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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: 3, Interesting) by Whoever on Saturday April 16 2016, @05:57AM
A IT contractor for a small company had been asked to add another hard drive to the company file server.
The server has 2 drives: /dev/hda and /dev/hdb.
He adds the hard drive and assumes that the new drive is /dev/hdc. Proceeds to format hdc, which was in fact the old drive with the entire network files on it, while the new drive was now /dev/hdb.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 16 2016, @04:27PM
For people wondering why: that wasn't that uncommon back in the day. On some distros, /dev/hd[a-d] were commonly assigned based on which pata port it was attached to. Therefore, 1 disk on the primary master was /dev/hda, the second drive on the secondary master was /dev/hdc. However, others would assign them based on the order they were attached. Still others would assign them in a somewhat random order based on a couple of factors like spin up time, other kernel activity, etc. That is why many distros now use various drive ID rules, like UUID, to make sure you get the same disk regardless of other factors.