Linux

I've broken systems far too many times in the last 24 years, since Mandrake 6.x, to count:

• I've dd a disk or more
• I've rm *
• I've chmod
• I've brought down the network, with every intention tar it would come back - on a remote box
• I've failed to RTFM far too many times

Not the installation strictly speaking, but my most "funny" fuckup was setting up xfree86. There was a configuration for crt monitor scan frequency that you had to setup. I messed up something and the monitor started to squeel like crazy and quickly hit hard reset in panic.

The monitor didn't die, but it had a slight high pitch noise to it after.

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.

~~Life~~ Linux is a harsh mistresses, sometimes.

Oh, I just remembered another one or three. So, resizing the partitions. My install at the time had a swap partition that I didn't need anymore. Should be simple, right? Remove the partition and the corresponding fstab entry, resize root, profit. Well, the superblock disagreed. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to be able to re-create the scheme as it was, and then take my time to read the wiki and do the procedure properly (e2fsck, resize2fs and all that stuff).

Some people I've met since, unfortunately, weren't so lucky (as far as I remember, both tried to shrink and were past mkfs already) and had to reinstall. The moral is, one does simply mess with superblocks; read the wiki first!

I copied a program into the /bin/ folder while in a file browser with sudo permissions and somehow overwrote every file except the one I was moving. It, of course, couldn't boot, but copying the bins from a live iso made it at least boot able. Reinstalled Linux after that, of course.

Nooo I have so many.. This one I can explain in English:

Xubuntu but blind

So, this is ~2016. Ubuntu is hip and a handful of my students use it. On my PCs I only use Debian and Suse. So to help them better I take out an old ASUS laptop and install Ubuntu on it. Try out Xubuntu instead.

At that time I was also huge into alternative keyboard layouts. I had a slightly modified Neo keyboard layout installed when I switched to Xubuntu.

Here the fun starts because the obscure internal graphics card built into the laptop didn't have driver support under Xubuntu. Black screen but I could hear it working. This was the hardest driver fix I ever did. No monitor and a keyboard layout I wasn't used to, under a Linux distro I wasn't used to. And I also was at the university library, so no hardware support or Debian stick in reach.

Connect via ssh to my home server from work

Using a cli torrent client to download stuff

Decide I need a VPN.

Install VPN again from CLI

Run VPN which disconnects my ssh connection

Even when I get home, the server is headless so I have to locate a keyboard and mouse before I can fix.

Not strictly Linux related, but in college I was an IT assistant. One day I was given a stack of drives to run through dariks boot and nuke.

I don't remember exactly what happened, but I think midway through, my laptop shut off.

Guess who picked the wrong drive to wipe with DBAN :)

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.

On OpenSUSE, in Yast bootloader tool, there is a checkbox to to do something like locking the bootloader (it has been a while, I don't remember the exact thingy). Rebooted and oh, surprise, the bootloader was locked... Which mean Grub didn't load.

I had to reinstall the whole OS 🤣

Oh, i have a brilliant one:

A few years ago i spent a lot of time converting .flac-files into .ogg-files in order to put on my oldschool iPod. As I did a lot of repetitive typing - entering $dir / for file in flac ; do convert etc / mkdir -p $somewhere/$artist/$album / mv $somewhere/.ogg->$new_dir/ and so on - I thought: "hm lets just write a loop over loops for all the artists here and then all the albums and at the same time create the nested directories somewhere else... hm actually in the home directory.... and later love everything on the iPod at once."

so i was in my music folder with the artists-folders i wanted to convert. i did something wrong

So i did my complicated script directly in the shell. I made something wrong and instead of creating a folder "~/artist/album" I created 3 folders in my current working directory: "~", "artist" and "album". hmph dammit gotta try again... but first : i have to clean up these useless folders in the current dir. so i type of course this: "$ rm -r ~ artist album " after about 5 seconds of wondering why it took so long i realized my error. o_O I stopped the running command, but it was (of course) too late and i bricked my current installation. All the half-deleted config files made or impossible to start normally and extremely tedious to repair it by hand, so i reinstalled.

Let's see: Unintentionally making a proxy accessible to anyone online

Accidentally deallocating an ext4 partition and then having to run testdisk on it

Trying to manually create a grub entry and corrupting the bootloader

Installing a arch derivertive and having it silently overwrite grub

Installing puppy Linux and then trying to get it to use apt

Incorrect use of ppa's on mint resulting in very old packages being installed

And many others besides

Installed python3 before it was made the native python on the dist. Half broke everything, including apt & python. So I uninstalled it, and then everything was broken. Finally got python3 reinstalled, and lived with it kindof working & awful distribution updates.

I have finally freed myself of that prison last month, by nuking everything and starting fresh.

sudo apt autoremove

Who ever made this shit and then decided to always show you this message that you should do it. What a dick

I set up 2FA via a hardware security key (a yubikey) for login, sudo etc. I then tried to switch security keys, removing the old pam files and adding a new one. But I didn't tidy the pam files up before logging in, and there was effectively no way to log in, since editing the pam files required sudo access to edit in the first place. So basically the whole system required access to a pluggable authentication module that it no longer had any ability to recognize. It was honestly pretty funny. I did manage to recover my data by booting from a live system and decrypting my drive from there.

I've also accidentally removed my desktop environment twice while trying to update Python versions and then cleaning up old packages, but that's kinda not that big deal and is just a facepalm moment.

Writing and running a script to delete the first 2 characters from all files and folders recursively.

It started backtracking to my home folder. :/

Linux Mint: removed all taskbars from the desktop. I was hoping it would just allow me to reset them to the default. But in reality, it breaks the GUI and it's very hard to reset from the GUI. Suddenly my keystrokes weren't being detected and I couldn't open up applications with any sort of regularity. After a lot of dicking around, I got the terminal working so I could reset Cinnamon.

It's not the worst way I've broken a machine. But it was one of the most annoying.

Types

rm -r -f Presses strg+v (instead of strg + shift + v)

Hits enter

Maschine proceeds to delete the home folder as the garbage that comes when pressing normal strg+v gets interpreted so...

I didnt break anything, but there was this one time i was setting up a new lxc container i had just spun up. I installed nginx, and a bunch of other packages, started writing new config files.... Then i noticed my prompt was user@desktop$ instead of user@server$

Whoops... I was in the wrong terminal window, typing commands into my desktop instead of the container i was setting up.

Don't get me started.

There are good reasons why I have personal "production system" to do my work with.

"Updating" a 5.2 RedHat install with a 6.0 Mandrake CD-ROM (or the opposite, can't remember right now...). Fun stuff.

dpkg-reconfigure sysvinit

I don't remember what I was trying to achieve, but it was a bad idea. I also didn't (and still don't) know how to fix the outcome of this, so - since my home was on a separate partition anyway - I just reinstalled Debian since that was much quicker anyway.

sudo apt remove python3

Thinking I would install a more recent version. 😂

At one point I had the coolest Ventoy USB; CyberRe, LABEL=hakr. But then I got a new computer and apparently the ssd was /dev/nvme0n1 instead of /dev/sda. While I was installing Arch, When I created a new GPT partition on /dev/sda, it wiped my beautiful Ventoy 😢

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.

I dont remember what I did when I was stoned. The next day I tried to do normal sudo dnf install and it doesnt recognize any command anymore. I tried restarting it and I cant login anymore because the login scripts dont work. Not that funny but just happened and weirdest way I have broke it

For me, it was a simple enabling of AUR im manjaro, twice Now I use arch, lol.

Man, this was a few months back. I’ve got fedora asahi Linux (Linux on an ARM Mac) and I was trying to install Pycharm to play a bit with Python. Unfortunately, they did not have it packaged for arm, so I had to download a pre compiled tar or zip folder. I test it, see that it is an assortment of bin folders and alike, and decide to put it all elsewhere so it wouldn’t get lost. So I put it on the root and merge the folders. I think immediately “wait this is stupid” and decide to get Pycharm out of there. (I was on nautilus with root privileges), so i simply Ctrl-Z outa there. It shows a warning whether I wanted to delete 4000 files, but because I am an idiot, I didn’t realise what rhay meant. So I did it. I then continue on with my life, and find myself unable to open apps. I was fairly confused, as the apps I already had open still worked. I decide to try to restart the laptop. It is when I see that there is no restart button anymore that I realise what I did, and I just think to myself. I’ll be dammed if this survives a restart, im already screwed so it doesn’t matter. (It didn’t survive the reboot, had to install from scratch. At least an excuse to use the K desktop environment)