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Date:      Sun, 19 Feb 1995 17:31:37 -0800
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh>
To:        core@FreeBSD.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Resend:  problems on freefall
Message-ID:  <199502200131.RAA22039@freefall.cdrom.com>

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Earlier today I said on freefall:

>Either we've been attacked, somebody on the core team just had a criminal
>case of the stupids, or I don't know what to think.

I guess I should admit that it was me who had the criminal stupids
(god don't you just hate it when you complain about something and it's
*you* who are the problem??), or at least a bad case of criminal negligence!

It was all caused by a bad combination of factors:  One that I didn't think
twice about the possible consequences of having AMD mount things in /tmp/amd_mnt
(/tmp has been "safe" again for too long, I guess) and two that I had
the old /etc/* files on time, the /etc/daily containing the search and
destroy in /tmp that we later disabled.

When I went to amd on time (mother didn't have the problem, being a new
installation) the next time /etc/daily ran it whacked us good.  AMD
mounts *everything* that a system exports when you first go to /host/<foo>
and so when I got my freefall home dir on time exported to me, along
came all of /a, /b and /c as well.

This was just really bad luck and some bad system admin on my part.
I feel really, really, really stupid.

A lot of people had their home dirs on one if these drives, and anything
you didn't touch in 3 days or more is likely gone!  I managed to stop
the find running once I figured out what had happened, but it had in
the meantime run over 5 hours, and much damage was done during that time.

Again, to repeat:  This ONLY removed files that had NOT been accessed
at all, meaning that your dotfiles and such should be fine if you
log into freefall regularly.  Likewise, all non-Attic portions of the CVS
tree should be OK since it's accessed regularly by the cvs update run.

Over the next couple of days we'll work on figuring out what got nuked
and what can be brought back.

I am dreadfully sorry for any inconvenience caused!  I shall atone for
my sins by appointing myself Mr Backup Meister for awhile and making
sure that freefall gets regularly backed up to tape.

                                        Jordan



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