![]() Run it with root privileges at the root directory, which is just a sudo and a cd / away, and you have wiped out your entire universe. For those of you whose palms aren’t sweating instinctively at the sight of this little beauty, it means "Remove all files in this directory and all directories beneath it." It's hugely useful when freeing up space or removing old installations, and the system won't let you get rid of things you don't have access privileges to. ![]() Take the infamous Unix/Linux command 'rm -r *'. Part of the problem is that our technology will do what we tell it, and the difference between very useful and existentially threatening can be wafer thin. Simple typos and their cousin, Mr Misconfiguration, can unleash chaos to anyone. But these excrescences are corporate and cultural: the typo-induced Azure outage is an industry wide phenomenon that good people perpetrate. Leaning on everyone to move to Windows 11 while nearly half of Windows 10 PCs fail the hardware requirements. Stuffing its OS with adware disguised as a help system. It is easy to rag on Microsoft for oh so many reasons. A typo triggered unforeseen cascading errors, which continued attempts to restore order dragged on for ten embarrassing hours. ![]() ![]() You can read the gory details here, they’re just as compelling as an episode of Air Crash Investigation. A careful, intricate, tested and approved rewiring of the Azure DevOps suite got sent out into the world, only for South Brazil to go dark as it started to eat customer instances. Some poor sod in Microsoft just had the mother of all elys. Opinion “ELY (n.) – The first, tiniest inkling that something, somewhere has gone terribly wrong.” One the finest definitions from Douglas Adams and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff, it describes perfectly the start of that nightmare scenario for ops in a big service provider - the rising tide of alerts after that update went live. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |