Etc Etc

Published on 18 August 2005 in , ,

This post will only mean something if you know anything about *nix operating systems. If you’re not that person, this will be meaningless.

Anyway I was trawling through a folder of old backups, and found an old backup of /etc.

I can get rid of that, methinks. Rats, I haven’t got the file permissions.

So I log in as root. And type the old rm -rf etc. Except there was a snag. I put in a slash…

Ever tried rm -rf /etc? Causes a few problems I can tell you. Can’t log in as root for starters (thankfully I realised I hadn’t closed my other root shell) and lots of things suddenly stop working…

Now thankfully I had a backup of said folder from a few months ago. It’s from Mandrake 10.0 (I’m currently on Mandriva 2005 LE) but it’s doing reasonably enough. Although Firefox now won’t open, and my printer settings have gone bust. That said, I’m not sure I dare reboot the PC as I dread to think what will happen when all the various services on the box get restarted…

All of which reminds me of my teenage years and something that I must confess. When I was fourteen or so, myself and Mark Parker did go into a branch of Tandy. They had some computers running a version of DOS (Windows was still in its infancy of course) and we deleted the whole hard drive…

For the next few months we kept going back into Tandy, to see the same computer sat there forlornly, unable to do anything other than sprout error messages. Obviously someone could have restored the file system with a few disks and a few simple commands… No doubt no one knew how.

Those were the days… Of course now I would have to tut and moan about the youth of day if witnessing such an event but at that time in your life, sometimes you do silly, pointless things in the idea of ‘fun’.

Wonder what happened to Mark…