Ways you have broken your gentoo install in the past?

john.newman · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Oct 2009 Posts: 78

Many years ago, gentoo was a lot of walking on eggshells for me. I've destroyed installs in a number of ways, and i'm sure most everyone has ran into some interesting mistakes. However, I don't think any of them were totally unrepairable (besides the accidental "rm -rf" type commands (and yes, I've done /*, more than once :roll:

)). The question of knowing how to or taking the time to repair it is another story.

Now I don't worry about it as much, and if there's something out there I haven't done yet, it would be helpful to know about it now.

A few things that i've done

# emerge -C linux-headers # that was difficult to repair - I've -C'd a lot of important packages.. libcrypt etc)
# echo '"ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"' >> /etc/make.conf # makes for a fun time.. noob thing to do
# rm -rf * # a lot of times due to carelessness with the ! trick
USE="a million different flags that you dont need"
-O3

be careful with that ! trick :idea:

BradN · Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 12:02 am Post subject:

I think one of the more insidious gotchas is how to remove all hidden files/dirs from the current directory.

Hint: rm -rf .* is a very bad idea.

And honestly, I don't know who decided ! would be a nice character to use for a useless (in my opinion) history expansion function. The couple times I did want to use it, I would put the ! on the wrong side and make it worse.

Jaglover · Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 12:05 am Post subject:

Can't add anything exceptional ... worst I've done was removing /var/db/pkg/* ... in an attempt to free some disk space.
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djdunn · Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 5:11 am Post subject:

I had the kernel crash all the time when i decided to compile it with -O3
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Veldrin · Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 5:26 am Post subject:

I followed an install guide, which recommended acovea optimizations. The system was somewhat unstable.

did a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda7 bs=4k skip=123456 (instead of seek) on my var partition to fix a dead sector. As the last backup was more than a Year old, reinstalling was faster.

Trying to run core2 optimized code on a amd system, and wondering why my multimedia apps and browsers were crashing. SSSE3 is not supported on amd.

V.
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forrestfunk81 · Guru Joined: 07 Feb 2006 Posts: 355 Location: münchen.de

In one of my first installs i somehow uninstalled coreutils. So no cp, mv, ls and portage couldn't install anything.
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ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1146 Location: Austria

An old portage update back in about the year 2001 or such broke gcc - that was quite some hell here.
Besides that I had some experimental stuff from that broke python, which kills emerge/portage
Other fun included fucked up kernel configs, graphit optimization and a few other things I don't remember anymore (there were plenty as I started back in 1999 with enoch linux)
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albright · Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 2:26 pm Post subject:

Not destruction, but this was painful

rh1 · Guru Joined: 10 Apr 2010 Posts: 495

One time I was doing a test install on another partition but the problem was i typoed the mount /dev/sda* command and ended up mounting my current install instead. Got interesting after i untarred a new stage3 which has all stable packages overtop of my ~amd64 system.

krinn · Advocate Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 3673

i gave my computer to my neightbor for 2 days

piedar · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Aug 2010 Posts: 80

Hibernate with one kernel, resume with another. Spend days recovering files.

ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1146 Location: Austria

zfs, reiser4... no comment.
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Kollin · Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 7:20 pm Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 8:04 pm Post subject:

I've always run ~arch so I expect a surprise to keep me on my toes now and again.

My two nasty moments were, doing the Xorg update to the split ebuilds and finding libexpat thrown in for free.
That meant no Xorg, as I had to uninstall it, and everything that uses libexpat, most of the rest of the system, broken as the ABI had changed.
That took a whole weekend to unpick.

In the early days of baselayout2 (I installed in mid 2007) openrc was only available from git. Now, it was late at night and my firewall blocked git.
I managed to get baselayout2 without openrc and decided that was a good time to shut down and go to bed.
As, I run ~arch, I set FEATURES=buildpkg, so I have binaries of everything I build. The get out of jail free card was to boot the CD, get into the chroot and emerge -K =baselayout-1. Then I was able to have another go.
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genstorm · Advocate Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 2238 Location: Austria

best self-ownage: uninstalling python (via --depclean methinks)
~arch-ownage: lvm2 update that broke startup with separate /usr partitions
hardware-ownage: bad memory that subsequently killed the system

Only the last made a rebuild necessary though.
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krinn · Advocate Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 3673

ah remind me i have been trap by wget & e2fsprogs upgrade times ago (the good old days without revdep-rebuild).
and i do remember been one time (never get one again after that) by ati radeon pissing drivers that weren't supporting my card.
Not really breaking my system, but i really do remember i was really upset to brought a kickass 3d card that i've paid big money to just run xorg thru vesa at end.

ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1146 Location: Austria

But there's one thing for sure: we did learn from our mistakes

I'm pretty sure about that
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Yamakuzure · Posted: Fri May 27, 2011 9:04 am Post subject:

The most ugly thing I ever did was to add Graphite's loop parallelization to the default C(X)FLAGS. After "emerge --emptytree @world" and a reboot I had about 5 to 10 Minutes before the "self-built-fork-bomb" lead to a kernel panic.
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dE_logics · Veteran Joined: 02 Jan 2009 Posts: 1979 Location: $TERM

Bash history mistakes, I've a habit of -

ionice -c 3 rm -Rf *

However I also -

ionice -c 3 rsync/httrack/cp etc....

And sometimes when passing through bash history to reexecute rsync/httrack/cp etc.... I see the 'ionice -c 3' and hit enter to realize it was 'rm -Rf *'. And the whole day goes bad.

BradN · Posted: Fri May 27, 2011 4:52 pm Post subject:

To be fair, reiser4 would probably have been much more kick-ass had certain events not occurred and the main developer not residing in prison...

BradN · Posted: Sat May 28, 2011 10:24 pm Post subject:

Got a brand new one. See here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-6702881.html

Hypnos · Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 1:49 am Post subject:

Been using Gentoo since 2002, and administering Linux systems since 1995.

Never a fuck up.

It's possible that I'm forgetting some potential disasters because I have always kept full backups (currently, with rsnapshot) and easily corrected any mistakes with a boot disk.

These have always been personal and research team machines. Perhaps the stakes would be higher in a multi-user environment in which I was not acquainted with all the users.
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Yamakuzure · Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 11:08 am Post subject:

yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 796 Location: PL

Frustie · Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 12:41 pm Post subject:

apache-apr killed my system at some point
and the best, suddenly missing ext3 module from initrd
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