[1290] in SIPB-AFS-requests
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jweiss@MIT.EDU)
Fri Apr 1 23:22:21 1994
From: jweiss@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 1 Apr 1994 23:21:37 -0500
To: sipb-afsreq@MIT.EDU
cc tlyu
Subject: lost data (recovered)
the clean_dir.csh script (for cleaning sipb guest accounts is very
broken, but that is really the subject of another mail message.
While attempting to fix it I used the syntax ./.[^.]* after confirming
that it DWIW. On most platforms this globs to .* except ..* (which
notably includes ..). However, I did not realize that this is
appearantly a tcsh-ism. On the RS6000's /bin/csh is actual vendor
csh. Default csh interpreted the ^ as a literal character, causing
./.[^.]* to return ./.. unfortunately . at this point was sipb3
(account I was trying to return). This made ..
/afs/sipb.mit.edu/user, which means it started nuking homedirs.
Fortunately, part way through the first homedir it attacked (monkey)
there was a dir without system:administrators all access, which caused
errors. As soon as I realized what these errors meant I ^C'd the
process. It had nuked 6M or 7M of stuff in monkey's homedir. With a
lot of help from tlyu and perl we figured out what order things had
beed attacked. I was then able to restore everything from the backup
volume created Wed Mar 30 14:48:58 1994. I believe that unless
changes were made to monkey's homedir between Wed. and now no data was
actually lost. I have sent mail to monkey with a list of the files I
believe were affected. (I did not cc sipb-afsreq, because it feeds a
public discuss meeting, and I didn't think it was necessarily
appropriate to send the list of files there.)
Not how I wanted to start my weekend...
Jonathon
