Stupid server tricks

[wheel]

In the spirit of <snip> hosting problems....

Fess up. You've done them. Screwed up the server.

Me:
1) rm -Rf * < enter >. Which is what I wanted, except I was up 2 directories in my main directory.

Of course I do have offsite nightly backups (unlike <snip> apparently :) ) so I just copied last night's files back up again. Live in under 5 minutes.

I bet you've done that too. Nowadays I check the directory I'm in first. Every time.

2) My personal fave. from a terminal on my desktop I issued the command 'shutdown -h now' to shut down my desktop. Except the terminal window wasn't logged on to my desktop, it was a terminal window to my main webserver. D'Oh!

I forget how I fixed that one, probably a call to my host to cycle the power. No idea why I would shut down my desktop, and if I did, why I would do it that way.

[edited by: lawman at 2:39 am (utc) on Feb 23, 2010]

[eelixduppy]

I've fork bombed servers accidentally a bunch of times. That was fun...

[rocknbil]

delete from several_million_records_table where id - 12345678;

Oops. Make that

delete from several_million_records_table where id = 12345678;

Too late. :-P

[Trav]

Mine was just recently; box is config'd to send out an email/page if certain services fail- unfortunately, the EXIM daemon among them. I hadn't noticed this defaulted to an email notice.

Was out of the office unexpectedly for a couple of days, and was so busy it took a few days before I realized that I hadn't received any brute force warnings in about a week....

Looked at the mail queue to discover ~3k email messages, most of which read "The EXIM daemon has failed..."