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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 [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[-] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago

I do dumb things like edit my network configuration do some stuff and log out. Then I can't login the next weekend because the IP address is wrong. Also:

Ifconfig eth0 down

And I am booted from ssh.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah screwing with the network interface of the machine you're SSHd into is something nearly every sysadmin have done at least once.

That or changing something, rebooting the server and subsequently being unable to contact it again due to said change. I'm always scared and feeling I'm taking a risk when upgrading a major OS version over SSH, yet Ubuntu never failed me in that, it's the silly things that got me, like messing with fstab.

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024

262 points (97.8% liked)

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