Re: [SAGE] the big mistakes (was Re: Evil Interview Questions)

["Mark D. Roth" <roth@feep.net>]

On Tue Mar 04 15:53 2003 -0500, Trey Harris wrote:
> How about this one.  User needed to change usernames. (Sex change.  No,
> this is not the setup for a joke.)  For various reasons, policy was to
> disable the old user, create a new user (with a new UID), dump/restore the
> homedir, and chown the files.  Yes, this should have been automated, but
> the admin in question didn't automate it.  (No, it wasn't me.)  After
> doing the restore, he ran
> 
>   cd /home/newusername
>   chown -R newusername *
>   # wait a long time
>   ls -al
> 
> Oops, that didn't get the dot files.  So...
> 
>   chown -R newusername .*
>   # Gee, this is taking even longer than before...
> 
> He sat, patiently waiting for the command to complete, until the Red Phone
> (it really was) that was a direct analog line to the telephone support
> rang.  I think something like three thousand users had all their files
> chown'd before it got interrupted.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Unix crash recovery stories.
It's pretty old, but definitely worth a read if you haven't seen it
before:

  http://www.feep.net/~roth/geek-humor/unix/unix-crash-recovery-story

I don't remember where I first encountered this, but it may have been
on alt.folklore.computers (way back before the bottom fell out of the
S:N ratio).  A quick web search indicates that it's originally from
1986, which means that it's been floating around the net a few years
more than I have. :)

-- 
Mark D. Roth <roth@feep.net>
http://www.feep.net/~roth/