UK Hosting Provider 123-Reg Accidentally Deletes Customer Sites (theregister.co.uk) 64
Richard Chirgwin, writing for The Register: UK hosting and domains provider 123-Reg has been struck by a weekend issue that knocked an unspecified number of VPS customers offline. The company posted a status message saying that the unspecified issues arose on April 16. 123-reg customer, software company INNmaster, contacted The Register directing our attention to its post on the topic, claiming a rogue script had deleted customer sites (such as this one). Slashdot has independently received several tips for this incident. Here's a copy of the email that Richard Winslow, Director of 123-Reg sent to the affected customers.
123-Reg (Score:1)
Sounds like some sort of new radioactive isotope
It's the singularity (Score:2)
Oh, and the obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
Re:It's the singularity (Score:4, Funny)
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So that Serverfault question wasn't a hoax (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like that Serverfault question about running rm -rf / was real then
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. It looks like they had a script that was supposed to delete old, unused virtual machines. Due to a database error, similar to the Serverfault hoax, the script get a null value which made it think many active machines were in fact dead and so it deleted them.
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Sysadmins running with the --complete-idiot option.
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Or the poor admin that thought he was in the dev environment.
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Referring to this one?
http://brobible.com/life/artic... [brobible.com]
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Congratulations. Your account has been upgraded with more free disk space.
Said the BOFH... 8-)
A hot I worked for did this once (Score:2)
In that case a "rogue script" meant that they were trying to prove that anyone could be an administrator so gave a sales person root access who promptly ran rm -rf /*.*.
On top of that their were no daily backups as promised for that server, because they would not invest money in it.
ait.com
Ahh those were some of the worst days of my life, but learned a lot fixing other people's mistakes.
Re:A hot I worked for did this once (Score:4, Insightful)
so gave a sales person root access who promptly ran rm -rf /*.*.
Running rm -rf /*.*. (or even rm -rf /*.*) is unlikely to cause much damage on a *NIX system as it's very unusual to have any files with dots in their names in the root directory and even more unlikely to have any directories that have dots in their names.
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> Running rm -rf /*.*. (or even rm -rf /*.*) is unlikely to cause much damage on a *NIX system [...]
Alas, times have changed. Nowadays every idiot and his dog, coming over from DOS (perhaps via OSX [1]) has the irresistible urge to name his shell scripts "foo.sh". Those are the very same people who think "all files" is spelt "*.*", so the only consolation for all that ugliness is that they bring their own antimatter along. May they annihilate themselves in a flash of light!
[1] Yeah, yeah. OSX is Unix ben
./pu.sh (Score:2)
Nowadays every idiot and his dog, coming over from DOS (perhaps via OSX [1]) has the irresistible urge to name his shell scripts "foo.sh".
Especially when a script to back up the day's work to a remote server is called pu.sh.
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The parent post was not about using unnecessary extensions but about having files or directories with an extension at the ROOT of the filesystem. /usr /etc /tmp .. match the pattern /*.* so rm -rf /*.* should be mostly harmless on most systems.
None of
For instance, on my current box, the only thing that would be removed is the symlink /initrd.imh -> boot/initrd.img-...
That would probably prevent me to boot but that is easy to repair.
Regarding the use of the .sh extension for shell script, I kind of disagr
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Hey. Don't drag Mac users into this one. Historically, we were used to using type and creator codes in the file's resource fork, naming our files whatever we damned well pleased; and mocked the windows people for their 8.3 filenames every bit as much as the Unix guys did. So even pre-OS X, no *.* people here.
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I am sorry, I was trying to be a bit funny and serious at the same timet. We named our customer data partitions /vs{#}. What she did was do a rm -rf /vs* deleting all the customers data, the OS was perfectly fine.
I probably should have stuck to the serious part of it.
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Even on current Linux systems,
Resolution [Re:A hot I worked for did this once] (Score:3)
On solaris * resolves to something or nothing, so /*.* resolves to /.
Wait, you said that the command eliminates slashdot?
I'm trying to decide if that's good, or bad...
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/*.* for me resolves for literal '/*.*'. Generally shells try to glob expand, and pass as literal on failure. So if you have no files in / with '.' in them, it will try to remove, literraly, a single file/dir named '*.*'.
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Bourne shells pass as literal on failure to match glob. This has always irritated me as commands like "find . -name *.c" do radically different things depending on whether there are any .c files in the current directory. C shells don't pass on a literal glob if it doesn't match - they return an error without running the command.
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Salesperson didn't know about & and the power of, well, you know...
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If you are not sure then remove it :-)
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sales person root access who promptly ran rm -rf /*.*.
Back a long long time ago in place far far away I was working in Unix on a VAX. It was late, I was tired. I wanted to delete a bunch of files. Some of the files I wanted to delete matched the pattern fred.* while others matched the pattern *.barney. So in my muddled head I thought that I could save a typing one command by combining the two patterns and doing rm *.* Of course I realized my mistake the moment I hit return. Fortunately it was in a local directory and I could easily recreate what I had l
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Incompetence abounds (Score:2)
So either of the following happened:
1. There is a massively incompetent administrator who scripted a blind delete without testing
2. There is a massively incompetent administrator who left security open enough that someone else could delete multiple customers stuff
I guess they just don't build them like they used to, because 'cloud'.
Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat (Score:3, Interesting)
Again [slashdot.org]?
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that was a stupid hoax. this is just stupid.
Let me guess. (Score:1)
Perchance, was it "just one line of code"?
"Webservers hate this one weird trick!"
"Find out the ancient neckbeard secret servers don't want you to know!"
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Don't accuse me of poetry (Score:3)
Cloud so convenient
Service provider not bright
All the files are gone
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The only thing you read is slashdot?!
30+ posts and no... (Score:1)
â¦comment of :
"â¦and nothing of substance was lost."
^__~
Which is worse (Score:1)
Two words pointedly missing from that email (Score:2)
1/ Sorry
2/ Apologise
Another publicity stunt (Score:1)
Looks like this is another publicity stunt, just like the hoax where a man deleted all his files with a rm -rf .
LINK IS A GOOGLE DOC WHICH CAN TRACK YOU (Score:1)
Oh yeah! (Score:2)
Senior admin to millenial newbie: "What ever you do, don't run the delete_all_evidence.sh script on the production systems. We only use that when the Feds raid us. It completely scrubs the boxes".
newbie: "Oh .... yeah. So it does. Where do I click undelete"