T. David Burns wrote:
...
*** Irrational rant mode on ***
This sounds like an excuse to me. If it's that messed up, its time to
get out the backups. For this one (hopefully unlikely) possibility we
should memorize the command line arcana? Put your system on a different
partition from your data, and back it up. If it goes fizz, reload it.
Using a GUI all the while, if possible.
** Irrational rant mode off ***
...
I had a guy who came into #linuxhelp on EFNet because he was in a major
bind. He had accidentally run, as root, rm -rf /lib/* on his colocated
system, hundreds of miles away. Restoring from backup was simply not an
option as it would take days just to get there (as I recall he was in
canada and the server was in florida).
For those of you who don't know what happens when you do that, basically
nothing new can start up. Everything on a UNIX system these days at
some point depends on a libc. Most of the stuff on your system is
dynamically linked to allow for easy upgrades of libraries and to save
space. Unfortunately, when you delete everything in /lib, the libc goes
with it and nothing can run as the linker can't find the libc.
He still had his telnet session up, and the FTP server was standalone
and accepting logins. I sent him a statically linked copy of busybox (a
tiny little thing normally used on rescue disks; it has all the utils
you need to recover a system). Since it was statically linked it could
be run even without his libc. He then found someone with a similar
redhat system and had them tar up their /lib.
I had him FTP over the busybox and tarball of /lib, run the busybox
shell, and run busybox tar to extract /lib. Viola, we have a working
system again. Had he not known how to do some command line stuff, that
would have been impossible (insert argument that he wouldn't have been
playing with rm either, but remember, many of those admin tools are run
from the command line, but automate things for you). As it was, he
again had a working linux system, with only about 15 minutes of
downtime, instead of days. All this because he could use the command
line effectively.
--MonMotha
