more CPU time. I begin to suspect I've been set up... The entire time the intern is with me sorting the numbered cards and punching new ones for the next few days I speak only in metaphorical double entendre concerning "what occurred". I conclude he's either extremely stupid, or a very convincing spy.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday April 16 2016, @01:12AM
Guessing it was harder to delete punch card backups though? Anyone have experience with that one?
Watched one time as someone loaded a huge stack of punch cards into the feeder. About halfway through it started shooting cards into the air instead of through the feeder. Being a new student at the time, I made the mistake of asking him why he didn't just sort them out rather then dumping the whole thing in the garbage. Learned something that day.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday April 15 2016, @11:24PM
It's easier in a GUI:
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday April 16 2016, @12:27AM
It's easier in a GUI:
With emacs, select-all is C-x h , so you probably won't be doing it by mistake. Also, typing doesn't replace selection by default*, so even if you accidentally C-x h and then type it won't replace anything unless you explicitly press something like delete or backspace immediately after selection. </smug emacs user>
* If you actually want that behaviour for some reason, though, you can get it by adding (delete-selection-mode 1) to your emacs config. Or temporarily by typing it into a buffer and using M-x eval-last-sexp on the line.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday April 16 2016, @02:22AM
I had something similar happen to me in aerospace.
New managers came in... they just had to change everything. You know the routine ... they have to show they are spending a lot of money so their salaries look small by comparison. Investors just seem to love that kind of thing. So do governments.
So I end up with another machine while the one I had ( which I had configured exactly to my liking ) was deemed too old to keep. Knowing there were a lot of programs I really needed, I saved them off to floppies, knowing management would soon call men wearing badgehats to take my machine away.
Sure enough, men came and carted off my old machine, which was extremely well tuned and working perfectly, and replaced it with some new machine that to me worked like a pile of crap. It had on it what at that time was a brand new program... Windows 2.0. I was being upgraded from a lowly 286 to a 386SX. Now, mind you, I had dual hard drives and 16 MEG of RAM in that old 286 configured as a ramdisk, which I used mostly for SPICE simulations. I also knew the guy who had taken the original Berkeley SPICE 3G5 and rewrote it from Fortran to Borland C++ to run it on PC's... and he had helped me optimize that old 286 for SPICE runs. That was the main thing I used my machine for - and oh yes, I did have copies of Mathcad 2, Eureka, Borland C++, GWBasic, Turbo Assembler, and a host of other goodies on that machine. Technical goodies. But I did not do fonts or prettyprint presentation materials - and that's what Management needed.... presentation. These guys were too high up to look at system font and make any sense of it.
The new machine seemed awful slow - I mean excruciatingly slow. It seemed it was taking forever to do a spice run. I was used to seconds... the new machine was taking hours! Well, one thing - I did not have my ramdisk anymore - and the hard disk light stayed on constantly, and the drive constantly churned between the source file, print file, and library file cylinders - which did not happen in my dual hard drive + ramdisk 286. Judging by the amount of churning, I figured I must have a terribly fragmented hard drive.
Anyone remember that old DOS file "Compress.exe"? It was a DOS disk defragmenter. PCTools, I believe, put it out. I ran it.
Then all hell broke loose. Nothing worked.
I managed to reformat the hard drive and get my DOS stuff running again, but the Windows stuff was all gone forever.
That day, I learned about a whole new disk technology called "double-space".
That day was also my pivot point to my fall from grace in the aerospace industry.
I was laid off by that company, but I did end up getting my machine back through surplus sales. I reconfigured it just as I had it, and loaded it back up and continued using it at my house. I still have the case, keyboard, and power supply running, but its innards have been upgraded a Pentium. It still runs DOS and WIN95. I still do spice runs on it occasionally, and for years it did all my Futurenet and PADS-PCB circuit layout - however by now, 99% of my SPICE runs are on LTSpice and EAGLE for schematics and PCB - run from a cheap WalMart HP WIN7 laptop - which does everything I need it to do.
I do not know where so many people get the idea one has to spend so much money when it is so much more productive to know what you are doing.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday April 16 2016, @02:40PM
I do not know where so many people get the idea one has to spend so much money when it is so much more productive to know what you are doing.
Because most people don't know what they're doing, but they do know how to spend money!
Sorry to hear your story, BTY. I too was bitten hard by "double-space". It was near the end of a burst of creativity and I hadn't run my tape backups yet. I still fondly remember some of that code, never recovered, clumsily and partially re-implemented.
I renamed dblspc.dll to dvlspc.dll where "dvl" was my abbreviation for "Devil". (Might not have been a .dll suffix, it was a while ago.)
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday April 16 2016, @10:19PM
It sure is a lot easier to spend money than it is to make it, eh?
That was my first experience with doublespace. Once I found out what was going on, and why my machine was running so poorly, I threw a fit. Right then and there in the conference room.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]