PowerTools DISASTER....and pain.

[Marcin Kowalski <marcin kowalski hotonline com>]

Hi All...

DO NOT USE Powertools - here is my sad tale :

Woa - after three days of compilation (including dependency tracking and 
general mayhem) I finally got 0.27.1 compiled and running on an old 
PII-233(256mb RAM) - Redhat 8.0...

I also installed the Gnome-Powertools (/meta/gnome-powertools). I loaded 
up the Gnome 2.4 desktop, which is very pretty I might add... then I 
decided I wanted to add some users to the machine - as it was to be used 
by a number of my house mates...
So I cranked up the System Admin (I think that is what it is called), it 
dutifully notified me that it is pre-release code and can make my box 
inoperable - fair enough... lets try it anyway and obviously I had to 
log in as root ...

So I added some new users, by pressing the add button... Once they were 
added I pressed the apply button, the app did not come return properly 
and eventually I had to kill it - then my *FUN* began (I know about the 
warning but this was just silly)....

Firstly ALL the users except myself and root were deleted from 
/etc/passwd and /etc/group and /etc/shadow... I thought that was quite 
funny - sure normally you system would effectively be rendered useless 
but I've been around a while and recreating users from an passd.OLD with 
a simple shell script was easy-peasy... but then I noticed that the 
script had also deleted ALL the assocaited home directories 
(AAAAAAARRRRGHH!!!) - can you imagine the PAIN!!..
All my mysql data - GONE - as the database home is /var/lib/mysql..., 
all my named COnfigs - GONE... most importantly - A site the I was 
HOSTING for a friend of mine - GONE!!!!!!

So right now I am running R-Linux (under win2k) to try to recover it - 
(will keep you informed)...
Now I do know that it was pre-release - but this is beyond unacceptable 
- you NEVER DELETE FILES without CONFIRMATION.... I can only hope that 
someone will learn something from this....

Since I do have a morbid fascination I took a peak into the power-tools 
directory and found user.* Perl scripts (in the engine directory) that 
called deluser -r (delete user and recusively delete home directories) - 
why on earth this would be called from an ADD user function - I don't 
KNOW...

Please DO NOT  release such terribly buggy code...

Woa - now that I have ranted.... thanks for the enormous amount of work 
that went into Garnome, not to mention the titanic achievement of 
Gnome... hopefully I have not been scared for life...

Regards
MarCin




--
Marcin Kowalski
Perl Developer / Unix Administrator
hotonline ltd

t: 0870 20 20 121
f: 0870 20 20 131
www.thehotgroup.com

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