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?

elax102, (edited )
@elax102@lemmy.world avatar

chown 777 everything

isVeryLoud,

Been there, done that

technohacker,
@technohacker@programming.dev avatar

source ~/.bash_history

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

papertowels,

And also a very understandable mistake, to boot.

ReverendIrreverence,
@ReverendIrreverence@lemmy.ml avatar

“Oh My…” thought in a George Takei voice

catastrophicblues,

Oh no. That fits the bill perfectly lol.

omidmnz, (edited )

Reminded me of this: github.com/jtroo/kanata/issues/595

Same concept, different granularity!

caseyweederman,

Dear god

pendulous,

Can a linux noob get an explanation of this?

jaykay,
@jaykay@lemmy.zip avatar

New fear unlocked

tubbadu,

Jesus Christ. It would be a good idea to format that file to have an exit as first line to avoid this

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

hawgietonight,

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.

aard,
@aard@kyu.de avatar

Back then I was testing modelines to see the maximum I could push to my 14" monitor. I then backed it with a 1200x1600 virtual screen.

My girlfriend got sick from watching me scrolling around and bought me a 19" display which could do that resolution - and ended up frustrated when I added a larger virtual screen.

hawgietonight,

A 19" monitor was quite big for the day, and expensive! I hope your gf didn’t beat you up too much for that :)

Delta_44,

I know little about crt because I was born in 2000. Can you explain why did the monitor started to make scary sounds?

I know that crt monitors didn’t have any method to report the supported frequency, aside from more recent models, correct?

hawgietonight,

Yeah, monitors were somewhat dumb, just received and did what the vga output asked to do.

The noise most likely came from the semiconductors that controlled the magnet field that directed the rays onto the screen. These components are selected for a specific speed that the monitor can handle. So going under or over it’s spec can make something resonate in the audible range, and could even destroy the components if stressed too much.

The thing is that for each resolution and refresh rate you had two values to configure, one for the vertical speed in Hz, and horizontal speed in kHz. These values were usually specified in the owners manual. Typos can happen, and this was quite a risky operation.

aard,
@aard@kyu.de avatar

A good starting point for a wikipedia rabbit hole covering the software aspects on how to drive a display: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86_Modeline

ethanolparty,

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.

xavier666,

I feel like you can fix linux as quickly as you can fuck it up

quantumfoam, (edited )

I once did an apt-get upgrade in the middle of when debian testing was recompiling all packages and moving to a new gcc version. I get it, using testing invites stuff like this. But come on, there should at least be a way to warn people beforehand.

fl42v,

That’s kinda weird: shouldn’t they recompile everything first and then replace repos’ contents?

xavier666,

Me: I want to change my car tire

Car: Hey, your car is going at 60 mph now. Do you want to change your tire now?

Me: Is it not possible?

Car: It’s your car, anything is possible with enough effort. As per Google one guy managed to change a tire of a bullock cart while it was moving at 2 mph.

Me: Sounds good. Let’s gooo!

This is the experience for Linux tinkerers.

quantumfoam,

In my case it was:

Me: I want to change my car tire, and i naturally assume we are parked safely in the garage. This is a routine maintenance thing after all.

Car: Sure thing! bork

Me: Umm, why are wrapped around a tree?

Car: Well, we were currently going 60mph, and we posted about it on this website.

Me: Why is there no warning that tells me that doing maintenance now will crash my car?

Car: Well like i said, there is, and it is on this website you should have gone to.

xavier666,

and we posted about it on this website.

In my personal experience, these sort of things happen rarely, unless you are using some sort of rolling-release distribution. For all my mission-critical docker apps, I wait for at least a week after a major update has been pushed and check the dev website.

Theharpyeagle,

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.

ethanolparty,

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

ULS,

A regular update I guess…

ohlaph,

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.

devnull406,

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.

fl42v,

Dang, similar stuff happened to me on nixos. Had to instruct one of the relatives on how to reboot the machine and choose a previous generation in the boitloader 🤣

tigerjerusalem, (edited )

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…

Menteros,

I stay away from apt. apt-update for me has never messed like apt has.

Mayonnaise,

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.

tigerjerusalem,

You’re right, I messed up - I always switch between the two, because “update” makes more sense in my head. I fixed the text.

drathvedro,

Actually, I have a story that I’d consider an achievement even though it was extremely stupid and by all accounts should’ve bricked the system but didnt.

So I was on windows and wanted to install linux as a dual-boot on the main drive. The problem was that my mobo didnt like this particular and the only flash drive I’ve had, dropping it out mid-boot, before I got any usable terminal, so a usual install method wasn’t an option. So I had this crazy idea to start a vmware vm in windows and pass the linux iso and the boot drive directly to it and try to install it live over the running system. Unfortunately, vmware guys thought of this and there’s a check that disallows passing the boot drive to vms. So i created a bunch of .vmdks for another drive and fiddled with them in notepad until I somehow managed to trick vmware and at some point it started booting the same windows copy that I was sitting on. I quickly powered it off, added the linux iso and proceeded to install like I usually would. It did involve some partition shuffling, but, somehow, it went smoothly, linux installed, grub caught on, and even windows somehow survived, even though it was physically moved around on the disk. It serms that vmware later patched this out, because later in an attempt to re-create the trick of running the same copy of windows twice, but after updates to both windows and vmware, I was met with the same old error that boot drive is not allowed when trying to add that same virtual drive I had laying around.

JATtho,

I had a similar debacle, when I managed to corrupt a btrfs file system to point it wouldn’t mount again…

I was preparing it to have as my main system on bare hardware. I had accidentally mounted the same block device simultaneously in the host and guest: kablamo silent corruption and all 5 hours of progress lost.^*^ :(

*shred the guest VM, host was ok.

deafboy,
@deafboy@lemmy.world avatar

I had a similar setup once. Dualboot, plus the VM with the same physical disk, to access windows, while running linux.

All it took was a small distraction… I’ve missed the grub timeout, and accidentally booted the same ubuntu partition in a VM that was running on the real HW. To shreds…

fl42v,

Allrighty, now we officially need a program (I’m hesitant to call it malware since technically it’s for the user’s good XD) that covertly replaces a running copy of windows with linux… Besides, I think it was possible before to install stuff like Ubuntu directly from windows?

thomasdouwes,
@thomasdouwes@sopuli.xyz avatar

I was testing a custom initramfs that would load a full root into a ramdisk, and when I was going to shut down I tried to run rm -rf --no-preserve-root / to see what would happen, since I was on a ramdisk anyway. The computer would not boot after that because it nuked the UEFI options.

JATtho,

On arch, UEFI boot vars are mounted at /sys/firmware/efi/efivars. It’s unwise to rm -rf them…

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)

sfgifz,

This thread should be renamed to 101 reasons why business give Windows or Macs to their employees.

fl42v,

It’s not like you can’t shoot yourself in the foot while using windows (not sure about macs, tho, but likely just as well). I remember breaking windows countless times while figuring out what service crap can be disabled, removing edge or defender, yada yada.

On the contrary, in my experience, if you’re not actively messing with linux, it’s overall more stable than windows. Like I had to install windows on an actual machine a short while ago, and it was a clusterheck. Drivers failed to auto install (touchpad/trackpoint drivers, for Chaos’s sake), random bsod after an hour or so of normal use, etc. As for linux breaking on itself, I remember like 3 times that happened with me in my ~5 yrs of daily driving different distros, and 2 of those were fixable by switching to a tty (the 3rd didn’t boot, as far as I remember, due to some incompatibility between bedrock and arch).

iegod,

A system update broke a dependency for libre Sprite, which hasn’t had an update in like two years. You can say they should but let’s be real, my apps shouldn’t break with an update. One of my laptop needs was portable graphics creation. This broke one of my major use cases. Yay.

Adanisi,
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Some Windows updates completely break the whole system. It’s not unique to Linux based systems.

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?”

Kjev,
@Kjev@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

oh… uh…

elkalbil,
@elkalbil@jlai.lu avatar

You could boot on an USB, mount the filesystem and change the permissions. But if the dude changed a whole lot of permissions, reinstalling might be the smart thing to do…

jordanlund,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

Changed it all to 000. ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

stackoverflow.com/…/who-can-access-a-file-with-oc…

cmnybo,

I managed to do that back when I was new. Luckily it was a fresh install, so I didn’t lose much when I had to reinstall.

So far, that has been the only time I really screwed something up outside of a virtual machine.

captainjaneway,
@captainjaneway@lemmy.world avatar

There’s got to be other tools though that could change the file permissions on chmod, right? Though I suppose you’d need permission to use them and/or download them.

fl42v,

You can dump the permissions from the working system and restore them. Quite useful when working with archives that don’t support those attributes or when you run random stuff from the web 😁

Petter1, (edited )

Many distros offer a automated file/directory ownership restore feature on their liveOS

fl42v,

Yeah, a very unfortunate one: probably, the most painful to recover from. I’d just reinstall, honesty 😅 At least with mine I could simply add the necessary stuff from chroot or pacstrap and not spend a metric ton of time tracking all the files with incorrect permissions

rhys,
@rhys@rhys.wtf avatar

@jordanlund @fl42v I think this one could be recoverable if they had a terminal still active by using the dynamic loader to call chmod — or by booting from a liveCD and chmodding from there.

That'd likely get you to a 'working' state quickly, but it'd take forever to get back to a 'sane' state with correct permissions on everything.

jordanlund, (edited )
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

Exactly. There’s no way to even know what the previous permissions were for everything.

They were TRYING to recursively change permissions in a single directory, accidentally hit the whole system. :(

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