[nycbug-talk] Unix Admin horror stories

[Henry M]

The entries are pretty old, but it's still an entertaining read.
http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/misc/horror.txt

Snippet:

From: tzs at stein.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith)
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
I was working on a line printer spooler, which lived in /etc.  I wanted
to remove it, and so issued the command "rm /etc/lpspl."  There was only
one problem.  Out of habit, I typed "passwd" after "/etc/" and removed
the password file.  Oops.

I called up the person who handled backups, and he restored the password
file.

A couple of days later, I did it again!  This time, after he restored it,
he made a link, /etc/safe_from_tim.

About a week later, I overwrote /etc/passwd, rather than removing it.

After he restored it again, he installed a daemon that kept a copy of
/etc/passwd, on another file system, and automatically restored it if
it appeared to have been damaged.

Fortunately, I finished my work on /etc/lpspl around this time, so we
didn't have to see if I could find a way to wipe out a couple of
filesystems...

--Tim Smith


Regards,
Henry
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