Russian Roulette, Sysadmin Edition
Description
A multi-panel comic from CommitStrip.com depicting a group of developers, seemingly in a cold climate and drinking vodka, playing a high-stakes game. One developer dares another to play a 'game for cowards' on their laptops, confirming that they are each on their own production server. The final panels show a close-up of a character sweating nervously as their finger hovers over the enter key, and the command visible on the terminal screen: 'root@server:~# [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo "Lucky boy";'. This comic illustrates a terrifying game of 'Russian Roulette' for developers or system administrators. The Bash command has a 1 in 6 chance (since `$RANDOM % 6` yields a number from 0-5) of being true, which would trigger the `rm -rf /` command, catastrophically deleting the entire root filesystem of the production server. If the condition is false, it safely prints 'Lucky boy'. The humor comes from the gallows humor and absurd recklessness of gamifying a career-ending mistake
Comments
27Comment deleted
The sudo password prompt is just the universe's way of asking, 'Are you *sure* you want to potentially update your resume in the next five seconds?'
Vodka-driven chaos engineering: 1/6 chance you rm-rf /, 5/6 chance you finally discover the DR playbook is just an outdated Confluence page
The only difference between this and most production deployments is that here the 16.67% failure rate is intentional and well-documented. In reality, we achieve similar odds through untested config changes, missing environment variables, and that one dependency that only exists on Steve's laptop
When your deployment strategy is literally 'rm -rf / || echo "Lucky boy"' with a 1-in-6 chance, you've achieved what most organizations only dream of: true continuous delivery - of either your application or your resignation letter. The real production incident here isn't the potential filesystem wipe; it's that someone thought running RANDOM % 6 on a prod server was an acceptable risk assessment framework
When “chaos engineering” is a 1‑in‑6 rm -rf on prod, the only thing under test is whether your IAM and backups are as fictional as staging
Chaos engineering is fun until the plan is $RANDOM%6 as root on prod - then your SLO becomes an obituary and --preserve-root is the designated driver
echo 'frag' > /prod/outage; tail -f /dev/pagerduty
😂 Comment deleted
well. that won't work. you need /* or --no-preserve-root. Comment deleted
I think the joke is older than rm preserving root, I've seen it some years ago Comment deleted
preserve root was introduced like in the beginning of 2000 :) Comment deleted
--no-preserve-root is from 2003 Comment deleted
is better dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd* && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nvme* Comment deleted
rpi is safe Comment deleted
nothing is safe if a prod server is on rpi :D Comment deleted
Nice Comment deleted
TIL, we can use $[ ], usually I use $(( )) Comment deleted
what's with the touchpad buttons? Should've been 'Enter', no? Comment deleted
thanks to the new microsoft office click-to-run shell add-in, you can now click to run commands Comment deleted
yes, however I kept reading "I accidentally rm -rf /" until late 2000s Comment deleted
> Русскоязычный паблик с мемами . . . > Комментеры выше ... Comment deleted
please only speak English in here Comment deleted
https://t.me/devs_chat/21715 As long as translation to English is present, you can talk in any language you want Разговаривай на любом языке, но не забывай про перевод на английский Comment deleted
Memes transcend language barriers and you thought they were in your native language Мемы преодолевают языковые барьеры и ты думал что читаешь их на своем родном языке Wake up, neo Comment deleted
Sry but I thought that's a russian speaking public, as there were some memes in russian language. Comment deleted
Or am I wrong? Comment deleted
I don't think that there was a Russian meme this month, no Comment deleted