(Li|U)n[iu]x admins collected and own WTFs



  • Hey

    After someone wrote about ":(){ :|:& };:" and "rm -rf" on main post comments, I'd like to start this thread. What did you do yourself / cleanup after others?

    I was hit by:

    • 'kill <pid of ssh>' while working remote (looked at wrong one in the ps tree),
    • 'shutdown'-ing / 'reboot'-ing while on remote shell by accident, thinking it was my box
    • 'iptables -F'-lushing while INPUT was DROP by default
    • mixing up partitions in software raid (noticed "rebuilding" too late)
    • 'tar -zcf *' instead of 'tar -zcf archive *' when the first 'aaaaa' file is the most crucial one
    • not noticing >> instead of << when running a command from history
    • setting too aggressive brute-force logins blocking rules and missing password 3 times in a row next time when connecting (ip block for a day)

    I cleaned up after others, that were hit by:

    • forcing bash update before libc package (lame update scripts on slackware - beware updating by more than 1 version - swaret will not warn you)
    • rm -rf /lib (I don't think we're in chroot anymore)

    Fortunately I've had backups always. But now I know more than others. And you have to do it once - no matter how much you think of it and how careful you are - it will hit you. I know many people that did some of this things. You should expect you'll hit every little thing like this and think before that, how would you fix it :)

    So what is your story? 



  • I once murdered a hobo.



  • I once accidentally removed /bin (meant to remove a subdir named bin, somehow a / got in there). This naturally left almost everything crippled. emerge refused to work with /bin/(ba)sh missing, for example, and of course, sash is also in /bin ... The fortunate thing was, I still had things like wget and scp, so I could scp off some /bin binaries from another ssh host I had access to until I had enough to get emerge to rebuild the rest.

    Also, not linux, but I somehow once managed to practically destroy a box running win2k once. It was an (older-than-dirt) packard bell, and while just goofing around, I set up a cmd.exe forkbomb, which led to BSOD, which led to the computer never able to boot again (tried floppy, etc). I'm thinking, user-assisted "natural" causes?



  • I once wanted to do "kill -9 $$" to kill the current shell without writing to the history (some bad typos I didn't want to repeat in C-r). The only problem was, I did "kill -9 -1"...
     



  • I have done something pretty similar - forgetting to add the dot to:

     rm -rf ./*
     



  • [quote user="viraptor"]

    • 'iptables -F'-lushing while INPUT was DROP by default

    [/quote]

    My friend (yes, really :-P) once did something similar, but backwards: he was setting up the firewall rules over ssh, and he set the policy to DROP (or maybe it was DENY in those days?) before setting any rules.  Fortunately the box was a minute or two's walk away, so he easily managed to fix it.  Didn't stop him from doing exactly the same thing 15 minutes later, though....

    As for me, the most interesting thing I can remember was when I was trying to learn bash history substitution... as root.  I accidentally recalled an "rm *" command, but fortunately I was in /root and there weren't any particularly important files there. 



  • Just having acquired basic Unix skills, I tried to show a friend, with whom I was sharing the account, a stupid joke, involving a shell command. So I did "cat > name" and typed a simple echo command or something like that. However, "name" was the file where my friend had stored his nearly finalized essay in nroff (we're talking 1985 here) that was printing at that very moment. We could never recover the file, but it completed printing fine...

     

    Another f*ck up, much later, was removing (or perhaps moving, I can't remember) an essential dynamic library, perhaps even libc. Suddenly all commands quit working. It was a headless box, so the only thing I could do was try to repair it using commands from /bin, since these still were functioning (good thing they don't rely on dynamic libraries)! Had I logged out or lost the connection, the box would have been rendered completely useless.

     

    Another stupidity was installing DEC Ultrix (from tape!) on a DEC-station and answering "yes" to the question whether I really didn't want to change anything to my set-up. I thought it meant the current configuration of the work station, but in reality it referred to the default values just shown. So the installation procedure happily started to repartition my drive, losing 300Mb of files.



  • Deleted the partition table. Recoverable fortunately.

    rm -fr . in my root instead of the broken copy of root. Ctrl+C wasn;t enough to stop the nuking of /lib and worse /etc. That meant a reinstall.

    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade from Dapper to Edgy. Breaks X, and I hate aptitude so I ended up going down the reinstall route, ultimately back to Dapper. As much of an Ubuntu WTF as a me WTF really.

    Not having up-to-date backups :D

    Having sshd running but having forgotten to open port 22 in the firewall.

    Not a WTF as such since it worked, but I needed to DL and burn a DVD iso without having the free disk space. So I wgetted it to a named pipe and burnt the pipe with growisofs.



  • Compiling a Linux kernel (back in the 2.0 days) and forgetting to include my root filesystem.

    Two hours later, reconfiguring my kernel, I came across an option for 'loopback interface', and thinking "gee I don't need that." (was a hopeless newbie at the time.) Took me four weeks to find out why I couldn't log in when running multiuser.

    Just four months ago, I did the exact same iptables fuckup.

    Just two months ago, was working on the company's main developmestruction machine as one of the disks in the (Highpoint IDE) raid-1 set had failed. Unknown to me, Highpoint cards don't hide the physical disks that are part of the raid set. "Hey, there's two spare disks in this box. I'll just 'dd' the data over there...." and copied the failed disk onto the good one.

    By the time I cleaned that up I gave my notice and found a better place to work which could actually afford backup.




  • sftp

    In grad school I wrote simulation code on my laptop and then ran the simulations on a workstation in our laboratory. So I would routinely sftp the code from my laptop to the workstation and later sftp the simulation results back the other way.

    One day I was in the middle of sending new code and getting back data. I sftp'ed, navigated to a data directory containing the results from several month-long simulations, and entered get *. I got confused when I listed the directory contents and found that all the files were zero bytes.

    I had forgotten that I had already ssh'ed into the workstation and was trying to sftp the files back onto itself. Unfortunately sftp didn't issue any warning that I was doing something stupid and decided that resizing the files to zero bytes was the proper response.



  • Since I was not wanting to do dual-boot anymore (I could run Windows with VMware if needed to), I decided to format my Windows partition and use it as /home.

    Partition list:

    hda1 -> /
    hda2 -> /media (where I kept all my stuff)
    hda3 -> Windows partition

    Booted from a Live-CD and typed 'mkfs.reiserfs /dev/hda1' instead of 'mkfs.reiserfs /dev/hda3', so I essentially formated the Linux partition! :(



  • Nothing to do with Linux, but... 

    I was messing around on my computer at my temp job at FirstUSA (old credit card company absorbed by BankOne, who was absorbed by Chase). I was playing around in the MS-DOS prompt when I noticed the deltree command. I decided to try it out on c:\temp\somerandomfolder so I started typing...

    deltree /y c:\

    And ya know, that forward-slash key is so close to the Enter key that they were both hit almost simultaneously...



  • [quote user="AlpineR"]

    I had forgotten that I had already ssh'ed into the workstation and was trying to sftp the files back onto itself.

    [/quote]

    That reminded me of great log filtering command:

    cat log.file | grep -v "worthless line text" > log.file

    .... unfortunately file is opened for writing and truncated before cat is run. Don't try this at home :/

    grep -v "worthless line text" < log.file > log.file

    doesn't work either - what you're looking for is:

    cat log.file | grep -v "..." | tee log.file > /dev/null



  • I've dropped a production database a couple times.

    I also uninstalled openSSL once, on a new fedora box that was at a hosting facility.  Turns out nothing runs.  No new SSH sessions.  The package manager won't even run.  So then you try to wget the openssl package, only to discover that both wget and curl require openssl...

     



  • [quote user="viraptor"][quote user="AlpineR"]

    I had forgotten that I had already ssh'ed into the workstation and was trying to sftp the files back onto itself.

    [/quote]

    That reminded me of great log filtering command:

    cat log.file | grep -v "worthless line text" > log.file

    .... unfortunately file is opened for writing and truncated before cat is run. Don't try this at home :/

    grep -v "worthless line text" < log.file > log.file

    doesn't work either - what you're looking for is:

    cat log.file | grep -v "..." | tee log.file > /dev/null

    [/quote]

     

    Personally, I just output to temp.file, and then mv temp.file log.file once I'm sure everything worked as planned.  Better to play it safe.   



  • Worst I've done is accidentally rm -rf'ing /usr/lib32/. Could've been a lot worse, but it still wasn't fun to fix. I've also done "do-shit foo > foo" or something similar a few times, but I've luckily never lost any important files to that.

    And how do you get a password wrong *three* times in a row? I've got a 20-character password for disk encryption that I have to enter at every boot, and two cats who very much like to sit on the keyboard to get my attention, and I've still never gotten it wrong even *twice* in a row.



  • On Windows, but one time when I was changing my password, I managed to do the SAME typo on both entries :o Good thing it was on a network where I could just ask the admin to reset it.

    Entering the wrong password several times is also quite easy if you can't remember which password you use for the system you're trying to log in to. That has happened to me. Heck, some places online I've managed to forget my USERNAME, never mind my password!



  • Doing some file clean up; (okay this is pretty basic, no fancy IP tables or nuttin'):

     "rm *.bak *.tmp *       .log"  (extra spaces included for emphasis)
     



  • [quote user="The Real WTF"]

    And how do you get a password wrong three times in a row? I've got a 20-character password for disk encryption that I have to enter at every boot, and two cats who very much like to sit on the keyboard to get my attention, and I've still never gotten it wrong even twice in a row.

    [/quote]

    1. Become a new sysadmin.
    2. Get a card with password written down.
    3. Discover, that it's random 16-chars string.
    4. Try to login with ssh, where you don't even see stars for characters, with a keyboard that will or will not recognise a keypress - depending on sun, wind direction, accumulated dust, noise in the room....

    Normal passwords? I'm writing my own mixed characters/numbers/height with eyes closed and hands tied behind ;)



  • rm * .bak

    (same like marvin_rabbit)
     

    removing or renaming (can't remember) /bin/sh

    (had to reinstall the OS then)



    tar cvf instead of tar xvf (destroying the tar file)

    tar xvf instead of tar cvf (overwriting the files with older versions)

    "scp x y z" instead of "scp x y z destination" (overwriting z)
     

    -9 Killing an Informix database during recovery probably wasn't the best way to get it working again... (eventually, it was, since it forced me to reinstall it then)


    But the by far worst one was when we had this Unix workstation (pretty expensive then) with the hard drive not securely mounted (physically, we didn't have the right screws), just inserted into the case; when we wanted to go to a customer with this machine, the hard drive (pretty expensive then, IIRC USD10K) fell out and was dead.
     



  • [quote user="ammoQ"]

    (had to reinstall the OS then)

    [/quote]You
    couldn't've used a livecd to put one back? Even if your controller or
    filesystem is not supported by said livecd, you could probably figure
    out something like passing root=\dev\cdrom to the kernel when booting
    from your regular bootdrive and still be on your way in considerably
    less time than it would take to reinstall.



  • Minor hardware-related one.... during the course of pranking each other at our summer internship, my coworker and I discovered that a DEC Alpha terminal will lock up hard if the mouse is unplugged while it's on.



  • Mixing up data, swap, and boot partitions during a manual install.

    Curiously, Linux didn't have any problem with formatting a swap partition as ext2 and formatting a data partition as swap -- nor even mounting them.  Or reformatting them while mounted.  Only when I ran out of space during the install did I notice anything was wrong.  It's not often you see a df listing of -64Z free.  And twenty gigs of swap was certainly not what I wanted.

     I'd made a big list of what all the partitions should be then built them in the wrong order.  Guhhhhh.  That could have been ugly.



  • Back in the '80s working on a dual-floppy PC, I typed


    del . obj

    to get rid of intermediate files taking up space after linking; the accidental space between "." and "obj" led MS-DOS to interpret it as

    del .

    I then spent a couple of days with a sector editor, stringing one or two hundred k of 8086 Assembler files back together. On the upside, I learnt an enormous amount about FAT.



  • DOS is not UNIX.



  • [quote user="The Real WTF"]And how do you get a password wrong *three* times in a row? I've got a 20-character password for disk encryption that I have to enter at every boot, and two cats who very much like to sit on the keyboard to get my attention, and I've still never gotten it wrong even *twice* in a row.
    [/quote]

     My work computer likes to randomly change between us and uk keyboard layouts on the login screen. Unfortunately the password contains a character which is in a different position on one layout than the other. I got locked out several times before I worked out what was happening.

     
    The other day I did

    ifconfig eth0 down

    over ssh. Took me longer than I would have liked to realise why the command was taking so long to run.
     



  • [quote user="pnieuwkamp"][quote user="ammoQ"]

    (had to reinstall the OS then)

    [/quote]You
    couldn't've used a livecd to put one back? Even if your controller or
    filesystem is not supported by said livecd, you could probably figure
    out something like passing root=\dev\cdrom to the kernel when booting
    from your regular bootdrive and still be on your way in considerably
    less time than it would take to reinstall.

    [/quote]

    Back then, 1991 or so, the machine had a tape drive, but no CD drive.



  • [quote user="Corona688"]DOS is not UNIX.
    [/quote]

    No, GNU is Not UNIX.

    DOS is Other System. 



  • [quote user="viraptor"]

    Hey

    After someone wrote about ":(){ :|:& };:" and "rm -rf" on main post comments, I'd like to start this thread. What did you do yourself / cleanup after others?

    [/quote]Let's see...

    • 'kill <pid of ssh>' while working
      remote (looked at wrong one in the ps tree),

    Check (at least a dozen distinct ways, including killing, crashing, shutting down, hanging up, power-cycling, changing the encryption keys for, or otherwise rendering useless a wide variety of access points, firewalls, gateway servers, routers, UPS power controls, modems, VPN daemons, log daemons, Kerberos masters, watchdog heartbeat processes, and other things on the critical path between me and the root shell on a live system...).

    The most spectacular was the array of four servers and four UPSes.  Not only did the people who set up the room use the wrong monitoring signal cable, but they connected the power cables to one UPS and the monitoring cables to another, in a cycle.  When I installed the UPS monitoring software on one of the machines, because it was using the wrong cable it immediately powered off the machine next to it...and as that machine died, it sent a signal to the UPS it was monitoring which powered off the machine next to it...and the next...and finally the first one.  20 seconds later they all powered back on, but the machine I was testing with had the monitoring software configured to start at boot, and as soon as it came up it tried to monitor again...click...click...click...click...it took another two cycles before I realized what was going on, and another for me to stop laughing long enough to fix it...

    • 'shutdown'-ing / 'reboot'-ing while on remote shell by
      accident, thinking it was my box

    Check.  I never make that mistake on a test or dev machine, always a production server or some unsuspecting user's desktop. 

    • 'iptables -F'-lushing while INPUT was DROP by default
    Check (and OUTPUT and even FORWARD once).
    • mixing up partitions in software raid (noticed "rebuilding" too late)
    I've tried to do RAID5 catastrophic recovery (that's where more than one disk failed and you're now just trying to pick up the pieces) and done that once.  690GB of slightly damaged but still mostly-recoverable data was irretrievably lost in a matter of seconds.  Fortunately there were backups, although at the time 690GB of data represented 78 continuous hours of tape access...
    • 'tar -zcf *' instead of 'tar -zcf archive '
      when the first 'aaaaa' file is the most crucial one
    I've avoided that one, but I did once mail myself my 600KB home directory as a series of uuencoded tarballs, one for each directory in the directory tree.  Unfortunately I didn't realize that tar includes all subdirectories by default, so there were dozens or hundreds of copies of the lower-level subdirectories, a total of 60MB accumulated in the outgoing mail queue.  In 1992, individual message size limits were on the order of 100KB and mailbox total size limits on the order of 1MB (which is why I had to split up the files in the first place).  At the time 60MB of mail could--and did--take out a large university's campus mail server.
    • not noticing >> instead of << when running a command from history

    I once had a cat walk across my keyboard while I was in another room.  She held-down the up-arrow for a while, then hit Enter on a machine that had open root shells on remote servers.  Very bad things happened.  I now have every computer in my house automatically lock down after five minutes of inactivity, and I now take care to phrase commands in a way that makes them harmless when entered out of context (e.g. always "rm -rf /full/path/" instead of "cd /full/path" followed by "rm -rf *").

    • setting too aggressive brute-force logins blocking rules and missing password 3 times in a row next time when connecting (ip block for a day)
    I set up one of those but I insisted on implementing a white list first so I wasn't locked out; however, the very first entry in the blocking logs was me, and I was not testing the white list at the time...

    [quote user="viraptor"]I cleaned up after others, that were hit by:[/quote]

    • forcing bash update before libc package (lame update scripts on slackware - beware updating by more than 1 version - swaret will not warn you)

    I do a lot of work with embedded custom boot images of various kinds (from firewall-on-a-bootable-CD to encrypted-root-filesystem-on-a-laptop), so things like forgetting a critical shared library in /lib (or more often upgrading the binaries in /lib and finding they need new shared libs) are a daily occurrence.  Also, a surprising number of disk read errors occur in the critical path for things like /usr/lib and /lib when disks start to go bad.  And if you're on the experimental branches of Debian or Gentoo, this kind of thing happens once or twice a year...it's part of the risk of doing front-line QA on these distros.

    I have done a lot of moving around filesystems on live servers.  Each server process needs to be hot backuped, shut down, recovered, and restarted on the new filesystem.  It's a complex process with a lot of critical steps, one of which is often to kill and restart all of the processes running on the machine except for two:  the login shell, and the ssh daemon that is hosting it.  It turns out that's surprisingly hard to get right (wait, don't kill the screen daemon either!  D'oh...).

    Another step involves atomically changing the root filesystem for all processes on the machine with pivot_root.  Now imagine that you do these steps on a machine 6000 miles away, and then discover that the temporary root filesystem that you created to keep the machine running during the transition was just slightly too small and doesn't contain all the data it was supposed to--and that while libc cut off after the first megabyte is actually usable for a surprising number of programs, that number does not include chroot, pivot_root, mount, cp, ln, rsync, tar, cpio, cat, chmod, dd, reboot, shutdown, or the parts of bash I used in my chroot sanity check before I ran pivot_root...

    I think I've personally discovered everything that can possibly go wrong with that process--the hard way.

    • rm -rf /lib (I don't think we're in chroot anymore)

    I once had a user running an IRC bot they had written.  As a debugging statement, they had something that would take input from a channel and feed it to:

        echo $@ >> logfile

    Sooner or later somebody said "rm -rf *" in an IRC channel, and I had to restore 17GB of that user's home directory data from backups.



  • [quote user="Zygo"]

    ... 

    [/quote]

    LMAO :) 

    [quote user="Zygo"]

    I once had a user running an IRC bot they had written.  As a debugging statement, they had something that would take input from a channel and feed it to:

        echo $@ >> logfile

    Sooner or later somebody said "`rm -rf *`" in an IRC channel, and I had to restore 17GB of that user's home directory data from backups.

    [/quote]

    Wait... IRC bot in bash?... I've just lost my 'stupid program of the decade award' for 'webserver in awk' to some bash script? Damn it!



  • Let's see:
    - rebooting customer's remote server thinking I was working on my own - twice in a row
    - changing the firewall script just before going home, running said script without checking if it's OK, going home - well, not for long
    - trying to expand a software RAID5 array, only to find out it takes 15 days to complete (crap SiI controler+4 300GB drives=bad combo); this was not an on-line resize
    - trying to update an initrd image and copying /lib in the wrong direction



  • The setting: early 90s, a DEC Ultrix server (workstation) at my high school, shared and administered by a bunch of students.

    I was connected to the machine late one Friday night, performing a very lengthy 'make' (gcc upgrade, or something like that) as root. I bg'd the make, yet it continued spewing output at me. After deciding that I really didn't want to continue looking at that at the time, yet might want to review the output later, I planned to kill the job and restart it with the output redirected to a file:

    root@server# kill -9 %1

    Unfortunately, amidst all of the screen-scroll, I didn't notice that I the "%" key was apparently not pressed quite hard enough... and PID 1 was killed (init)... taking down just about every other running process, including inetd. The machine was completely useless until Monday morning, when I was able to get in to the machine room to hard-reboot the sucker.
     



  • cd /
    cd stufff
    rm -r *

    Doesn't seem bad? here was the output:

    $ cd /
    $ cd stufff
    stufff: No such file or directory
    $ rm -r *
    $

     

    Or, there was the time I hooked up my friends harddrive to my computer (without mounting it in the case.).  Normally not a bad thing, unless you lay it on some uninsulated metal.

     

    What about the time I wrote a program that writes to ports 70 and 71? Overwriting much of my CMOS configuration (and somehow damaging the FAT table of the boot harddrive).

     

    Although, I've managed to fix problems too. My girlfriend-at-the-time had a harddrive starting to fail.  One day the computer won't boot normally, so I add my hdd to her system, write a program that does a raw image dump of the disk. 

    I found out two things: The first FAT table (DOS stores two) was wiped out, and the second FAT table doesn't have all the right offsets. 

    I wrote another program that goes through the disk image, and look for sub directories (DOS starts all subdirectories with entries for . and ..).   I was able to reconstruct the directory tree and extract most of her files from the image. 
     



  • Closest thing to a WTF I've done was a slight mistake while replacing the boot hard drive in my computer.  I was upgrading from a 60GB hard drive to a 200GB drive, re-arranging the partition layout in the process.


    The old drive's partition layout:
    /dev/hda1: Win98 boot
    /dev/hda2: Old Linux startup partition, now unused and too small to be practical
    /dev/hda3: Old Linux swap partition, now used as the startup partition
    /dev/hda4: Win98 data

    The new drive's layout:
    /dev/hda1: Win98 boot
    /dev/hda2: Linux startup partition, containing the contents of the old /dev/hda3
    /dev/hda3: Win98 data
    /dev/hda4: Storage for large files that don't need to be backed up (/tmp, an offline copy of Wikipedia, etc.)

    I set up the first three partitions to be exactly the same as their counterparts, used 'dd' to image the data across, shut the computer down, moved the new hard drive from "secondary slave" to "primary master", and turned the computer back on.

    At which point I discovered the hard way that the active boot partition and the LILO boot sector were on the now-vanished /dev/hda2.



  • hi there,

     

    I used Windoze Remote Desktop and wanted to change network settings. Due to a lag the click ended up in deactivate. The other computer was some 150 miles away. 



  • I found out the hard way that on Solaris, the killall command does not take any arguments.



  • [quote user="joe_bruin"]I found out the hard way that on Solaris, the killall command does not take any arguments.
    [/quote]


    What sort of sensible function could "killall" have if it doesn't take arguments?



  • @Carnildo said:

    [quote user="joe_bruin"]I found out the hard way that on Solaris, the killall command does not take any arguments.

    What sort of sensible function could "killall" have if it doesn't take arguments?
    [/quote]
    Presumably it's used during shutdown. Linux typically has a "killall5" command that does something similar, although it does take an argument to specify which signal to use.



  • Before doing some tidying on a Sun box, I thought I would save all the files to tape, for "safety's sake". Trouble was, I  mis-typed the target device, and wrote to raw disk rather than the tape. I had backups, which I needed! Took me about 2 hours to get the machine operating, after which I went round and apologised to all 4 of the other users...

     



  • man, Unix is lame! :-)



  • @webzter said:

    Minor hardware-related one.... during the course of pranking each other at our summer internship, my coworker and I discovered that a DEC Alpha terminal will lock up hard if the mouse is unplugged while it's on.


    I found out with the ati X11 driver (the free one, maybe the radeon one) using a metascreen style dual-head setup if either monitor is disconnected it will crash the system. No X. No ssh. No tty's. Nothing.



    On a slightly related note it would be really nice if mke3fs and friends would confirm about formating a partition, I accidentally typed /dev/hdb1 instead of /dev/hda1 because I'm used to mounting /dev/hdb1 (anime partition) and I wanted to format my /dev/hda1 (windows partition). Oh well, at least it wasn't anything I couldn't recover.



  • @viraptor said:

    (Li|U)n[iu]x

    What the hell is Unux? 



  • foo bar [b]>[/b] /path/to/some/command

    Instead of ...

    foo bar [b]|[/b] /path/to/some/command

    Probably the dumbest and easiest one for me to make. Fortunately I keep a nicely maintained path now and have a personal policy to never explicitly type a full path to a command if I can help it.



  • Was trying to compile a 2.6.22 kernel in Slackware 12.

    Copy my .config (which is all configured for my hardware) from my ArchLinux partition (which runs 2.6.22, too), build the kernel, BLAM! Kernel Panic. Check the configuration again, maybe I forgot one module, Kernel Panic again.

     
    Was to give up when I realized that I used an initrd on Arch Linux, and this initrd had the reiserfs module and the module for my IDE controller.

    And, sure enough, they were checked as modules in my .config.  Marked them as built-in and the kernel worked. 
     



  • What the hell is Linix?



  • A friend gave me a copy of slackware 3.x about 10 years. I managed to figure out how to partition and install in about a week. It took me a year to learn that there was a graphical interface.

    More recently(a few years ago), I bought a 200GB HDD. XP made me mad by only giving me access to the first 120GB (this was before the patches that fixed this). I decided to partition in Linux, and use it for storage of music, movies, etc. At first everything was ok. XP seemed to read and write to it just fine. That is until i added more than 120GB onto it. Pretty soon, most of my music was corrupted. Not that they didn't play, but each song was an extract of part of a movie.


    Not knowing how to use ln -s properly when linking to a directory, and then using rm to delete the link.



  • @spxza said:

    More recently(a few years ago), I bought a 200GB HDD. XP made me mad by only giving me access to the first 120GB (this was before the patches that fixed this). I decided to partition in Linux, and use it for storage of music, movies, etc. At first everything was ok. XP seemed to read and write to it just fine. That is until i added more than 120GB onto it. Pretty soon, most of my music was corrupted. Not that they didn't play, but each song was an extract of part of a movie.

    Known windows bug. It should never have even attempted to access a filesystem that was larger than the limit, and would routinely destroy any such filesystems that it did encounter.



  • @asuffield said:

    @spxza said:

    More recently(a few years ago), I bought a 200GB HDD. XP made me mad by only giving me access to the first 120GB (this was before the patches that fixed this). I decided to partition in Linux, and use it for storage of music, movies, etc. At first everything was ok. XP seemed to read and write to it just fine. That is until i added more than 120GB onto it. Pretty soon, most of my music was corrupted. Not that they didn't play, but each song was an extract of part of a movie.

    Known windows bug. It should never have even attempted to access a filesystem that was larger than the limit, and would routinely destroy any such filesystems that it did encounter.

    sigh
     



  • Heres quite a recent one:

    A friend of mine moved /lib/glibc* to get his compiled program to use a glibc local to the program, while we were in the process of fixing that minor issue, a few months before I did a cleanup of installed deb packages, and removed dhcpcd. The problem is, the box is coloed and gets it's IP via dhcp, doh.

     



  • @Nik_Doof said:

    Heres quite a recent one:

    A friend of mine moved /lib/glibc* to get his compiled program to use a glibc local to the program, while we were in the process of fixing that minor issue, a few months before I did a cleanup of installed deb packages, and removed dhcpcd. The problem is, the box is coloed and gets it's IP via dhcp, doh.

     

    ouch, how'd you fix it (the glibc thing)? (i know one way - there's a statically-linked copy of "ln" that only creates hardlinks on most systems, you can run it if you have an shell open.)


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