Admin horror stories (was: Shell Quoting)

[Tom Buskey]

On 10/10/07, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Oct 9, 2007, at 17:31, Ben Scott wrote:
>
> >   Did you know 'rpm' will let you remove every package from the
> > system?
>
> rm lets you remove libc too.  DAMHINT.


I had a user call about a user supported system that was having issues.  We
explicitly do not support it and the users only use the root account.

He gave me the root account to login and I couldn't.  I went to his system &
looked around.  /etc was empty.  I told him he was fsked and he should ftp
any files he wanted to elsewhere & that he wouldn't be able to login again
or reboot.  In any event, we were not supporting it.

Sure enough, a help desk ticket came in for another admin, claiming that the
system got corrupted during bootup.  Why do users lie so often?  All it does
is obscure the problem...
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