Valentine's Day Call to Action

From the teaser:

Quoting:The very same heroes that restore a backup after we drag and dropped the /bin directory into the trashcan?

?????? I certainly hope no organization is running a distro setup on their desktops that lets the users delete system files......

Windows did for a long time.

My ex dished out a harsh lesson in reality to someone who went into a MUD looking for free Windows tech support. She got 2,000 experience points from the MUD senior admin for it, too.

TANSTAAFL, mister.

The writer must work for one of the thousands of organizations that run Puppy Linux. ;)

(For anyone who doesn't already know, Puppy Linux users always run as root).

techiem2: It's just Miguel's sense of humor - obviously that's not a likely scenario on *nix (at least not if the admin is competent).

Once I accidentaly deleted /bin/mkdir. Which is kind of fun, because the system still keeps working - but whenever you try to install 'binutils' again it fails (on Gentoo) because it cannot create a build directory to compile and prepare stuff. It would have been great if I had some sort of backup, but obviously I didn't.

@hans:

cd /tmp lynx

and then download the binutils source code, untar it, find the mkdir source, and build it manually with "gcc".

cp mkdir /usr/local/bin/

then reinstall it in Gentoo, confirm it's working, and

rm /usr/local/bin/mkdir

And I haven't used Gentoo in, what, four years?

I had a friend accidentally nuke /etc on one of his servers once... Fortunately he realized it before rebooting and had a backup or another server to copy stuff from.

Speaking of keeping backup history, I've started using etckeeper (git for /etc) and am loving it. I keep backups too, of course, but it's pretty handy to be able to see the history of all your changes to your config files. etckeeper stays out of your way by running an automatic commit each night. Of course you can also do your own explicit commits if you want. If you need to browse changes, you can use "tig" (think of it like a mutt for git).

yum install etckeeper apt-get install etckeeper

Quoting:it's pretty handy to be able to see the history of all your changes

And at first it might be surprising how much can change upon a simple upgrade!

Yeah, I'm loving etckeeper too :)