I've screwed up plenty of things too

Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by foobarbecue on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @09:09AM (#22298563)

I accidentally recursively chown'ed / to myself on a server in Antarctica that was a critical gateway for our geophysical network, the night before we were planned to leave the ice. Luckily, my flight was delayed... I spent the next day wiping the server and setting it up from scratch, after giving up on trying to recover from all the bizarre problems that stem from owning all the system files (including broken ssh). You should try it sometime!

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by Balgair on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @11:16AM (#22299605)

> You should try it sometime!

An overnight mission at McMurdo or a server reset without internet access on another device?

I'll take the overnight.

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by bostik on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @04:13PM (#22302915)

> An overnight mission at McMurdo

Depending on the time the year, perhaps. What's the longest possible time from sunset to sunrise at those latitudes?

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by Balgair on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @08:52PM (#22305013)

179 'days' (4296 hours total). Missions vary in length though.

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by mondoshawan on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @10:47AM (#22299349)

I did something similar on a central box used for mail aliases, cron jobs, and kerberos called "cartman" by copying and pasting a cronjob line at a root shell. I only noticed when things started failing, and spent the next day rebuilding the permissions all over the disk.

chmod -R is powerful. :-)

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by JKirchartz on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @10:15AM (#22299073)

I did this on a VM once - it's fun for about 15 minutes... then burn it all and start from scratch.

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by ianai on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @11:29AM (#22299710)

Is there a way to save and revert such metadata? I can’t think of anything that stores just FS metadata.

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by Lammy on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @03:07PM (#22302242)

FreeBSD does! You can rescue yourself from this with mtree. Something like:

> cd /

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.root.dist

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.var.dist

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.include.dist

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.sendmail.dist

> mtree -U -f /etc/mtree/BSD.usr.dist

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by BenjiWiebe on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @02:43PM (#22301943)

I think rsync has an option to copy everything but file contents. Couple that with 'find' running 'touch' and it should be fine. (create blank files, copy attributes to them)

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by shifto on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @05:15AM (#22307568)

Sysadminning in Antarctica. This really speaks to the imagination! Can't imagine how different it would be from my normal sysadmin work.

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by foobarbecue on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @09:11AM (#22308915)

You should meet Holly, who was the main McMurdo sysadmin most of the seasons I was there. I can't remember his last name but that guy was really wonderful. Super competent, friendly, and seemed to love his job.

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Re:I've screwed up plenty of things too by shifto on Wednesday February 12, 2020 @09:19AM (#22308972)

Wish I could! But my Google-fu turns up empty. You'd think working on Antarctica would make it easier to find someone on LinkedIn e.g.

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