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Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk

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Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#61

Post by simonblack »

geocrasher wrote: post #48

This one made me LOL: My mistake on SunOS (with OpenWindows) was to try and clean up all the '.*' directories in /tmp. Obviously "rm -rf /tmp/*" missed these, so I was very careful and made sure I was in /tmp and then executed "rm -rf ./.*". I will never do this again. If I am in any doubt as to how a wildcard will expand I will echo it first. I read this, and just had to go try it because I couldn't picture it in my…

As a brand-new UNIX user around 1991 and coming from MSDOS, I was used to being 'God' on my machine so I thought it would be a good idea to login always as 'root'. I couldn't understand why long-time users of UNIX knew that to be a very bad idea, and always advised against it.

Like the SunOS person, I had lots of dot-directories in /tmp. So I duplicated his actions almost perfectly.

Also like he did, I was wondering why an 'instantaneous' action was taking so long. I had to do a complete re-installation.

Ever since then, I've always logged in as a 'normal user'. My reign as 'God' in a UNIX environment lasted about 2-3 weeks in total.

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#62

Post by drewg123 »

Not a sysadmin horror story, but I remember as an undergrad in the late 80s / early 90s what happened to me when i left my terminal unattended. Every time I ran my project via "a.out", I would see "Segmentation fault: Core dumped" and there would be a zero-length core file created in the directory.

Turns out a helpful soul had aliased "a.out" to 'echo "segmentation fault: core dumped"; touch core"

That made me learn at an early age to never have "." in my path, and to always execute things in the CWD as ./a.out (among other things).

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#63

Post by kiddico »

etcet wrote: post #15
cstross wrote: post #5

This takes me back to roughly 1993. I was in a department running on a mix of Wyse green-screen terminals and, later, X terminals, when we got a budget upgrade that would roll out actual individual PCs -- 486s running SCO Open Desktop -- to everyone. (This was not cheap, it cost about £4000 for the hardware per seat, although the software was free because, er, this was back in the day when SCO was a respectable UNIX…

I've seen a bash history where "sudo chown -R me:me /" was followed up by "sudo chown +R me:me /". At least they tried.

I read that and went "oooh I wonder what +R does."

Time for bed.

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#64

Post by smackeyacky »

One thing I do miss after reading these stories is that brief period where vendor unices were everywhere and none of them worked quite the same. AIX, SunOS, the DEC variants, whatever ran on the Aviions, Pyramid, SCO, ISC, Xenix etc.

It was glorious. Now its Debian varieties or Apples BSD abomination and nothing else.

Even windows server is getting steamrollered. All the progress is now happening elsewhere i.e. virtualisation, containers, devops.

I kinda miss the days where the iron was expensive and screwing up your Pyramid kicked 200 terminal users to the curb while you figured it out.

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#65

Post by mjg59 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #59

Alas, as cam.ac.uk prepares for the final shutdown of Hermes — their quarter century old Unix mail facility used by members great and small, from telnet to prayer and replaced by Microsoft Outlook on 12/31 — the timing of this post could not be more prescient. Another onprem service formerly run by experts shutters its doors. In their halcyon days they wrote Exim. You can’t even forward to gmail because the current s…

Go to ISC and work on Bind, apparently: https://twitter.com/fanf/status/1465641653788712962?t=iwtAWb...

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#67

Post by lsh123 »

geocrasher wrote: post #48

This one made me LOL: My mistake on SunOS (with OpenWindows) was to try and clean up all the '.*' directories in /tmp. Obviously "rm -rf /tmp/*" missed these, so I was very careful and made sure I was in /tmp and then executed "rm -rf ./.*". I will never do this again. If I am in any doubt as to how a wildcard will expand I will echo it first. I read this, and just had to go try it because I couldn't picture it in my…

Actually this is exactly what Oracle installer did in 93-94 after a jr sysadmin tried to install it from /tmp.

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#69

Post by U8dcN7vx »

drewg123 wrote: post #62

Not a sysadmin horror story, but I remember as an undergrad in the late 80s / early 90s what happened to me when i left my terminal unattended. Every time I ran my project via "a.out", I would see "Segmentation fault: Core dumped" and there would be a zero-length core file created in the directory. Turns out a helpful soul had aliased "a.out" to 'echo "segmentation fault: core dumped"; touch core" That made me learn…

./a.out() { echo surprise; }

Re: Unix Admin Horror Story Summary (1992)

#70

Post by mark-r »

geocrasher wrote: post #23

2003 or 2004. Customer called in and said that his dedicated server was hacked. I restored from backup. An hour later, he calls back. Hacked again . Restored again. An hour later, he calls back. He realizes that the hacker is him ! He's doing a thing, but doesn't know what he's doing wrong. So I have him email me the last thing he typed on his server, as root: rm -rf /home/user/path/to/thing /home/otheruser/path/to/s…

That was surprisingly subtle. I had to look at it about 3 times before I saw the problem.
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