Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
You must have missed the main point of this essay, so I'll reiterate here.
"take a deep breath, count to ten"
Count to ten when a plane goes down
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Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#62Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
In fairness, it was a different world back then. There were so few people administering computer networks that you could generally assume someone who was doing so had been thoroughly trained; and the thing about highly trained people is that they tend to view things like failsafes and safeties as pointless time-wasters. "I know what I'm doing when I hit F7, but the damn system makes me sit there for 30 seconds before…
You're invoking an annoying and ridiculously overused false dichotomy that is as false today as it was 30 years ago. An interface that has fail-safes does not have to be annoying and clunky. In fact, interfaces that are annoying and clunky are a great contributor to human mistakes, because they require a lot of rote action, which encourages people not to pay attention and work on auto pilot.
If something has changed over these years, it's the overall understanding of design principles and their popularization. (Thanks, Don Norman and other people in the field!)
Training has nothing to do with it. Even if you can train a person to work with a badly designed system without making mistakes (often), designing the system well in the first place is almost always significantly easier and cheaper.
For example, accidental key presses can be easily prevented by requiring the user to type a command of reasonable length. Typing "reboot-all-workstations" is not that difficult, but it would definitely prevent the incident described in the article.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really, a lot of novice unix users are of the habit of removing files with -rf switch. I cringe everytime I see it. The command "rm -rf ~/blue/" is just a single space key from being equivalent to "rm -rf /" with "rm -rf ~/blue /"
On any modern system it's actually "sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root" and then entering your password while staring at the command. "rm -rf ~/blue /" will not come close to deleting / unless you are in the habit of running every command as sudo, even ignoring the presence of --no-preserve-root
Except when: (these are terrible lessons to learn)
1. You type it into the wrong system (D'oh)
2. You have run `mount --bind / /somewhere/else` then `rm -rf /somewhere` a week later
:(
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#64Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#65I disagree that it was appropriate that you were fired, but interesting story all about.
For security reasons I think that it might have been justified, considering the events that had just taken place. Still a crappy way to go out though.
What security reasons? Firing the author didn't change what had already happened.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#66Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
agreed 100% (if there truly wasn't a prompt).
OP took the fall because the head administrator was too ashamed to admit that their system was so poorly designed to allow for this to happen.
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#67Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
[deleted]
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
But typing "rm -rf /" is significantly harder to do accidentally than typing F7 instead of F6.
The / key was right next to Enter on a lot of old keyboards. It was quite easy to type 'rm -rf /tmp/garbage*' and have a simple fumble turn it into 'rm -rf /'. I mean, there's this guy I know, he did that once.
There's also the chance of it happening when writing a script
Such as this classic:
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commi...
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#69Reset all computers in the embassy with F7? No warning prompt? Fire the idiot who wrote that function.
I don't remember how it is on the newer versions, but try using fdisk in an old linux distro and see how many confirmations you get when deleting a partition. Or just the old rm -rf / Older stuff asks for much less confirmations.
No thanks. It makes me shudder to just see this printed in the comments section!
Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, you know, he had a perfectly good reason to think that accidentally resetting all the computers in the building at that time would not be a problem: "Not long after I arrived in my office, I received a call from a secretary in the Agriculture Department who liked to play a computer game before her workday started. Her favorite game had a bug that regularly froze her workstation. [...] I realized that I had mistak…
Yes, he had a pretty good reason to think that probably no major damage was done, and this was sufficient to comfort him. This kind of carelessness about the possibility of causing harm or having caused harm suggests to me that he wasn't taking his responsibility as seriously as he should.
you're really reading too much into a simple story, from over 20 years ago, etc.
In any case, we already know where your line of thought leads, risk adverse cultures ultimately stagnate and wither away.