Posted by Rick on March 15, 1999 at 08:35:29 {MWSZV6.08fSjY}:
In Reply to: Hey Rick: Security posted by a.j.w. on March 15, 1999 at 03:49:26:
I must admit a combination of shock and fascination at the sudden disappearance of our deleted posts. It started last night with the strange appearance of those posts directing you to the deleted directory showing up as duplicates in the deleted directory. This is an increase of almost 2,000 files. I was exhausted and couldn't figure out "what the heck?" It was too strange.
To make a long story short, I went to control/ and put a quick fix into the routine. Since the rogue posts contained 6 characters before the decimal, followed by a decimal and "html", I decided to enter the unix routine into the code:
rm -f ??????.html
I double-checked it, and sure I did this right. After you reading your post and feeling the shock of seeing thousands of deleted posts die in the "bit bucket," I went to control/ and looked at the script. At first I didn't notice it, but a subtle change was in the code:
rm -f ******.html
It dawned on me that this subtle change caused ALL files with html extensions, not just 6 digit prefixed files, to enter into their everlasting place of rest.
I'm too blown away at this early hour of the morning to even speculate. I did delete the lines of code so that future deleted posts will not get deleted when swept into deleted/ directory! I apologize to all for the mixup and sincerely hope this was an error on my part, and not some little "gremlin" making a subtle alteration to the code. I have a lot of confidence in the security of their server, even though admittedly I'm sure that I used ? and not * in the code.
As for elevating the Society to "shepherd" status, I gather you disagree they ever enjoyed a favored relationship with God?
Rick