Monday, February 28, 2011

How to hose your Linux box, lesson 1: the power of rm -rf

If you've used Linux, you already know rm can be dangerous. Getting a newbie to run sudo rm -rf / is a cliché joke among geeks. Helpfully, GNU rm won't actually let you delete the root directory, but you can still get into trouble.

Recently, I was cleaning out an old system disk in order to use it as a backup disk. I had already copied some data onto it, so I didn't want to just wipe it out, so I explicitly deleted the directories I did not want:


I knew it was going to take a while to delete all the files, so I went back to working on the backup script. After a few minutes, something odd happened: any command I entered failed with No such file or directory. The rm process continued to run, since it had already been loaded into memory. When the most basic commands like ls and cp don't work, there's not much that can be done. I couldn't stop rm; I had detached from the screen session and screen couldn't start again. I had no choice. I pulled the plug.

Booting from a USB drive, I was relieved to find that the root drive had not been wiped. The only casualty was the /lib directory, which explains the error: The ELF interpreter, /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 was gone. I restored /lib from a recent backup, and everything was fine.

So, why was /lib singled out? The culprit was the extra slash on lib64/lib64 is a symbolic link to /lib. Normally, rm does not follow symbolic links when deleting recursively, but it does follow links to directories when resolving paths given on the command line; rm -rf lib64 means "delete the symbolic link lib64", while rm -rf lib64/ means "delete the directory lib64 points to".

Today's lesson has been brought to you by the letter "B", for backups. It doesn't matter how secure your box is, one typo on the command line can completely clean out your data.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

An update? Unbelievable.

I started working full-time right out of high school, so I never had time or incentive to continue my education until now. I've started taking a few gen-ed classes at Butler Community College, and I'm plannng to transfer to WSU for a degree in Computer Science.

Long story short, my English professor strongly encourages me to practice writing, so I'm going to try postng here more than once every two years...

Anyway, I recently bought an HP LaserJet Professional P1102w, and was disappointed to find that there was no way to set up its wireless networking using Linux. I did some digging, and hacked together a script to access the embedded web server over USB: USB EWS gateway. It may work with other printer models, but I've only tested it on mine.