HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: ahoekstr@cs.utwente.nl (Andre Hoekstra)
Subject: Message for Gordon L Burditt
Organization: University of Twente, Dept. of Computer Science
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 09:40:40 GMT


I'm sorry for posting this. I know I shouldn't.

Dear Gordon,
Thank you for your reply.
I was totally wrong (I must have had a bad day :-()
I cannot reach you be e-mail at gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org,
it bounces at utacfd.uta.edu.
Best Regards,
Andre Hoekstra

(For those who care what it is about:
I said the directory changes each time you access a file. This is
not true: the accessed time in the inode is changed. Gordon also
pointed out that not on every system you can do shutdown before dump
from a script)
-- 
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in | Andre Hoekstra
their home. (Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977) | Enschede -- NL
From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Sticky-Bits and Group IDs in DIRECTORIES?
Date: 13 Oct 1992 19:42:36 GMT
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
NNTP-Posting-Host: telecaster.think.com

In article <1992Oct13.110046@iphase.com> plarkin@iphase.com (Patrick Larkin) writes:
>First of all, what is the purpose/benefit of setting a sticky-bit on a DIRECTORY?!?!?

The directory sticky bit indicates that only the owner of a file may remove
a link to it.  This is most commonly used on shared directories like /tmp,
/usr/tmp, and /usr/spool/mail, since everyone needs write accesss but users
shouldn't be allowed to delete each others' files.

>Secondly, why do all files created take on the group id of its parent directory and 
>ignore the group id of the user?  (Below is a sample session:

Is the set-gid bit set on the directory (I know it wasn't in the
description you posted, but perhaps you mistyped) or the file system
mounted with the "grpid" option (this exists on SunOS, I don't know about
Sequent systems)?  These both cause new files to inherit the group id from
the directory rather than the creating process.

The SunOS documentation refers to the "grpid" option as the "BSD
file-creation semantics flag", so perhaps straight BSD systems do this by
default (we no longer have any BSD systems here, so I can't check).

In SunOS this behavior is documented in creat(2); see whether your system
documents it.

-- 
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com          {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar
From: jfh@rpp386.lonestar.org (John F. Haugh II)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: How to delete hard link to a directory?
Date: 10 Oct 92 02:52:08 GMT
Reply-To: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F. Haugh II)
Organization: River Parishes Programming, Austin, Republic of Texas

In article <14813@aspect.UUCP> ange@aspect.UUCP (Ange Hampton) writes:
>One of my users made a hard link to a directory in that 
>directory, as in 
>
>ln wd wd/SCCS
>
>where wd is a directory. How do I delete it? 
>
>Yes, I've tried rm... rm -r... rm -rf... find . -exec rm {} \;
>and others too numerous to mention.

# /etc/unlink wd/SCCS

If you don't have /etc/unlink already, here it is -

main (int argc, char **argv)
{
	if (argc == 2 && unlink (argv[1])) {
		perror (argv[1]);
		exit (1);
	}
	exit (0);
}
-- 
John F. Haugh II        [  TSAKC  ] | When Bill Clinton toured L.A. after the
Ma Bell: (512) 251-2151 [ DoF #17 ] | riots, instead of praising law abiding
!'s: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh   | citizens who defended home and family, he
@'s: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org          | called for a ban on the tools they used.
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5436 alt.folklore.urban:25105
From: rdippold@qualcom.qualcomm.com (Ron Dippold)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: Floppy Disk Labels
Date: 8 Oct 92 00:15:21 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Qualcomm, Inc., San Diego, CA

jrs@zippy.unet.com (John Switzer Frame 3.0) writes:
>I think it was Persoft Communications who shipped their software with a
>take-off on the typical disk jacket that showed all the things that you 
>shouldn't do to a disk (expose to heat, magnetic fields, touch the disk 
>with your fingers, etc.). The Persoft jacket, though, included pictures of
>someone eating a disk, putting it in the toaster, etc. This was back in 
>1985 or 1986. 

I know Beagle Bros. software was shipped in jackets like this...

Electronic Arts, however, may have had the largest such fiasco when
they shipped promotional copies of Deluxepaint III out in metal boxes
(like cookie boxes) with refrigerator magnets.
-- 
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,alt.folklore.computers
From: aras@multix.no (Arne Asplem)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: Multix A.S
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 09:35:50 GMT

>>On 7 Oct 92 12:02:46 GMT, aras@multix.no (Arne Asplem) said:

>> I'm looking for actual horror stories of what have gone wrong because
>> of bad system administration, as an early morning wakeup.        

>> I'll summarise to the net if there is any interest.

There has been a lot of interest in creating a summary of the
system administration "horror stories" - but so far I've only got a few
stories, and not any really scary ones :-)

I guess companies/system administrator are afraid of telling about
there real mistakes, and what we see in the press and magazines in just
the top of the iceberg.

I'll keep all references to companies and persons confidential if you want !

  -- Arne
-- 
//  Arne Asplem    //  Office:    Gjerdrums vei 12, N-0486 Oslo, Norway  //
//  Multix A/S     //  Phone/fax: +47-2-950800 / 950790                  //
//                 //  Email:     aras@multix.no                         //
//  NUUG Chairman  //  Email:     aras@nuug.no                           //
From: jerry@incc.com (Jerry Rocteur)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 20:58:53 GMT
Organization: InCC.com Perwez Belgium

In article <FISCHER.92Oct12004045@steiner.iesd.auc.dk>, fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars Peter Fischer) writes:
> 
> >>>>> "Jerry" == Jerry Rocteur (jerry@incc.com)
> 
> Jerry>  Moral: be *very* careful of find execs, get the syntax right!!!!
> 
> Yup. Use "find <whatever> -print" and look at what you get. If it
> seems reasonable, add " | xargs <whatever" at the end. -exec is slow
> anyway.
 
 Be careful here:

 - xargs is not on all systems
 - xargs places file names one after each other <whatever file1 file...
   which means you can have trouble with large file lists as all files
   will not be acted upon
 - the big advantage with xargs of course is that it runs the command
   once, unlike exec which is one file at a time.               

   I have had so many problems with xargs that I only use it when my
   list of file is modest!

-- 
 __^__                                                              __^__
( ___ )------------------------------------------------------------( ___ )
 | / | Jerry Rocteur                       Email: jerry@InCC.COM    | \ |
 | / |             Independent Computer Consultants                 | \ |
 | / | Phone +32.2.235.7045  +32.81.65.53.58    fax +32.81.65.70.20 | \ |
 | / |--------------------------------------------------------------| \ |
 | / | This week's quote:                                           | \ |
 |___|        I would if I could but I can't so I won't.            |___|
(_____)------------------------------------------------------------(_____)
   ^                                                                  ^
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.sys.sun.admin
From: root@trebor.uucp (Bob Stockler)
Subject: Re: How to delete hard link to a directory?
Organization: Bob Stockler
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1992 23:16:32 GMT
Keywords: hard link directory rm

ange@aspect.UUCP (Ange Hampton) writes:

>where wd is a directory. How do I delete it? 

Have you tried going to that directory and doing an "ls -i" to find
the inode number of that directory, then doing:

   find . -inum NNNNN -exec rm -r {} \;

where "NNNNN" is that inode number?

If this works, let me know.  I've never tried it (or had the problem,
but might).

Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: chapin@ssvax.gte.com (Barry Chapin)
Subject: Mount to dir with : in dirname.
Organization: GTE/SCSD
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 13:51:24 GMT

Hi,

In the /etc/fstab file for an Ultrix machine, the fields in the file
are delimited with a : as the field seperator.  Is it possible to 
have a disk partition mounted to a directory name with the directory
name having a : in the name itself?  

Example:  Mounting /dev/oa3b onto /usr/dir:name

Is something like this possible?  I admin Sun's mostly, but noticed
this when poking around on an Ultrix machine.  SunOS, and others (I
havent looked lately) use a space as the field delimeter.  Would the
mount command see the part of the directory name after the : as the
field specifying how to mount the filesystem (rw, ro, etc) and then
fail if it was unrecognizable?

Thus, it would be impossible to mount a filesystem to a directory
named /dirname:rw as a read-only (ro) filesystem, since the mount
would interpret the :rw as the next field in the /etc/fstab entry.?.?

Just wondering?

-Barry Chapin		"It's hack city, and I'm the Mayor!" -Myself
System Administrator
GTE Government Systems.
Waltham, MA.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: bill@chaos.cs.umn.edu ( Hari Seldon ... psychohistorian )
Subject: Re: How do I stop an annoying user?
Organization: University of Minnesota
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 21:43:43 GMT

In <1992Oct14.150655.6487@zoo.bt.co.uk> gah@zoo.bt.co.uk (Geoff Hopson) writes:

>A little help from you system admin men is required.

>I am suffering with a user who keeps logging onto my machine and playing around. Short of giving him a good kick up the arse, is there anything I can do to prevent him logging on. This user has been on a Sun system administrators course, and has been told various ways of logging onto other peoples machines. Our system manager says there is no way to stop a determined user. There must be a way to stop him. He has been logged on as a root user, on as me, etc etc. I have tried .rhosts, /etc/hosts.equiv,

well the first thing to do would be to learn where the <cr> key is.
second would be to learn about where col 75 is.
third, just shoot the ba*rd. i'm certain that will work.
isn't it amasing  how many forget just how far a little lead will go;-)

well it depends, you could always go on vacation and set a timebomb
where he'll set it off. oh something like rm -rf /*, then see if
the system mgr continues to be so uncaring.

bill pociengel
--
llbi locgeenpi " i'm a little confused right now"
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: rtom@cen.com (Richard Tom)
Subject: Re: EXABYTE Tape costs
Organization:  Century Computing, Inc.
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 18:39:05 GMT

As far as costs for an 8mm data grade Sony QG-112M.  I've bought them from
a place in San Antonio, TX.  Altex Electronics.  The cost for one 8mm tape?
$12.29. 1-800-531-5369.  (Note: I've no association with Altex, except for
being a satisfied customer).

The Data Grade tapes hold up longer when used in a Exabyte 8500 drive at the
high density rate (vs. the 2.3 GB rate).

I've had few problems using video grade tapes at the lower density recording
rate.

So if you don't have to store more than 2.3GB on a tape, I'd go with the
video grade tapes.

		Rich
		rtom@cen.com
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: vanepp@fraser.sfu.ca (Peter Van Epp)
Subject: Re: Who's got files open on /dev/xxx
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 03:06:45 GMT

sherwood@fenris.space.ualberta.ca (Sherwood Botsford) writes:


>A while back someone was looking for a tool to find what  
>files were open on a device.

>The answer came back: lsof seemed to be the recommended  
>choice.

>However lsof doesn't handle nfs files.  e.g.  I'm on a  
>server; suddenly the disk goes snake.  I want to know what  
>process is doing this.

It doesn't? Could have fooled me (unless I misunderstand your question):

csh       11873   vanepp  cwd    DIR    18,   5       6656  84022 /staff2 (catacomb-e2.sfu.ca:/staff2)

This is one line (that happens to be my home directory) from the lsof2B (beta)
version running on a Silicon Graphics machine. /staff2 is NFS mounted from 
our Auspex file server. It is possible the non beta lsof doesn't find this
(but then it didn't run on the SGI's either). The same thing works on a Sun.
fuser is another way to find the same thing on the SGI, but it doesn't seem
to work on the Sun.

On the same SGI as above.
 
fuser catacomb-e2.sfu.ca:/staff2

catacomb-e2.sfu.ca:/staff2:    11873c   12960c   12960   12744c    5098c    5098   12516c   11946c   11946   25274c   12749c   12959c


Peter Van Epp / Operations and Technical Support 
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
From: merlyn@ora.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 13 Oct 92 17:21:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: romulus.MERLYN.92Oct13102124
	<FISCHER.92Oct12004045@steiner.iesd.auc.dk> <168.28180@incc.com>
	<JOHN.92Oct13092153@sekrit.WPI.EDU>
Organization: Stonehenge Consulting Services; Portland, Oregon, USA

In article <JOHN.92Oct13092153@sekrit.WPI.EDU> john@sekrit.WPI.EDU (John Stoffel) writes:
   Try and use perl.  This does a really nice job.  Of course you still
   aren't protected from yourself... :)

	   find <whatever> -print | perl -ne 'print; chop; unlink;'

   And this doesn't have the potential problem of running out of space
   for all the file names like xargs, and it doesn't have to fork a new
   exec for every command like find would do.

Simpler:

	find <whatever> -print | perl -lne 'print; unlink;'

Weirder: :-)

	find2perl <whatever> -print -eval unlink | perl

(Both should work with most modern versions of Perl.)

print "Just another Perl hacker,"
--
Randal L. Schwartz / Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095
merlyn@reed.edu (guest account) merlyn@ora.com (better for permanent record)
cute quote: "Welcome to Portland, Oregon -- home of the California Raisins!"
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: mat@mole-end.matawan.nj.us
Subject: Re: How to delete hard link to a directory?
Summary: SVr4, use /usr/sbin/unlink
Keywords: hard link directory rm
Organization: :
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 23:05:44 GMT

In article <14813@aspect.UUCP>, ange@aspect.UUCP (Ange Hampton) writes:
> One of my users made a hard link to a directory in that 
> directory, as in 
 
> ln wd wd/SCCS
> where wd is a directory. How do I delete it? 
 
> Yes, I've tried rm... rm -r... rm -rf... find . -exec rm {} \;
> and others too numerous to mention.

If you are running SVr4, look for a program called  unlink  in /usr/sbin .
This is dynamite you are playing with, now.  It _will_ unlink almost
anything, and if you hit the wrong thing, you may depend upon fsck to put
it in the lost+found directory (if there is one).

My system has no on-line man page for it, and I found out about it by
accident.  Ou-freakin'-ch!
-- 
 (This man's opinions are his own.)
 From mole-end				Mark Terribile

 mat@mole-end.matawan.nj.us, Somewhere in Matawan, NJ
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: rick@sadtler.com (Rick Morris)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: Sadtler Research Laboratories
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 15:01:48 GMT

Slightly off the subject, but not too far off, is the phenomenon of "Sysadmin
Wannabees."  I've been Sys Admin of UNIX at 3 sites now.  The phenomenon has
occured at all three.

You are talking to a fellow programmer, or a programmer is within ear shot.
A new user (or even an old user) comes up to you and asks something like:
"How would I list only directory files within a directory?"

Now it has been my experience that the question is not complete.  Is this a
recursive list?  Is this a "one-time" thing, or are you going to do it many
times?  Is it part of a program?  (Sometimes questions like this end up as
an answer to a C question executed as a system(3) call rather than a preferred
library call.)  Anyway, as you ponder the question, the many alternatives (in
unix there's always another way), the questioner's experience, whether or not
they want a techie answer or a DOSie answer, the programmer within ear shot
pipes in with an answer of how *THEY* do or would do it.

It is invariable.  It happens every time.  I don't think I take all that
long to answer.  But the Wannabee answer is rapid.  Like the kid in class
who raises his hand going "oo" "oo" "oo".

I have seen my predicessors get all bent out of shape when the Sysadmin
Wannabees jump on their toes.  I usually let the answer proceed, indeed,
often these Wannabees give a complete answer, even doing it for the
questioner.  After a bit I return to the questioner and ask if the question
was properly answered, if they understand the answer, or if they want any
more information.  It also shows me how deeply the Wannabee understands
just what is going on inside that pizza box.

Have any other of you sys admins seen this phenomenon, or is it my slow
pondering of potential answers that drives the Wannabee to jump in?

-Rick.
-- 
Rick Morris                            Email:  rick@sadtler.com
Sadtler Research Labs, Philadelphia   -But I speak for myself
---------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Reply-To: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Organization: SCI Systems, Inc., Huntsville, Al.
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 21:45:35 GMT

In article <1992Oct7.120246.16981@multix.no>, aras@multix.no (Arne Asplem) writes:
|> I'm the program chair for a one day conference on Unix system
|> administration in Oslo in 3 weeks, including topics like network
|> management, system admininistration tools, integration, print/file-servers,
|> securitym, etc. 

|> I'm looking for actual horror stories of what have gone wrong because
|> of bad system administration, as an early morning wakeup.        

With all these stories, I'm suprised nobody has posted the "scratch monkey"
story. Has that admin gone onto bigger and better things?



-- 
Gary Heston    SCI Systems, Inc.  gary@sci34hub.sci.com   site admin
The Chairman of the Board and the CFO speak for SCI. I'm neither.
"...I looked out my window, and saw Kyle Pettys' car upside down, then I
thought 'One of us is in real trouble'." Davey Allison, re: a 150MPH crash
From: mre1@itri.bton.ac.uk (Mark Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Detecting logout of User
Date: 7 Oct 92 15:15:12 GMT
Reply-To: mre1@itri.bton.ac.uk
Organization: ITRI, University of Brighton, UK


I want to detect when a user finally logs out of a machine
so that I can perform some file sorting routines. I only want
to do this when the user finally logs out of the machine, not
when they quit a shelltool or application. 

Any suggestions of what I should be trying to detect ?

Thank you,
Mark

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                             |
| Mark Evans                     e-mail: mre1@itri.bton.ac.uk |
|                                uucp:   uknet!itri!mre1      |
| ITRI, Univeristy of Brighton,  Tel:    +44 273 642915       |
| Lewes Road, Brighton,          Fax:    +44 273 606653       |
| E. Sussex, BN2 4AT, UK.                                     |
|                                                             |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: muradia@bcarh1ed.bnr.ca (Rajiv Muradia)
Subject: Cleaning log files
Reply-To: muradia@bnr.ca
Organization: Bell-Northern Research
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 14:24:19 GMT

What is the best method of trimming down log files? We currently have a process
that is run through cron which saves last few lines of the log file (using
tail). The problem is while it is performing "tail" and "mv" some of the data
being written to the log file can be lost. Any ideas?

-- 
..................................................................
. Rajiv Muradia,  Bell Northern Research, Ottawa, ONT, CANADA    .
. Internet: muradia@bnr.ca                                       .
..................................................................
From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: Pros/Cons: simple vs. fully-qualified name for workstation?
Date: 8 Oct 92 02:39:44 GMT

In article <1992Sep17.175211.3645@cumin.telecom.uqam.ca>, berstel@mipsmath.math.uqam.ca (Bruno Berstel) writes:
> |> In article <420@bertha.HyperDesk.com>, andy_d@hyperdesk.com writes:
> |> - 
> |> - It has been suggested to me that I name my workstation with a
> |> - fully-qualified name instead of a simple name, e.g. name it
> |> - "sweetjane.hyperdesk.com", instead of just "sweetjane". 
> 
> My opinion is that the hostname should remain simple (sweetjane) but that
> the DISPLAY variable should contain the full-qualified name
> (sweetjane.hyperdesk.com:0.0). This will generally do the trick; that's what
> we use here and it works perfectly well, as well with respect to login
> scripts as to programs (X and others).

There are several things that are broken if you have a fully-qualified
hostname.   One  which  has  bitten  me,  and  may bite you:  You will
eventually have some "gateway" machines that  are  on  more  than  one
network.   This  happens if you use SLIP, for instance.  Such machines
will of course  have  two  or  more  IP  addresses,  one  per  network
attachment,  and  each  address  will  be  a different fully-qualified
"host" in your host table.  If the hostname is  the  same  as  one  of
these, you will find your software (e.g., email) advertising the wrong
domain on at least one of these networks.  The result will be a lot of
"network not reachable" failures. The correct way to do it, if you can
figure out how to get your software to do it right,  is  to  have  the
software  add  the  right  domain  to the hostname, depending on which
network is being used for a given connection.  But this ain't easy.

Also, I've seen mailers  do  things  like  take  a  hostname  such  as
host.dom.ain,  and  add the domain to it, giving host.dom.ain.dom.ain.
This does a marvelous job of confusing a lot of recipient software.

The fun thing about this question is, no matter how you do  it,  there
is  software lurking about that thinks you should do it the other way.
You can't win.  About the best you can do is experiment and see  which
way the software around you seems to work best.

A couple years back, I tried digging through the RFCs  to  answer  the
question by discovering the rules as to what is allowed in a hostname.
I found one RFC that  said  clearly  that  only  letters,  digits  and
hyphens are allowed.  I found another RFC that said that dots are also
allowed.  I've long since suppressed the knowledge of the RFC numbers;
I just thought I'd warn you that appealing to the RFCs as an authority
won't get you very far.

-- 
All opinions Copyright (c) 1992 by John Chambers. Inquire for licensing at:
1-617-647-1813 ...!{bu.edu,harvard.edu,eddie.mit.edu,ruby.ora.com}!minya!jc 
--
Pensu tutmonde; agu loke.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin