3b2 Questions - Answers Appreciated

[flint at gistdev.UUCP]

I may be wrong, but I would guess that proper documentation of magic
mode and some of the simple things you can use it for would save them
support time.  Since all magic mode gives you is a root shell that has
fewer commands and capabilities available than the normal one, an
inexperienced user is no more dangerous there than they are running as
root on the normal system. 

Let me give a real-life example: A customer of ours who had had 3-4
weeks of training and about a year of experience running their system
created a program to do "something" with /etc/passwd (I don't know
what they were trying to do), set up a cron job to run it, and left. 
At 1 am, the program zeroed /etc/passwd.  At 2 am, another cron copied
the empty /etc/passwd from the network leader to all the other 8 hosts
on the LAN.  (They didn't have any yellow pages, this was SYSV) At 7
am, they came in and nobody could log in anywhere.  Confused, they
went to the AT&T documentation, and dutifully followed directions-
they did a partial restore on the network leader and spent 4 hours
re-installing all their software packages from scratch.  At 11 am,
they called us saying that everything was all messed up (since they
had now obliterated all of the configuration info for uucp, lp,
/etc/master.d, starlan/rfs, /etc/profile, etc.)  and the whole network
was unuseable.  Could we help them?  We of course found this whole
thing quite humorous, and since they hadn't done anything to the other
machines in the network, we got them fixed up with magic mode in about
2 minutes each, but we spent more than a day getting all the other
junk put back right on the network leader.  

Flint Pellett, Global Information Systems Technology, Inc.
1800 Woodfield Drive, Savoy, IL  61874     (217) 352-1165
INTERNET: flint%gistdev at uxc.cso.uiuc.edu
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