Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.
Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don’t remember all the details, unfortunately.
For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it’s units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors… So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.
And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it’s contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).
Anyways, what are your stories?
source ~/.bash_historyThat’s the scariest horror story in 2 words I’ve seen so far
I’m genuinely having a chuckle at how shocked people are at my submission, made my day xD
I mean, it’s simple, elegant, and destructive AF given the right circumstances. Basically a chaos grenade we didn’t realize existed
“Oh My…” thought in a George Takei voice
I once deleted the network system in alpine. I’d been having some trouble with with the default one (I think wpa_supplicant) so I decided to try the other one (I think iwctl). But I thought that there might be problems with havung both of them so before I installed iwctl I deleted wpa_supplicant (thinking that it was more of a config utility than the whole network system), only to find that I couldn’t connect to the internet to install iwctl.
A regular update I guess…
Accidentally executed a JPEG (on an NTFS partition) and the shell started going crazy. reboot was not successful =[
A few years ago I was having obscure audio problems on Ubuntu so I tried replacing pulseaudio with pipewire. I was feeling pretty cocky with using the package manager so I tried
sudo apt install pipewire
Installed successfully, realized nothing changed, figured maybe I had to get rid of pulseaudio to make it stick.
sudo apt remove pulseaudio
Just two commands. Instant black screen, PC reboots into the terminal interface. No GUI. Rebooting again just brings me back to the terminal.
I fixed it eventually, but I’m really not very computer literate despite using Linux, so I was sweating bullets for a minute that I might have bricked it irreversibly or something.
Not really a “braking my linux setup”, but still fun as hell! Back in university, a friend of mine got a new notebook at a time… we spent the night at the university hacking and they wanted to set the notebook up in the evening. They got to the point where they had to setup luks via the cryptsetup CLI. But they got stuck, it just wouldn’t work. They tried for HOURS to debug why cryptsetup didn’t let them setup LUKS on the drive.
At some point, in the middle of the night (literally something like 2 in the morning) they suddenly JUMPED from their seat and screamed “TYPE UPPERCASE ‘YES’ - FUCK!!!”
They debugged for about six hours and the conclusion was that cryptsetup asks “If you are sure you want to overwrite, type uppercase ‘yes’”. … and they typed lowercase. For six hours. Literally.
The room was on the floor, holding their stomach laughing.
Found out the hard way that if you edit /etc/sudoers with anything other than visudo you best be absolutely sure the syntax is correct, otherwise sudo will refuse to read it and you’ll be locked out.
Also learned to add -rf to the rm command at the end, after I re-read it to make sure it does what it should do. Something like rm /path -rf instead of rm -fr /path. That protects you from your fat fingers hitting the enter key half way through.
Not me, but one I saw… dude used chmod to lock down permissions across the board… including root… including the chmod command.
“What do I do?”
🤔
“Re-install?”
Years ago a friend mistakenly typed in killall5 as root on a remote server. Didn’t break things but resulted in extra work and effort.
Once I succumbed to a proprietary software’s allure, post-usage, I felt like a digital pariah! To rid myself of the taint, I wiped my system clean – reinstall time!
CTRL-C-ing apt because it looked stuck for more than 10 minutes. I don’t recommend doing it.
Haven’t used
aptin a while, is it not atomic? What happens if you mess with it?I don’t think it is, if it doesn’t run its course on its own, you’re screwed. It’s Debian so you can recover, but, at least for me, it was painful.
Learned about the importance of trailing slashes in rsync by using the -delete flag.
Generated my grub configuration as grub.conf
This one took a stupid amount of time to debug - but on the other hand, when grub failed it did with “can’t find any bootable thingy” and not “missing configuration file” as, in my later opinion, it should.
LifeLinux is a harsh mistresses, sometimes.I wanted to use fio to benchmark my root drive. I had seen a tutorial saying that the
file=parameter should point to the device file, so I pointed it at /dev/sda. As you might expect, the write test didn’t go so well.Many many years ago I wanted to clean up my freshly installed Slackware system by removing old files.
find / -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {};
Bad idea.
