[ale] Stoopid Noobs

[H. A. Story]

Used  dd once wrong and have been scared ever since. 

Figured out the hard way that the tar and paths within the tar file are 
not the same in SCO and Linux.

Sorry I had to bring the 3 letters into the mix.

Adrin

James P. Kinney III wrote:

>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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>>    
>>
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