From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Subject: [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf /
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 16:59:30 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170424235930.GB24499@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20170424232328.GB27654@wopr>
This is gonna seem like I'm tooting my own horn, and I am a little, but
here's an rm -rf / story.
Clem will be amused because I was a junior or senior in college and a sys
admin for a Masscomp with a 40MB disk with 20 users. And I did some version
of rm -rf /, realized part way through that I screwed up, and killed it.
But /bin and /dev were gone so putting things back together was hard.
But I did it and wrote up this little note for the people who came after
me, if I was stupid enough to do this someone else would, was my thinking.
You can get a sense of how scared I was in it if you read it carefully.
It was a very long night.
For an undergrad, I think it's not bad? Maybe? I dunno, I look at how
much I needed to have understood to get the system back up, that's a lot
of reading, playing, experience. Love that Geophysics department, they
pushed me.
And it was during my (brief) foray into the *roff -me macros (I went
-ms and never looked back). Roff source on request to anyone who is
twisted enough to want it.
http://mcvoy.com/lm/masscomp-restore.pdf
Complete with all the typos.
--lm
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-04-24 23:59 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-04-24 22:06 [TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards? Noel Chiappa
2017-04-24 22:18 ` Josh Good
2017-04-24 23:23 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-24 23:59 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
2017-04-25 0:44 ` [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf / Dan Cross
2017-04-25 14:02 ` Clem Cole
2017-04-25 14:08 ` Larry McVoy
2017-04-25 14:12 ` Álvaro Jurado
2017-04-25 14:29 ` arnold
2017-04-25 14:31 ` Álvaro Jurado
2017-04-25 16:28 ` Pete Turnbull
2017-04-27 23:44 ` Steve Johnson
2017-04-27 23:54 ` Ron Natalie
2017-04-28 3:04 ` Toby Thain
2017-04-28 5:19 ` arnold
[not found] ` <mailman.198.1493337336.3780.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-04-28 14:48 ` John Floren
2017-04-25 14:18 ` Clem Cole
2017-04-25 15:28 ` Dan Cross
2017-04-25 17:56 ` Bakul Shah
2017-04-25 14:19 ` Corey Lindsly
2017-04-25 0:06 ` [TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards? Ron Natalie
2017-04-25 0:18 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-25 0:22 ` ron minnich
2017-04-25 0:24 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-25 0:26 ` ron minnich
[not found] <mailman.805.1493129956.3779.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-04-25 15:17 ` [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf / David
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