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What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by danielquinn@lemmy.ca to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I'm working on a some materials for a class wherein I'll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we're including a section we're calling "foot guns". Basically it's ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I've got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like... just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

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[-] Kid_Thunder@kbin.social 14 points 2 months ago

I accidentally overwrote /etc/passwd once and I allowed /boot to run out of space during a kernal update and I created a local user with the same user that was also on the realm/domain that I had joined and various bash script issues.
Some stuff I've had to fix that someone else did:

  • named a file rm -rf
  • rm -rf /bin instead of ./bin -- Also the fact that they had sudo was crazy and also I guess this was the second time
  • chmod -R 777 /
  • Various software bugs running swap out of space or hitting the inode limit by creating files over and over again with a timestamp in the filename and having to remove all of them because there was no backup to the OS
  • Someone disabled SELinux because something wasn't working but didn't tell anyone -- ugh
  • Compiled java because they googled some issue and followed some old tutorial without understanding anything instead of using alternatives and symlinked the old java from /bin to /home/theiruser/java -- had sudo because he was a Windows domain admin.
  • Cybersecurity guy didn't know what some VMs did so he turned them off and figured he'd find out if/when someone complained. Caused a massive core services outage.
  • Same Cybersecurity guy deleted a bunch of data because he wanted to see how the sysadmins would respond and witness backup restorations. He did not inform anyone.
  • Cybersecurity guy above still has Domain Admin and sudo everywhere. I would have personally removed his privileged access regardless of what 'CyberSecurity' management thought but I was leaving for a new job by then anyway so I figured I'd just let them eventually lie in the bed they made.

There's more but I don't want to keep going because it is Sunday and I don't want to ruin it.

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
264 points (97.8% liked)

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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