For those who don’t know, ‘rm’ tells the computer to remove, and the
‘-rf’ part deletes everything by force, overriding the usual safety
warnings.
This command line is often used to delete from a specific directory, but none was given because it was ran by accident.
Marsala who used a Bash script that was supposed to set the location, but a bug in the code above the line in question meant no directory was given, resulting in absolutely everything being deleted.
Writing on the Server Fault forum, speaking by Marsala said: "I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1,535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.”
Marsala went on to explained that the line of code had also deleted his backups and all his customers’ websites. “All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)."
Forum users told Marsala that his only option was to now contact a data recovery service, hope for the best, and get a good lawyer. He was also criticized for not putting safeguards in place that would have stopped this particular line of code from running without a specified location.
"This is not bad luck: it's astonishingly bad design reinforced by complete carelessness,"
Marsala who used a Bash script that was supposed to set the location, but a bug in the code above the line in question meant no directory was given, resulting in absolutely everything being deleted.
Writing on the Server Fault forum, speaking by Marsala said: "I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1,535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.”
Marsala went on to explained that the line of code had also deleted his backups and all his customers’ websites. “All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)."
Forum users told Marsala that his only option was to now contact a data recovery service, hope for the best, and get a good lawyer. He was also criticized for not putting safeguards in place that would have stopped this particular line of code from running without a specified location.
"This is not bad luck: it's astonishingly bad design reinforced by complete carelessness,"
No comments:
Post a Comment
We love to hear from you!
Sign in to comment "anonymously" without entering verification text.
Want to be notified when I reply your comment? Tick the "Notify Me" box.
If your comment is unrelated to this post, please drop it at my Facebook page here
THANKS.