T. David Burns wrote:
At 02:11 PM 7/27/2002 -0500, you wrote:
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).
Note that it was a command line command improperly used that trashed his
system in the first place.
If you'd like to explain how to delete files on a system that's 100s of
miles away without using rm or a similar command line utility, I'd be
happy to hear it. I don't want a "oh, remote display nautilius" answer
either as that takes such an ungodly amount of bandwidth that I sure
wouldn't want to see the bills...
Note that this is a highly unusual situation, in which it is *perhaps*
appropriate not to have reasonable backups available. In other words,
the cost of doing reasonable backups and having them available was
considered to be higher than taking a risk backed up only by highly
expert firefighters. This looks like a good choice in retrospect?
He had backups, but it was an issue of restoring them. He had no
physical access to the server as it was hundreds of miles away. It
would have taken him a few days just to get to the server, then he would
still have to take the server out of the colo, restore, and then ptu it
back in. Some colo companies will do restorations for you, but usually
at a very high price if they will at all.
Maybe this (necessity for use of CLI) is the state of the art, but you
guys are talking as if we should be resigned to this situation, or even
proud of it. I am not convinced.
If the system's sitting at your desk or on your local lan where you can
export X displays to your heart's content without paying thousands of
dollars in bandwidth fees to money grubbing telcos, a nice GUI works
just fine. However, when you've got a server living in a datacenter
habitat that's hundreds or even thousands of miles away from you and
you're paying for every bit you transmit, you'd better be sure you're
gunna be workign on it from the command line. Any other method of
administration is simply uneconomical.
Raving Dave
--MonMotha
