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Ooops.

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Re: Ooops.

#221

Post by robin_reala »

chops wrote: post #163

I've done a similar thing a few years ago when I was first starting work on my guild hosting company's code. At the time, the main thing hosted on that machine was my WoW guild's website, which I had been working on for close to a year, and was beginning work on converting the site over to a general purpose guild hosting site. I was doing some work for a client, setting up a mirror of sorts for some kind of yearbook…

I did not have backups or source control

There’s an important motto to bear in mind here: data you haven’t backed up is data you don’t want. To be fair, this does bite us all at one point or another, but once it’s got you once you make damn sure it doesn’t get you twice.

Also, these days I get shaky just doing FTP deploys. Give me capistrano and git, or even better a direct Heroku push any day of the week.

Re: Ooops.

#222

Post by eran »

Once we got catastrophic backup

rsync -a --delete /home/project/ /mnt/backupDisk

Left unnecessary slash after "project" and rewrite all content on "backupDisk" by project files (instead of sync project folder on it)

Re: Ooops.

#223

Post by Natsu »

chops wrote: post #163

I've done a similar thing a few years ago when I was first starting work on my guild hosting company's code. At the time, the main thing hosted on that machine was my WoW guild's website, which I had been working on for close to a year, and was beginning work on converting the site over to a general purpose guild hosting site. I was doing some work for a client, setting up a mirror of sorts for some kind of yearbook…

At work, we had a USB drive full of Ghost images. Someone else didn't know how to use Ghost that well and they managed to nuke the partition table by trying to write an image on the USB drive onto the drive itself... or something like that anyhow (newer versions don't let you do that any more, I note). Fortunately, they didn't destroy the data itself.

I rebuilt the partition table and saved all of our backups.

Re: Ooops.

#224

Post by nettdata »

r00fus wrote: post #161
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't accidentally write a TRUNCATE statement though.

You can have dev-environment scripts that accidentally point to a production instance.

ALL of my PROD environments are unreachable from DEV boxes, for a good reason.

Re: Ooops.

#225

Post by fmx »

The designer of rm is the greater culprit here, not the author of that install script. A single mistyped character should not lead to such drastic consequences.

"Usability? What's that? I'm really smart, so I don't make mistakes. If lesser humans do - that's their problem". That seems to be the attitude of many Linux programs and rm is among the worst of them. No doubt I'll get downvoted for saying this, but I've rarely, if ever, heard of such things happening in Windows. (And people still manage to delete files in Windows without too much difficulty.)

Re: Ooops.

#226

Post by fmx »

mikeklaas wrote: post #156
earl wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL is desperately in need of some updates. For starters, DELETE FROM should never be allowed without a WHERE clause. DBs should simply define that as malformed sql.

Exactly. There is no need given TRUNCATE exists.

No entirely. DELETE will work with cascading foreign keys, while TRUNCATE will not, at least on SQL Server. Also, DELETE is logged and (I believe) TRUNCATE is not. Having said that, I agree that a WHERE clause should be required - you can always say "WHERE 1=1" or similar if you really mean to delete all rows.

Re: Ooops.

#227

Post by scythe »

shrikant wrote: post #44

Perhaps because I'm not a GitHub user, and because I've only ever peeked at HNers' GitHub accounts, but I was always under the impression that given the nature of the service, it would have an early-days-of-HN feel wrt to user behaviour. It was a little disheartening to see the number of Reddit-esque comments that are simply a couple of words along the lines of "omfg" and a constant stream of meme abuse. I expected b…

>It was a little disheartening to see the number of Reddit-esque comments that are simply a couple of words along the lines of "omfg" and a constant stream of meme abuse. I expected better from the programming community.

You don't get good discussion from a commenting system. Github's comments aren't designed for with-each-other discussion, they're designed for at-the-author/audience commenting.

HN takes comment quality extremely seriously, and with-each-other discussion is perhaps the main focus.

reddit is somewhere in between: most of the users of reddit don't seem to be interested in discussion, but in open-ended polls a la AskReddit, IAMA, DAE, etc. The fact that reddit threads only last for a few hours, and that the volume of comments is so huge that it's hard to expect the people you're aiming your comment at to get anywhere, these both reward commenting rather than discussion; /r/bestof does as well. That said, reddit's topical breadth draws in lots of smart people, who are usually looking to talk about something interesting.

The vBulletin/phpBB model of forums doesn't really scale too well (unless you go the SomethingAwful route and impose a fee and lots of super-strict moderation) but it works well with up to around 150 active users. The best forums have the highest SnR on the Internet.

4chan-ish anonymity works up to around 5000 before you get chaos, hence the longing for "old /b/" and the value in the other boards.

Re: Ooops.

#228

Post by agilebyte »

samstokes wrote: post #97
jerf wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the years I've been steadily training myself to type "WHERE" earlier in the process, until I have finally settled on the obvious-in-hindsight solution: Always simply start with the WHERE clause. (Of course every effort not to be on the SQL shell of a production server in the first place should be taken, but sometimes you need a sledgehammer and nothing else will work.)

The habit I learned was: before running any DELETE or UPDATE statement, run a SELECT with the same WHERE. (e.g. if I meant to say DELETE FROM puppies WHERE cute = 0, first run SELECT FROM puppies WHERE cute = 0.) I find I remember to do that because of the direct benefit (getting a sneak preview of what I'm going to delete), but it also means I end up thinking twice about the WHERE statement, so I'm much less likely…

Good tip.

Unfortunately when I was working as a PHP programmer, I once made a typo in a variable name, a variable that had my WHERE clause in DELETE...

Back then I fixed it with a box of chocolates and flowers.

Re: Ooops.

#229

Post by whacker »

tlrobinson wrote: post #141

I've started quoting arguments in shell scripts even when it's not technically necessary to avoid problems with spaces. I can't count how many scripts I've written/encountered that didn't work with a path containing a space (apparently much more common with OS X users than Linux users) This wouldn't delete the correct directory, but at least it won't delete "/usr" either: rm -rf "/usr /lib/nvidia-current/xorg/xorg" T…

I always use set -eu. Makes my scripts much safer and less unpredictable.

Re: Ooops.

#230

Post by pwnguin »

zerd wrote: post #190
getsat wrote: post #102

Looks like someone never read the Unix Hater's Handbook. Another fun thing is rm + shell expansion. A file named * or / can cause extremely unintended deletions.

Files can be named anything but / in Unix.

I'm pretty sure there's a file named /
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