From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 07:08:53 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf / In-Reply-To: References: <20170424220603.883CB18C0D0@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> <20170424221840.GB4966@naleco.com> <20170424232328.GB27654@wopr> <20170424235930.GB24499@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <20170425140853.GD24499@mcvoy.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 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