From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Subject: [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf /
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 07:08:53 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170425140853.GD24499@mcvoy.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2NNp6eCJZGxZyQcM84aZV4-6UXCj3mQtkqjDQrssPndFQ@mail.gmail.com>
Whoever was the genuis that put mknod in /etc has my gratitude.
We had other working Masscomp boxen but after I screwed up that
badly nobody would let me near them until I fixed mine :)
And you have to share who it was, I admitted I did it, I think
it's just a thing many people do..... Once :)
On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 10:02:26AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> Larry,
>
> I had to laugh when I read that because what you don't know is it was part
> of my old Unix wizards test which was left over from a the day when one of
> our hackers (whom I think you would later get to know so I'll not name him)
> accidentally typed: rm -rf . as root from his / on his workstation.
>
> Because /bin/rmdir had been lost, he started getting errors when rmdir was
> forked. So he hit ^C, but he had already lost: /bin, /dev, /etc, /lib,
> most of /usr. He was a developer in the networking group so he was working
> on network code which we could not trust would not panic (in fact we
> disconnected the node from the ethernet immediately just in case). But we
> did have pretty much everything in /usr/bin/[s-z]* -- that is we think it
> was deleting files in /usr/bin when he stopped it.
>
> We obviously had another working Masscomp box just like it. And of course
> the shell was working on the machine that was in trouble. We recovered
> the system as it was. Hint the key item is you have to start by putting
> /dev back together and the solution to that problem has had been discussed
> on this list.
>
> Clem
>
> On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-04-25 14:08 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 ` [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf / Larry McVoy
2017-04-25 0:44 ` Dan Cross
2017-04-25 14:02 ` Clem Cole
2017-04-25 14:08 ` Larry McVoy [this message]
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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