I somehow locked myself out of sudo when trying to give my user permission to read serial devices.
Had to reinstall.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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rm -rf /var
I don't know what I was thinking on to type it 😅
I had rEFInd and GRUB installed entirely by accident, and a botched update for Arch hosed my entire EFI setup making it impossible to boot Linux or Windows w/o a LiveCD. Thankfully it self repaired once I nuked rEFInd. I ended up going back to Ubuntu, but I hate snaps. I still would recommend Arch for most Linux users who want the power windows.
I wanted to move my Arch VM to bare metal, so I copied out all the important bits. Then I wanted to move that copy to a new drive so I could boot into it.
I THOUGHT I'd MV all the files in the Arch install's etc directory using sudo MV /etc ...
I also (somehow) mashed my install's etc with Arch's and bungled both, with no live CD to help.
I learned a thing or two about absolute file paths...
Renaming a mount point while mounted was a fun experience in losing data back in the big box Redhat 5.0 days.
Can't say I have any interesting stories. Most of mine are just the head-scratching "I don't know why that didn't work; guess I need to reinstall" kind of story. Like enabling encrypted LVM on install and suddenly nothing is visible to UEFI. Or trying to switch desktop environments using tasksel and now I have a blank screen on next reboot. That lame kind of stuff.
My coworker though... he was mindlessly copy/pasting commands and did the classic rm -rf $UNSETVARIABLE while in / and nuked months of migrated data on his newly built system. He hadn't even set up backups yet. Management was upset but lenient.
Wanted a cool bootscreen on my Nixos machine - commented out the bootloader to troubleshoot, why my meme-boot-picture wouldn't show - after rebooting, it loaded straight into the BIOS and finally realized what I had done... Was able to fix it thankfully
Before I understood how to properly build and test mesa (graphics driver), I compiled it and then procedeed to manually symlink the files in the lib and lib32 directories. When I pressed enter on that ln command, the UI immediately crashed and X would no longer start after rebooting the computer. Reinstalling mesa from a virtual terminal wouldn't fix it so I just reinstalled the system. Good times :)
Relied on an AUR package for building and signing my unified kernel image... one day it was outdated and geberating the image failed, I noticed that by the fact that the system refused to boot my OS. Fixing it was done in a few minutes but boy, that was a shock :D
Guess who also checks the exact output of the kernel rebuild now before rebooting!