If I’m breaking any rules, apologies.
I know, labeling something a repost is a lead weight, but I’m a fan of full disclosure. I posted this topic two years ago and I thoroughly enjoyed reading all the replies, I even learned a few things. Time has passed, and I figure some of you out there will have some new and interesting stories to share, so tell me:
So I was thinking of silly things I’ve done that pseudo-broke my system, or made me think I had a broken system. Like the time I put the cmd :
exit
in my ~/.bash_aliases file and I had to open a text editor to fix it because that broke all the terminals on my machine.
I’m curious what other silly things users have done to confuse themselves.
Op Op.


Not exactly Linux related but I think it is in the same spirit.
I self-host a git server at home which uses non-default SSH port. In my home network I did a local port-forward from port 22, so that I didn’t have to specify it every time I connect to it. I somehow messed up the port-forward rule, so it routed all outbound traffic to port 22 to my home server. I didn’t notice this for a while.
After a few months I tried to connect to another SSH server (public, work-related) and it failed. I tried the same with a VPN with an exit node in another country and this time it worked. I got scared that my ISP or some adversary was trying to do a MITM attack. I remembered my local network configuration about an hour later. Gave myself a big scare that day. 😅