How would you feel if the hosting company that you have entrusted with keeping your website has deleted all your files?
Mr. Marco Marsala he is the owner of a small hosting company, or to put it better, he was the owner of a small hosting company, which, unfortunately, will be closed after an irreparable mistake.
Two days ago, Mr. Marsala had discovered a bug in the code of, but since the damage had already been done.
As reported in the technical support forum, he managed to delete the company's server contents along with backup network files that should have been separated from the live site hosting infrastructure.
The error came from poor design in Ansible's code, one auxiliary program Linux used to run automated scripts at certain time intervals on multiple servers simultaneously.
Mr. Marsala revealed that one of the scripts he used was the very dangerous bash command "rm -rf", which tells a server to delete all data without ignoring the errors and without asking the user for any kind of confirmation.
As he explained, the pension she used was:
"rm -rf {foo} / {bar}",
where foo and bar were two variables that were dynamically defined and passed through the script.
Due to an error in processing the variables, the general syntax failed to enter their values in the bash command.
So the command then became "rm -rf /", which means "delete everything without asking anything" on disk "/", which is the root of the computer, ie all drives.
So Mr Marsala and his 1.535 clients were left with no data, after deleting the backups after the destructive order ran into the backup servers.
Meanwhile, in support forums his clients are looking for ways to recover. The answer they get is:
"We will close it business. No technical advice, you should call your lawyer.”.
