Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

--On 2004-10-2 11:19 AM +0300 Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at freebsd.org> 
wrote:

> John Beck, who works for Sun, has posted an entry in his blog
> yesterday about "rm -fr /" protection, which I liked a lot:
> http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jbeck/20041001#rm_rf_protection

The best protection from 'rm -rf /' is an AT&T 3B4000 computer.

I had the misfortune of dealing with one in the late '80s. After I
convinced management that it was ... well ... a waste of time, we
held a de-commissioning party. Somewhere around 2030 (hours) I took
the liberty to do something I have wanted to do on a live production 
system
for a long time:

  1. login as root
  2. rm -rf /

We did this, in party mode, with a couple of bottles of champaign, 
streamers,
and a bit of Frank Zappa and Cap't Beefheart in the background.

By midnight, we were getting worried that last call at the pub would end
before the machine. So, we left. And came back. And left again to come
back with offsales, on account of said machine not only being deathly 
slow
in life, but also in suicide.

I think we gave up around 0530 and just pulled the AC from the box and 
went home.
Or back to the bar. For a month. To get over the brain damage of the 
3B4K.
(We inflicted less upon ourselves :-)

Of course, this was just a little while after All Of Usenet hit 5MB per 
day,
so I don't expect anyone to get this anecdote correct on their MCSE 
exam :-)

--lyndon