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What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

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Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#61

Post by yrro »

Stratoscope wrote: post #39
kazinator wrote: post #27

It's not a "hoax" in any sense. Just a plain lie. A hoax has to be fairly large-scale and affect a lot of people (negatively). The original question contained no hyper-links at all. (Ironically, one was inserted by subsequent editors). The question is plausible. I once deleted a /lib directory due to a misspelled variable in a script! Recovery consisted of copying libs from another installation of the same OS. Server…

> I once deleted a /lib directory due to a misspelled variable in a script! Ah yes, the old "rm -rf $TEMPBASEEDIR/lib" bug. It is so easy to have that happen. Or like I did, write a script that assumes a certain environment variable is set outside the script... and then forget to set the variable before running it! To prevent these problems, use "set -u" at the top of your bash scripts. This will halt the script inst…

But make sure you read up on the problems with `set -e` before you rely on it!

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#62

Post by oliyoung »

mmahemoff wrote: post #16

Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail. Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noi…

"this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible"

Having done rm -fr / on a box before, I think it should stay. The incident was fake, the problem is real, it elicited real responses and has value.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#63

Post by mlvljr »

mlvljr wrote: post #57
rcurry wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know how they recovered from it all. I think they were able to recover parts of it from some people's workstations, but still had to rewrite an awful lot of their code.

Once again proves, you have to A) look at what your scripts are actually doing and B) test them manually at least couple times somehow, otherwise this is plain unprofessional (in one of the many ways sadly and funnily possible).

[downvoted by he-who-never-checks-what-his-code-does-actually, quite an honor to be in the same thread with people of that brilliance :)]

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#64

Post by shaftway »

mmahemoff wrote: post #16

Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail. Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noi…

Banning the account will have no effect. In the future people will just use throwaway or sockpuppet accounts, so who cares?

Also, I don't see who benefits from this hoax. Who is going to use him as a hosting provider whether the problem was real or fake. Both indicate that he's not a reliable provider.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#65

Post by captainmuon »

mmahemoff wrote: post #16

Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail. Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noi…

They say questions should be "about real problems people face" but that's not quite true.

- You can post questions out of simple curiosity. - You can post rhetoric questions where you already now the answer ( http://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer ).

It shouldn't matter whether the question was based on a real situation, or if the story was just made up for "motivating" the question [1]. I often (> 50% of the time) make up or change the backstory for my SO posts, to prevent people from asking "But what is your real problem", "What have you tried", and so on, and because I want just a simple answer to my question goddamnit.

([1] Even if it is a hoax, or a joke, the question has merit. Just close as duplicate without getting all worked up about it.)

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#66

Post by emilburzo »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #12
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #7

Does it matter that it didn't happen, if it could happen? Sounds like a serious issue.

Not so easily. I wrote Ansible, but no longer work on it. There are numerous problems with the hoax. (A) the user skipped --no-preserve-root to the command, if he really wanted to delete /, he would need to try harder on a modern distro, because the rm command would stop the attempt (B) ansible by default fails on undefined variables, meaning it would never execute the command (C) Jinja template variables are actuall…

> I wrote Ansible

I know this doesn't add to the conversation, but: thank you for writing ansible!

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#67

Post by Houshalter »

phjesusthatguy3 wrote: post #56
Houshalter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the moderation itself is the problem, it's the rules. There are certain kinds of questions that are interesting and useful, and get shut down. That of course makes people upset. The moderators are perfectly fair and consistent in enforcing the rules, but the rules are stupid.

All rules are arbitrary, though, and if you want to participate in a community you have to abide by the rules. If the rules are stupid enough, anybody can splinter off and say they're starting their own community, especially on the internet! I mean, look at HN here. I'm on my third account: the first, I have no idea why I got hellbanned; the second, I know exactly why; the third, I don't really care about. But it's i…

You are allowed to criticize the rules. Rules can be stupid. And if no one complains, then they will never change.

I don't agree with many of HN's policies, but they are nowhere near as bad as stack overflow. At least on censoring actually useful discussions, whereas HN mostly censors flame wars and political stuff.

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#68

Post by [deleted] »

phjesusthatguy3 wrote: post #56
Houshalter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the moderation itself is the problem, it's the rules. There are certain kinds of questions that are interesting and useful, and get shut down. That of course makes people upset. The moderators are perfectly fair and consistent in enforcing the rules, but the rules are stupid.

All rules are arbitrary, though, and if you want to participate in a community you have to abide by the rules. If the rules are stupid enough, anybody can splinter off and say they're starting their own community, especially on the internet! I mean, look at HN here. I'm on my third account: the first, I have no idea why I got hellbanned; the second, I know exactly why; the third, I don't really care about. But it's i…

[deleted]

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#69

Post by JdeBP »

oliyoung wrote: post #62
mmahemoff wrote: post #16

Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail. Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noi…

"this hoax is not real. While we could imagine it's possible" Having done rm -fr / on a box before, I think it should stay. The incident was fake, the problem is real, it elicited real responses and has value.

You should read the Italian news coverage. Marco Marsala points out that the problem is fake, that (as several people also noted on Hacker News) the command mentioned has been benign since 2006, and that Ansible doesn't permit this anyway. He observes that "serious administrators" would know this, but apparently there were no such people at ServerFault answering his question because otherwise they'd have spotted such a blatant error ("altrimenti saprebbero che quanto ho descritto non può accadere").

* http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/15/news/cancella...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500711

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497590

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11514666

Re: What to do with the “rm -rf” hoax question

#70

Post by JdeBP »

mmahemoff wrote: post #16

Firstly, let me say I find StackOverflow's trigger-happy attitude as annoying as everyone else. "Not a real programming question" for questions needed to solve programming problems or blocking comparisons ... #fail. Now that I've said that, I do think this hoax question should be closed because one of the principles is that it should be based on real problems people face, which is a good way to keep the signal-to-noi…

As noted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497590 , the author of the question has since stated that he was attempting to see whether there were any "serious administrators" at ServerFault who would know that what he had claimed he had done could not have happened as stated.

I wonder what he's making of all of the people now conflating Stack Overflow with Server Fault. Server Fault says its blurb, is a question and answer site for system and network administrators.

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