Comments on: Typos can be fatal…

By: nigel kersten

nigel kersten — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:15:58 +0000

It’s so so true.

Perhaps being an IT person requires you to internalise the fact that all data really is ephemeral…. :)

By: Ed Marczak

Ed Marczak — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 20:36:53 +0000

I was doing something similar just this morning – with a less than perfect backup – and all I could think was, “I’d never do this with a client’s data…” Sometimes, though, we can get sloppy with our own equipment.
–
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By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:14:43 +0000

that’s a riot! I’ve never done anything like that… yet. This is the first time I’ve had root access to real, live production boxes, so I’m sure there’s a gaffe in my near future. Look forward to the article on Mobile Home Dirs!

By: nigel kersten

nigel kersten — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 20:24:53 +0000

heh. That’s a good one.

While we’re on the topic… back when I first started as a sysadmin, this was a nasty mistake that I’ve never ever made again… :)

(this is on a live mail server btw, OS X 10.2, working as root….)

#!/bin/sh

temp_working_directory="/tmp/sqldumps/somethingorother"

#clean out working dir before we start.
rm -Rf $temp_working_directory/*

# Do lots of stuff involving the variable $temp_working_directory

You might be able to see where this is heading…

Nigel thinks to himself, “You know, I’m really sick of typing in $temp_working_directory all the time, I’m going to rename that variable”

#!/bin/sh

wkrdir="/tmp/sqldumps/somethingorother"

#clean out working dir before we start.
rm -Rf $temp_working_directory/*

# Do lots of stuff involving the variable $wkrdir

Nigel thinks to himself, “Gosh this is taking a long time…”

then an error pops up about deleting some crucial system file that was in use at the time…

oh… my… god.

Hilariously enough, the mail server kept running happily, as I cancelled it somewhere in the /System directory.

I then carefully copied across all the missing files from a machine with the same OS version, and the mail server kept working happily for another year or so… it never let me run SoftwareUpdate though, and I had to unpack all updates and apply them by hand from that point on.

By: leeg

leeg — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 18:51:21 +0000

Unlucky. I’ve done that on a number of occasions, as well as the extremely retarded:

dump -0f / – | (cd /mnt; restore -xf – )

which is akin to doing “tar cjvf importantdirectory backup.tar.bz2″

But i like the way you’re watching OS X and XP install. Hooray for dual-coreitude! ;-)