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?
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.
The first time I read this, i thought "shouldn't all that be executable anyway?"
And then I read it again and realized, minus x
An intern nuked their workstation by
sudo chmod -R 777 /. Turns out adding exec to everything isn't good either.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