Ah, where to place the blame? That is the question ...
The situation: I work in a small webhosting company, and in order to cut
costs (and boost employee morale) we now all work from home. Or rather, we
no longer have to work at The Office. Which is a Good Thing (TM). We have
a large physical server (running Linux) upon which we installed OpenVZ, and
my "workstation" is a virtual server (also running Linux) running on this
monster box. My "workstation" is really only used to check email (I receive
root's mail on this box from all the various servers) and to log into
certain devices that have restricted access. I can do everything (short of
anything requiring physical access to the servers, which is rare) from
anywhere I have Internet connectivity.
So far, so good.
Except for accessing our spam firewall [1]. It's one of the restricted
devices, and double plus ungood, the only interface is via the web [2].
Which wouldn't be so bad, except that when I set up my "virtual workstation"
I did not install X Windows. At the time, I forsaw no need to install about
a bazillion megabytes of crap. If I'm working remotely, I already have all
the GUI crap I need in front of me. But recent events at The "Office" [3]
require I check the spam firewall on a regular basis.
Now, if I'm at home, this I can do. Since I have DSL with a static IP
address [5], I can access the spam firewall. If I'm elsewhere (which I am
half the time), then I can't.
So, today, I decide to install Firefox on my "virtual workstation". That
way, I can "ssh -X workstation" and run Firefox there, which has the access
I require to access the spam firewall.
Silly me, I thought it would be a simple:
GenericRootPrompt# yum install firefox
Surprisingly, specifying "firefox" to "yum install" actually did what I
expected it to---install firefox---instead of bitching about not finding it
because it *really* wanted "yum install
firefox-pointless-version-numbers-and-architecture-information". But what I
did not expect was the process *DELETING* the contents of /dev.
Yup.
Gone.
The whole thing.
No /dev.
Oh, I didn't find out immediately. No. I first had to try
GenericUnixPrompt> ssh -X workstation
only to get the bizarre "couldn't exchange keys" or something error---the
one that happens when sshd crashes on a connection. Okay, I'm still logged
into my "workstation" as root---so just a simple:
GenericRootPrompt# /etc/init.d/sshd restart
but it failed, saying to couldn't generate some key or other. *THAT'S*
when I found out /dev was empty.
At least being a virtual server meant that I could do some stupid things
to get it working (instead of doing stupid things and locking myself out of
the "workstation" were a trip to the Data Center and a recovery disk were
required).
So ...
Who gets the blame here? OpenVZ? Yum? The firefox yum installation
script?
-spc (oh, and apparently firefox no longer supports the "-no-remote"
option [6] ... sigh)
[1] An "appliance" from some company. I have no complaint with this
device. It does what it does, and doesn't give us much trouble.
Our customers, however, do, because they either receive too much
spam, or "important" email is filtered as spam, and they keep asking
to be added, then removed, from said spam firewall. But that's not
a software hate, so I shall speak on this topic no further.
[2] Okay, maybe I have one complaint about the spam firewall [1].
[3] Lost messages between three mail servers, one of which is the spam
firewall, one of which is another email server we control, and one
which is an email server controlled [4] by our customer, which I now
have to debug. Joy.
[4] They're a Windows shop, but have a token Linux box doing their
email. Fun times.
[5] DSLi. Static IP address at no extra charge. I love these guys.
[6] http://spc.hates-software.com/2007/01/25/73ba6651.html
