Your worst mistake so far with Gentoo, or Jaguar

[kgdrenefort]

Hello,

Today I made the worst mistake one can make while trying to fix his own poop.

Will not get into details, but I had to remove the content of my root partition and apply a xfsdump backup with xfsrestore.

I mount on my old Debian the root of my actual OS, Gentoo.

Then, I type, while in the /mnt/gentoo directory:

[eeckwrk99]

[Hu]

While on a system with a glibc older than the latest stable of the day, I ran emerge --usepkgonly important-package (maybe sys-apps/coreutils? I don't remember exactly). Portage dutifully installed the requested update from my binhost, which had a newer glibc and had built coreutils with that newer glibc. The package's RDEPEND data does not instruct Portage to ensure that the target's glibc is not older than the build glibc. That left me with a coreutils that failed to start due to it needing the newer glibc's symbols. I remember being very pleased with myself that in less than an hour of work, and with no reboots, I got everything fixed. Statically linked busybox was key to recovering that system.

[kgdrenefort]

[Ralphred]

I've had an errant rm -rf * command, but we all know how that goes.
The real mistake was when using testdisk to recover the files, I accidentally dropped the recovery image on the same disk meaning all the files after the like the first 5 were of "zero bytes". Had to restore from backup in the end, no real losses, just embarrassed annoyance, well and a new appreciation of physically writing down dev names against "normal" mount points when booting from "foreign" media.

[Goverp]

I did an oil change but forgot to put the drain plug back before I refilled.
Oh, sorry, that was a Jaguar, not Linux. Still messy.
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Greybeard

[rab0171610]

I keep daily backups with Timeshift. If anything goes wonky, I just roll back to midnight last. Thanks to that, I haven't had these types of problems in years. I have actually installed a different OS over my partitions to see how it would work on bare metal, and within just a few minutes had my system restored back with Timeshift as if it never happened. If I delete or overwrite something by accident, I have daily backups on a separate drive I can just browse through and restore the files individually if needed.
Anyway, I think the biggest mistake anyone could ever make in Linux is not keeping good, reliable and easily accessible backups. That would seem to prevent a lot of problems that I see users, both inexperienced and advanced, experiencing on Linux OS forums.

[Spanik]

Not yet with linux. But I had a moment with W2K when with some friends we were recording a demo for their band and I added an extra disk to the pc (just to be sure you know). Windows changed the drive letters and I formatted the drive with all the recordings on instead of the new one. We had some backups but not everything.

This was one of the reasons I went to linux, to get rid of those idiotic drive letters. But that took some years to really switch.
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Expert in non-working solutions

[kgdrenefort]

[Leonardo.b]

Easter holydays. Bank account password change.
I create a new random password, and store it in a safe place on disk.
Soon I want to manually backup it, but I type cp command in the reverse order and I override the new password.
Got locked out for almost a week.

I call it a mistake but Freud may agrue...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychopathology_of_Everyday_Life

[wuzzerd]

Trying systemd.

[Taigo]

I tried installing LFS for the funs one day. And i still have no clue how it happened but i messed up my root file permissions.
I could not fix it i had to reinstall my system but at least i learned from this.
It's either:
- Do not install LFS on your main host system ( use a VM )
- Watch out with changing permissions

I think this could be similar to OP's issue where instead of changing recursively from ./* i did /*

[Genone]

To add some non-FS related content: Accidentally put a "DROP ALL" rule at the top (instead of bottom) of the iptables rules on my headless server and wondered why my SSH session froze instantly.

[dartleader]

[lekto]

For some reason, I have decided to switch from AMD64 to ~AMD64. About halfway through rebuilding, I changed my mind and stopped it. But instead of rebuilding stuff back, I decided to restore it from my rsnapshot backup. After I restored it, I ran emerge to check if everything was up to date, and emerge wanted to rebuild packages back, like I didn't restore them at all. So, I restored them again, and emerge still wanted to rebuild them, so I started investigating. I compared a few files that belong to packages that I was 100% sure were rebuilt, and they matched files in backup, so I did restore them. It took me a while, but I found that I didn't have /var/db/pkg in my backup, so I had a system with files in the right versions, but portage was thinking they were in the wrong versions, and it wanted to downgrade them, but it couldn't because dependencies were in the wrong versions. I couldn't use genlop to check what exactly I rebuilt because I restored emerge.log. I had to manually run qcheck to find what was wrong and then ebuild merge to rebuild it, but I had to do it in the right order, and then I ran emerge -e @world. In the end, instead of waiting a few hours for downgrading, I wasted many times more trying to fixing that mess manually.

To this day, this machine is working, and according to find: 35528/736397 (~4.82%) files in /usr/ are older than the 2020 year and are probably leftovers from that mess.

P.S. By restoring from backup, I mean I copied files from backup, but didn't deleted files that weren't in backup.

[mrbassie]

I convinced my parents to buy me an Atari Jaguar.

I do feel somewhat vindicated after seeing what people have been able to get out of them since, visually approaching PS1 or Saturn level stuff. Clearly the hardware was capable of more than what any of the published games ever produced, a step ablove the 3do, cdi etc.
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Bus conductors learned to code.

[OpenSauce04]

I don't remember exactly how it happened, but one time I was trying to delete everything inside a directory I was in, and typed in:

[Goverp]