The Importance of a Name | Hacker News Reader

The Importance of a Name

joebordes.com

17 pointsSandeepg33k8 comments

I once deleted about 20 years worth of pictures from company outings and such. This was stored in "cms.original2/data/images" or some such. There was also "cms.original", "cms.old", and just "cms" (and the entire thing was unused and didn't even work in the first place).

When I took over as maintainer of the intranet I set up subversion and cleaned up all of this "cp -r version control", which included checking in the latest version of everything and deleting everything else (there were dozens of projects with this kind of "version control", including "project.new", "project.new2", and it wasn't always obvious which one was the live version: could be anything).

Wasn't discovered until a few months later when someone wanted to look up some pictures, by which time the backups had been overwritten. I got some pretty sour looks for that, but seriously, 1) this was a stupid location to store stuff, and 2) version control is not rocket science.

Also: once had a customer who stored a lot of important documents in C:\Temp. I told him that was probably not a good idea.

Can someone explain why this is a naming problem? I just feel like I'm missing something.

I think just in the sense that a directory called `/opt/redash` strongly hints by its name that it contains only a Redash installation, so that either other crucial infrastructure should not have been placed there, or it should have been called something that better reflected its contents.

I agree. I cannot understand why they mounted the MySQL data directories where they did. It just doesn’t make much sense. To me it’s like mounting it onto /boot and then being surprised when it goes badly.

> Linux was intelligent enough to keep the i-node references even if the parent directory was different so the docker container kept working inside the deleteme_after_202202 directory.

Who would have been launching a container inside the deleteme directory? They were very lucky if that's how they found it. How long did it take to discover that?

The container wasn't launched inside deleteme_after_202202 it just kept working after somebody did the equivalent of:

mv /opt/redash /opt/deleteme_after_202202

until the machine was rebooted.

Sounds like lsof could have saved them.

or docker ps, where is shows volume mounts.

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