[plug] Dumb stuff recovery

[Byron Hammond]

Does rsync have a dry run option?

I generally like to confirm what's being done first.

Regardless tho. That is an excellent bit of knowledge there that the shared
object can be executed like that. I never would've thought.

Pro tip #323 for sure

On Mon, 26 Aug 2024, 8:16 am Brad Campbell, <brad at fnarfbargle.com> wrote:

> I learned something new today.
>
> I have a duplicate test server here I use to stage and script all updates
> on the prod machine. I had just done a major OS update and was getting
> ready to tweak the package manager. Before I did that I thought I'll backup
> the root fs entirely. I did that using rsync to a mounted RAID6 on /server.
> I performed a few tweaks and wanted to undo them, so I cd to the backup
> directory and ran this :
>
> rsync -avxH --delete /root/ /
>
> What I should have typed was rsync -avxH --delete root/ /
>
> So I wiped out the entire root filesystem excepting the root directory.
> That left me with a running root shell and nothing else. All commands were
> gone. Unless it was a bash builtin I was stuffed.
>
> I never knew you could run the dynamic loader as an executable.
>
> /server/root/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-2.31.so --library-path
> /server/root/usr/lib:/server/root/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu:/server/root/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
> /server/root/usr/bin/rsync -avxH --delete /server/root/ /
>
> And I was back in business. Bad day when you don't learn something!
>
> Thankfully bash completion still worked, although I still had the fs
> skeleton on the prod server to refer to for directory names just in case.
>
> Regards,
> Brad
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