Worst Admin Mistake? was --> Re: /usr broken, will the machine reboot ?

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:00 PM, Bob Proulx wrote:
> jacques wrote:
>> by error most of the binaries in /usr are erased (killing rm :-(
>
> Everyone has made that mistake at some point. I know I have!

Not me! Though I did chmod -R /usr once. I noticed it immediately
and cancelled. Most of the commands were broken, though luckily tar
and scp still worked, so I copied over a backup and untarred it. This
anecdote is brought up whenever anyone suggests skipping /usr /bin in
backups is a good idea because the data doesn't change and would be
recovered by OS reinstall anyway (yes I've heard that argument).

Which brings me to another fun question. What's your worst
administration mistake and how did you recover?

I once tried to change the ownership of all the files in a user
directory by doing something like "chown -R <newuser> .*" from within
the directory -- I've forgotten what exactly I typed, but my motive was
to get all the "." files included in the scope of the command.

Unfortunately, ".*" includes "..", so the chown command hopped
up to /home, and started switching the whole file system over
to be owned by the new user.

I caught it after it was taking a suspiciously long time, and
after a minute or two, I figured out what had happened.

Nothing focusses the mind quite like screwing up a live
server. After a brief but intense look at the man-page, I figured
out that what I wanted was "chown -hR <newuser> <path/to/target>",
and did that for both my initial task, and to fix the user directories
that had been messed up.

These days, I almost always use verbose options of commands,
if they exist, so I can verify that they're operating in the
expected scope.

Andrew Reid /


To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact
Archive: http://lists.debian.org/