[afnog] Self induced Mail Server (POP) crash and recovery.

[Frank Habicht]

On 11/19/2009 1:01 PM, Ismail M. Settenda wrote:

> So I am curious after all this;
>    1. Is it that easy to cripple a server and what steps does one take
>       to avoid it (lets ignore unauthorized entry for now).
make sure you always work as root so any mistyped command can do maximum
damage. </sarcasm>


>    2. Could the immediate recovery strategy and decisions have been
>       handled better?
on a server with very similar versions of freebsd:
sudo tar czf - /usr | ssh ismail at mail.server dd  \
 of=freebsd_version_usr.tgz
and then extract there carefully....?
should be faster than your 6 hours.

>    3. Any ideas on how to avoid this in future and how to recover better?
stop working as root !
You can also mount the /usr partitions read-only ...
but i guess freebsd has some config files under /usr/local/etc...


Frank

PS: on bsd the real passwords are in a db file, not /etc/passwd & shadow ...