I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I’ve got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

  • corsicanguppy
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    2 months ago

    Let a narcisist bipolar family member onto my home server for phaseI. For phaseII I granted too much access in sudo because I was busy. Fast forward a year or two and a downswing triggers the victim rage and he attempts to wreck my server after a minor argument – would have, too, if I wasn’t keenly aware of a conversation he had a few weeks before where he detailed “how to fuck with someone horribly” to a peer and I used that recollection to reverse the damage. It was a lucky thing, and 25 years on I have better security and backup processes.

    I still regret that. #family, right?

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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      2 months ago

      Not got any computer related stories from my messed up family, but I can relate to many of the vibes here. Solidarity on the family front.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      I would just give them there own VM. They can blow it up and it will do notho. Bonus if you can restore it quickly.

      • corsicanguppy
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        2 months ago

        Ah, but 25 years ago? No easy vm setup. And I trusted the guy then, so I wasn’t guarded as I should be.

        We learn through pain.