How to destroy one's business...?

What is on Your Mind?
1

I don't know enough about this subject but this is for the big guns...

Yesterday:-

Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code | News | Lifestyle | The Independent

2

OK, i have read the whole story and it boils down to a very bad case of "accidental rm -rf". But:

  • The Unix-variant the guy used is not named but i presume the guy used some sort of Linux. In Linux the rm-command has an already built-in protection against private persons (the translation of the greek terminus technicus for these people), see the man page:
    text --no-preserve-root do not treat '/' specially --preserve-root do not remove '/' (default)


    So, basically, to make an rm -rf / work at all you have to in fact override the default with rm --no-preserve-root -rf / and i wonder if this could happen by "accident".
  • Even given that this might happen, how comes the guy had all his backups mounted? Shouldn't there be at least one FS (or share, ...) to mount for every day/generation so that - if somethiing bad happens, like a corrupted FS - only one day worth of backups is destroyed?
  • And even then, how comes he hasn't tested his script prior to running it on production? Routinely, before doing an rm -rf <something> i do a echo <something> just to get an idea of what <something> might consist of.

So, all in all, i think this guy deserves the IT-equivalent of the Darwin Award for successfully cleaning himself out of the list of people doing business in the computer branch. This leaves more room for experts to do what he was clearly unfit to do - good!

Dear paratrooping experts, maybe you can help me out: i incidentally forgot that i had purposefully removed my parachute after i happened to enter a plane and then involuntarily opened its door and accidentally jumped out of it as it reached its maximum altitude of 35000 ft. Right now i am rapidly approaching the altitude of zero and maybe you can suggest what i should do now.

bakunin

1 Like
3

Hi bakunin...

Thanks for the reply. I for one am not sure if this is really happened, hence the question mark in the title bar. If it did the guy in question will never make the mistake again.

As I am no expert in this field I was relying on you pros to educate me.

But why mount the external parts before using rm in the first place?

The mind boggles.

4

No no - mount only for the backup process, must be umount ed for the rm .

5

And as it seems your gut feeling was right about that:
link to slashdot.org

Now, that i learned how things are done in this company: i am sooo inclined to host my next servers at this guys site. Knowing his understanding of "operational security" i take it there is nothing that could possibly go wrong.

If this really was a "marketing effort": it was a bad one.

Thanks to agent.kgb, who notified my of this link.

bakunin

1 Like
6

Hi bakunin...

Thanks for the info.

Went to the link and read it....

Cheers...