I see as raised, and add some more. Few years ago, while (and still) administrating the Israeli Radio Amature Commette (IARC) server, which is a Linux machine, and back then it was old RH5.1 (very old at that time), I played with a spare disk (small one) I had, and a backup script, using tar.
It happened that I was very drunk that night, and it seemed like the best idea to play with the script, and try to handle everything in the / partition, where it was anyhow well divided between many partitions. I did the following: cd / tar <some commands> | (cd /mnt/backup && tar xvf -) <Oh no, I thought to myself, now it's backing up /home, which is on another partition. Lets clean the space and try again, correctly this time> ls /mnt/backup <yep, home is there. Not good. Need to remove it, and try again> rm -Rf home <Had I ran `pwd` I'de seen I'm located in / ...> <Shit!> ^C </me now very sober> At that stage I started copying whatever realy resides on /mnt/backup from the home subdir. With luck, I had a week old backup of the home dirs, at home, connected through ADSL, and got to start uploading a 4GB file to the server, to open and restore. (afterwards I've decided to untar it on my computer, and upload only the missing parts). During this upload and restore time, a user starts "talk"int to me, saying he can't login to his home dir... I've explained there are some maintanance works on the server, and that it will be ok by morning. He claimed he can't read his mail using pine (wonder why...), and I've used the same explanation... That's another way to get real sober, real fast... Ez. > On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 09:22:22PM +0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> I told him I'de sell tickets for his show, if he ever did it again. > > I'll see this and raise you one. > > Some time ago I was working on a custom embedded PPC board (running > Linux, naturally). After I finished hardening the system against > intrusion, I disabled root access and logged off. There was a super > secret sneaky method for enabling root access remotely, which I > proceeded to try. The method was buggy and root access was not > enabled. No worries, I still had serial console access. Which required > root access. I also had a couple of open root logins on the board - > until my X died. Oh shit. > > I then proceeded to try and break into the system I just finished > hardening to (re)gain root priviledges. A few hours later, I gave > up. Cooked up a RiscWatch, sacrificied some blood to the bare hardware > gods, hooked it up, and proceeded to reflash a new kernel that should > drop me into /bin/sh. Driving the RW was done from a machine several > firewalls (and continents over), with the latency you would expect. It > was done via a set of shell scripts that usually worked, except when > they didn't and completely fried the board. Naturally, they were > sensitive to timing. Amazingly, this time they worked. I rebooted the > board, dropped into /bin/sh, was happy to discover that everything > still worked, restored the old kernel and rebooted. > > As it was booting, I realized that I haven't enabled root access > before rebooting... > > Cue several more hours of alternately massaging RiscWatch and banging > head against wall. Eventually, root access is restored and I go > home. Some mistakes you only make once. > > Cheers, > Muli > -- > Muli Ben-Yehuda > http://www.mulix.org | http://mulix.livejournal.com/ > > > ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
