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Comment by notheguyouthink | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. They also seemed to acknowledge that in the post, as they mentioned improving the tool to not allow such destructive options.

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You mean like range checking the input parameters to the command? =)

    SHUT DOWN S3?  ARE YOU SURE? (y/N) :

More like:

SHUT DOWN S3? ARE YOU SURE? ("I'm absolutely positive."/n) :

Were it so easy. Likely more like

"Shut down 73 servers? Are you sure? (y/N)":

"Seventy-three? Wow, I hadn't realized our system grew that much. Probably a new backend dependency got added that I'm not familiar with yet; I'll look into it later." (Y)

Every sysadmin at my previous job (a Fortune 500) would stop the moment that number is off the expected by a few machines, just long enough to verify it's correct. That may be due to having made a mistake like this once. I know that's true in several other large shops, as well.

Source: I'm was the one the one they would call for our team... usually at 4:00 AM because one of our team members (which was also frequently me) didn't document something correctly.

Too easy. should make u run NP-hard solver to confirm.

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