Man destroys his business with 1 line of code

morguk

morguk

morguk

Associate
Joined
5 Dec 2007
Posts
1,294
"I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

How I can recover from a rm -rf / now in a timely manner?"

http://serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf

Check out the responces
 
We consulted a data recovery company who analyzed one of our 1500+ server disks for a reasonable fee, and after diagnoses, sent you a list of recoverable files. All files are here. Now we're finding the money to pay the recovery service for all our servers.
Click to expand...

Lucky guy.
 
morguk said:
"I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

How I can recover from a rm -rf / now in a timely manner?"

http://serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf

Check out the responces
Click to expand...

Anyone know what the company actually is so we can check? Whilst this is possible, I suspect it is a hoax until I get an actual company name.
 
Done that before - fortunately just 1 system - managed to hit enter instead of tab and ended up executing rm -rf / instead of autocompleting the directory name :( also done it with chmod which is pretty destructive to an OS though doesn't lose data files.

I can't believe any business like that would operate without cycled offline backups though - I even do that at home with my NAS incase of crypto malware.
 
so any one got an answer why anyone would write a line of code with a ww2 film reference for ****ing things up?
 
Archeum said:
Skeptical. Where are the customers stories/reports of this?
Click to expand...

h4rm0ny said:
Anyone know what the company actually is so we can check? Whilst this is possible, I suspect it is a hoax until I get an actual company name.
Click to expand...

IOVPS did basically the same thing once and only had partial backups (lost many of their customers over it though mostly due to lack of communication rather than the screwup) - basically the framework of usernames and machine stats and nothing else. End of the day though the terms and conditions put the onus on the end user to maintain their own backup as well usually.
 
Tefal said:
as a non coder person



fubar as in the saving private ryan reference?
Click to expand...

Foo and Bar are traditional names used for generic variables in coding examples. And Fubar (****ed Up Beyond All Recognition) is a military term that long predates that movie (which I've never seen).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom