Slashdot Mirror
Bone-Headed IT Mistakes
snydeq writes "PCs preconfigured with stone-age malware, backups without recovery, Social Security numbers stored in plain view of high school students — Andy Brandt gives InfoWorld's Stupid Users series a new IT admin twist. Call it fratricide if you will, but getting paid to know better is no guarantee against IT idiocy, as these stories attest."
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/06/16/25FE-stupid-users-part-3-admins_1.html Printer friendly version, rather then 7 pages.
That story is almost word-for-word the same as an Alexa deleted my pages rant on a previous anti-Alexa Slashdot article. Apparently whoever compiled this article didn't read the reply to that post.
By copying his script to "/usr/bin", he over-wrote the system command of the same name. On unix and unix-like systems, "df" is a command that reports disk usage.
So this probably had two nasty side-effects:
1. Whenever any other user typed "df" to determine how much disk space was left, their shell environment would get suddenly "re-customized" to the settings that Mr. D.F. liked. Depending on what was in the script, this could have been merely annoying ("Why did my shell colors suddenly change?") to downright crippling (causing people's preferences to be stored in the wrong place, thereby breaking all kinds of software).
2. Most utilities in *nix end up being used in a wide variety of other utilities, scripts, and system processes. As a result, a whole slew of standard operations probably broke as a result of "df" returning garbage data. This may have broken some system loggers, or disk caps, or maybe it triggered emergency "disk nearly full!" emails being sent to all the admin staff.
Moral of the story: wield root wisely.