What's (are) the funniest/stupidest way(s) you've broken your linux setup?

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?

musicmatze,
@musicmatze@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

Thann,
@Thann@lemmy.ml avatar

Accidentally executed a JPEG (on an NTFS partition) and the shell started going crazy. reboot was not successful =[

mexicancartel,

Bro and it does not give any format error or anything?

Thann,
@Thann@lemmy.ml avatar

Nope, I guess the processor just skips bad instructions, or most numbers are valid…

mexicancartel,

New fear unlocked

ulterno,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

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:

  1. Migrated from Manjaro KDE to EndeavourOS KDE. Kept the previous home directory.
  2. 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)
  3. After a few google searches, found out that downgrading glibc would do something, so downgraded… Worked for a while
  4. While using pacman -Syu, I always checked for warnings (foolishly thinking that the downgraded and ignored glibc would cause a pacman warning if it broke dependencies) and there were none. So, the updated OS stopped working due to unmatched glibc. BREAK 1
  5. To fix it, I opened one of my multiple boots (another EndeavourOS) and made a script using pacman -Ql and cp to copy new glibc related files into the broken system (because I was too lazy to learn how to do it the correct way with pacman and chroot didn’t work because glibc is needed by bash).
  6. Turned out the script I made was wrong and I hadn’t checked the intermediate output from pacman -Ql, which was telling cp to copy the whole /etc /usr and other directories. (just if I hadn’t given the -r to cp) 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

janabuggs,

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.

EponymousBosh,
@EponymousBosh@beehaw.org avatar

“Just pretend it’s always been Linux” is a bold move. I salute 12-year-old you o7

Kanedias,
@Kanedias@lemmy.ml avatar

Just straight up overwriting boot sector and superblock of my hard drive thinking it’s the USB drive.

Udev tried to warn me, saying there’s no permission, and I just typed sudo without thinking.

Then after a second I remembered USB block devices are usually writable by users, but it was too late.

Jordan_U,

USB block devices containing mountable filesystems (on Desktop systems) can generally have those filesystems mounted and files written to them by regular users; But the block device itself stays only root writeable.

So, you need root privileges either way.

(Going from memory, but also decently confident)

technohacker,
@technohacker@programming.dev avatar

source ~/.bash_history

caseyweederman,

Dear god

fl42v,

That’s the scariest horror story in 2 words I’ve seen so far

technohacker,
@technohacker@programming.dev avatar

I’m genuinely having a chuckle at how shocked people are at my submission, made my day xD

fl42v,

I mean, it’s simple, elegant, and destructive AF given the right circumstances. Basically a chaos grenade we didn’t realize existed

grubders,

i never thought i had a nuke that i can launch using one command

jaykay,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

New fear unlocked

x3i,

Relied on an AUR package for building and signing my unified kernel image… one day it was outdated and geberating the image failed, I noticed that by the fact that the system refused to boot my OS. Fixing it was done in a few minutes but boy, that was a shock :D

Guess who also checks the exact output of the kernel rebuild now before rebooting!

Quazatron,
@Quazatron@lemmy.world avatar

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.

jerrythegenius,
@jerrythegenius@lemmy.world avatar

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.

krimson,
@krimson@feddit.nl avatar

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.

jordanlund,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

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?”

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • linux@lemmy.ml
  • fightinggames
  • All magazines
    •