Posts by howy

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

Urban myth or not - happened to me in support for DWP in the 90's - we also got disks "write-protected" with a big line of tape over the read hole rather than the little notch on the side.

College student with 'visions of writing super-cool scripts' almost wipes out faculty's entire system

Live system - Whilst training

Did something very similar in late 80's - training on Unix and trained the hard way to create new accounts/directories etc ( editing /etc/passwd directly ) - demonstrated how to create homeless logons etc.

Finally, on last day of course we were introduced to "easy" way to add/delete users - aka helpful unix scripts adduser/deluser.

Thought I'd tidy up !!! So I duly run deluser on the homeless account created above.

Helpful script prompts "Are you sure you want to delete ?" (the spaces here are critical and are hiding a fatal flaw for those uninitiated in Unix)

Duly press Y and enter and wait patiently.

After a couple of seconds "rm not found" starts scrolling up the screen ????? Call over the trainer who promptly goes white.

Yup - deluser found no home directory and promptly issued rm -rf / <SIGH>

Full rebuild from scratch required - system unavailable to go live following week.

So not ALWAYS a noob error in scripting.