Miscellaneous > The Lounge

Funny Computer Mishaps

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voidmain:
Had an RS/6000 wiped out because of a stupid admin. He wanted to remove all of the files and subdirectories under a particular subdirectory, including the hidden files (files that start with ".") so he did an "rm -rf .* *" as root.  Well, after 5 minutes or so the command had not yet completed and he thought that was odd because there wasn't much under the subdirectory.  Needless to say ".*" also matches ".." which is the parent directory so it started to recurse down the directory tree to the root directory and then proceeded to erase everything on the system that it could.  This system served about 300 programmers.

Needless to say the first thing I did was fire him, and the second thing was to get out the backup tapes and restore the system.  Those were the days when you really had to know what you were doing to be an administrator. I believe most versions of "rm" have built in protections to not allow this to happen today.  I still am in the habbit of using ".??*" when I want to delete hidden files/directories with wildcards just in case.

choasforages:
hmmmm, i once deleted libc6.so or something like that, becuae i had just recompiled glibc and didtn' know what i was doing atthe time. i deleted it to replace it with the one i just compiled, doh, that was pretty dumb

Chooco:
i tried to see if i could abuse a PHP application that i made on my website which was on a Windows computer.
the PHP application allowed me to make a file then save the file as whatever name i wanted. i made a file which was blank and saved it as ../../../mysql/bin/mysql.exe

suddenly MySQL stopped working and i had to re-install it on the web server lol

Calum:
my keyboard doesn't do capital 'x's unless you use the caps lock, and doesn't do capital 'd's or 'r's unless you use right hand shift key. Also, escape either doesn't work, or sticks on, and ~ is hard to type too. Not sure if it was something that i did though, but it was fine when i bought it. Of course now i'm stuck with it, since it's a laptop...

Master of Reality:
blood + motherboard = bad
do you really want to know more?
---------------------
i turned my computers off in a thunderstorm after the storm had long gone away i turned on my computers and just when they had started up the power blinked out and corrupted something that i could fix causing me to re-install debian, then redhat Linux and having to find iptables equivalents to my ipchains that i had. The Bob Hub is still up though!

[ August 17, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

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