Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 20:01:55 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk (Paul Richards) Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.com, lada@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at, philip_milne@il.us.swissbank.com, hackers@freebsd.org, armando_ferreira@il.us.swissbank.com, charlie_conklin@il.us.swissbank.com Subject: Re: Nightmare. Message-ID: <199608141031.UAA01998@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <57g25q9vf6.fsf@elsevier.co.uk> from "Paul Richards" at Aug 14, 96 10:17:33 am
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Paul Richards stands accused of saying: > > Ehh, either I'm missing something really stupid or everyone else is :-) > > tar -cvf /dev/rfd0a / > > is going to backup the / partition onto a floppy, what's wrong with > that? About the worst that could happen is that rfd0a doesn't exist > and you create a tar archive, at which point tar will say something > like "/usr/bin/tar: /dev/rfd0 is the archive; not dumped" or you fill > a floppy (doesn't gnu tar prompt for new floppies anyway). > > I certainly wouldn't expect this command to trash my / partition. You obviously don't deal much with nontechnical types 8) The key concepts were : "our admin is on holidays" "we thought we would do xxx" "this is exactly what we did" (not) "everything is broken and we want you to fix it" The problem is that they are intentionally or otherwise _not_ telling us what they really did. Some people have assumed that they typoed the tar command; this is certainly a good place to start, but there are other obvious possibilities beyond this. FWIW, gnu tar will only prompt for new floppies if specifically warned in advance that it's doing a multivolume dump (at least that's what I found last time I was stupid enough to backup anything to floppy). > Paul Richards. Originative Solutions Ltd. (Netcraft Ltd. contractor) -- ]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] Genesis Software genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] Collector of old Unix hardware. "Where are your PEZ?" The Tick [[
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