Re: Worst Admin Mistake? was --> Re: /usr broken, will the machine reboot ?
On 9/13/11 3:15 PM, Bryan Irvine wrote:
> Which brings me to another fun question. What's your worst
> administration mistake and how did you recover?
Years ago on my main workstation back in my slackware days, I was
upgrading samba from the source tarballs.
I had everything compiled and installed in /usr/local and was trying to
remove the old binaries in /usr/bin. The command was something like this:
root:/usr# rm /usr/bin/smb *
The command ran quickly, and obviously I realised something was wrong
when various things, like ls, stopped working.
Fortunately I had an open instance of midnight commander, so I was able
to ftp the now-missing binaries from the original install media in a
secondary windows machine and use the built-in chmod/chown functions in
mc to unarchive and fix the files so they could be run.
>From this, I learned the importance of watching the spaces in a command
and being aware of what the value of cwd is.
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