“If you really don’t have any backups, I am sorry to say but you just nuked your entire company.”
That was simple advice given to hosting provider Marco Marsala, when he asked for tech help after a simple line of computer code destroyed his entire business.
Marco was in the need of some tech support after accidentally running a small bit of code in his business and was on the lookout for some encouraging words from server experts at Server Fault forums. Instead he got a “Sorry mate, but you’ve f*cked it”.
Instead he got a “Sorry mate, but you’ve f*cked it”.
The simple Skynet havoc-wreaking piece of code was “rm -rf” – a joke within some coding communities for how destructive it is.
‘Rm’ tells the computer to remove, ‘r’ deletes everything in a certain space and ‘f’ skips the “ARE YOU REALLY SURE YOU WANT TO BURN EVERYTHING TO THE GROUND?” warning.
Put it all together, and Marco Marsala’s web-hosting company doesn’t exist anymore.
To add insult to injury, Marco is completely out of back-ups for his company, because the drives that were backing up the computers were mounted to it.
There’s up the creek – and then there’s this.
Here’s hoping Marco can rebuild without too much fuss and loss of earnings.
As for the rest of us, we’ll stay eagle-eyed for any “rm -rf” commands.
Good grief.
This article was originally posted on JOE.co.uk.
