Man accidentally ‘deletes his entire company’ with one line of bad code | News | Lifestyle | The Independent

Man accidentally ‘deletes his entire company’ with one line of bad code from The Independent shows a good example how a small mistake can sometimes cause huge problems. Be careful and have proper backup system.

Mr Marsala wrote on a forum for server experts called Server Fault that he was now stuck after having accidentally run destructive code on his own computers. Mr Marsala confirmed that the code had even deleted all of the backups that he had taken in case of catastrophe. ‘I feel sorry to say that your company is now essentially dead,’ one person on a coding forum advised Marco Marsala. “You’re going out of business,” wrote Michael Hampton. “You don’t need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer.” 

“This is not bad luck: it’s astonishingly bad design reinforced by complete carelessness.”

Update: Man who allegedly deleted his startup with one line of code is a huge troll  tells that Speaking to the Italian publication Repubblica, Marsala explained that the story was something of a viral marketing scheme for his startup. Ansible actually prevents such large scale mistakes. Moral of the story? Another day, another internet hoax.

 

 

 

6 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Man Deletes His Whole Company With One Bad Line of Code
    http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a20405/man-deletes-company-and-backups-accidentally/

    Thanks to just one mistake, he instructed the computer to delete everything it could find.

    The next time you accidentally close a file without saving, just keep in mind that it could be worse. You could be Marco Marsala, a hosting provider who accidentally and irrevocably deleted his entire business with a faulty line of code.

    As Marsala wrote on Server Fault, a forum where he was asking for help with the bind he’d gotten himself into, “I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers …All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too.”

    A dire situation for certain, but one that Marsala was apparently hopeful he could rectify. “How I can recover from a rm -rf / now in a timely manner?” his plea for assistance ends.

    That “rm -rf/” is the troublesome line that got Marsala into trouble. It is, essentially, a command that will forcibly delete data without asking for confirmation.

    Why was Marsala running this command at all? It was actually part of his backup procedure, presumably intended to delete old backups. But due to the lack of specificity, it just deleted everything it could get its hands on—including customer websites.

    The lessons to be learned here? A few: Always double check instructions to delete anything. Make sure you back up your important data offline.

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Linux command line mistake nukes web boss’ biz
    RTFM not rm -rf, man! FFS!
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/15/man_deleats_customers_running_script/

    The owner of a web host has unwittingly deleted his customers data after executing a powerful line of code on his servers.

    Marco Marsala has appealed for help to recover his punters’ info after accidentally running a Bash script on his Linux servers via Ansible.

    Marsala is said to have 1,535 customers, although he does not identify his company. Unfortunately for Marsala, the script he ran was rm -rf {foo}/{bar}.

    “All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script),” he wrote on serverfault.net.

    Reply
  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    It seems that this whole news was hoax according to http://serverfault.com/questions/587102/monday-morning-mistake-sudo-rm-rf-no-preserve-root

    Please note: The answers and comments to this question contains content from another, similar question that has received a lot of attention from outside media but turned out to be hoax question in some kind of viral marketing scheme. As we don’t allow ServerFault to be abused in such a way, the original question has been deleted and the answers merged with this question.

    Reply
  4. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Man who allegedly deleted his startup with one line of code is a huge troll
    http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/04/17/turns-dude-didnt-delete-entire-company-single-line-code/

    You might’ve heard the tragic-but-kind-of-funny story of Marco Marsala, who allegedly deleted his entire startup with a single line of code this past week. It was the ultimate case of IT bad luck – or carelessness, as some commenters suggested.

    But all isn’t as it seems. In other words: another day, another internet hoax.

    Speaking to the Italian publication Repubblica, Marsala explained that the story was something of a viral marketing scheme for his startup, which outsources server management services.

    Interestingly, Marsala says that it’s not completely false – someone he knew really did delete his company with one line of code back “before 2006.”

    Commenters on Server Fault then delivered the bad news: there was effectively no way to recover the files. Some suggested he’d have been better suited to ask for legal advice after deleting so much client data.

    But after revealing the hoax, Marsala says most commenters missed out on the fact that Ansible actually prevents such large scale mistakes, and that the situation he described “can not happen” with that tool.

    Moral of the story? As always, don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

    Cancella l’azienda con un clic e diventa star del web. Ma dice: ”E’ solo uno scherzo”
    http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/04/15/news/cancella_l_azienda_per_sbaglio_la_disavventura_tecnologica_di_marco_marsala-137693154/?ref=twhr&timestamp=1460722285000&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&refresh_ce

    Reply
  5. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Somewhat similar situations have happened:

    Have You Ever Deleted Your Production Database? This Company Has
    http://webscripts.softpedia.com/blog/have-you-ever-deleted-your-production-database-this-company-did-502094.shtml

    A small startup is going through hell right now, as its engineers are scrambling to restore service after one of them accidentally deleted the company’s main production database.

    All software engineers, coders, and hardware experts have gone through this scenario at one point in their life, where they have the original file and the backup/clone, and they delete the first by accident, having to restore it later on.

    This is exactly how the situation played out at Gliffy, a startup providing a service for creating diagrams and flowcharts for their clients.

    One of their software engineers, while performing maintenance operations, got his file names mixed up and deleted the company’s production database instead of a backup, effectively bringing down the entire service and deleting all the customers’ data.

    Fortunately, the company created daily backups, so as soon as the problem was detected, the Gliffy crew started restoring the latest database version they had on hand.

    For startups, this is one of those risks that almost everyone’s familiar with, but doesn’t think will ever happen. Disaster recovery – or not having a single point of failure – is important for making sure you’re not down for days when accidents happen.

    This is every startup’s worst nightmare: accidentally deleting your entire database
    http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/03/23/every-startups-worst-nightmare-accidentally-deleting-database/#gref

    Gliffy, a popular online diagram and flowchart Web app, experienced every startup’s worst nightmare this week when a member of its team accidentally deleted the company’s entire production database.

    The issue started when Gliffy’s team found an issue in one of its backup systems and so scheduled maintenance to resolve it. When working on the issue, the administrator accidentally deleted the wrong database, in its entirety, according to its support site.

    That meant the entire service has been offline, and users can’t retrieve any of their data or charts.

    RESOLVED Gliffy Online System Outage
    http://support.gliffy.com/hc/en-us/articles/217896028-RESOLVED-Gliffy-Online-System-Outage-

    Thanks for your patience and we apologize for the inconvenience this causes. No data has been lost with this outage.

    Gliffy
    process-to-delete-db-from-website
    https://www.gliffy.com/publish/4201103/

    Reply

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