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#61 2017-05-26 11:18:56

martix
Kim Jong-un Stunt Double
Registered: 2016-02-19
Posts: 1,267

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

@iMBeCil Indeed, that's the right way to handle such a situation: Liquid anywhere - power off immediately! I was not quick enough but surely I'll remember it if something like that should happen again.

When I was researching what I could do, I read about the following experiences: After 2-4 days drying the computer started to work again (well, not for me) or use distilled water to clean the components and let it dry.

As you suggest, I probably should have tried to clean it, but I was fortunate enough to find a well priced (used) keyboard in good condition. After it arrived, I put the defect one on sale (there were two keys fixed with tape anyway) and someone bought it after a short time. I'm glad it's gone, so it won't remind me what just happened to it...

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#62 2017-07-07 16:42:38

becker_11
Member
From: Perth, Western Australia
Registered: 2015-12-30
Posts: 66

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

I'd just gotten my distro setup/configured to the way I liked it, so roughly 2 to 3 weeks post install and I was attempting to install the latest video driver and I broke something and on reboot couldn't get past the TTY. So I decided to be calm and I apt-get installed irssi and got onto Freenode where I asked in the ##linux channel for help and was politely told I'd screwed the pooch and had no other choice but to format and reinstall.
At the time my only other working computer at that time was a tiny 9in eeepc running debian so using that to browser the web and the fullsized laptop running irssi some 10 hours later and I'm not even kidding I fixed my stuff up and booted back into Openbox.

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#63 2017-07-07 17:33:16

Sector11
Mod Squid Tpyo Knig
From: Upstairs
Registered: 2015-08-20
Posts: 8,008

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

]:D No is the time to go bach into irc and tell the person that "politely" told you that "you'd screwed the pooch and had no other choice but to format and reinstall." "That s/he was 'politely-now_no-bad-adjective-here' wrong, that you had found the solution with a little searching on the web and fixed things no thanks to him/her.


Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

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#64 2017-07-07 19:41:23

bigbenaugust
Member
From: the 704 / KCLT
Registered: 2017-05-20
Posts: 179

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

I have two.

1. Once at Sun, I thought I was bouncing my own workstation and stuck the reboot command in the wrong terminal. Turns out I bounced a SunRay server with ~150 sessions on it. umm... oops. Sorry, Santa Clara campus! 

2. This was my first Linux machine in 1998, RH 5.2. The StarOffice installer told me I had an incompatible glibc library. So I changed it. The machine never booted again.


--Ben
BL / MX / Raspbian... and a whole bunch of RHEL boxes. :)

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#65 2017-07-07 19:57:21

Sector11
Mod Squid Tpyo Knig
From: Upstairs
Registered: 2015-08-20
Posts: 8,008

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

@ bigbenaugust

I have two.

1. {snip} umm... oops. Sorry, Santa Clara campus! 

2. {more snip snip} So I changed it. The machine never booted again.

lol  lol  lol  lol  I love them!


Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

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#66 2017-07-07 20:23:16

bigbenaugust
Member
From: the 704 / KCLT
Registered: 2017-05-20
Posts: 179

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

Then there was the time I paid a pile of college student money for a whopping 850MB drive, then tried to partition it to dual-boot DOS (maybe Win95, I don't remember) and RH 5.2 (this was also 1998). Somehow or other, I gave fdisk the wrong info and damaged the drive, so back to my dual 200MB Toshiba lappy drives it was.

22 years with various Unices... I have some stories. smile


--Ben
BL / MX / Raspbian... and a whole bunch of RHEL boxes. :)

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#67 2017-07-07 20:26:39

s-rod
Member
From: Kansas City, Missouri
Registered: 2015-10-09
Posts: 39

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

On a production SLES server (running email for 200 users) I did a distibution upgrade. A year previous I had added an OpenSUSE repository on the server to install a single specific package, and neglected to remove it.  The distribution upgrade pulled packages from both the SLES and OpenSUSE repositories.

Unfortunately at the time OpenSUSE had moved to systemd while the SLES had not. I successfully made the server unbootable. 

Fortunately, I was able to get some good assistance. Ended up booting from an ISO and then the tech wrote a script that would query every package on the server and if it came from the OpenSUSE repository it would uninstall it and replace with the package from the SLES repository. 

I started this nightmare at 5:00 pm and was able to get the server back up an running 10 minutes before employees started showing up for work at 8:00 am.

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#68 2017-07-07 21:39:21

Sector11
Mod Squid Tpyo Knig
From: Upstairs
Registered: 2015-08-20
Posts: 8,008

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

bigbenaugust wrote:

Then there was the time I paid a pile of college student money for a whopping 850MB drive, then tried to partition it to dual-boot DOS (maybe Win95, I don't remember) and RH 5.2 (this was also 1998). Somehow or other, I gave fdisk the wrong info and damaged the drive, so back to my dual 200MB Toshiba lappy drives it was.

22 years with various Unices... I have some stories. smile

Start a thread, start a thread ...

"22 years *nix of stories"
The Good the Bad and the OMG Funny!


Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

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#69 2017-07-07 21:46:58

Sector11
Mod Squid Tpyo Knig
From: Upstairs
Registered: 2015-08-20
Posts: 8,008

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

s-rod wrote:

I started this nightmare at 5:00 pm and was able to get the server back up an running 10 minutes before employees started showing up for work at 8:00 am.

s-rod, Starring in another episode of The Twilight Server


Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

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#70 2017-07-08 08:50:27

brontosaurusrex
Middle Office
Registered: 2015-09-29
Posts: 2,737

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

I managed to expand ext4 partition to another (hosting some old windows) using bootable gparted (It took 2 hours to move, expand, so enough time to think/reflect on about how stupid I'am < mostly remembering all the stuff/scripts that runs from cron...), of course as usually without doing backups (morale: sometimes it works, but don't!). It was a tense moment at reboot time... p.s. Well my /home has a new 200 gigs now, so happy.

Last edited by brontosaurusrex (2017-07-08 08:59:41)

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#71 2017-07-23 10:06:34

Head_on_a_Stick
Member
From: London
Registered: 2015-09-29
Posts: 9,063
Website

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

Clearing $HOME of scrots, misplaced a space:

empty@Puffy:~ $ rm * .png

Ah well, I needed to tidy up anyway...  roll

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#72 2017-07-23 17:03:58

Sector11
Mod Squid Tpyo Knig
From: Upstairs
Registered: 2015-08-20
Posts: 8,008

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

^ Now that's an OOPSIE!  sad


Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

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#73 2017-07-23 17:35:22

damo
....moderator....
Registered: 2015-08-20
Posts: 6,734

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

^ It is the cli version of doing Shift-Delete on a directory in Thunar, and not noticing that home is selected   8o  :8


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#74 2017-07-23 18:53:52

Sector11
Mod Squid Tpyo Knig
From: Upstairs
Registered: 2015-08-20
Posts: 8,008

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

Oh that's another OOPS


Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

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#75 2017-07-23 22:50:44

martix
Kim Jong-un Stunt Double
Registered: 2016-02-19
Posts: 1,267

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

Clearing $HOME of scrots, misplaced a space:

empty@Puffy:~ $ rm * .png

Ah well, I needed to tidy up anyway...  roll


Do I see it correctly: Did it delete everything in home?

After all these years on linux I'm still wondering what would be the next (best) step if something like that happens (I mean on ext4). (Q)photorec? Magicrescue? extundelete? foremost? sleuthkit? On windows with ntfs it would be a matter of 5-10 minutes to recover all that content (I have to admit that it can be a big advantage of ntfs even if I'm not fan of the OS from Redmond).

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#76 2017-07-23 22:55:05

Sun For Miles
Member
Registered: 2017-04-12
Posts: 262

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

Compiling KDE for 14h and then deciding I want Gnome DE in the given case. Beats all the partitions, boot loaders, X sessions, files and folders I've screwed up.


Señor Chang, why do you teach Spanish?

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#77 2017-07-23 23:20:39

Sector11
Mod Squid Tpyo Knig
From: Upstairs
Registered: 2015-08-20
Posts: 8,008

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

martix wrote:

Do I see it correctly: Did it delete everything in home?

After all these years on linux I'm still wondering what would be the next (best) step if something like that happens (I mean on ext4). (Q)photorec? Magicrescue? extundelete? foremost? sleuthkit? On windows with ntfs it would be a matter of 5-10 minutes to recover all that content (I have to admit that it can be a big advantage of ntfs even if I'm not fan of the OS from Redmond).

Plug in EXT HDD and copy:
/media/sector11/disk/S11-Jul (2017-07-17 14:41:37)
over to home and reboot.
Hmmmm time to back up.


Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

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#78 2017-07-24 06:30:37

Head_on_a_Stick
Member
From: London
Registered: 2015-09-29
Posts: 9,063
Website

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

martix wrote:

Do I see it correctly: Did it delete everything in home?

Well, all of the folders are still there so it was mostly just junk anyway.

what would be the next (best) step if something like that happens (I mean on ext4)

Restore the files from the backup.

In Arch or Debian I would simply copy the stuff over from the most recent (btrfs) snapshot, it's very quick & easy but it does encourage a more cavalier attitude at the command line  hmm

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#79 2017-07-24 19:07:28

martix
Kim Jong-un Stunt Double
Registered: 2016-02-19
Posts: 1,267

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

^Oh yes, indeed, btrfs - I will have to give it a try. Although there still might be some files which were created after the snapshot. In that case recovery might be the last resort.

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#80 2017-07-25 14:42:27

iMBeCil
WAAAT?
From: Edrychwch o'ch cwmpas
Registered: 2015-09-29
Posts: 767

Re: What is the most stupid thing you did on linux?

This doesn't qualify as as 'stupid thing', but moar like 'unfortunate thing', yet ....

Still at the small server from the beginning of the topic ... I have been cleaning stuff, making last backups before leaving for holidays, trying to improve this-and-that with more or less success ... few reboots included ... and finally decided that I will go home.

I come home, log in via ssh, and soon discovered that my server has 100% CPU. yikes 8) WTF? HOW? WHY? What have I done?

Quick 'top'/'htop' revealed that the process called 'agetty' is taking all CPU time (99.5%). yikes 8) WTF? HOW? WHY? What have I done?

Moreover, I was not familiar with the 'agetty' ... what on earth was this? OK, one 'man agetty' later, and I learned that it is (an improved) 'getty' - serial console: the stuff which takes care of logging in from the actual console (keyboard and monitor) in front of the server (unlike ssh, where you are logging in from remote machine, and which is handled by sshd). Good, makes sense, but quite disturbing, because I forgot the last time I have directly logged in from the console attached to server. So: WTF? HOW? WHY? What have I done? yikes 8)

Well, after some more 'man'-s and some goggling, I discovered how to stop (and disable) this service started by systemd, and - voila - CPU usage dropped from 100% to usual few percent.

OK, no more panic, everything is in order, except for the question how and why on the earth 'agetty' - which by now I realized is completely standard and normal stuff in linux installment - got mad? Well - who knows ... lets call it the day, and go to sleep.

Next morning, after breakfast, I (re)started think about it, switched on the logic in my brain, and thought occured: 'agetty is behaving as somebody is constantly pressing a key on the console'. Did I have insane intruder in my room whose idea of hacking my server is constantly press a key on the keyboard? And then it dawned on me: I have a flexible (rubber) keyboard attached to the server and I usually leave it folded!

And, I have to make another unscheduled trip to my work mad mad to unfold the keyboard, restore 'agetty' service ... and now everything is as should be.

And: no more rubber keyboards for me! Ever!  8.(


Postpone all your duties; if you die, you won't have to do them ..

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