'Catastrophic' server disk-destroying glitch menaced Google cloud

'Shame on you!' screams one developer as race-condition bug discovered

Google has squashed a bug in its public cloud that threatened to accidentally delete users' virtual disks – an error so serious that one security researcher termed it potentially "catastrophic".

The web king today admitted that one of its server migration commands could have "erroneously and permanently" deleted persistent disks attached to virtual instances; the admission was sent out in an email from the Google Compute Engine Team to users of the service on Friday. Coincidentally, Google only just updated its persistent disk feature on Tuesday.

Today's email read:

    We discovered a serious issue with the gcutil moveinstances command: with the release of the new auto-delete feature for persistent disks, there is an unintended interaction that can result in accidental deletion of the disk(s) of the instance being moved.

What this means is that if a cloud user enabled auto-delete on a persistent disk in their Google server storage, then moved a virtual server via the command-line management tool gcutil to another Google data center, the system may have accidentally deleted the attached disk before the transfer was fully carried out.
 
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