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?

  • Mahonia@lemmy.world
    11·
    10 months ago

    I set up 2FA via a hardware security key (a yubikey) for login, sudo etc. I then tried to switch security keys, removing the old pam files and adding a new one. But I didn’t tidy the pam files up before logging in, and there was effectively no way to log in, since editing the pam files required sudo access to edit in the first place. So basically the whole system required access to a pluggable authentication module that it no longer had any ability to recognize. It was honestly pretty funny. I did manage to recover my data by booting from a live system and decrypting my drive from there.

    I’ve also accidentally removed my desktop environment twice while trying to update Python versions and then cleaning up old packages, but that’s kinda not that big deal and is just a facepalm moment.