(This is part of the podcast discussion extension)

You worst moment on a Unix system

Everyone's bad moment was about data loss. Some mis-used cp/mv and overwrote their precious music libs, some badly used dd, some repartitioned incorrectly and got corrupted filesystems.

http://unixhorrorstories.blogspot.com/20...about.html

I've managed to remove my music directory several times while organising it, thankfully I keep backups.

Also for some reason, I'm having terrible luck with crux's init system. 3 times it refuses to boot the system after the kernel has been loaded and I can't find any error messages anywhere! I've just ended up reinstalling the root partition several times now...

Not really a Unix system, but related: When I still had a Debian server, I managed to mix up "cp" and "rm" while doing routine maintenance work because I was already thinking of the action after the copying. Of course, no backups were made.

The next step was to write a shell script to automate this maintenance.

sudo rm -rf /...........

(23-05-2016, 11:26 AM)cjm Wrote: sudo rm -rf /...........

Doesn't it require "--no-preserve-root" now?

My laptop (barely) booted up once with a "bad superblock". It wouldn't let me `fsck` it so the only thing I knew left to do is reinstall the OS.

i learned early about using paths on your arguments.

i now almost never use:

as opposed to:

When I thought I was cool and tried using Ubuntu's default encryption for my home directory.
Needless to say, I failed, miserably and lost about 200GB worth of music and photos. 6 years later, I still don't trust encryption perfectly to be safe to use.

(23-05-2016, 12:32 PM)rocx Wrote: My laptop (barely) booted up once with a "bad superblock". It wouldn't let me `fsck` it so the only thing I knew left to do is reinstall the OS.

But you had your /home on a separate partition, I hope? That has certainly saved me before (I'm terrible at back-up discipline).

I recently had one of my server diying. I found the issue while trying to backup a directory, when rsync refused to read some files. Turned out to be the hard drive.
Hopefully, I had most of my services/data moved onto another serv a few days before. The worst part for me was that the server was used by other people, so the service was down for a few days.