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?

captain_aggravated,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

I uninstalled Python.

I was playing around with Pygame of all things, and it wasn’t behaving as the (apparently out of date) documentation was saying it should, so I figured I’d just uninstall and reinstall Python.

EVERYTHING borked. APT wouldn’t even work.

BrianTheeBiscuiteer,

Ha! Came to say this too!

I tried to uninstall Python because I was just trying to minimize junk on my computer and I usually code in Bash, Node or Java.

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

Oh that’s a good one. It feels like it should be doable and then… BAM

paddirn, (edited )

Years ago I was dual-booting with Ubuntu just to try out whatever this Linux thing was that all the nerds were talking about. Liked it and played around with it, but for whatever reason I wanted to go back to just Windows, I needed the space I had partitioned off or something, can’t remember why. So I just uninstalled or deleted the bootloader somehow (maybe I just deleted the Linux partition and expected the space to clear up like normal).

Go to restart the computer… oh shit. Ohshotohshitohshitohshit.

mlg,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

fstab bind mount for /home that I misspelled, so I couldn’t login as myself.

fstab external hdd mount that didn’t have ignore flag so PC would pop if I booted while unplugged

Accidentally booting windows after a year and it overwrite my EFI boot entry.

The best I’ve see however was an acquaintance who accidentally set perms to own user on /usr/bin

So everything went from root:root to user:user which removed all the SUID/SGID bits as well so a bunch of bins broke lol.

Believe it or not, it was actually fairly easy to fix with chmod and chown

Nibodhika,

I’ve done my plenty of stupid stuff, from dd disks I was using to forcefully uninstall dependencies of the package manager. But the one that takes the cake for me happened back in 2012, I was working at a research lab in the university and was sharing a computer with another intern. That other intern used Gentoo and so we agreed that the machine should be Gentoo, I’ve installed it at my house on my PC and got comfortable with it before we shared that computer. One thing that I learnt when installing Gentoo is that the /dev folder is created on boot, you don’t populate it when installing, instead you mount the one from the host system you’re using to install.

The computer had an issue with a device, can’t even remember what it was, so I thought I’ll run rm -rf /dev that should take care of the issue and after a reboot it will be repopulated… It might have worked, but what I actually ran was rm -rf /etc.

herc3141, (edited )

Backed up the whole disk image to an external drive because I didn’t have time for a proper backup but knew I would need some of those files later.

Installed a fresh new OS on the same disk, used it for a couple of months.

Needed to make some space on the external drive I had the backup on so I’ll just delete the backed up system files from it.

cd /mnt/external_drive

rm - r /usr /boot …

As you can probably see, a fresh new install was happening again

Scribbd,

Took me a solid second to get it as well.

martinb,

☠️

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)

skeletorfw,

My own classic was fiddling with the nvidia PRIME config to try and get rid of some very mildly irritating screen tearing. No graphics output at all. Now this is fixable of course, but it’s a pig.

And I’d decided to do this 2 hours before an incredibly important progress review meeting for my PhD.

Got it back with about 10 mins to spare and decided just to leave the driver config alone after that.

Bonus round

Also a friend managed to bork his ubuntu 16 laptop by trying to switch from unity to gnome and ending up with sort of neither. That was reinstall territory right there.

carcus,

Learned about the importance of trailing slashes in rsync by using the -delete flag.

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.

halfway_neko, (edited )
@halfway_neko@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Deleted my entire efi partition while trying to install some grub themes.

And then my backup didn’t work when I tried to restore it.

I have pretty colours now though, so it was all worth it :)

lemmyreader,

😁

Cwilliams,

Been there, done that. But I haven’t had any problems once I switched to systemd-boot 🤷

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.

fragment,

I deleted bash on my work computer one week into the job 🫠

martinb,

csh FTW eh 🤣

FQQD,
@FQQD@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

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.

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

reallyzen, (edited )
@reallyzen@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

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