Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code

[Taurolyon]

Marco Marsala, who runs a hosting provider with 1535 customers, accidently deleted his company with a poorly written bash script automation. He accidently inserted a "rm -rf ..." line into his code.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/man-accidentally-deletes-his-entire-company-with-one-line-of-bad-code-a6984256.html

 

http://serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf

 

Morale: Always backup.... or live dangerously.

 

UPDATE: PCWorld reports it was a hoax: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3057235/data-center-cloud/that-man-who-deleted-his-entire-company-with-a-line-of-code-it-was-a-hoax.html

[Trik'Stari]

..........Ouch.

[Aytex]

Thats amazing lol

[2FA]

Well, he did backup but the code was badly formatted and thus applied to every single server, including the backup servers. I also wouldn't really call this news worthy as the original source is from a stack exchange site and therefore can't be verified.

[NumLock21]

Did he try system restore?

[PCBjon]

I can just imagine the amount of swearing and shouting that he done.

[Trik'Stari]

1 minute ago, PCBjon said:

I can just imagine the amount of swearing and shouting that he done.

Ultimate nerd-rage?

[2FA]

3 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

Did he try system restore?

Kappa

[Moonzy]

recuva?

[don_svetlio]

[HalGameGuru]

The community offered him some well founded advice. He should be able to recover his data, after much work and more time. This whole thing makes me empathetically nauseous.

[NumLock21]

Not sure what OS he's using, but they need to learn a thing or two with Vista's UAC. It won't even let you delete anything. Until it ask you "are you sure" a million times before doing it.

[Cryosec]

reading comments on serverfault.com, it looks like he recovered almost all the data (as he stated) 4 hours ago. looks like he will live a little longer

[2FA]

1 minute ago, NumLock21 said:

Not sure what OS he's using, but they need to learn a thing or two with Vista's UAC. It won't even let you delete anything. Until it ask you "are you sure" a million times before doing it.

CentOS 7, likely logged in as root. The -rf tag is basically delete this and don't ask if I'm sure just do it.

[2FA]

4 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

Not sure what OS he's using, but they need to learn a thing or two with Vista's UAC. It won't even let you delete anything. Until it ask you "are you sure" a million times before doing it.

Also because Linux handles deletions differently from Windows, it is much more difficult to recover data. Windows just marks data as no longer needed and safe to write over. Linux is a bit different but doesn't quite delete the data entirely.

[Taurolyon]

From the StackExchange/ServerFault site, it was posted under the CentOS Linux.

 

If as root, it would do so without any preventative permissions.

 

Also this -rf means "recursive" (anything under that folder) and "force" (without yes/no confirmation)

[AlexGoesHigh]

I was going to post rm - rf as a comment to be funny but he actually used rm - rf to did this.  

 

LAWL

Laughing asides though i don't wish this on anyone. 

[unidentical]

2 hours ago, PCBjon said:

I can just imagine the amount of swearing and shouting that he done.

Guaranteed he didn't swear. Mistakes that you swear about are small ones.

 

When he saw what happened he probably went dead quiet, jaw slack, might have puked a bit, probably cried.

[Lethal Seraph]

He wishes it's only a April fools joke that's two weeks late.

[thekeemo]

As a person launching their own hosting company soon

[VerticalDiscussions]

K

 

[Fetzie]

Isn't this why you set an alias, so that you can't accidentally rm -rf everything?

 

“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.”

 

Couldn't he have

LET foo = "dontDeleteAnything"

LET bar = "noReallyIMeanIt"

 

so that they don't start with a null value?

[Guest]

They did that on Toy Story - deleted the production copy. Apparently a staff member took a copy home to show their kid though.

[SansVarnic]

3 hours ago, Taurolyon said:

Marco Marsala, who runs a hosting provider with 1535 customers, accidently deleted his company with a poorly written bash script automation. He accidently inserted a "rm -rf ..." line into his code.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/man-accidentally-deletes-his-entire-company-with-one-line-of-bad-code-a6984256.html

 

http://serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf

 

Morale: Always backup.... or live dangerously.

[Blake]

4 hours ago, Taurolyon said:

Marco Marsala, who runs a hosting provider with 1535 customers, accidently deleted his company with a poorly written bash script automation. He accidently inserted a "rm -rf ..." line into his code.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/man-accidentally-deletes-his-entire-company-with-one-line-of-bad-code-a6984256.html

 

http://serverfault.com/questions/769357/recovering-from-a-rm-rf

 

Morale: Always backup.... or live dangerously.

Meh, he was going to get crypto'd anyways looks like his dev/primary account had global write access. It's his own fault really. you shouldn't need admin/sudo access to do 95% of your day job.