On Mon, 7 May 2012 15:09:28 Cristian Rodríguez wrote:
[...] Yes, cheap-ass hardware fails and usually sucks..but human beings screw things up in a much larger scale..big time! so think before you type ! ;-)
Cheers!!
To damn right! It is *way* too easy to be logged on with root priveleges, type rm -rf * and then suddenly get that sinking feeling when it takes much longer than expected...then, slowly (or maybe suddenly) the panic sets in when you realise that you didn't cd to the parent of the directory you wanted to remove but, rather to / and, like a good little indian, your rm command is dutifully doing exactly what you (as root) told it to do - removing everything, recursively, from / without asking for further confirmation... BTDT. Once. Only once! If you're quick you catch it before it gets to /sbin (where the statically linked "restore" should be located, and of course you have a backup handy and you *don't* reboot the machine (which, if you do, won't start because /etc, /bin, most of /lib and a good bit of /home are already gone) and can therefore recover it! I rebooted. Bad mistake. Bad, very expensive mistake. We did get it back. Eventually. From a backup. After much unplanned (and very inconvenient) downtime. I learned my lesson! Keep backups and know how to restore them, even on a broken system. TEST the restore process and make sure a) that your backups work and b) you're confident doing it under pressure if you have to. That is a lesson I won't forget in a hurry! -- ========================================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au ========================================================================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org