[ale] Never log onto your satellite as root

Mike Harrison meuon at geeklabs.com
Mon Apr 16 22:22:56 EDT 2007


> >I don't get the "rm -rf /".  Was that a joke inserted by the author of
> >the piece?   Every link says it was an orientation command that was

It's probably just an analogy or bad reporting.

Back when I ran an ISP and server farm(s), no-one got root access to a 
production server until they did that, ("rm -r -f *" usually) to a 
personal workstation or non-production server. 

To this day, when I type "rm -r -f *" or anything similiar, 
I pause, take a deep breath, make sure I'm on the server/system I think I 
am, and where I think I should be.. breath again, check again, 
and -then- press enter. 

One of the worst 2am calls of my life, was to one of the other sysadmin/programmers:
"Andrew, when did the backups run?" - Luckily, it was 30 minutes before I
accidently wiped the drives at 2am. Luckily, few people noticed and 
almsot all was recovered. 

Feces occurs. 
When intelligent people with lots of access make mistakes... 
Feces impacts the rotating blades at high speed. 














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