From: drew@hazelrah.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) Subject: Re: Safety Belt / SLS Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 23:50:31 GMT
In article <1993Jan27.062345.1839@sol.UVic.CA> pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) writes:
>In article <1993Jan27.000807.28623@newsserver.rrzn.uni-hannover.de> riepe@ifwsn4.ifw.uni-hannover.de writes:
>>In article 94187@mavenry.UUCP, maven@mavenry.UUCP (Norman Hamer) writes:
>>|>
>>|> Something I'd like to see in the MKFS/MKEFS program would be a "are you
>>|>really sure" thing if you try to write a linux filesystem onto a partition
>>|>which isn't marked as linux... I tried to install the 99p2 SLS release,
>>|>ended up writing a linux partition over my DOS partition (user stupidity),
>>|>had to restore from week-old backups... Ugh. While I don't have anyone but
>>|>myself to _blame_, it sure woulda been nice if it had said "this partition
>>|>is marked as DOS... use fdisk to change to type 81 before proceeding"...
>>|>
>>
>>The same applies to mkswap - I once wrote a swap signature into the FAT
>>of my DOS partition (fortunately, I could fix it with dd).
>
Unix assumes that YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, and doesn't burden you
with any protections that are going to get in your way when you don't
want them. Normal users aren't priveledged, and can't break anything
important. Root is priveledged, and can break everything. So, when
you are root, you should sit on your hands for thirty seconds after
typing something, think real hard about weather or not that's what
you really want to do, and then press enter.
You'll only get in trouble if you let your fingers doing the typing
get ahead of your brain doing the thinking.
-- Boycott AT&T for their absurd anti-BSDI lawsuit. | Drew Eckhardt Condemn Colorado for Amendment Two. | drew@cs.colorado.edu Use Linux, the fast, flexible, and free 386 unix |