The Official Dumb Mistakes Thread (TM) part deux

davidm · Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 6:57 pm Post subject:

Having ubuntu on a machine before with a separate ext3 partition acting as a datadisk independent of /.. Like an idiot, then fully backing it up and removing it via fdisk prior to the Gentoo install.

... Of course it didn't need to be removed at all. It was on a separate partition and could have easily been mounted just lik normal on Gentoo. D'oh!

It came to my mind about two seconds after writing the new partition table. :oops:

jho · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 1:52 am Post subject:

I was trying out a small status script for Apache on my home server. It involved spawning a few sh processes to get some of the information. After getting the script to work properly (or so I thought), I decided to check top and saw that there were 500+ zombie processes of sh. For some reason they weren't quitting properly. Quite surprised, shocked even, from that I did the first thing that came into my mind.. kill `pgrep sh` (this is an OpenBSD system mind you; no killall here)

Only after running that command (and seeing my ssh instance disconnect) I realized that pgrep matches any substring of the process name without the -x flag. Guess what all "sh" matches? There went sshd which was my only way of getting in touch with the server without having to mess with video cables etc. I ended up hard resetting the whole box to get it to start sshd when booting. Now i'm running fsck on the 500GB USB HD to get it to mount... Then I'll have to get rtorrent to re-hash the 300GB of stuff I was seeding... This will be a long night... :lol:

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szczerb · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 2:06 am Post subject:

Remember to sort out acpi for the next time ;] So that you can just press the power button (unless it's still an AT...which is unlikely with USB ( I guess it's 2.0 which never was on a AT board, so you'd have to buy a PCI USB card four you Pentium 1 or something - very unlikely) ) and it shuts down cleanly. That's what saved my data through all those xorg freezes ;]

jho · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 2:18 am Post subject:

I wonder how the ACPI stuff works on OpenBSD nowadays.. The only stuff I got by quickly googling was from 2004 and said it's not officially supported and one shouldn't expect it to work.

Fortunately I don't have a habit of making (that bad) mistakes too often, so I think I don't need to bother since there's nothing too important on that box (except my porn collection of course

).
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szczerb · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 11:10 am Post subject:

Don't you care about your porn collection? :lol:

gkmac · Posted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 6:18 pm Post subject:

Attempted to try out MythTV 0.22rc2 on a spare hard drive. So I shut down the MythTV box and swap the hard drive in the case. Press the power button with rescue CD in hand... but it doesn't POST. Instead the power light turns off and all the fans go to max speed. No beep. Nothing on the display. No drive activity.

Swapped the old hard drive back in, same result.
Took the old hard drive out, same result.
Disconnected the DVD writer, same result.
Reseated the RAM in a different slot, same result.
Removed all the expansion cards, same result.

So I prepare to clear everything out of the box in preparation for a CPU swap. Took out the 24 pin ATX power connector and reached over to the 4 pin CPU power connector...

...which is already disconnected. I don't remember disconnecting it.

Plugged in the CPU power connector that somehow fell out when I swapped the hard drive, then the ATX power connector... and I see the BIOS screen for the first time again.
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rodoke · Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 7:30 pm Post subject:

Wasting three days of your life installing Gentoo on a brand-new quad-core system. Turns out, assemblers don't like it when

edit_21 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Nov 2004 Posts: 110

Getting to work way to early, selecting the wrong term, updating a mysql slave instead of one of the masters, then wondering why non of the slaves are updating ... 15 million rows in on table to sanitize, 7pm and home time...

:roll:

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1633

I guess I'm obligated to post... :oops:

So I was running short on disk space, and I decided to clean out my /usr/lib/debug folder (which contains debug information is FEATURES=splitdebug is enabled). Generally, it's a safe thing to do...

So, I was looking for stuff to delete, I thought, why don't I delete /usr/lib/debug/usr/lib/gcc, since I probably won't need backtraces from that. So I go and "rm -r /usr/lib/gcc" ... whoops - that first slash was not supposed to be there

Problems:
- I don't have a compiler to compile GCC with
- I don't have a liveCD, since last time I needed one was 2 years ago
- It's past midnight, and I have work due

Further problems:
- libstdc++ is gone, and none of the C++-dependent applications which aren't running work. For example Python.

DON'T PANIC, I say to myself

The good thing is, I have KDE running, so as long as I keep my windows open, can still do some things. Like Googling for things. Like "gentoo tinderbox".

Whew, I think. Now I'm safe. I'll just get the gcc package, extract it, and then copy over the /usr/lib/gcc, and reemerge gcc to make sure everything is right. The problem? Tinderbox has gcc 4.3, while I have 4.4. So I extract 4.3 into /, and cross my fingers in hope that gcc-config is not a python script. Luckily, it's not, and I switch to 4.3 successfully. Python now works, and so does emerge, but, some other applications don't, so I can't just leave 4.3 - I have to rebuild 4.4. So I decide, I'll just have gcc build while I go to sleep, and everything will be fine. Then, I remember about this thread, and I decide to post here.

Good thing I did! Some time into the compile, it fails due to the graphite stuff. I disable the graphite flag and run again. I really don't want to wait another hour for gcc to build, so I'm gong to go to sleep now, and hope everything works tomorow morning. Wish me luck!

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

Classic!

Good luck.

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1633

Alright, gcc built fine, I rebuilt it again (with graphite flag on, this time), rebooted and everything went fine. Yay Gentoo!

Note to self: don't do potentially risky stuff late at night. (Did I mention I also managed to delete /usr/lib/gimp?)

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

ziggysquatch · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 8:56 pm Post subject:

From ssh... init 1 instead of init q...

needless to say, I now use init Q

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

slycordinator · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 9:38 pm Post subject:

ziggysquatch · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 9:40 pm Post subject:

jbarnes8 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Nov 2009 Posts: 92

How about completely outdated Debian install on hdb and a brand new one on hda..
Hmm, might as well try gentoo on my spare HD....

fdisk hda

******

Another not so stupid one.
As Root
adduser jeremy .... .. ...
Enlightenment->quit
login jeremy
su
Denied
reboot
Command not found
shutdown
Command not found
sudo
Denied
umount /mnt/home
Denied

Pull power plug
login jeremy
DOH!

jdmulloy · Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2009 11:27 pm Post subject:

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

jbarnes8 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Nov 2009 Posts: 92

msalerno · Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 3:39 am Post subject:

New machine, new job, brand new Gentoo install. The last thing I always think about is the sound card. So after a day configuring and compiling I decided to test out the sound card. I had no mp3s or cds so I decided to listen to a little static.

BoneKracker · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 1488 Location: U.S.A.

That's a good one. You might want to see a psychologist about why you did that.

Good tip on testdisk, I wasn't aware of it. Hey, it's on SystemRescueCD. Cool.

slycordinator · Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 4:19 am Post subject:

Muso · Posted: Wed Nov 18, 2009 4:23 am Post subject:

YEARS ago, I think I was 18 at the time... some friends and I were walking around about 10 pm in Malibu. We saw this girl bent over fixing her shoe, from behind. Really nice shape, and then HE turns around with a mustache. We all might have thrown up a little in our own mouths.

Viewing that was one of the dumbest mistakes of my life (real girls are more careful... in general... in how and when the bend over like that).
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jbarnes8 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Nov 2009 Posts: 92