When you make a potentially system breaking change and forgot to make a snapshot of the VM beforehand…
There’s always backups… Right?
… Right?
oh there is. from 3 years ago, and some
Someone set up a script to automatically create daily backups to tape. Unfortunately, it’s still the first tape that was put in there 3.5 years ago, every backup since that one filled up failed. It might as well have failed silently because everyone who received the email with the error message filtered them to a folder they generally ignored.
Never update, never reboot. Clearly the safest method. Tried and true.
Found the debian user!
Never touch a running system
Until you have a inviting hole in your systemNevertheless, I’m panicking every time I update my sever infrastructure…
this week i sudo shutdown now our main service right at the end of the workday because i tought it was a local terminal.
not a bright move.
There’s a package called
molly-guard
which will check to see if you are connected via ssh when you try to shut it down. If you are, it will ask you for the hostname of the system to make sure you’re shutting down the right one.Very usefull program to just throw onto servers.
nice. got it installed to test it out
We got the Trojan in, let’s move move move!
Best thing I did was change my shell prompt so I can easily tell when it isn’t my machine
you mean the user@machine:$ thing? how do you have yours?
I was making after hours config changes on a pair of mostly-but-not-entirely redundant Cisco L3 switches which basically controlled the entire network at that location. While updating the running configs I mixed up which ssh session was which switch and accidentally gave both switches the same IP address, and before I noticed the error I copied the running config to the startup config.
Due to other limitations and the fact that these changes were to fix DNS issues (and therefore I couldn’t rely on DNS to save me) I ended up keeping sshing in by IP until I got the right switch and trying to make the change before my session died due to dropped packets from the mucked up network situation I had created. That easily added a couple of hours of cleanup to the maintainence I was doing