At the end of the last post about my RAID1 farce, Michael Paoli had given great and brilliant advice on dealing with accessing the /var folder in the root file system after I’d mounted a RAID on top of it.
Rick Moen, also of Bay Area LUG (BALUG) chimed in with an idea on their mailing list: create a file in a mount point with a name that indicates something ought to be mounted there.
Great! I’m going to create RAID-SHOULD-BE-MOUNTED-HERE in the root file system’s /var, and move the remaining files in there to /var/OLDvar.
I had /dev/sdc1 mounted to /tmp/root, so I cd‘d in there, mid-phone call, and mkdir -v OLDvar & mv -v * OLDvar.
Dammit! I was in the root of the root file system!
Had to boot from USB to get that fixed.
Couldn’t run ls, nor most other commands, and while changing directories looking for things, I ended up in folder /OLDvar instead of /tmp/OLDvar – I couldn’t even move everything back to /.
I’m embarrassed, but so thankful I did this to myself and not to a client nor an employer who had entrusted me with their system. I’d feel absolutely devastated then.
Lesson learned: when on the phone, issue NO commands. Browsing the web is okay though.
Please don’t tell anyone I did this, and let us never speak of it again.
