Bryan Nuked an email server once...

I nuked an email server once from a misplaced period.... We had an SGI box running IRIX and some old Netscape email server. That thing would fill up will all this cache crap from time to time and you had to login and rm -f ./*/*/*/* from the top cache folder.

I was relatively new to the whole *nix world and obviously there are better ways to skin this cat but at the time its what we did. Well, you can imagine what happens when you forget that simple little dot. I ran the command and I noticed it was taking much longer to complete the cleanup than usual. I looked at the screen and just froze as I noticed everything scrolling by being deleted from / forward.

I confessed my sins pretty quickly to my boss and as luck would have it I was just about done setting up a new Linux based email server to replace that old Netscape stuff.

The new server got put into production much quicker than planned and obviously without any proper testing. Thankfully it worked fine. Never made a mistake like that again. Didn't really get in trouble with it and was actually praised by the company for the implementation of the new email server.

I don't think my boss ever told anyone what really happened.