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.

  • AcornTickler@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    2 hours ago

    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. 😅

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    5·
    13 hours ago

    A few years ago at $DAYJOB, we were evaluating Apache Nifi, which is basically a data routing tool. I wanted to use it for reading some files from one directory and just writing them back out to another.

    So, I figured, I have two stray files in my home-directory, I’ll just tell it to read straight from the home-directory.
    What I didn’t expect, is that it would recurse into subdirectories.
    And even less so, that it would remove the files it had read.

    So, all the files in my home-directory were gone.

    Although, it had written them dutifully to that other directory. So, in theory, I still had all my files.

    But it hadn’t copied the folder structure. Documents, SSH keys, cache files, everything was placed into a single, flat folder.