Really bad programming

I know, I'm no one to talk. I make dumb coding mistakes too, but recently I ran across a classic.

I was just finishing up a Linux server install for Counterpoint ( /Linux/cp.html). All users had been created, all minor configuration details tweaked, and the system was in the process of doing it's first DVD-RAM backup ( /Reviews/dvdram.html).

It was then that we remembered that the UPS software hadn't been configured. This particular UPS communicated by a USB port, and had Linux software which had already been downloaded. So, while the DVD-RAM backup was running, I installed the downloaded software, but it didn't seem to recognize the possibility of communicating by way of USB. Thinking that perhaps I had missed something or had made some mistake, I decided to run the uninstall script so thoughtfully included with the software.

I was prompted "Do you really want to remove the Belkin Bulldog Plus:!y|n] "

Sure I did. I answered "Y" and just a moment later I saw a rather odd message from rm complaining that it couldn't remove /boot. Huh? What the..

Ayup. This uninstall script had started at / and removed EVERYTHING. I powered off the machine the second I saw that, hoping that disk buffers hadn't yet been flushed, but I was too late: all our hard work was gone. Had the backup perhaps finished? I hoped it had, but no printout had come out yet, so it certainly wasn't completely finished. Ever the optimist, I booted from the DVD and let t restore. Unfortunately, it hadn't even completely finished the base OS stuff, so I had to start over from scratch: reinstall, reconfigure everything. Two extra hours of work and then some.

Later, I looked at the script to see how it screwed up. The basic problem was that it did a

        rm -rf $path/*
 

but unfortunately $path was NOT set, so that ends up as

        rm -rf /*
 

A silly mistake, but one that could have been very costly. Imagine if this server were actually in use when this happened!

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