Re: Worst Admin Mistake? was --> Re: /usr broken, will the machine reboot ?

[Andrew Reid <reidac@bellatlantic.net>]

> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:00 PM, Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote:
> > jacques wrote:
> >> by error most of the binaries in /usr are erased (killing rm :-(
> > 
> > Everyone has made that mistake at some point.  I know I have!
> 
> Not me!  Though I did chmod -R /usr once.  I noticed it immediately
> and cancelled.  Most of the commands were broken, though luckily tar
> and scp still worked, so I copied over a backup and untarred it.  This
> anecdote is brought up whenever anyone suggests skipping /usr /bin in
> backups is a good idea because the data doesn't change and would be
> recovered by OS reinstall anyway (yes I've heard that argument).
> 
> Which brings me to another fun question.  What's your worst
> administration mistake and how did you recover?

  I once tried to change the ownership of all the files in a user 
directory by doing something like "chown -R <newuser> .*" from within 
the directory -- I've forgotten what exactly I typed, but my motive was
to get all the "." files included in the scope of the command.

  Unfortunately, ".*" includes "..", so the chown command hopped 
up to /home, and started switching the whole file system over 
to be owned by the new user.

  I caught it after it was taking a suspiciously long time, and
after a minute or two, I figured out what had happened.  

  Nothing focusses the mind quite like screwing up a live
server.  After a brief but intense look at the man-page, I figured 
out that what I wanted was "chown -hR <newuser> <path/to/target>", 
and did that for both my initial task, and to fix the user directories 
that had been messed up.

  These days, I almost always use verbose options of commands,
if they exist, so I can verify that they're operating in the
expected scope.

                                 -- A.
--
Andrew Reid / reidac@bellatlantic.net