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.
I was setting up fail2ban on an sftp server at work.
Guess who got
adminpermanently banned from that machine.I had a situation where I though my user was banned. I was troubleshooting an entirely different issue when it hit me. The Debian install was extremely corrupt. It was a restore from a snapshot but for some reason the snapshot was totally corrupted. I loaded a different snapshot and the machine worked fine.
The .ssh/authorized_keys was just gibberish in the bad snapshot