[ale] Little OT: Bad Linux Sysadmin Practices

[jdp at algoloma.com (JD)]

On 10/11/2012 04:23 PM, simontek at gmail.com wrote:
> Company I once worked for backed up 3 times a week. Never tested the tapes.
> My first week there, they had a crash, went to check the tapes, nothing was
> there. Looked at the logs, tape drive died 3 years earlier.

On of my first jobs as an admin was earned after a developer changed and
immediately forgot the root password on a new SPARC the first day it was plugged
in.  I hacked into the machine, hacked the root account and refused to tell
anyone else what the root password was. They obviously couldn't be trusted.

I knew nothing about being an admin, since it wasn't my primary job in the company.

A few months later, I was getting worried that we didn't have any backups
besides copies of the code on 10 PCs, so I did a 0 level ufsdump to a 4mm tape.
 The next day, I ran a fantastic find + rm -rf {} script that proceeded to
delete every file on the HDD. It was really impressive, especially the part that
found /.  I didn't have any idea how to restore and we didn't have OS CDs to
reinstall it.  I never missed access to a man page so much in my life. ;)  $20
at microcenter for a book that had the single most important command I needed to
that point in my career - ufsrestore.

I started buying more tapes ASAP and implemented a 1 month standard backup
schedule that all tape-based backups used for a long time.

S M T W T F S
- ? - ? - ? -
D D D D D D M
D D D D D D F
D D D D D D F
D D D D D D F

Life is so much easier these days.