Toying with a production server.

I think I want to give me a prize for this one.

It was Friday’s afternoon, and I was checking an issue with a customer’s emails.

When I suddenly had the bright idea of typing "cat /tmp/somefile.txt > /var/qmail/bin/qmail-queue" and hit enter.

The moment I saw the prompt back, I realized what I had done, and felt such a cold rush emerging from the inside of my body.

At first I tried coping a qmail-queue binary from any of the other servers, but promptly I realized that the Linux versions where different, and that the binaries where compiled different, and therefore it didn’t run.

Having the system pos-customized with 50 virtual domains, and over 700+ e-mail accounts, made it extremely unfeasible to reinstall the software, as it may backfire by messing up the configuration.

The tension in the air could be tasted, as customers started to call, and ask why they get a binary error as they try to send e-mails.

About twenty minutes later, I had the issue solved, and I could finally breathe. That was a great way to end the week, and my coworkers agreed that dealing with such tense issues, makes the rest of the daily issues seem insignificant.

And just in case someone is reading this for technical solutions here is what I did.

Got the qmail-whtever-version.rpm

Copied it to the /tmp/ directory.

Typed this "rpm2cpio qmail-whtever-version.rpm | cpio –idv" and hit enter.

This will extract all the contents of the rpm file (with directory structure) into the /tmp/ directory.
Then it was just a matter of copying the file , assigning the right user/group and sticky permission.

Ahh… life is good (and exiting).