Dumbest computing mistake you've made?

When I had to install another Linux distro, I moved all my personal data, files, pictures ... to my iPod, cause I hadn't an external HD and my iPod (60GB) was just big enough to store all my stuff.
Before booting the live CD, I got the perfect idea to boot my iPod. :p
I was interested in what would happen.
There happened just nothing, I got an error message en went on booting the live CD en installing Linux.
When I was about to move all my stuff back to my computer, I noticed my iPod had been destroyed, it just wouldn't work anymore.
Result: iPod got killed and my stuff, all 60GB of stuff, were gone and I hadn't a back-up anymore because I formatted my HD while installing Linux :r
 
I've only done a couple of stupid things. Obviously, like most people, I learned about hard drive backups the hard way. But that pales in comparison to the time when I learned that you can wrap Unix tools to deny access by certain users. I did this on my server for wget, which blocked user "nobody". So I was like "hey this is cool, now no one can use those stupid remote downloader scripts on my server"...you know, the ones that run from temp but aren't supposed to be able to? So anyways, I was like "well hell, if I did that for wget and it worked like a charm, I should do it for sh too!"...so I did. Most idiotic thing I'd ever done. Since this was a remote server, I had very limited ability to do much. In the end, an admin at the data center had to hook up one of those vterm things and use a live cd version of RHE to boot the system, where I quickly corrected my mistake. The server was completely functional after that. But wow what an idiotic move on my part. :)
 
When I was 15, I assembled my first PC... CD drive got an audio out which had to be connected directly to the soundcard.
The sound chipset was on the motherboard, near a jumper which looked really like the CD audio out connector... I didn't even had to insist, the cable got plugged really easily. And then, I switched power on.
Both the motherboard and the CPU got killed on the spot, and has a bonus, some burn marks for the CPU and a burned out epoxy (I guess) smell.
 
My dumbest mistake ever was to waste my time writing a script, which checks mailboxes from an exchange server, with Microsoft technology (MAPI).

ONE month of work and it still did only work whenever it was in a good mood , I guess.

-> I rewrote it in perl with CPAN and it worked (and still works) fine. Days needed: 1
 
in FreeBSD (A few days ago):
# more /etc/fstab | grep proc
Code:
proc   /proc   procfs   rw   2   2
:h
in DOS 6.22 (Around 1993):
All of my Apps/Data was resided on 20 floppy disks. I needed some empty disks, so I copied them to HDD, done formating, ...,
after a few days my PC(486) was attackted by OneHalf Virus and MBR gone. I was Crying about 15 minutes! :x - Fortunately, my angel freinds came with a Norton Toolkit and repair it. :beer
 
I received a 1.44 floppy that contained a few photos from Those-days-BBS plus a .exe file that I ran it proudly. -- in those times in my region if somebody talk about BBS, people wass correcting her/him : it's BBC not BBS.
 
In 25 years of playing with computers I once (only once, and never again) bought a name brand computer. What a rip off. I guess they need to make money somehow, but they sure saw me coming. Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that it came with one of those pre-installed operating systems that they give away with new computers. Luckily I was able to fix that part. :)
 
OJ said:
In 25 years of playing with computers I once (only once, and never again) bought a name brand computer. What a rip off. I guess they need to make money somehow, but they sure saw me coming. Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that it came with one of those pre-installed operating systems that they give away with new computers. Luckily I was able to fix that part. :)

LOL.

I remember my first computer....it was a Packard Bell

That was the last name brand computer i bought, unless you count laptops.
 
Not checking to see if I had the right equipment- see posts on here.
Not creating a simple / + swap for older computers.
Not creating a root account password.
And basically, not having patience.
 
In the mid-80's I once unthinkingly deleted a data file on a customer site that contained at least $250K worth of unposted charge transactions. No backup. It took me about 30 hours of writing tools and rebuilding the disk to recover the data (PDP-11 running RSX-11M+). Not a fun weekend.
 
Shutdown wrong server in wrong building

I was a newly hired junior sys admin in a mixed Windows/Linux server environment. We were in the middle of upgrading to SP2 on some Windows Server 2003 boxes, which I was hired to help with. This was my 3rd day on the job, and My boss had given me a list of server names. I was to remote desktop into each one, install the service pack, and reboot the machine. We were doing this in stages, so no one would lose any work.

The problem: I was using the IP address of each machine to remotely connect. Due to a typo on the sheet I was going by, I connected to a rather important ERP database server, upgraded and rebooted it. This would not have been a major issue, but, the machine did not come back online. You can imagine my horror, only a few days on the job. Not only did I shutdown the wrong server, but it wouldn't even come back online!

So, I went to the server cabinet to see why it wasn't online and....I couldn't find it! I didn't know it at the time but several of our servers had been moved to a different building before I was hired. This was not mentioned to me during my initial briefing. My boss was gone and no one else had any idea where the server was.

After lots of frantic calls and much searching, I finally discovered it was across the street. I ran over and found it was waiting at a keyboard halt error. Pressed F1 to continue and it booted back up with no error.

Luckily the department that used that server was not working that day so no data was lost. I always double check IP addresses given to me on paper now.

edit: spelling/grammar
 
At home: rm -rf in the / directory from an ssh connection to my server. In a panic I hit ctrl-alt-del and rebooted my desktop.

At work: lost a head on a hard disk. Had a non-admin user moving data off the hard disk to tape and restoring old data tapes for a project they were working on. Somehow they got the tapes mixed up and the project person was backing up their project data onto the system backup tapes. It took me a weekend of working nonstop, but I got 100% of the data back, using a sector editor and restoring what remained of the backup tapes.

Hitting the off switch in the back off my UPS while trying plug in a monitor.

-JJ
 
When I was new to & using & learning linux, I started going through all the programs in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin to see what they did - usually by running them. Eventually I needed to become root, so I did. I was looking for a program to resize a partition. Eventually I found things like fsck.ext2, mkfs, etc. I don't remember exactly how, but I formatted both of my partitions, and lost all my data.

When I was younger (13) I accidentally deleted everything on c:/ from dos prompt on a windows machine, on my dad's computer.
 
?!@

I change the mount of home folder to zfs file system without moving files which delete all configration inside my home folder �e I reinstall the hole system after that
 
Update a system remote via ssh to a very late time.
After checking everything works well decide to stop working and type # shutdown -p now and wondering why my desktop doesn't go down...
Quickly connect to another system in the same remote segment, read out the arp tables compile wol and bet I get the system back.
Now wol is a default on every machine.
 
darkshadow said:
I change the mount of home folder to zfs file system without moving files which delete all configration inside my home folder �e I reinstall the hole system after that

I've done this before but if you then change the ZFS mount again via
Code:
zfs set mountpoint=/oldhome tank/home
or whatever, then the stuff in /usr/home will still be there, provided it was a ufs filesystem before.

Zfs mounts in FreeBSD mount ON TOP of a dir. At least this is how it is in my experience.
 
When I was a lot younger, telling my parents friends I liked computers . . . ended up being the neighbor hood 'anything to do with a computer call Rob' guy.

This is back when a lot less people understood computers, TRS-80's and one guy had an IBM-PC with the fully expanded 128k memory - that's kilobytes.

Mostly inane crap like:
- "can you teach grams how to type a letter"
- "my printer is jammed, can you help" and again and again and again . . .
- "my floppy disk wont work (and many frustrating hours later revealed) I accidentally put my coffee cup on it, does that mean I have to buy a new one? What about my saved programs . . ."
- lot's of: "it doesn't work" mostly fixed by: "you forgot to switch on the monitor - it is a separate switch from the computer" (or similar)
as well as "can you write me an accounting program" - typically answered: "sorry, but I don't have an accounting program and it's too big for me to write" [with unspoken] "yes I know some BASIC programming but geez I'm just a kid who CLOAD's "SPCINV.BAS" - give me a break].

Talk about a way to kill your weekends.

(Younguns: CLOAD means load a program from a cassette tape, for "kilobyte" "floppy disk" "BASIC" and "cassette tape" try wiki.)
 
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