> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:00 PM, Bob Proulx <b...@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 / rei...@bellatlantic.net
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