Fat Finger Stories

[Michael Jarvis]

I think everyone has done something like that at least once.

In my case it was /usr/local on a production Solaris server, and I had fun
recompiling all of our open source tools, after boot-strap compiling
the gcc compiler first, of course. I managed to get everything fixed
before anyone noticed.

This was roughly 20 years ago, and back then if you wanted free and
open-source tools on Solaris, you downloaded the tarball and compiled
it yourself.

Let's just say it was a learning experience, that thankfully hasn't
been repeated since then!




On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 08:51:12PM -0500, Michael Brazda wrote:
> I was talking with a friend the other day about the famous fat finger
> oops and I thought it would be fun to have a thread on it. I would like
> to hear your stories.
>
> Here is one of mine.
>
> Way back in the day I had a web server running on redhat 5 and was
> modifying the httpd.conf file. Well I was deleting the existing file and
> here is what I did..  rm -fr /etc /httpd/httpd.conf  All you hear was me
> hit the enter key followed by a number of expletives coming from my
> office.  The amazing thing about Linux everything was still running and
> chugging away as long as I didn't reboot or restart a service. So I
> downloaded all the rpms for the distro and extracted everything for etc
> and rebuilt the config files. Nobody was the wiser..