That story is a great lesson for the kids out there.

I'm really surprised you didn't get fired. I have to ask: did the boss who was so understanding know that this was a result of horsing around as opposed to an accident?

Yes, he knew the full story of what happened. Of course, he was a student also - I guess I was a little in accurate when I said 'boss', he was actually the student leading the project, but our real 'boss' never found out about it. I think as a student he was a bit more understanding than someone older would have been.

How fitting that my intro post is in this thread. I was lurking over here last week while I setup my server, so can I blame some subconscious memory of 'rm -rf /' from the forum? Nah, more like trying to multitask on a lack of sleep.

So I've been on Linodes for about a week, really loving it. Hosting my game clan's website. It isn't a big site, but I enjoy the freedom of a VPS and like having the power to spare. Last machine was in bad shape, so I was looking forward to calling it quits.

So, last night I pull down my last backups, check them for completeness, and then alt-tab to the terminal. Hey, didn't I read about someone rm -rf /'ing an old VPS to decommission it? Yeah, that sounds fun. Until about 10 seconds later when I see the hostname and realize I'm nuking my Linode. Oy

Wound up killing the OS, of course - also my MySQL DB and half of my web root. Latest backup was only about 24hrs old, so not too bad. Learning experience, I guess.

Y'know, I think it was karma taking me down a notch. I was just riding a high from the fact that I started my Linode on Ubuntu and decided the evening before that I'd prefer Debian. Provision a new node, configure, copy files, swap IPs.. Hardly any downtime. I was all sorts of proud of my new Debian install and how quickly I set it up. Well, now I get to practice setting it up again.

Right after I get some turkey..

Happy Thanksgiving folks


edit -- I jest, but the trauma must still be there. I hit Submit and my eyes skimmed over the post as it went away. Had an "Oh crap!" second as I saw 'rm -rf /'

Hello,

I never done "rm -rf /" but I've leaned some lessons ... fo instance, my local backup is done to a external image mounted as "/.backup".

"rm -rf /" won't eat the dot!!!

"rm -rf /" will. Dot protects you from "rm -rf *".

I had a "rm -rf dir /" moment, but managed to notice and ^C it before it finished with "dir". Whew.

What I regret much more was a local damage... I was tired, finished a piece of code after many hours... and, don't ask me how, it must have been the gremlins or something... I typed "cp filename.ext{.bak,}" instead of "cp filename.ext{,.bak}"...

Re-coding previous two hours of work in this state of mind took most of the night.

On some old servers, there used to be a command called "ci". I've always been a fan of the "vi" editor. I don't remember what "ci" was supposed to do, but I do know that whenever I typed "ci filename", it would wipe out the file. Then I was left digging through my backups. Needless to say, I shortly deleted the "ci" executable.

I have run rm -rf / intentionally. It was fun.

The biggest mistake I've made is attempting to install Filezilla on my server when I meant to do it on my home computer. Thankfully, the dependency list was enough warning. It wasn't exactly a big mistake, now that I mention it.

I suppose the real mistake was running ssh in the same terminal window as a local shell.

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ci is like an ancient version of CVS (http://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/RCS.html)



I make my shells different colours for local and remote

I've learned to check the hostname in my prompt, which is easiest because of the number of servers that I administer. On my servers, root in the prompt is bold red, too, so I know to double check before carriage return.

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

Mine's pink!!!...no idea why it's just the default...honest.

I've run 'rm -rf /' a few times to trash chroot jails. I've never hosed a system by accident with it.

I find the fact Linux rm has a --no-preserve-root option rather sad but I can see why they added it.

Installing a new prolog based system on our lone linode that runs production for a small commercial product. The data on the server has lots of turnover so it's hard to have current backups.

The engineer doing the install thinks he's in some directory and types

sudo rm -r lib

ooops..... he was in /