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Comment by leejo | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a DBA drop a production table as well, fortunately it was a small in memory table for non persisting data that could be quickly repopulated. Still lead to about 5 mins of downtime.

I always have two terminals open, both running tmux. One is white text on black for dev work, the other is white text on red. I only ever ssh into production servers on the white on red terminal so there's a strong visual signal that I absolutely shouldn't be running drop, delete, truncate, rm, dd, whatever commands on them and if I do then I am extremely careful.

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"One is white text on black for dev work, the other is white text on red."

Cool. Sorry, but I'm going to steal this idea from now on.

Also doable with desktops for those occasions where it is a remote screen share.

For UAT / Test environments that are different than dev, I use a yellow background.

I used to do the same thing with RDPs to windows production servers. I'd set up a different colored color scheme on each computer, with prod being bright red :)

For Windows work, I made sure to have one regular user and one admin user. And set the desktop background of the admin user to red. An additional benefit is that the garish background is uncomfortable to work with, and so discourages being logged in as admin all the time...

Changing the desktop background alone isn't enough. You will inevitably get into a situation where fullscreen windows are occluding it. To avoid any ambiguity, set the color scheme to high contrast and then set all the windows title bars to red, and tint the task bar red. On QA, I tint everything purple, and on DR I tint everything green, or yellow.

> I only ever ssh into production servers on the white on red terminal so there's a strong visual signal

This is a great idea.

I've found that quickly changing the color of Terminal windows is pretty much the only useful application for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar.

You have to back it into your profile. That way ANYONE that SSHes into that box gets the funny text colors... or at least a funny colored prompt.

Good way to save your bacon.

I once got a call from someone with DBA privileges: "I just ran 'SELECT table_name FROM user_tables' and it says 'no rows selected." I logged in and checked, and said, 'Yep, you have no tables.' Fortunately, Oracle by then had the RECYCLE$BIN, and the interruption in service was minimal. I'm not sure how he dropped all the tables.

And let's not talk about my own (mostly minor) disasters.

Thanks for sharing , I setup now a production profile for Konsole with red on black for the tab I use for ssh into servers

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