Heck, I’m foolhardy enough that I went to it just to check, from an office computer.
I certainly hope that it was more Monica than Linda.
A county IT department worker demonstrating the power of the internet to local government officials in the mid 90’s unwittingly showed them all whitehouse.com on a projected screen. This lead to a discussion of the differences between .com and .gov. And no small amount of blushing.
I just lost 6 months worth of accounting and payroll data, due a glitch found in the back-up system after the server exploded at work. I am in the valley of despair. The manual data recovery is going to take months, and I’m already working 55-60 hour weeks.
Which is?
On other issues, I didn’t know whitehouse.com was no longer porn; I declined to look at it from work.
rm is the Unix command to delete a file or files.
The * is a wildcard character. You would use the command rm *.c to delete all files with the extension .c.
However, there’s a space between the * and the . in the post. That means Unix interprets it as rm * followed by the nonsense command .c.
rm * deletes all files in the current directory.
What Anne Neville said.
And yes, I did that once…
It’s probably worth adding that Unix doesn’t bother to ask if you are sure before proceeding with that command.
Some admins and users alias rm so that it’s actually rm -i and does ask if you are sure, but the default behavior is not to ask if you are sure. There are other people who argue that aliasing rm so it does ask if you are sure is dangerous, because it lulls people into a false sense of security by making them think that rm always asks if you really want to do that.
SQL Server doesn’t ask, either. A few years ago I wanted to make a copy of a table, so I generated a script. I was going to change the name to dbo.ValuableDataThatLivesDependOn_copy, but I hit that run button a little too soon. And the first command was DROP TABLE.
Yes, I soiled myself immediately. It was bad. It was very very bad.
My gosh - I can’t believe I forgot this similar tale that is one that still gives me the willies.
I was doing data conversion for a client. During the lead-up to going live, I frequently had to basically wipe everything I’d done, to start from a clean slate. To make this easier, I had a script that dropped a bunch of constraints (foreign key etc.), and either deleted from or truncated the assorted tables.
I got a ton of use out of that script.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks after go-live date. Everything was working fine. Late afternoon, I was chatting with one of the client staff members (she was learning how to do database administration), while another client staff member (the real DBA) was in the room.
The apprentice DBA was logged into the production database in the interactive SQL tool. With whatever database user ID that had full rights to do anything at all.
The apprentice for some reason did ctrl-V. A bunch of commands appeared on the screen, one after the other, and I saw with horror things like “deleted xxxx records” and “table truncated” appear on the screen.
I yelled “KILL THAT SCRIPT!!”.
She did… but the damage was done.
I remind you again, this was production. She had just wiped out a large fraction of the production database.
Now, why she’d even been looking at my conversion script, was a mystery to me.
And being logged in to production, with a user with that kind of power, when she wasn’t doing anything that required it… well, that’s just sloppy and shows you the sort of thing that can happen.
The senior DBA was surprisingly mellow about it, really. He said they could reconstruct it from the database logs. Being late afternoon, simply restoring from the nightly backup wasn’t a great choice as they’d lose all their day’s work.
This being my last day on that particular project, I never really found out how he did it all. Which was sort of too bad, as it would have been useful knowledge.
It’s pretty much a rule in IT that 50% of storage doesn’t have backups, and the 50% that you think has backups actually doesn’t because it’s not backing up the right thing and nobody has time to test it. This comes up over and over in my IT career.
Yup, what we call a Code 4 problem.
Say it with me -
“Problem exists between the keyboard and the chair.”
I had a colleague delete all the source code we had been working on in our Y2K environment. And it had not been backed up for seven months.
A former colleague.
Regards,
Shodan
My father somehow got it into his head that he could make changes to the hardware on my brother’s PC. Father is good with electronics, not so much with common sense sometimes.
He decided that the computer’s fans were too loud, so found some software online that would allow him to reduce the fan speeds…
Not enough cooling, leads to bad things. When he called me, he was very vague as to what he did, until I got the whole story… and informed him that the CPU was now blown. When the PC arrived at my house, I confirmed the same, and warned him never to fiddle with fans/cooling again.
I used to use FoxPro as one of my ex-employers critical applications ran on it.
There was a fair amount of database manipulation going on in that job and I got pretty good at it, even though it wasn’t something I was trained for.
I got to be fast… very fast. Sometimes too fast. So I’m typing away at the command box and for some reason, at times, I would get ahead of myself and type ZAP:
USE TABLE1.DBF
REPL ALL BLAH WITH SUBSTR(BLAH2,3,40) FOR BLAH, BLAH, BLAH
ZAP
… WTF??? DAWGAMMIT!!!
Fortunately, I tended to backup my databases to non-standard backup extensions, like TABLE1.BAQ, TBL2BAK.DBF, etc before I made some major modifications to the data - I would end up with possibly 20 different backup files when all was said and done, so my (slight) tendency to ZAP would only cause me to lose 1/2 hour of work or so, not days of it.
(ZAP, for those uninitiated to FoxPro, would just wipe the entire database, no questions asked.)
Nowhere near the degree of devastation of these database guys, but I used Lotus 1-2-3 back in the days that printing was just unsure enough that the first macro I wrote on every spreadsheet I started consisted of the save command followed by the print command.
A few years ago we got an application that had shared files, and users had to refresh to see files other users had created. Refresh was done via the f5 key.
I was admin for the application for a while, and people would call in desperation because (even though we just went through this last week when they couldn’t see a file someone else created) the files that were supposed to be there didn’t exist! I would tell them to refresh. Then I’d specify ‘press f5’. Then I’d walk over to their desks and press it myself, to be praised as having some kind of magical touch, because it sure didn’t work for them.
It took me a couple of weeks (slow on the uptake) to realize that they were probably all hitting the ‘f’ key, then ‘5’ when I told them to ‘press f5’.
That was the most irritating issue for me personally with the software, however, the worst issue was that we were using it wrongly, and users could get to the shared files via windows explorer as well as via the app. So they’d just circumvent the app entirely, and work on the files outside it, which defeated the purpose.
I’ve run into a few that will install the crap even if you click “No”. It lulls you into a false sense of security by making you think you have a choice. Then you click “No” and you’re still fubarred. :mad: Safer to use Task Manager no matter what.
This is not entirely correct.
.c doesn’t get interepreted as a nonsense command. Instead, it’s interpreted as another argument to rm, which in turn, means it gets interpreted as another file to be deleted. Of course there’s generally not a file named .c to be deleted, but that’s still significantly different from being a nonsense command. If there were a semi-colon between the * and the .c, then it would be considered a command.
It’s also worth noting that “*” get expanded by the shell to all non-dot files in the current directory rather than all files in the current directory. So a file named “.foo” would survive.
Oh gawd… that one hit my project. A colleague received it, and of course it forwarded itself to everyone on the project. I was also foolish enough to open the attachment… a split second later, I heard someone else say “That looks like a virus - DON’T OPEN IT!!”. :smack:
Had to make a hasty phone call to Typo Knig suggesting that he not open any emails from my work address that day, as an email from me with that subject line… well, would be a tad unusual but not entirely out of line.
This was a DoD project, and the worm hit a lot of groups other than just our own. A couple of days later, everyone in DoD got a warning email reminding us to be careful with attachments, and “if you get an email from a general saying ‘I love you’ you should be concerned for SEVERAL reasons”. LOL!!!