On 11-05-13 04:54 PM, Tom Perrine wrote:
>
> What subtle opportunity for massive destruction would you pass on as a
> warning to the next generation of system administrators?
>
> Don't limit yourself to bash/csh, feel free to explore databases,
> storage and network catastrophes!

The classic one is when more than one sysadmin work as root on the same 
machine without realising it and they all fill up the same command history. I 
have seen, several times, disastrous results from a quick "Esc k enter".

I had a summer student who thought it was the coolest thing ever to use "kill 
-9 -1" to log out. I did not know about that. He had done a good job for 
everything I had asked him to, and was thorough and careful, so I started to 
let him do more important tasks and gave him the root password... This is 
years ago when OSes did not protect against this.

Deleting (rm) a huge file that is still open and still growing.



-- 
Yves.                                                  http://www.SollerS.ca/
                                                        http://blog.zioup.org/
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