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posted by cmn32480 on Friday April 15 2016, @09:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the glad-it-wasn't-me dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @05:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @05:12AM (#332611)

    Everyone does that once.

    In my case, I was helping a DEC field engineer test a new 6250 bpi tape drive on our VAX 11-750.

    We dumped the root partition to tape, then extracted it into a test directory, then deleted what we had extracted.

    Except ... oops! ... I was in the root directory when I did that.

    My boss said, "That's what backups are for", and, since I was the guy who did the backups, we used the opportunity to upgrade from 4.2 BSD to 4.3 BSD, then reloaded everyone's home directories, configured the network interface (which tapped into an Ethernet cable as thick as my thumb), and we were good to go.

    Apparently whomever did this was a beginner.

    Seasoned pros run their commands with the '-n' switch to check syntax before they execute it ... and they anticipate worst-case scenarios, drawing upon their rich store of unhappy experiences. They add code to test for directories before they operate upon them. They unmount devices when they are through with them. They check filesystems after they unmount them - even when the unmount was error-free. Etc.

    That's what employers get for hiring kids fresh out of college and deliberately snubbing older, wiser heads.

    What's the value of a seasoned UNIX systems administrator?

    Whatever it is, it's orders of magnitude less than the value of those ~1300 websites and the man-hours that went into building and maintaining them, the data contained within their databases, the transactions generated by their media, the business intelligence embedded within their middleware, the unique security tokens, etc.

    Learning Ansible, Salt, Chef or Puppet is TRIVIAL ... compared to learning how to be diligent, and responsible, and patient.

    But, hey, what do I know?

    I've only been in this business longer than most recruiters and some venture capitalists have been alive.

    These are the same people who want "rock star" sysadmins and developers ... but somehow forget that Keith Richards was born in 1943 ... Rod Stewart, and Pete Townshend, were born in 1945 ... Gene Simmons was born in 1949.

    ~childo