Man who claimed to have destroyed his web-hosting company with careless Bash command admits trolling

Marco Marsala admits trolling for publicity

Marco Marsala, an Italian developer who had claimed to have wiped out his company with a single line of code, has been exposed as a troll

While many had already suspected that the claims, made last week, were somewhat dubious and improbable, he came clean over the weekend, sending Computing and several other publications tweets like:

The news broke on Thursday when Marsala, who offers web hosting for more than 1,500 companies, posted in Server Fault that he had typed the immortal five characters 'rm -rf' into his server as part of a wider, automated script.

In plain English, this means 'delete everything and don't stop to warn about the consequences'. Marsala claimed that, because of further instructions in the script and the way in which his systems were set-up, this also shredded the back-ups, effectively deleting his entire business.

"I run a small hosting provider with 1,535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers," he had written. "Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line."

However, Marsala appears to have made up the story in order to publicise his business - presumably reasoning that all publicity is good publicity. The consensus of opinion on the website he originally wrote his plea for help, however, wasn't impressed, with Stack Exchange (of which Server Fault is one sub-site) users saying:

"We went into it thinking he was an idiot. We've come out of it thinking he's an idiot, but for a different reason. I don't think the joke is on us."

They also debated whether he should be banned from the forums:

"If this were a mistake or April Fools then I would agree with you, but it's neither. It is a deliberate act and should be punished as such."

One added: "This is a very similar story as the first spam message ever, which went to usenet and didn't get policed hard enough. That is why we have spam now. it goes back over 20 years because some company got away with it."

The Bash command line is the same one recently added to Windows in a tie-up with Ubuntu. It is not the first time that an entire server has been wiped, of course. Kim Dotcom accused hosting company LeaseWeb of wiping data pertaining to his controversial Megaupload service in 2013.

The responses from the Server Fault community were refreshingly frank. Some offered hindsight on how to avoid the problem happening again, while others simply pointed out that future mitigation was irrelevant as the chances of getting the data back are minimal.

"You're going out of business," wrote user Michael Hampton. "You don't need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer."

Ouch. Harsh but fair. In an interview this weekend (in Italian), Marsala criticised both the site and tech sites like Computing and its sister site The INQUIRER for not 'fact checking' the story by checking the site he claimed was deleted.

Well Mr Marsala, what we reported was what you claimed to have happened, on a public forum. We didn't report that your website was down, and haven't mentioned it once. In fact we still haven't. So, you've had no publicity out of us whatsoever - the joke is still very much on you.