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Next time you guys botch a spreadsheet, just remember it could always be worse. I mean, at least you didn’t nuke your own company like this poor SOB. Yeah, so there’s a lot of tech talk involved that I’m sure someone will breakdown for us in the comment section, but this guy, Marco Marsala, basically ran a destructive code that deleted his company’s servers.
According to The Independent, “The problem code 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.”
I get anxiety when I see that I’ve neglected to respond to an email an hour after it was sent, so I can only imagine what would happen if I went ahead and euthanized my company. Marsala reacted the only way anybody would have after a highly fatal error- he went to a forum.
Yep. That’s panic mode. Marsala went to a forum for server experts seeking advice on how to unbotch an egregious error, but he instead received affirmation that what he had just done was, in fact, worst case scenario.
Here’s a small taste of the responses, all of which are likely to induce a massive panic attack:
“I feel sorry to say that your company is now essentially dead,” wrote a user called Sven. “You might have an extremely slim chance to recover from this if you turn off everything right now and hand your disks over to a reputable data recovery company.
“This will be extremely expensive and still extremely unlikely to really rescue you, and it will take a lot of time.”
Others agreed that perhaps Mr. Marsala was on the wrong forum.
“This is not bad luck: it’s astonishingly bad design reinforced by complete carelessness.”
“You’re going out of business,” wrote Michael Hampton. “You don’t need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer.”
Not much help, guys. Thanks for that. No word yet on the fallout, but I’m guessing he’s hitting up his boys looking for LinkedIn endorsements and cleaning up that rezzy. My advice? Try rebooting. If that doesn’t work, enable cookies. If that fails? Drink heavily..
[via Independent]
Image via Shutterstock
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Dave
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How do these things even get mixed up? This sounds like trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and accidentally nuking Russia
According to a friend of mine who is better at this stuff than our friend Marco here, it’s because he didn’t set a destination for the command, so it defaulted to his local computer instead of a target. Then that spread to the backup servers, which he doesn’t have set up properly.
Dude, just call Kumar down in IT. Probably just had an expired password or something.
Oh wow, tough day at the office. I’ll stop complaining about having to stay late.
Like… remote server backups aren’t a thing? I don’t even do IT, and that seems like IT 101.
Exactly. That software company I work at doesn’t do everything perfectly, but regular, ideally multiple per day backups are a fucking standard of any business these days. Plus, if you’re going to use Linux in your company, make sure whoever is responsible for scripting out stuff isn’t a complete idiot who uses a bulk delete command without safeguards.
“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).”
Not reading the article just the summary – PGP
Meh. Why the fuck should a scripting error make it possible to delete ALL the backups they had unless you’re a real rink-a-dink IT organization? Separation of concerns/least privilege principle should not allow that.
Goldman Sachs should hire this guy.
I was thinking Sallie Mae/Navient.
I’d be ok with my student loan info being deleted.
Shit, you’re right. How did i forget about Sallie.
Do you even cloud bro
Hillary Clinton should have hired this guy.
Chicken Marsala for dinner? I think so!
It’s hard to do something like this by ‘accident’. This was either deliberate sabotage are complete carelessness on the part of IT.