Reasons not to work as root

[Lord Nikon6]

One day is one day where you are gonna be on the wrong console

It does happen, do a quick whoami before executing any serious commands...of course it wont help if you have the same user across all systems.

 

[koffiejunkie]

One day is one day where you are gonna be on the wrong console

Where I work we can't afford making that kind of mistake. Client's can do it (they have root), but we don't. We have many ways of indicating which server you're working on, e.g. the server ID is in the shell prompt, my terminal app is set to rename the tab to the server hostname, etc. That, and I never do "rm -rf /" anywhere EVER.

 

[Went_For_Beer]

Found this... thought it might be fitting

 

[itareanlnotani]

Why don't you all have prompts set which show you your server details?
I have mine set for different colors for root and normal user, and the server name is in the prompt.
Simple, and stops the doh! factor.


My root .bashrc includes this -

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;31m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '


...and that looks something like:

root@mail:/home#

 

[itareanlnotani]

Ever since I had to do 30+GB db backups I now don't perform a lengthy task without starting 'screen'.

There's no worse feeling than dc'ing during a 10 hour backup and having to restart because you're an idiot who didn't use 'screen'...

Screen is ok, but mosh is better imho.

https://mosh.mit.edu/


Even if you aren't using that sort of solution, theres no reason why you can't run a long running job with nohup, so that it doesn't die when your session does.

 

[Went_For_Beer]

[video=youtube;XsIxNYl0oyU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XsIxNYl0oyU[/video]

Some intresting stuff here

 

[Zyron]

Or you have two root terminals open, one to production, one to test

and you mistakenly hose the production box instead of the test box...

Never happened to me yet.

But I like the idea of VM's - can rollback to a good backup should you manage to bork a working VM badly...

haha, this happened to me on October 17 2014 The day of The Great Deletion!

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

 

[koffiejunkie]

One that bit me in the preverbials today (although you need root to even do this): LVM reports rounded up [bBsSkKmMgGtTpPeE] figures. Baaaaad things happen when you resize a volume to a rounded-up size.

 

[creeper]

SU( what to )DO

 

[dadecoza]

a few years back we were messing around with forkbombs, checking how long it will take for our laptops to die. Suddenly this one guy got up and ran down to the server room and we realized he typed the forkbomb in the wrong window, so ja even if you are not root you can do some damage if you are in the wrong terminal

 

[Magnum]

You guys are just cracking me up. How much sht could you possibly do with one input device?

 

[SauRoNZA]

I have a colleague who insists on typing absolute paths for everything (especially rm's) instead of going to the folder first and the more I try to explain to him how it's wrought with failure the more he argues it's "safer".

Simply doesn't get that typing "rm /" can happen by accident if he just hits enter while typing his full path to "rm /home/whatever".

 

[SauRoNZA]

You guys are just cracking me up. How much sht could you possibly do with one input device?

Well if the input device in question is the root user to my Proxmox Master and I were to do a "rm /" on that one it means sinking the entire ship in one go.

 

[Rocket-Boy]

I feel like a complete tool now

Just managed to "delete" our one Centos box, at least to a point where it's not functioning.

It's never a good thing when you see this on a production box:

rm: cannot remove `/dev/shm': Device or resource busy
rm: cannot remove `/dev/pts/0': Operation not permitted
rm: cannot remove `/dev/pts/ptmx': Operation not permitted

Thank god for vm's, had a 2 hour old backup to restore from and back up in 15 minutes.

luls, had this happen to one of our admins and it was on a dedicated server at Hetzner...

 

[Magnum]

Well if the input device in question is the root user to my Proxmox Master and I were to do a "rm /" on that one it means sinking the entire ship in one go.

Henceforth I dub thee Iceberg...

 

[SauRoNZA]

Henceforth I dub thee Iceberg...

Well there are still cluster nodes and backups and all that but it would be painful regardless.

 

[soliton]

Network Error: Connection timed out

Good practise to comment out PermitRootLogin yes in your sshd_config unless you absolutely need it...