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.

  • Kid_Thunder@kbin.social
    14·
    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.