Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 04:37:07 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Philip Milne <philip_milne@il.us.swissbank.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org, armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com, charlie_conklin@il.us.swissbank.com Subject: Re: Nightmare. Message-ID: <4826.839936227@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 13 Aug 1996 11:49:58 BST." <9608131050.AA02567@ln1d273nwk>
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> Hi, we are a small ISP running FreeBSD to power our WEB server and mail > host. While trying to do a simple exhaustive dump of everything as a crude > backup we have brought our system down. Our sysadmin is on holiday and I'm willing to accept that this was your original intention, yes. It is unfortunate, however, that you did not simply wait for the intervention of qualified personnel (or, ideally, your system administrator to return from vacation) and attempted instead to rectify the situation yourselves. Your crude attempts to formulate a backup procudure could not have worked, even had the system not died in the process, and it's even more than likely that the command you typed wasn't the one you meant to, and the situation you're now in can be blamed on a simple typo (or, as the engineering support folks so charitably put it in their trouble logs, "problem caused by loose nut behind console." :-) I'll explain: > As root we did the following: > > tar -cvf /dev/rfd0a / This can't possibly work because: a) Using / will decend through your *entire* filesystem, including any cdroms or NFS mounted media, and is probably the least desirable place to start any sort of dump from. It's also probably a lot more floppies than you own to back up a typical UNIX installation without compression. b) You did not specify the multi-volume flag to tar, and it will write only one floppy's worth of data before hitting rudely against the end. I just tried it, in the spirit of thoroughness, and it indeed wrote out about 1.4MB's worth of tar file before announcing that it couldn't write anymore and stopping. > As there were some odd messages appearing in the console this was aborted wit h: Those "odd messages" are generally the only thing we have to go on in cases like this, and you certainly should have written them down, but to make a total guess here (and that's all I can do) I'd say that what you typed instead was: tar -cvf /dev/rsd0a / Transposing one simple character and turning this command into a killer of typical root filesystems on SCSI boot drives when run as root. You wouldn't happen to have a SCSI drive, would you? One you're booting from? Or were, I guess I should say? > Boot: > - Yep, no kernel. Looks like the root filesystem took a pounding. Either way, it looks like a fixit floppy is in your future and, depending on what information it turns up on how lost your root filesystem is, perhaps a reinstallation. Better page that administrator again, and next time PLEASE keep your sticky fingers out of the machinery! :-) Jordan
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