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?

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. :(

d950,

When Ubuntu 16.04 had just been released, I tried upgrading my 14.04, the whole system broke and I had to install another os (Manjaro won).

That day I learned Ubuntu too can be a bit stupid.

Static_Rocket,
@Static_Rocket@lemmy.world avatar

This is where someone tracks down an upgrade path chart you didn’t know existed and points out some goofy intermediary release, not an lts for some reason, that you were supposed to upgrade to first…

captainjaneway,
@captainjaneway@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Petter1,

Always remember, there is always a “terminal” accessible: Don’t forget poor tty

Nibodhika,

One thing I learnt a while back is that if you break your GUI you can always use Ctrl+Alt+F<1-9> to go to different terminals to try to solve it. Worst case scenario I would do something like mv .config .config.bkp and sudo systemctl restart that should hopefully get you back to default settings on the UI.

Source: been there, done that. Not exactly your error but similar enough.

Kjev,
@Kjev@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Somehow convinced a person to run sudo chmod -x /usr/bin/*

I don’t remember the exact command so it could be a bit different but it did the job. It was a fun evening.

fl42v, (edited )

Daaem, I guess the poor dude at the receiving end did not consider it particularly fun. Well, at least they had sbin working, so probably possible to recover without a live cd. Huh, guess who’s now spinning up a VM to check it out 🤣

Checked it out: on arch that results in inability to run tty on reboot, then you’re dropped into initramfs’s rescue shell where you can simply +x new_root’s /usr/bin/* and be back up and running

avidamoeba, (edited )
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

An intern nuked their workstation by sudo chmod -R 777 /. Turns out adding exec to everything isn’t good either.

glibg10b, (edited )

Before installing Arch on a USB flash drive, I disabled ext4 journaling in order to reduce disk reads and writes, being fully aware of the implications (file corruption after unexpected power loss). I was confident that I would never have to pull the plug or the drive without issuing a normal shutdown first. Unfortunately, there was one possibility I hadn’t considered: sometimes, there’s that one service preventing your PC from turning off, and at that stage there’s no way to kill it (besides waiting for systemd to time out, but I was impatient).

So I pulled the plug. The system booted fine, but was missing some binaries. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use pacman to restore them because some of the files it relied on were also destroyed.

This was not the last time I went through this. Luckily I’ve learned my lesson by now

SSUPII,

Debian sid a few years ago: Uninstalled Python2, system became unusable and couldn’t neither reinstall from APT neither recompile it

luk,

Did it on Ubuntu and nothing worked anymore. Somehow managed to recover.

SSUPII,

I was much more inexperienced in Linux at the time, I could probably fix it now if the same thing happened again.

krimson, (edited )
@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.

glibg10b,

I wanted to use fio to benchmark my root drive. I had seen a tutorial saying that the file= parameter should point to the device file, so I pointed it at /dev/sda. As you might expect, the write test didn’t go so well.

fl42v,

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!

9488fcea02a9,

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.

avidamoeba,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Tried to convert Ubuntu to Debian by replacing the repos in sources.list and apt dist-upgrading. 💣 Teenagers…

Empricorn,

I’m as nerdy as they come, but… I don’t think you did teenage rebellion right.

Dagamant,

I thought about trying something like this the other day and quickly reconsidered

jws_shadotak,

Not quite catastrophic but:

I’m in the process of switching my main server over from windows to Linux

I went with Deb 12 and it all works smoothly but I don’t have enough room to back up data to change the drive formats so they’re still NTFS. I was looking at my main media HDD and thought “oh, I’ll at least delete those windows partitions and leave the main partition intact.”

I found out the hard way that NTFS partitions can’t just reclaim space like that. It shuffles all the data when you change the partition. It’s currently 23 hours into the job and it’s 33% done.

I did this to reclaim 30 MB of space on a 14 TB drive.

fl42v,

You mean you’ve removed the service partitions used by windows and grown the main one into the freed space? Than yes, it’s not the way. 'Cause creating a new partition instead of growing the existing one shouldn’t have touched the latter at all :/

jws_shadotak,

Yes, I grew the existing one. Lesson learned I guess. 30.5 hours into it and it’s at 41%.

BlueEther,
@BlueEther@no.lastname.nz avatar

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
escapedgoat,

ran chown -R www-data: ./ from /var instead of /var/www.

fhein,

I have a stupid one, but far from funny… I’ve been using and building computers for a very long time so I’m far from a noob, but I’m still quite cautious, bordering on paranoid, so I like to unplug all other drives when re/installing an OS just to avoid stupid mistakes. I go through the installer on the livecd, there’s only one drive to choose from so I don’t think much about it, select that it should erase everything, I set up the new partition structure, and start the process. After about a minute I begin wondering “why is it taking so long?”, and “what is that ticking noise? SSDs shouldn’t be making any sounds when written to”, when I realize that I had unplugged the wrong drives and that I was currently overwriting my main storage drive. Of course I had backups of the most important things like photos and code, though not really synced for a couple of months so I lost some stuff permanently.

rzlatic,
@rzlatic@lemmy.ml avatar

I can totally feel that sudden clot in the gut the moment you realize on which drive the action is happening, just by reading this.

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