At about 9am this morning the perl script which synchronises user creation and deletion on our mail server with the rest of the network went berzerk and deleted a great many of the users’ home directories (for mail storage only).

I’ve no idea what went wrong so I’ve commented out the deletion part of the script and am now restoring all the data from the central University Tivoli backup system (horrid interface) and then from the automatic back-up of the inboxes (which runs every minute) which isn’t affected by the synchronisation script.

This script has been running without any problems for 4-5 months now. Maybe it’s a NIS glitch, as it compares a previous list of users from “ypcat passwd” with the latest version. The strange thing is that if that did happen it should have re-created the directories on the next run, all be it that they would be empty. This didn’t happen.