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?

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[–] 53 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Not me, but one I saw... dude used chmod to lock down permissions across the board... including root... including the chmod command.

"What do I do?"

🤔

"Re-install?"

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You could boot on an USB, mount the filesystem and change the permissions. But if the dude changed a whole lot of permissions, reinstalling might be the smart thing to do...

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  • [–] [S] 10 points 2 years ago

    Yeah, a very unfortunate one: probably, the most painful to recover from. I'd just reinstall, honesty 😅 At least with mine I could simply add the necessary stuff from chroot or pacstrap and not spend a metric ton of time tracking all the files with incorrect permissions

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    There's got to be other tools though that could change the file permissions on chmod, right? Though I suppose you'd need permission to use them and/or download them.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I managed to do that back when I was new. Luckily it was a fresh install, so I didn't lose much when I had to reinstall.

    So far, that has been the only time I really screwed something up outside of a virtual machine.

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