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Comment by fgnkj | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of something similar that happened to me once a long time ago.

I hacked into a server. I wanted to take a copy of everything so I made a tar of / to wget it to computer later. Only that the disk was at >50% usage so I filled it by making the tar file. Everything stopped to work with 0 bytes left of disk space (I wasn't root) so I kinda bricked the machine. I had to walk away in shame.

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> I had to walk away in shame.

No, you'd have walked away in shame if you had walked away in handcuffs. Don't do stupid stuff. Imnsho you got lucky that disk filled up before you could notch up a(nother?) crime.

What happened is arguably more stupid: by filling up the disk, 1) they definitely noticed, 2) I couldn't get what I wanted, and 3) I couldn't clean up the logs after it. Thankfully I had covered up my steps (or, more probably, the sysadmin was ashamed to see he had been hacked and chose to fix it and say nothing).

I hope you learned and not just to use 'df' more often.

It's unlikely you bricked the machine by filling the disk as a regular user. E.g. Ext2 by default reserves 5% for super-user processes.

Do something more useful with your time and skills.

Don't feel bad. 1995. SunOS. Very patient boss. I did the same thing.

When I was learning Microsoft Access, many years ago, I didn't really understand joins. So I did a cross join with no where condition. And the machine (Windows XP) just sat there, and eventually locked up.

So I rebooted, and tried it again. Same result.

Eventually I figured it out.

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