It’s taken me a while to get to this, as I’ve been under the weather with a cold and some back pain. Something they didn’t mention when handing out beard cards after graduation was, it isn’t a real pretty sight blowing your nose with a mustache. Probably more than anyone really wanted to think about.

Last week it actually snowed!

Felt really weird driving in to work on snowy roads, with rain pouring down.

On Friday I went to our company’s Christmas party, at a hotel in Seattle.

I got back from this party Friday night, and didn’t really leave my apartment again until Tuesday morning. Got a real bad cold, intermingled with some bad back pain. I took some cyclobenzaprine to relax the muscles, and boy did that throw me through a loop. Definitely not safe to drive while on that stuff. I had to triple-check all my work emails to make sure I wasn’t typing nonsense.

I’ve been watching a few old classics. And I’ve learned a couple things. First, the Parent Trap remake is a hoot to rewatch, after all these years. Smile on my face the entire time. Second, Dr. David Drumlin from Contact is a weaseling back-stabbing hypocritical nincompoop.

Story time. A couple days ago I was tinkering around on my home server, and I was about to delete a directory containing some files I didn’t need anymore. I typed the command out, but didn’t hit enter yet, since I wanted to confirm elsewhere that the files were indeed unneeded. So my terminal looked like this:

$ rm -rf folder/to/delete/▋

I left it like that, ready to execute when I finished up confirming things. In the process of doing that, though, I got distracted and forgot what I’d been doing. I came back to the terminal and typed cd ~, to get back to my home directory, then pressed enter.

Those of you familiar with Unix will know I just made a horrible error. The command I ended up running was:

$ rm -rf folder/to/delete/cd ~

Now, folder/to/delete/cd is a path to a file that doesn’t exist, so that didn’t do anything. But rm was happy to clean out ~, my home directory. Whooooops. Luckily my home directory is on an SSD with limited space, and all my large data directories are merely symlinked from there. But there were some handy utility scripts I’ve had to recreate from scratch.

One other kinda important file that got wiped was ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Without that file I couldn’t log in via SSH. And I’d done a bang-up job in hardening the server, so there wasn’t any way to get in except to plug in a keyboard and log in as root. Well, except for the fact that neither I nor my roommate have a USB keyboard lying around, so I’d effectively locked myself out of my own server for the day, until yesterday when I borrowed a keyboard from work to get myself out of this mess by temporarily editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow password-based remote login.

Lesson learned, don’t leave an rm command sitting around on the terminal. Also, I sprang for an offsite backup service, so if it does happen again it’ll be easy to restore what I nuked. This also has the added benefit of increasing the protection of backup data, for any of you using my server as a backup location.