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?

escapedgoat,

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

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.

spittingimage,
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

I set up a progressive backup of my home folder… to my home folder. By the time I got home that day it was impossible to log in because there was no room to create a login record. Had to fix that by deleting the backup file using a live CD.

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.

BradleyUffner,

One time I rebooted. The system never recovered.

rhys,
@rhys@rhys.wtf avatar

@fl42v I have thousands from my early days, but my only recent-ish one was pretty funny.

On an Arch install that hadn't been updated for a while, in a rush, had an app that needed OpenSSL 3. Instead of updating the whole system, I just updated the openssl package.

Everything broke immediately. Turns out a lot of stuff depends on openssl. Who knew?

To fix, booted to the arch installer, chrooted into my env, and reverted to the previous version of the package — then updated properly.

DrillingStricken,

Once I succumbed to a proprietary software’s allure, post-usage, I felt like a digital pariah! To rid myself of the taint, I wiped my system clean – reinstall time!

squid_slime,
@squid_slime@lemmy.world avatar

I was new to Linux, I made the not so calculated decision to use manjaro as my daily, deleted xorg to in an attempt to reinstall xorg to then hopefully fix the stuttering. Everything went wrong, no display obviously, /boot/ files where corrupt. I now use arch and am wiser

musicmatze, (edited )
@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

StorageAware,

It was only in a container on a Chromebook, but I’ll share it anyway. One time, I had installed Android Studio but found it mildly annoying that I got a line when using apt about Android Studio and some error on a certain line of this one file. I believe the file was something related to dpkg, and after changing some things within the file, I seemed to have broken apt. Luckily, I had a backup, but it was a few days old, so I had to reinstall some apps.

UnfortunateShort,

Accidentally deleted system Python, which on GNOME meant my DE was toast as well. Luckily very freshly set up, so no harm done.

Related note, add this in your shell profile:

bash
export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true

proper scripting language
set PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV true

Delta_44,

What does it do? Is it some kind of failsafe?

WalrusByte,
@WalrusByte@lemmy.world avatar

Makes it so when you install packages with pip, it will only work if it’s using a virtual environment. This keeps any installed packages separate from ones your system uses.

If you want to learn about python virtual environments, check this out.

Delta_44,

Nice! Thanks!

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

linearchaos,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I used to work at this place that had a gigantic QNX install. I don’t know if QNX that we used back then had any relation to q&x now They certainly don’t look very close.

It was in the '90s and they had it set up so that particular nodes handled particular jobs. One node to handle boot images and serve as a net boot provider, one node handled all of the arcnet to ethernet communication, one node handled all the serial to mainframe, a number of the nodes were main worker nodes that collected data and operated machinery and diverters. All of these primary systems were on upper-end 386s or 486s ,they all had local hard disks.

The last class of node they called slave nodes. They were mainly designed for user data ingest, data scanning stations, touch screen terminals, simple things that weren’t very high priority.

These nodes could have hard discs in them, and if they did, they would attempt to boot from them saving the net boot server a few cycles.

If for some reason they were unable to boot from their local hard drive, They would netboot format their local hard drive and rewrite their local file system.

If they were on able to rewrite their local file system they could still operate perfectly fine purely off the net boot. The Achilles heel of the system was that you had no idea that they had net booted unless you looked into the log files. If you boot it off your local hard drive of course your root file system would be on your local hard drive. If you had net booted, and it could not rebuild your local file system, your local root file / was actually the literal partition on the boot server. Because of the design of the network boot, nothing looked like it was remotely mounted.

SOP for problems on one of the slave nodes was to wipe the hard disk and reboot, in the process it would format the hard drive and either fix itself or show up as unreliable and you could then replace the disc or just leave the disc out of it. Of course If the local disk had failed and the box had already rebooted off netboot without a technician standing there to witness it, rm -Rf would wipe out the master boot node.

I wasn’t the one that wiped it, but I fully understand why the guy did.

Turns out we were on a really old version of QNX, we were kind of a remote warehouse mostly automated. They just shut us down for about a week. Flew a team out. Rebuilt the system from newer software, and setup backups.

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.

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