The Real TechTV Story
=====================

> At 9:30am on Friday last, I decided to create a user account whose
> home directory was the document root for the website. Purely for the
> convenience of being able to cd ~techcentral rather than having to
> type the full pathname.
> 
> > useradd -u 201 blah blah blah techcentral
> useradd: techcentral: Name too long.
> 
> Oh. Okay.
> > useradd -u 201 blah blah blah techcent
> useradd: ERROR: UID already in use.
> 
> Eh?
> 
> > grep 201 /etc/passwd
> techcentral:*:201:blah blah blah
> 
> Aw crap. Okay...
> 
> > useradd -u 202 blah blah blah techcent
> 
> Right, I'll remove that other account.
> Haven't used userdel before, so let's see the usage message:
> 
> > userdel
> usage: userdel [-r] login
> 
> Oh, okay. user admin command, and -r means remove. Right. <<<< ACTUAL
>                                                           <<<< THOUGHT
>                                                           <<<< PROCESS
> 
> [ Go check the manual page to find out what -r really does ]
> 
> > userdel -r techcentral
> > cd ~techcent
> > ls -a
> . ..
> > pwd
> /blah/blah/techcentral
> > ls
> . ..
> 
> Ohshit. Ohshit ohshit ohshit.
> 
> And, to complete the oshit, I didn't have backups. Why? It's a new
> machine, with a high-capacity tape drive for which we have no tapes. I
> ordered the tapes on Monday. For various reasons to do with the MD, I
> ordered from a different supplier. For various reasons to do with who
> owes who money, the supplier didn't deliver the tapes until Friday,
> /after/ I'd removed the entire site.
> 
> Oh, and for what it's worth, periodicity: 6 years. I last caused
> damage on this scale using a recursive delete in 1992.
> 
> And there you have it. You know me; I honestly wouldn't delete web
> pages simply because they were bad press. In fact, our stated policy
> is that as long as you keep your language tidy, you can post pretty
> much as you like.