Tinkering is all fun and games, until it's 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you're about to execute... And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: "damn, what did I expect to happen?".
Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don't remember all the details, unfortunately.
For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it's units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors... So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.
And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it's contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect... So, I installed glibc from Debian's repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn't have one at the time).
Anyways, what are your stories?
Not me, but one I saw... dude used chmod to lock down permissions across the board... including root... including the chmod command.
"What do I do?"
🤔
"Re-install?"
You could boot on an USB, mount the filesystem and change the permissions. But if the dude changed a whole lot of permissions, reinstalling might be the smart thing to do...
Changed it all to 000. ಠ_ಠ
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5593752/who-can-access-a-file-with-octal-permissions-000-on-linux-unix
Yeah, a very unfortunate one: probably, the most painful to recover from. I'd just reinstall, honesty 😅 At least with mine I could simply add the necessary stuff from chroot or pacstrap and not spend a metric ton of time tracking all the files with incorrect permissions
There's got to be other tools though that could change the file permissions on chmod, right? Though I suppose you'd need permission to use them and/or download them.
You can dump the permissions from the working system and restore them. Quite useful when working with archives that don't support those attributes or when you run random stuff from the web 😁
Many distros offer a automated file/directory ownership restore feature on their liveOS
I managed to do that back when I was new. Luckily it was a fresh install, so I didn't lose much when I had to reinstall.
So far, that has been the only time I really screwed something up outside of a virtual machine.
oh... uh...
@jordanlund @fl42v I *think* this one could be recoverable if they had a terminal still active by using the dynamic loader to call chmod — or by booting from a liveCD and chmodding from there.
That'd likely get you to a 'working' state quickly, but it'd take forever to get back to a 'sane' state with correct permissions on everything.
Exactly. There's no way to even know what the previous permissions were for everything.
They were TRYING to recursively change permissions in a single directory, accidentally hit the whole system. :(