mind the explanatory gap

many a slip ‘twixt mind and lip…

mind the explanatory gap RSS Feed
« wtfdtfd ? : A wiki-like system for the Mac OS X file system…
Temporarily swapping user passwords in Open Directory »

Typos can be fatal…

So last night I was playing around with the MBR on an external drive… and completely without thinking managed to wipe out my laptop.

/dev/rdisk1 Nigel, not /dev/rdisk0 ….

bleagh.

Anyway, it’s made me realise just how much I love HomeSync, as 95% of everything that matters has been syncing up to the server… and as I’ve had two requests now for a post on Mobile Accounts and HomeSync best practices, this is as good a time as any… working on it now while watching OS X and Win XP reinstall….

Posted on October 18th, 2006 under Snippets, ramblings. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.

5 Responses to “Typos can be fatal…”

  1. leeg Says:
    October 19th, 2006 at 4:51 am

    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! ;-)

  2. nigel kersten Says:
    October 19th, 2006 at 6:24 am

    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.

    :)

  3. Andy Says:
    October 20th, 2006 at 3:14 am

    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!

  4. Ed Marczak Says:
    October 20th, 2006 at 6:36 am

    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.
    –
    erm

  5. nigel kersten Says:
    October 20th, 2006 at 7:15 am

    It’s so so true.

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

Leave a Reply