Re: PowerTools DISASTER....and pain.

[Cedric Marcone <marcone mdeo fr>]

I'm very sad for you, but keep in mind that garnome is for testing code
and should ONLY be used on non-production systems.
--
Cedric

On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 09:08, Marcin Kowalski wrote:
> 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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