UK Hosting Provider 123-Reg Accidentally Deletes Customer Sites (theregister.co.uk)

Richard Chirgwin, writing for The Register: UK hosting and domains provider 123-Reg has been struck by a weekend issue that knocked an unspecified number of VPS customers offline. The company posted a status message saying that the unspecified issues arose on April 16. 123-reg customer, software company INNmaster, contacted The Register directing our attention to its post on the topic, claiming a rogue script had deleted customer sites (such as this one). Slashdot has independently received several tips for this incident. Here's a copy of the email that Richard Winslow, Director of 123-Reg sent to the affected customers.

Comments

So that Serverfault question wasn't a hoax

[hardill]

Looks like that Serverfault question about running rm -rf / was real then

Re:A hot I worked for did this once

[TheRaven64]

so gave a sales person root access who promptly ran rm -rf /*.*.

Running rm -rf /*.*. (or even rm -rf /*.*) is unlikely to cause much damage on a *NIX system as it's very unusual to have any files with dots in their names in the root directory and even more unlikely to have any directories that have dots in their names.

Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat

[fustakrakich]

Again?

Re:It's the singularity

[14erCleaner]

It's agents in the present will probably mod you down for saying that.

Re:A hot I worked for did this once

[Anonymous Coward]

> Running rm -rf /*.*. (or even rm -rf /*.*) is unlikely to cause much damage on a *NIX system [...]

Alas, times have changed. Nowadays every idiot and his dog, coming over from DOS (perhaps via OSX [1]) has the irresistible urge to name his shell scripts "foo.sh". Those are the very same people who think "all files" is spelt "*.*", so the only consolation for all that ugliness is that they bring their own antimatter along. May they annihilate themselves in a flash of light!

[1] Yeah, yeah. OSX is Unix beneath the covers, they say. But the culture, the spirit, the soul? Rather an Unix zombie, no soul and eating braaaains.

Resolution [Re:A hot I worked for did this once]

[XXongo]

On solaris * resolves to something or nothing, so /*.* resolves to /.

Wait, you said that the command eliminates slashdot?

I'm trying to decide if that's good, or bad...

Don't accuse me of poetry

[TechyImmigrant]

Cloud so convenient
Service provider not bright
All the files are gone

Re:More space

[Archtech]

Congratulations. Your account has been upgraded with more free disk space.

Said the BOFH... 8-)