My brother, and nearly every other sysadmin out there will tell you that Web designers can't be trusted with root access. In a way, if they give you root access, it's their own damn fault. (Except for Robert and Digger - giving me sudo privileges was the right thing to do! {wink}) Henry's friend the sysadmin should have known better, but Henry seemed like a trustworthy guy... but he's a Web developer, by nature shifty. :)
About 10 years ago, 1996 or 7, i was a newbie on Linux. I was just employed for a few weeks in a large company. Major computer store in a major city.
My work was on the IT department. Figuring out how Glimpse and WebGlimpse could be used within the company. Played around a bit with it in my userspace. Then it was time to install the package system wide. And it only could be done by root. Since i didn't have that password, I was way not good enough for knowing that password, a co-worker gave me a root shell on my machine. He trusted me but it must be kept secret.
Well, he shouldn't have.
All went up in a disaster! And i was only extracting the package...
Most packages, or all, extract in a newly created subdirectory. But not Glimpse. I wanted to have /usr/local/glimpse but the archive was completely dumped in /usr/local overwriting any subdirectory already existing. One of those dirs named lib.
The company drove on /usr/local/lib.
No /usr/local/lib, no cashregisters, no ordering information, no logistics, no NOTHING. The whole company just felt still.
And i did it. And noticed it instantly. Couldn't breath for a moment. And then a telephone rang, and another one, few people came to the office, panic, what's happening!
A few day before christmas and a company selling more than 50,000 dollars a day had a melt down.
The boss didn't like my action.
