Dumbest computing mistake you've made?

on a CentOS box which had Cpanel installed i was trying to install subversion, and it wouldnt' install with yum, so i downloaded the rpm's from the subversion website. sqlite on this machine was at 3.3 and subversion needed 3.5

when i tried to upgrade, it just gave me a conflict error. So i was like, screw it, i'll just remove 3.3 and install 3.5

now on most of the OS's i've used (like freebsd for instance) when you remove a port/package, it will allow you to do this regardless of the files which may depend on it. On Centos apparently, it removes EVERYTHING which depends on it...unfortunately for sqlite 3.3 this included yum and rpm and about 100 other important things.

I completely borked the install.
 
mix_room said:
I would strongly advise against it. What happens when you get used to being asked for confirmation, getting sloppy in the process, and then end up at an important machine where this alias is not set. Bye-bye important system files.

One solution which I came up with but don't actually use is this:

alias rm=echo
alias RM='/bin/rm -i'

I guess over time, one would just type the capitals all of the time, but the same can be said for '-i' in general (habitually putting -f after each issuing of rm to override it).
 
8 or 9 years ago I was working as a hardware inventory tech for a health care provider. One day my counterpart realized that he could save time scrubbing drives before they left the organization. Why use a piece of software that would take hours when he could use a 8 pound magnet to do the same work in a few seconds? ( ;

Unfortunately he left the magnet on his desk right beside his beautiful CRT monitor which soon had a permanent magenta cast (which looked not unlike the auroras) no degaussing could fix. It probably didn't help I used the magnet like a bookend to keep a stack of laptops from falling over.
 
saxon3049 said:
Interesting one came across my desk today, a guy who considers himself a Techie calls me up and says "Help I have got a virus now my computer wont boot" so i tell him to bring it to me and I ask what happened well AVG wouldn't shift the infection so he read about highjack this ran it deselected everything and restarted... oh but it gets worse... I don't know how fammilure you are with the concept of a Car Boot Sale well there is always a number of stalls selling CD's with things on like "10 thousand PC drivers" or "Watch SKY TV ON YOUR PC FOR FREE" or the best one "FIX YOUR OWN COMPUTER WITH ONE CD" normally it's nothing more than AVG, CCleaner, Double driver etc on a CD well some one was selling BartPE at one evidently and this supremely intelligent individual some how managed to delete his C: partition.

Hehe, i almost accidently banned you because it looked like a SPAM post at a first at a glimpse. ;)
 
Dutch, what was your dumbest computing mistake? ;), just guessing here, but you probably have some interesting ones :p
 
I'm sorry, not very prosaic: the usual rm -rf, followed by a panicky series of Ctl-c's, and frantically looking for backups. And of course the occasional shutdown -p now in the wrong ssh session. Plus the random pf -Fa when it was least convenient. Boring ;)
 
Just like many of you, i did [CMD=""]rm -rf[/CMD] in the wrong directory.

The other day I was helping my colleague and ran [CMD=""]ipfw flush[/CMD] on his remote server (very very remote). It denied everything by default and was very far from our location.
 
god dammit....
while I was experimenting with zfs compression
I just deleted /var/db/ports/*
I keep it on separate fs, because that saves me trouble configuring ports every time I Install FreeBSD from scratch.

Grrr, and I never did backup for it, or even snapshot....

Oh well... Will start building fresh system in jail..... to recover this.... don't want to guess what I picked when I was building this setup next time i rebuild things.... :(
 
once i buy new pc and assemble it at home,plugged it directly to the lan, install fbsd and .. no internet connection! omfg - my lan is not recognized! rush to install 2k3 - half the installation i figure it out - i didn't change the mac address...
 
wonslung said:
on a CentOS box which had Cpanel installed i was trying to install subversion, and it wouldnt' install with yum, so i downloaded the rpm's from the subversion website. sqlite on this machine was at 3.3 and subversion needed 3.5

when i tried to upgrade, it just gave me a conflict error. So i was like, screw it, i'll just remove 3.3 and install 3.5

now on most of the OS's i've used (like freebsd for instance) when you remove a port/package, it will allow you to do this regardless of the files which may depend on it. On Centos apparently, it removes EVERYTHING which depends on it...unfortunately for sqlite 3.3 this included yum and rpm and about 100 other important things.

I completely borked the install.

Well, so long as you still have ftp, curl, or wget, right?

Oh, I umm put a flexible rubber power connector into a hard drive upside down. Four years worth of data into acrid smoke in about two seconds.

Note to manufacturers: polarised power connectors should be rigid plastic because I am an oaf.
 
fronclynne said:
Well, so long as you still have ftp, curl, or wget, right?

Oh, I umm put a flexible rubber power connector into a hard drive upside down. Four years worth of data into acrid smoke in about two seconds.

Note to manufacturers: polarised power connectors should be rigid plastic because I am an oaf.



lol, i was working with a guy who accidently mounted his hard drive badly in one of those old Dell cases. It had a LOT of metal surfaces, somehow the bottom of the circuit board was touching bare metal and the entire hard drive caught on fire.


Burning circuit board smells terrible....it ended up with a burn about the size of a 50 cent piece.
 
The old Dell piano hinge case is a nightmare lost count of the number of times my knuckles have been jammed in one.

I have a legendary one from another forum - "How do i download more RAM?"
 
The dumbest computer mistake I ever made? Hmm, well, there was this one time where I decided that I would install emacs...
 
Got a golden one guy walks into my shop and says "Hey mate can you upgrade this?" and he drops a 1st generation Panasonic toughbook on my counter (Denting it too) and I say not really it's too old to do much with and he looks at me like I am a idiot and says "are you sure?" eventually he says ok what can I get for part exchange and £200 quid I said for for part ex your looking at nothing as I wont take it and for 200 your looking at a old refurb he looks at me calls me a idiot and walks out leaving this brick of a laptop on my counter.
 
saxon3049 said:
Got a golden one guy walks into my shop and says "Hey mate can you upgrade this?" and he drops a 1st generation Panasonic toughbook on my counter (Denting it too) and I say not really it's too old to do much with and he looks at me like I am a idiot and says "are you sure?" eventually he says ok what can I get for part exchange and £200 quid I said for for part ex your looking at nothing as I wont take it and for 200 your looking at a old refurb he looks at me calls me a idiot and walks out leaving this brick of a laptop on my counter.

haha; I love when stuff that we (techies) have no control over goes wrong and we get blamed. I'm a student technical director for my high school (mainly work in the school theatre), and I go through this quite a bit.


@saxon, when you find out how to download more ram, let me know. Also let me buy some stock in the company that organizes this, because I think that would be a bit revolutionary. :p
 
I have one about some one washing there computer out with warm soapy water if they want to here that or another about a woman asking to return a computer because there kid painted the screen with gloss paint on a £2000 thinkpad if you want them.

And yea if I find what wonderful company you can download ram from I will let you know :)
 
OK this one is a wonder:

A company I was contracting for, a wommans hubby is a techie and told her that a computer is hot when it's running, anyhow she decided because her computer was hot she would put her Chicken sandwich inside to keep it warm and thought it was dirty and washed it with soapy water plugged it back in and it wouldn't work... some how it was my fault.
 
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