Hoax the Marsala story: Days ago we published the tragic but also funny story of Marco Marsala, who allegedly deleted his entire company with a mistake line code last week.
The absolute case of the bad luck of the computing - or a carelessness, as reported by some commentators.
But they are not everything they look like. In other words: another hoax on the internet.
Speaking in Italian version of Republic, Marsala explained that history was a viral way of advertising his company.
Marsala even mentions that the story actually happened, someone deleted his company with a wrong line of code "in 2006."
In the story first published by The Independent, Marsala posted on the Server Fault forum a call for help as he deleted his company under the command "rm -rf" using Ansible.
As the authoritative Independent explained: “rm” tells the computer to delete, r deletes everything inside a specific directory, and f stands for “force”, which tells the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come up when deleting files.
Server Fault commentators then reported the bad news: there was no way to recover the files.
But after the hoax was revealed, Marsala said commenters forgot that Ansible actually blocks Mistakes on such a large scale, and that such a thing "can't happen" with this tool.
"Almost every serious administrator uses it," Marsala said.
Moral lesson of history? As always, do not believe everything you read on the internet.
