The Internet is filled with trolls. The latest on the list is Marco Marsala, the man who "mistakenly deleted his entire company."
Marsala made headlines last week after he "accidently" ran a bad line of code on his computers, which led to deleting all his data and clients' websites. However, it was all just a viral marketing scheme.
The truth was reviled in an interview published by the Italian publication Repubblica, in which Marsala explained the story was set up to promote his startup — a hosting website that outsources server management services.
Although this particular case is a hoax, the bad line of code still exists and has caused issues in the past. Marsala said he's met someone who actually did delete their entire company back in 2006.
The destructive line of code is "rm -rf," which is a basic line that will delete everything it is told to. The "rm" means remove; the "r" deletes everything within a directory; and the f stands for "force," which tells the computer to ignore all warnings against deleting files.
In the original story, Marsala posted on the ServerFault community forums seeking help from experts.
"Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script…" Marsala wrote. "All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)."
Most experts were familiar with the code and were honest with their feedback. The majority delivered bad news.
"I feel sorry to say that your company is now essentially dead," commented an expert. "You might have an extremely slim chance to recover from this is if you turn off everything right now and hand your disks over to a reputable data recovery company."
"You're going out of business," wrote another. "You don't need technical advice; you need to call your lawyer."
Thankfully, none of Marsala's clients lost their data.
Tags: technologySource: Man who 'deleted his entire company' admits story was a viral marketing scheme
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