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_history
That’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
And also a very understandable mistake, to boot.
Dear god
Reminded me of this: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata/issues/595
Same concept, different granularity!
i never thought i had a nuke that i can launch using one command
Jesus Christ. It would be a good idea to format that file to have an
exit
as first line to avoid thisNew fear unlocked
Can a linux noob get an explanation of this?
source
is a bash shell built-in command that executes the content of the file passed as argument, in the current shell.~/.bash_history
contains all the commands you ever executed in bash (the default shell in most Linux systems)To add on to this explanation, you generally use
source ~/.bashrc
to reload your shell whenever you want to make changes to your user config. Tab completion weakens the barrier to destruction significantly (esp. in my case)Until you use a system that doesn’t have a ~/.bashrc , and now your tab completion helpfully expands “~/.ba[TAB]” to “~/.bash_history” .
It was my first time using a Linux GUI. I was comfortable with CLI, but it was my first time having it installed on a laptop instead of just sshing into a server somewhere.
So naturally, instead of learning how the GUI worked, I tried changing it to be exactly like Windows. I was doing things like making it so I could double click shell scripts and other code files and they would run instead of opening them up in an editor. I think you see where this is going, but I sure as hell didn’t.
Well, one of my coworkers comes over and asks me to run this code on this device we were developing. We were still in the very early stages of development, we didn’t even have git set up, so he brought the code over on a USB stick. I pop it into my laptop. I went to check it once by opening it in an editor by double clicking on it… Only it ran the code that was written for our device on my laptop instead of opening in an editor.
To this day, I have no idea what it did to fuck my laptop so bad. I spent maybe an hour trying to figure out what was wrong, but I was so inexperienced with Linux, that I decided to just reinstall the OS. I had only installed it the day before anyway, so I wasn’t losing much.
Accidentally executed a JPEG (on an NTFS partition) and the shell started going crazy. reboot was not successful =[
Bro and it does not give any format error or anything?
Nope, I guess the processor just skips bad instructions, or most numbers are valid…
New fear unlocked
I used to work at this place that had a gigantic QNX install. I don’t know if QNX that we used back then had any relation to q&x now They certainly don’t look very close.
It was in the '90s and they had it set up so that particular nodes handled particular jobs. One node to handle boot images and serve as a net boot provider, one node handled all of the arcnet to ethernet communication, one node handled all the serial to mainframe, a number of the nodes were main worker nodes that collected data and operated machinery and diverters. All of these primary systems were on upper-end 386s or 486s ,they all had local hard disks.
The last class of node they called slave nodes. They were mainly designed for user data ingest, data scanning stations, touch screen terminals, simple things that weren’t very high priority.
These nodes could have hard discs in them, and if they did, they would attempt to boot from them saving the net boot server a few cycles.
If for some reason they were unable to boot from their local hard drive, They would netboot format their local hard drive and rewrite their local file system.
If they were on able to rewrite their local file system they could still operate perfectly fine purely off the net boot. The Achilles heel of the system was that you had no idea that they had net booted unless you looked into the log files. If you boot it off your local hard drive of course your root file system would be on your local hard drive. If you had net booted, and it could not rebuild your local file system, your local root file / was actually the literal partition on the boot server. Because of the design of the network boot, nothing looked like it was remotely mounted.
SOP for problems on one of the slave nodes was to wipe the hard disk and reboot, in the process it would format the hard drive and either fix itself or show up as unreliable and you could then replace the disc or just leave the disc out of it. Of course If the local disk had failed and the box had already rebooted off netboot without a technician standing there to witness it, rm -Rf would wipe out the master boot node.
I wasn’t the one that wiped it, but I fully understand why the guy did.
Turns out we were on a really old version of QNX, we were kind of a remote warehouse mostly automated. They just shut us down for about a week. Flew a team out. Rebuilt the system from newer software, and setup backups.
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.
A regular update I guess…
I had a few programs for various things and one was simply an extension from the gnome extension manager. I updated it and my screen turned black and I couldn’t get it back. I had to revert to a previous version, then uninstall everything until I figurd out what caused it.
It took several hours.
I can’t remember what I did to break it, but back when I was in high school I was tinkering right before class and rendered my laptop unbootable. I booted into an Arch Linux USB, chrooted into my install, found the config file I messed with, then reverted it. I booted back into my system and started the bell ringer assignment as quickly as I could. I had one minute left when the teacher walks by, looks at it, and says that I did a really good job. She never knew my laptop was unbootable just 2 minutes earlier.
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.
I feel like you can fix linux as quickly as you can fuck it up (as long as you know what you did)
I set up a progressive backup of my home folder… to my home folder. By the time I got home that day it was impossible to log in because there was no room to create a login record. Had to fix that by deleting the backup file using a live CD.
One day on my main Arch installation I created a container inside a directory, and “booted” into it by using systemd-nspawn. When I was done with it I decided to do a
rm -rf /
inside the container just to be funny. Then I noticed that my DE on the host froze and I couldn’t do anything. Then I realized that systemd-nspawn mounts some important host’s directories on the container, and I deleted those when I did therm -rf /
. I didn’t lose anything, but it was scary.chown 777 everything
Been there, done that
The only time was within a VM. I accidentally wrote
rm -rf ./*
while my cwd was/
I use absolute paths with
-rf
now, to prevent the error again.Every other breakage I had was with
apt
shitting itself. It has always been fixable just annoying.I now use Fedora, to prevent the error again.
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.
Been there with sudo. Fortunately,
su
still works, as well as going to another tty and logging in as root. Well, as long as the root login is enabled; otherwise that old hack withinit=/bin/bash
may work, unless you’ve prohibited editing kernel cmdline in the boitloader or decided on efistubIIRC the root account was disabled (with no password), so I resorted to my trusty SystemRescueCD pen to fix things. Never leave home without it.
Back when I started using Linux, I really wanted something that was super different from windows (I used Gnome 3 for like 3 years). I decided one day to try out Fedora cause, hey, I can live on the bleeding edge.
Second day I had it installed, I was having issues with the audio. Decided to try reinstalling pulse. Apt autoremoved it and somehow completely nuked the entire GUI. Stuck in terminal mode, I found that I had no ethernet to connect to, nor could I figure out how to connect to a wifi network with a password or download packages to a USB. After a couple hours, I gave up, wiped the drive, and went back to Mint.
Nowadays I’m happier in my little comfort zone.
Same thing happened to me! I was on Ubuntu, trying to replace pulse and when it got removed instantly kicked me to the terminal. Eventually I fixed it but now I also just Mint, lol
sudo apt upgrade -y
To this day I can’t figure out why it killed the GUI and all terminal commands on a Mint install…
I’m relatively new to Mint, but I thought that sudo apt update just checked for updates and sudo apt upgrade -y was for actually installing the updates. I don’t see why that would break it though.
You’re right, I messed up - I always switch between the two, because “update” makes more sense in my head. I fixed the text.
I stay away from apt. apt-update for me has never messed like apt has.