Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 22:31:45 +0000 From: Daniela <dgw@liwest.at> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Accidentally truncated crontab Message-ID: <200408092231.45340.dgw@liwest.at> In-Reply-To: <20040809143801.08e33b00.wmoran@potentialtech.com> References: <200408091928.20307.dgw@liwest.at> <20040809143801.08e33b00.wmoran@potentialtech.com>
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On Monday 09 August 2004 18:38, Bill Moran wrote: > Daniela <dgw@liwest.at> wrote: > > Hi all! > > > > I just emptied the system crontab, and don't know how I can recover it. > > I know that the contents are still somewhere on the drive, as I didn't > > write anything on that partition. > > The size of the file must be stored somewhere in the inode, or maybe in > > the directory, so I could just load the raw partition into my hexeditor > > and change that field to the original length. But I thought I'd better > > not touch it without consulting the experts first, because I don't have > > much experience with file systems. > > In the ports I couldn't find an undelete utility, and the -w option to rm > > doesn't work here. > > > > Please help me, or at least tell me that there's nothing else I can do, > > so I can use the method mentioned above. > > Well ... there are some undelete utilities out there (I'm surprised there > are none in the ports) and I've seen a number of tutorials on how to > recover deleted files from UFS filesytems ... but I think you're > _seriously_ overcomplicating things! It was really not as complicated as I thought. After searching the web and finding no undelete tools, but a tutorial on UFS layout, I pulled out the binary editor and recovered the file myself. It was much easier than I expected! Well, I had to make a copy of that file system, since it's root, so I can't simply unmount it. But that was pretty much the only complication. I think that low-level stuff starts to grow on me! Maybe I should start writing device drivers, kernel modules and so on. > If you haven't customized the crontab, and you have sources installed, then > "cd /usr/src; mergemaster" will give you an opportunity to re-install the > default system crontab. You could also download it directly from CVS. No, the file was heavily customized. > If you did customize it and are foolish enough not to have backups, then > do some google searches on "undeleting from UFS" or something like that. > I've seen a few articles on how to do it in the past. And start making > backups. Putting your /etc directory under revision control is a decent > idea! Yes, you're right, I was an idiot. I had a backup, but it was not recent enough. I'm really too lazy and irresponsible to be root. I'm young and I have much to learn. Revision control is great, and I'll install tripwire, which I should have done a long time ago. Thanks for your answer. Daniela
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