On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:05:54PM +0100, Peter Onion wrote:
I do hope that the wrecklessness with which people are treating other peoples machines on the IRC channel at the moment doesn't result in the loss of anyones important data.
As far as I'm concerned getting a less than expert user to edit /etc/fstab via instructions on IRC is asking for trouble.
Right, the situation is that someone wanted to mount a Windows ntfs partition on their new ubuntu install.
To do this we ended up taking *2* backups of fstab, one of which we edited and the other was kept out of the way in case of disaster. We used echo and an io redirect to edit the copy in the guys home directory. We then got him to compare it to the real copy of fstab etc. The guy isn't a total newbie to computers and he was confident to recover his system (with no data on it, because he couldn't get access to the ntfs windows partition with his data on it...)
At *every* stage we double checked things, ok, I did make a slight mistake at one point, but at no point was any data at risk. We ended up using the backup copy to start the editing again.
I have done sysadmin work in a couple of large places where availability is critical, I always try to minimise any risk by adopting best practise when doing things like this.
If you can point out *any* way in which we took a risk that could have killed any important data or somebodys computer then I am all ears. The person in question has been hanging around for quite some time now, if they had been a newbie who dropped in for the first time and I wasn't sure of their abilities then I would have asked a few more questions first, but the way I see things we have got yet another happy alug customer.... and, I think that the person involved has learnt quite a bit too ;)
Adam