Know Your Role (and Commands)
By Mike Marr
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-11-18
"I know this System Administrator. They are always busy. Their company won't cough up the necessary funds to get them any help, and thus they are supporting a network and user base way above and beyond their means.
In this hectic scenario, I am they are always scrambling to handle one emergency after another. When problems arise that they have not seen before, it is nearly impossible for them to fully research the problem. Without this vital education, the copy-paste solutions from the Internet often are the only option as numerous other emergencies wait for our attention. What should I they do?"
No worries, SysAdmin! You are not alone! I mean, your friend is not alone. You, of course, are never in these bad scenarios. You always have your act together and have the necessary time to thoroughly research and implement fixes to new problems. You're definitely not like the guy who went to the
WebHostingTalk forums after he ran a command that, as he later deduced, wiped out his hard drive. This systems admin, like your friend you mentioned above, was likely just overwhelmed and behind schedule. So, when wanting to test out his HDD RAID configuration, he copied/pasted a nice little command from some other forum thread:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=1000
Well, if you're familiar with the dd command, then you may already know what the above line does. As our dejected systems admin realizes his mistake (before and after the post), he can take comfort in that his story can be a warning to others.
There is documentation for a reason. (See: man). Even when given a command from a trusted source, it is best to research and understand what we are doing before we do it. It is this way that we can eliminate minimize self inflected system crashes.
About the Author:
Mike Marr is a Staff Writer for WebProNews
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