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
Dear god
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.
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?”
This was pre-linux for me but something you can still do in most distros so I think it’s a valid story.
In 1999 I was using Napster on computer running MS-DOS. I was 12 years old and an aspiring open media enthusiast/stupid script kiddie. I was using the file explorer interface in Napster and accidentally gave access to my entire C drive. I also had opened ports to share certain media and to fuck with my friends using daemon tools (back then you could do stupid stuff like control a friend’s desktop with certain versions of daemon tools). Immediately I started receiving packages called things like “sleep.tight.tiny.mite” and I knew I was fucked so I clicked in the Napster interface and clicked “delete” and deleted my entire active drive.
I panicked and installed the only operating system we had which was a random copy of Red Hat. When my dad came home I pretended like it had always had Linux on it. I do think he was more impressed than mad.
“Just pretend it’s always been Linux” is a bold move. I salute 12-year-old you o7
I’m not sure how funny this will be, but here’s how I broke my system twice in a single case. Step by step:
- Migrated from Manjaro KDE to EndeavourOS KDE. Kept the previous home directory.
- After a few updates, there was a problem with Plasma. Applications were not starting from the panels or the .desktop files (they worked from the terminal. The terminal emulator was in startup and worked that way)
- After a few google searches, found out that downgrading glibc would do something, so downgraded… Worked for a while
- While using
pacman -Syu, I always checked for warnings (foolishly thinking that the downgraded and ignored glibc would cause apacmanwarning if it broke dependencies) and there were none. So, the updated OS stopped working due to unmatched glibc. BREAK 1 - To fix it, I opened one of my multiple boots (another EndeavourOS) and made a script using
pacman -Qlandcpto copy new glibc related files into the broken system (because I was too lazy to learn how to do it the correct way withpacmanandchrootdidn’t work becauseglibcis needed by bash). - Turned out the script I made was wrong and I hadn’t checked the intermediate output from
pacman -Ql, which was tellingcpto copy the whole /etc /usr and other directories. (just if I hadn’t given the-rtocp) BREAK 2
In the end, I just made a new installation, this time with a new home and hand-picked whatever settings I wanted from the previous home, Viva la multi-HDD
sudo apt upgrade -yTo this day I can’t figure out why it killed the GUI and all terminal commands on a Mint install…
I stay away from apt. apt-update for me has never messed like apt has.
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.
