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.

  • @czardestructo
    16•8 months ago

    Deleted the certs from the sshd daemon which locked me out of a remote server that required and a 2 hour drive to fix.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•8 months ago

      Wonderful. Just like deleting all the iptables rules with a default DENY rule in place *chef’s kiss*. Required calling the service provider to enable a remote console over HTTPS (it was a manual action for them… supposedly).

      Anti Commercial-AI license

      • @[email protected]
        1•8 months ago

        I’m curious: Is it a bad idea to have iptables with a default DENY rule? I use a deafult DENY in ufw, and it uses iptables under the hood.

    • Possibly linuxEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      This is why we use ufw or firewalld. If nothing else setup an undo button