The great woops
James finally did it. What is it? He typed rm -rf / on a Solaris box. Fortunately, he wasn’t root. I, however, was root when I typed rm -rf * on a SunOS 4 box that ran a lot of core apps for a company in the mid 1990s. By the time I realized what had happened, I had blown away the kernel, and /etc. Needless to say, much hilarity ensued, fortunately it didn’t crash due to the fact that the kernel and all the files it needed were still open, and therefore accessible. It was the reboot that would kill it.
So, I had to restore /etc from tape, the kernel from a backup location (it had been custom built), and hope. Turned out I got it right, except for marking the magic setting on the kernel to make it bootable. Live and learn.
This entry was posted at 2:17 pm on 8 April 2008 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
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LOL…reminds me of the time I did the same thing, on purpose, to an HP-UX box in the early 1990s that was getting retired. In my case, what was more interesting was what happened as /dev was getting blown away…all the peripherals went bonkers as the drivers were removed, then the storage as well.
The box convulsed (on screen anyway) as everything got ripped out, then went into firmware mode. Pronounced dead shortly thereafter as the box tried to reboot itself and stayed in firmware mode.
That particular episode is still relevant today, as I’ve seen a few rookie SA’s at clients make the same mistake on Linux boxes, and were not as prescient as you were back then in realizing what they’d done, until it was too late.