The first time I crashed something was at my first programming job, and my boss was really cool, he too said if I didn't break something, I might not be working hard enough. Maybe he was understanding because, despite bringing down the entire SCO/Unix system, it was on the very morning of the day we had a consultant in to upgrade to a new version. And I learned a lot about Unix that day, watching over his shoulder as he brought the system back up.
Second time it was a bug in the Unix implementation's (HP-UX) version of userdel. I was the closest to a DBA/Unix expert at the hospital I worked at in a small western town. A consultant was coming up the next day from the metropolitan area 200 miles to the south to hand over the reigns to me, and she said I should create a user account for myself, and copy all her files over from her account into mine.
Problem was, in so doing, the entire / root partition got filled up. I recognized this instantly, and so ran userdel on my newly created account, with the idea that we might put my user account in a non-standard partition, or just wait until she showed up for other suggestions.
Immediately after doing this I noticed that all files no longer had any user and/or group associated with them. I stayed after hours and with the help of technical support almost completely restored everything from backup. The next day the consultant and I did a little research, and the issue with HP-UX's userdel is that it tried to create a copy of /etc/passwd in the / root partition, as a working copy to make changes to. Problem was because the partition was full, the working copy was 0 bytes in size, and then the original got over-written with this.
I tried to replicate this on my Linux box at home but it's implementation of userdel was sane and it did not fail the same way. My employer didn't give a rat's ass though and I was no longer with them after another couple of weeks.
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The first time I crashed something was at my first programming job, and my boss was really cool, he too said if I didn't break something, I might not be working hard enough. Maybe he was understanding because, despite bringing down the entire SCO/Unix system, it was on the very morning of the day we had a consultant in to upgrade to a new version. And I learned a lot about Unix that day, watching over his shoulder as he brought the system back up.
Second time it was a bug in the Unix implementation's (HP-UX) version of userdel. I was the closest to a DBA/Unix expert at the hospital I worked at in a small western town. A consultant was coming up the next day from the metropolitan area 200 miles to the south to hand over the reigns to me, and she said I should create a user account for myself, and copy all her files over from her account into mine.
Problem was, in so doing, the entire / root partition got filled up. I recognized this instantly, and so ran userdel on my newly created account, with the idea that we might put my user account in a non-standard partition, or just wait until she showed up for other suggestions.
Immediately after doing this I noticed that all files no longer had any user and/or group associated with them. I stayed after hours and with the help of technical support almost completely restored everything from backup. The next day the consultant and I did a little research, and the issue with HP-UX's userdel is that it tried to create a copy of /etc/passwd in the / root partition, as a working copy to make changes to. Problem was because the partition was full, the working copy was 0 bytes in size, and then the original got over-written with this.
I tried to replicate this on my Linux box at home but it's implementation of userdel was sane and it did not fail the same way. My employer didn't give a rat's ass though and I was no longer with them after another couple of weeks.