Re: Worst Admin Mistake? was --> Re: /usr broken, will the machine reboot ?
On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 11:32:38PM +0000, Walter Hurry wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:15:13 -0700, Bryan Irvine wrote:
>
> > Which brings me to another fun question. What's your worst
> > administration mistake and how did you recover?
>
> The worst admin mistake is failure to secure proper backups. Full stop.
>
Early one morning I was experimenting on one of my company's Linux
servers. In the home directory of a test user, I issued:
rm -rf *
I did it on purpose. But it took a long time to remove what should have
only been a handful of files. I hit Ctrl-C and then 'ls'. I realized
that I had a shared company network drive mounted as
/home/testuser/company, and it was deleting everything on that drive!
11 GB of data was deleted from that drive. Thanks to BackupPC, I had
everything restored in 15 minutes. Nothing was lost, and only one
person even noticed what happened.
-Rob
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