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Entire hosting company deleted by owners miscode

A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code.

By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers.

Mr Marsala wrote on a forum for server experts called Server Fault that he was now stuck after having accidentally run destructive code on his own computers. But far from advising them how to fix it, most experts informed him that he had just accidentally deleted the data of his company and its clients, and in so doing had probably destroyed his entire company with just one line of code.

The problem command was “rm -rf”: a basic piece of code that will delete everything it is told to. The “rm” tells the computer to remove; the r deletes everything within a given directory; and the f stands for “force”, telling the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files….

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/man-accidentally-deletes-his-entire-company-with-one-line-of-bad-code-a6984256.html

Before he deleted them he used to have ‘about’ 1535 customers; now he needs a solicitor…

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By: hampden98 - 24th April 2016 at 19:30

I can believe this and have experience of something similar.
Not mentioning any specifics, but, I used to work for one the the big four Telecom companies.
A newb support engineer who thought he was gods gift to computers added a crontab to the entire
shop functionality of said companies website. Not just one computer out of the farm to test, but all the computers
in the farm.
The cron entry was something like cp -rm *.
It moved the contents of a directory to another area. However a typo in the command move the root partition to another area!
This is similar to pulling the chips slowly out of HALS brain.
Needless to say the entire farm went down and with it the shop.
The only thing that saved the day was that the shop was being replaced with an upgraded farm.
So we just moved that upgrade hastily into live.
Never did see that engineer again.

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By: snafu - 16th April 2016 at 00:29

Although…it might be a hoax.

Reading the comments beneath the story questions whether anyone could name any of the 1500 customers since the story obviously doesn’t…

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