Comment by Twirrim
11 years ago
This one comes up ever 3-4 years or so in sysadmin communities, and I read it every single time. because it's worth it.
It's one of those things that I highly doubt would have occurred to me to have even checked, or given even a moments thought to, under normal circumstances.
This and the story of Mel never get old.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
I was looking for another famous sysadmin story, where the guy who also happens to be a top Linux developer (so maybe Alan Cox?) rescues a deeply broken Linux system where even glibc is no longer accessible by manipulating inodes in a running process. Or something.
Over the years, my Google-fu has failed me. Any clue? :)
http://www.lug.wsu.edu/node/414 is what you are looking for.
That's pretty damn close (and impressive!), but I don't think that was it :)
For one thing, I'm pretty certain the story involved recovering a deleted file's inode via some other running process's FDs.
That's a classic.
Best I can claim is zmodem transfers of uunecoded packages over a PLIP link as I tried to get ethernet support up on an old but fairly reliable box.