Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything
Letting a 21-year-old write critical code without supervision is not smart
WHO, ME? Welcome to Monday morning, the time of week when The Register always asks “Who, Me?” because that’s the title of our reader-contributed column in which you confess to having made a mess, and found a way to egress without career distress.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Miller” who told us that as a whippersnapper of just 21 summers he found himself tending a mainframe that created a virtual machine, and accompanying virtual disk, for each user.
Miller’s employer shut down those VMs at the end of the workingday to free up resources for overnight jobs. He therefore wrote a cleanup routinethat removed the drives and backed up their contents.
This story took place in 1981, a time when it was possible forcode written by a 21-year-old to go into production without much scrutiny.
Oversight...
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