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Title: Man accidentally 'deletes his entire company' with one line of bad code
Source:
the Phoenix that ever rises
URL Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s ... line-of-bad-code-a6984256.html
Published: Apr 14, 2016
Author: Griffin
Post Date: 2016-04-14 21:29:26 by NeoconsNailed
Keywords: None
Views: 130
Comments: 5
A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers. Mr Marsala wrote on a forum for server experts called Server Fault that he was now stuck after having accidentally run destructive code on his own computers. But far from advising them how to fix it, most experts informed him that he had just accidentally deleted the data of his company and its clients, and in so doing had probably destroyed his entire company with just one line of code. The problem command was "rm -rf": a basic piece of code that will delete everything it is told to. The “rm” tells the computer to remove; the r deletes everything within a given directory; and the f stands for “force”, telling the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files. Together, the code deleted everything on the computer, including Mr Masarla’s customers' websites, he wrote. Mr Masarla runs a web hosting company, which looks after the servers and internet connections on which the files for websites are stored. That piece of code is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles. Normally, that code would wipe out all of the specific parts of the computer that it was pointed at. But because of an error in the way it was written, the code didn’t actually specify anywhere – and so removed everything on the computer. “I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers,” wrote Marco Marsala. “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.” Mr Marsala confirmed that the code had even deleted all of the backups that he had taken in case of catastrophe. Because the drives that were backing up the computers were mounted to it, the computer managed to wipe all of those, too. “All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).” Most users agreed that it was unlikely that Mr Marsala would be able to recover any of the data. And as a result his company was almost certainly not going to recover, either......... 
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#4. To: NeoconsNailed (#0)
Very true. The "rm -rf" is a scary command to run. Or should be. So much more so when a superuser. But the real mistake was not having offsite / disconnected backups. Anyone could mistype something, but for a company that huge with 1000+ customers, not having off site or at least disconnected backups was managerial mistake that really did his company in. Still, if it's not a virtual server, he should/could try sending the hard disks in for forensic salvaging. Probably get most of the data back that way.
Right -- the journalism missing in action here. Aren't all HDs salvageable? I've read consistently through the years that whatever you delete is still there even if it could take big bucks to fully rescue it -- thus the oft- heard admonition that the only way to truly wipe a drive is a bullet hole. It does seem inconceivable he totally deleted everything. Doesn't everybody in his business have backups of backups? Or a series of HDs backing up everything you do as it happens? (Tsk, tsk..... should have been a handicapped left-handed unmarried pregnant teenage transsexual Afrasian Juess in that picture.)
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Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestThat piece of code is so famously destructive that it has become a joke within some computing circles.
#5. To: Pinguinite (#4)
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