[ale] Stoopid Noobs

[James P. Kinney III]

In a production environment on the master login authentication machine
adding a new user required manually editing the passwd file to set up
the TACACS connection port (this was at HP). So I did a:
sudo cp /etc/passwd /etc/passwd.new
sudo vi /etc/passwd.new
sudo mv /etc/passwd /etc/passwd.BAK && mv /etc/passwd.new /etc/passwd

and promptly discovered that the sudo command on HPUX doesn't cache an
authentication cookie and expiration time, it caches the password as
suddenly no one could log in because there was no /etc/passwd file.

Luckily, someone else did have a root shell open on that machine. But it
did take nearly 40 minutes to find them.

On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 20:57 -0400, Byron A Jeff wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 08:14:10PM -0400, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> > Lets get another thread going.
> > 
> > When I first did Linux in the early 90s I needed to copy a file from
> > Linux to Windows.  /dev/hda1 was Windows partition.  Here is how I did
> > it:
> > 
> > cat file > /dev/hda1
> 
> Ouch.
> 
> > My next step was to reinstall Win 3.11 and then load my backup off of
> > floppy tape.  Never tried that again.
> 
> Now the post mortem. The stupidity was not in trying to copy the file.
> The stupidity was in the fact that it succeeded. So that means you had
> to be logged in a root.
> 
> Yet another reason to take care doing root activities.
> 
> I have mine of course. Try the difference between
> 
> rm -rf / tmp
> 
> and the intended
> 
> rm -rf /tmp
> 
> That one required a reinstall too. Ouch. Even worse I thought I knew
> what I was doing so I was root on purpose, not out of ignorance.
> 
> BAJ
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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