STUPID things I've done

[MooPi]

Yesterday I was editing my /etc/sudoer file and left a line on that was meant to be deleted and I lost all control of admin or sudo privileges. That would include shutting down my Openbox system, UGHHH. Easily fixed by booting my backup pendrive, but what a stupid trick I pulled. Anyone else wanna confess to stupid tricks ??

[McRat]

I was in the computer room at HS, so I wanted to play a trick on a friend.

I wrote a program that faked the logon, and if the user = DonaldS, it would print repeatedly "Don wears his mom's army boots!" or something like that.

I got him a couple times, and he got wise and would hit CNTL-C to test if the log on was real.

So I did a call to NONCAN? A fortran function that would refuse interruption.

Well, that would have been OK, if I didn't try to "improve" the program. I made a mistake, and when I went to test it, it went into an infinite loop.

Since the mainframe was off-site, it was a big ordeal to shut off the program. I was suspended for 3 days, and banished from the computer room. So I had to go to the local community college to continue to learn programming.

[MooPi]

Good one McRat :-)

[Frogs Hair]

Tried to upgrade a Wubi 9.10 install to early version of 10.04 , the computer froze while configuring packages . The reboot resulted in kernel panic and a few days later I made a proper 9.10 installation I will wait for final releases from now on. :oops:

[schauerlich]

isn't that what visudo is for?

[MooPi]

isn't that what visudo is for?
Yes but if you've fubard'd the sudoer file it's not much help.

[alket]

I installed kubuntu-desktop with sudo tasksel install kubuntu-desktop
then i uninstalled, it started to erase everything untill it said: Gnome Terminal cannot be removed.

[wojox]

About a year ago I wanted to purge the old kernels I had. So I opened up the gnome-terminal and ended up deleting all the kernels. needless to say, when I rebooted it told No OS installed, :rolleyes:

[Zip247]

I was using webmin to administer my file server. I had apache and ampache installed to play with. When it was time to remove ampache, I removed apache instead.

[Old Marcus]

I was installing Ubuntu 8.04 a while back and during the manual partitioning stage I saw a drive I didn't recognise. Not stopping to think what it might be I unformatted it. Only when Ubuntu was installed and I tried to access my USB drive did I realise what I had done. Luckily photorec came to the rescue and restored my files so I could reformat.

[the yawner]

Happened yesterday to me: I wanted to remove the first email address I've entered on my HTC Legend. But for some reason it could only be done by setting the device to factory default. I went ahead with it, without taking into account that my contacts would probably be deleted. End result, lost about 40% of my phone book. It didn't helped that I've purged the data on my SIM and on my old phone.

[stinger30au]

I was in the computer room at HS, so I wanted to play a trick on a friend.

I wrote a program that faked the logon, and if the user = DonaldS, it would print repeatedly "Don wears his mom's army boots!" or something like that.

I got him a couple times, and he got wise and would hit CNTL-C to test if the log on was real.

So I did a call to NONCAN? A fortran function that would refuse interruption.

Well, that would have been OK, if I didn't try to "improve" the program. I made a mistake, and when I went to test it, it went into an infinite loop.

Since the mainframe was off-site, it was a big ordeal to shut off the program. I was suspended for 3 days, and banished from the computer room. So I had to go to the local community college to continue to learn programming.





hhahahahahahahaahahaaaaa


GOLD!

[Cuddles McKitten]

Not something I did, but a kid I knew in high school got out of class by using MSPaint. During the "I Love You" virus circa 2000, he opened up the standard Windows NT boot-up splash screen (which was saved as a BMP file at the time) in MSPaint. I proceeded to draw on "Infected by I Love You Virus. Have a nice day." He then sent the file to a few computers around him, so a total of four out of the thirty or so computers had his starting splash screen. After the teacher noticed that, he called in the school's (not terribly sharp) techies.

It took said "technicians" a few hours to figure out that someone just changed the image and they weren't infected with anything.

[pwnst*r]

I put my milk in the cupboard last week.

[pwnst*r]

It took said "technicians" a few hours to figure out that someone just changed the image and they weren't infected with anything.

Probably because they don't typically have retards that pull stupid pranks like that often.

[Hman242]

I put my milk in the cupboard last week.I did that once. I didn't notice until next day, it didn't smell too good...

[julio_cortez]

Probably because they don't typically have retards that pull stupid pranks like that often.
+1.

When you are working you certainly don't think about a joke when they tell you a PC is infected with a virus.
Even more if it's connected to a LAN.
Even more if the LAN includes also workstations/servers that hold sensible data.

Anyway, talking about nasty jokes: at the high school where I went, a teacher once moved all of the files of the sysadmin from the sysadmin's folder to another one, leaving in the sysadmin's folder only a .txt file stating "is it normal that I can do this to your files?"
The "sysadmin" was halfway between blue and black when he discovered that his files were missing.

[lisati]

I once put together a package for a community group, using a mixture of ASM and compiled basic. I didn't think to find out what kind of CPU their machine had, and did some of the ASM code with a sprinkling '286 instructions. Worked nicely on my machine, which had a '286. Trouble was, they had a "lesser" cpu. One of the unintended side-effects was a scrambled database. Thankfully I'd made a backup for testing purposes a few weeks earlier, which saved a LOT of typing.

[OtakuWrath]

there was a bunch of people around and i typically don't like to reveal i listen to Japanese pop music.. so i put my headphones on and played the music.. i realized i forgot to plug the headphone in so i attempted to quickly turn the sound down. i slipped and set it to max volume and everyone could hear a loud Japanese girl screaming because it was so loud.. it was very embarrassing..

[Tristam Green]

Cool stories, bros.

I placed aliases of the trash can in all available icon spaces (and on top of existing icons) on our library's Macs when I was in the 8th grade.

The librarian wasn't pleased.

[Bodsda]

In an attempt to remove all files from a 'temp' dir I had created I accidentally put the * in the wrong place and used the -rf args. oops


sudo rm -recursiveForce * ~/temp/

[nothingspecial]

find ./ -type f -exec mv '{}' ./ \;

from the root directory as root instead of from ~/Photos as me.

[samalex]

This wasn't stupid per say, but more of a joke on a former boss of mine who was on vacation and turning 40. Around 2001 or 2002 I found a 500 Meg HD and set it up as the Primary OS in his system (which was running Windows 2000 Pro) and installed MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 (WFW). I had full network support, it was on our domain, plus I had the latest browser and email client setup on WFW.

When he made it in the next Monday he thought it was just a theme or something on his system, but it didn't take him long to realize it was real. He was pissed for a minute or two until I assured him his original HD was still in the box, safe and sound, and he spent the rest of the morning being nostalgic with Windows 3.11 :) Surprisingly most of what he needed to do do worked because we were still on Exchange 5.5 which worked with Windows 3.11.

Oh, and I've done the milk thing before as well... not fun.

Sam

[kaldor]

Not something I did, but a kid I knew in high school got out of class by using MSPaint. During the "I Love You" virus circa 2000, he opened up the standard Windows NT boot-up splash screen (which was saved as a BMP file at the time) in MSPaint. I proceeded to draw on "Infected by I Love You Virus. Have a nice day." He then sent the file to a few computers around him, so a total of four out of the thirty or so computers had his starting splash screen. After the teacher noticed that, he called in the school's (not terribly sharp) techies.

It took said "technicians" a few hours to figure out that someone just changed the image and they weren't infected with anything.

I don't get that. Why are so many technicians unable to see through kids' jokes? An example of that is when my dad got on my nerves one day before school, so I went to his computer and took screenshot of the desktop, set it as wallpaper, removed icons, etc etc and left for school. I came home 6 hours later and he was angry and panicky as all hell saying the technicians told him he had a trojan and to bring the computer in to repair. I had to stop him from boxing it all up and spending a fortune by fixing it myself.

Another one I've told before is my absent minded tech teacher from school a few years ago. He seemed like he was always stressed or muddled and couldn't think straight. Anyway, he forgot his Windows XP login password. So, he had the bright idea to reformat his laptop and reinstall Windows XP so he could "get a new password". Needless to say he lost everything including student work for the entire year (he removed it all from the school networks earlier) and this was around May. So he was in a panic about that, and he actually was stupid enough to go around asking each student what their mark was before he lost everything. Everyone got A to A+ that year. *sigh*

[samalex]

I don't get that. Why are so many technicians unable to see through kids' jokes?

It depends on the user... For average users the oldies are still goodies, like making a screen shot of the desktop, saving as wallpaper, then hiding desktop icons. That or remapping keys on the keyboard or setting it to Dvorak mode. Even tape under the mouse ball/optical thingie can drive non-tech computer users crazy but they never get old.

It's the more malicious jokes like sending a noob "rm -rf /" or creating a boot floppy with DBAN (http://www.dban.org), leaving it in the drive, then shutting down the system. Jokes that can be easily reversed are classic, but some have no place in IT. There was even one floating around in IRC where someone said "Yeah if you type your password in, it'll change it to ###. See.. My password is ##########. I typed it but it changed it". Something like this in a noob channel will always get someone to type in their password. People can be way too trusting online if they're new to the environment.

Sam

[kaldor]

It depends on the user... For average users the oldies are still goodies, like making a screen shot of the desktop, saving as wallpaper, then hiding desktop icons. That or remapping keys on the keyboard or setting it to Dvorak mode. Even tape under the mouse ball/optical thingie can drive non-tech computer users crazy but they never get old.

It's the more malicious jokes like sending a noob "rm -rf /" or creating a boot floppy with DBAN (http://www.dban.org), leaving it in the drive, then shutting down the system. Jokes that can be easily reversed are classic, but some have no place in IT. There was even one floating around in IRC where someone said "Yeah if you type your password in, it'll change it to ###. See.. My password is ##########. I typed it but it changed it". Something like this in a noob channel will always get someone to type in their password. People can be way too trusting online if they're new to the environment.

Sam

Yeah, that type of stuff is not good. But I can't stand it when people can't understand basic computer functions =p

[renkinjutsu]

Happened yesterday to me: I wanted to remove the first email address I've entered on my HTC Legend. But for some reason it could only be done by setting the device to factory default. I went ahead with it, without taking into account that my contacts would probably be deleted. End result, lost about 40% of my phone book. It didn't helped that I've purged the data on my SIM and on my old phone.

Doesn't android sync your contacts with your google account?


one of the stupidest things i've done was overwriting my partition table while trying to add a new partition... I lost my whole drive! if only i had made a backup of just 512 bytes, i could have avoided the whole thing

[Eisenwinter]

Installed a "32-bit chroot subsystem" within a 64-bit Arch Linux.

It was installed in /opt/arch32.

I forgot I had created symlinks to my REAL home directory. One day I wanted to get rid of that installation, so I simply did rm -rf /opt/arch32/, and wiped all of my real home dir's contents.

Lost configuration files, perl scripts, bash scripts, and so forth.

It was brutal.

[ZarathustraDK]

This one time...I bought Windows...

[Tristam Green]

This one time...I bought Windows...

Aww man, what did you do??! I would have burned teh CD, but not before cursing Bill Gates's name and stomping teh CD flat.

[RiceMonster]

This one time...I bought Windows...

Oh man, that's so funny. I can't stop laughing.

[Penguin Guy]

What are these for? *delete*

http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=161120&stc=1&d=1277143336

[murderslastcrow]

Oh, Penguin Guy, falling into the 'keep my system clean' OCD trap. I had that as a carry over from Windows for a while- now the furthest I get into cleaning things up is organizing my files into the appropriate folders, and maybe tagging a few things.

One time I tried to Hibernate in a Wubi install.

[the yawner]

Doesn't android sync your contacts with your google account?


Erm... I initially used my google account for the mail and market, the phone book was just saved on the phone. Also found out later that I could have backed up the phone book to the SD card.

[julio_cortez]

Even tape under the mouse ball/optical thingie can drive non-tech computer users crazy but they never get old.
Done this myself to a colleague of mine last week. Old but still CLASSIC.

It took him several minutes to figure out it was just the tape.
Uh, and he's probably one of the ones I call IT-savvys:lolflag:

[slooksterpsv]

Ok, stupid thing I've done:

I installed Ubuntu on its own partition on a 160GB Drive and gave it only 30 GB. I thought, well I'll reinstall Ubuntu as I want to setup my own partitioning schema and that. I had Windows Vista on the other 110 GB, and each had the same data as far as pictures, movies, music, etc.

Anyways, I booted into Windows Vista DVD, went into PARTED for Windows and deleted the Windows partition and the linux partition, but somehow managed to leave the Swap partition.

Luckily I had just backed up all my data to a 250GB Drive in case something happened. Now the worst part, the 250GB Drive was dependant on the 160GB MBR for loading into the OS on the 250 GB. The 250GB had a GRUB partition that was damaged.

EDIT: Had to install Linux, copy all the data to the Linux drive, then wipe the 250GB and reinstall Vista on it, then copy the data back to the 250GB Drive.

[Puzzled Guy]

I don't get that. Why are so many technicians unable to see through kids' jokes? An example of that is when my dad got on my nerves one day before school, so I went to his computer and took screenshot of the desktop, set it as wallpaper, removed icons, etc etc and left for school. I came home 6 hours later and he was angry and panicky as all hell saying the technicians told him he had a trojan and to bring the computer in to repair. I had to stop him from boxing it all up and spending a fortune by fixing it myself.

rofl!

I did something similar to that once. About a year ago, I was living in the school dormitory. The school has an encrypted network. I took a screenshot of the desktop and edited it in paint to make it look like I had cracked the password. I set it as background, made the icons invisible, and set the taskbar to autohide. Long story short: they fell for it.

Had a good laugh about it too.

Here's another one:

I had a fresh install of Ubuntu. I spent about an hour of waiting for updates. My little brother got tired of waiting and forced my to hand over the ethernet cable. I thought "hey, it's just installing, I don't need internet for installing, right?". Wrong. Approximately 5 seconds after I disconnected, the installation got stuck at "registering documents with scroll keeper". I waited for 15 minutes, and then canceled the process. I rebooted and found out that I had half a kernel on my system because I interrupted the installation. I had to completely reinstall Ubuntu.

That was with Jaunty. Lucid works perfectly out of thee box

[chriswyatt]

I put the jungle Windows 98 theme on one of the library computers with the volume turned up, the librarian (angry old lady) didn't know why the computer was making weird noises and I was observing her getting annoyed from a distance, lol. Childish and stupid. I did a lot of stupid things at school, pranks etc. that I probably shouldn't have done looking back.

[Stancel]

I installed an Nvidia driver manually without remembering to remove the one I had installed in Hardware Drivers. So I had two drivers installed at once. And I couldn't remove the one I should have removed before installing the new one because I got an error message. I had to re-install Ubuntu.

[chriswyatt]

Oh, and letting off an air horn in the canteen once probably wasn't one of my best ideas, there was a very very angry teacher not far from me. 8-[

[chriswyatt]

I installed an Nvidia driver manually without remembering to remove the one I had installed in Hardware Drivers. So I had two drivers installed at once. And I couldn't remove the one I should have removed before installing the new one because I got an error message. I had to re-install Ubuntu.

You could've probably sorted it out somehow, maybe going in to recovery mode and just removing both, also I think there's a way you can force removal with Aptitude. X-Org would've probably just fallen back to the open source nv driver.

[droewors]

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it..." Great words to live by.
My modem-router with Wi-fi was working great, but I thought I would update the firmware. at 1 am. OVER wi-fi! Needless to say I lost my connection to the router during the process.

Talking about "tricks": Every now and then in a homewares store you will come across a basket of those twist (or dial) kitchen timers for sale. With a few twists, I turn a whole stack on to random times and then leave ;) And then the ringing begins...

[xircon]

I have done so many stupid things, here is a selection....

My first work PC had 128kb of ram and ran CC/PM. I wiped SuperCalc off the hard drive and couldn't find the master disk. Luckily the local newspaper had the same system and I had helped them out in the past and they kindly lent me a copy!

Overwrote the boot sector of an ICL System 25 mini with zeros. Spent 5 hours in a hex editor rebuilding it.

Didn't shut the door on a freezer full of raw frozen dog meat (in the cellar), the whole thing froze to enormous block of ice. My girlfriend was going to kill me.

She, on the other hand, left a packet of the meat on top of the freezer by accident whilst fetching some - after a few days the smell was horrific, took us two days to track it down :) Our living room is over the cellar!!!

[pricetech]

Tricks;

I had a friend who was very much into Commodore computers. One night we were bored and dreamed up a program we called "rat trap" that he took to the local big box store where they sold Commodores and put on all the demonstrators.

When any key was pressed the program would make a siren like sound and flash a red screen a few times, followed by the sound of an explosion and a black screen.

Fun to watch.

Not long after starting my current job, a part timer was hired to assist me. As something of a welcoming prank I edited his registry remotely and put some really freaky wallpaper on his computer, plus added a login banner with some silly message I don't recall now, and to top it all off, created a batch file that asked for his name and then told him that <his name> was an idiot and ran it at every login.

Another fun prank involved a screen saver from the NT4 Plus Pack that captured the current desktop and started folding it up into cubes which were subsequently unfolded elsewhere on the screen. It only worked the first time, but I got a few laughs out of it. (gotta find that and see if it works under XP)

[cj.surrusco]

This was only a few months ago...

I have a secondary 500GB HDD in my computer. It had a ext4 partition that covered the entire disk except for about 2GB that had swap. I had all of my data on that partition (Over 250GB of Music, Videos, Pictures, Documents, etc.), with no backups, of course (I was yet to learn my lesson of backing data up).

I wanted to move this hard drive over to a server that I had just set up from an old tower. For whatever reason, I needed to add a little more swap space before I transferred it over to the server. So I opened up GParted and set it to shrink the ext4 partition only about 1GB, so that I could give it a little more swap space.

I thought this would be a quick procedure. Shrinking a huge partition only 1GB won't take long, right? Well, that was before I knew about how ext4 partitions were structured. About 2 minutes into the procedure, GParted estimated about 4 or 5 hours to complete the process. I didn't have near the amount of patience necessary to wait that long. So, "screw the swap", I thought.

GParted said that it was performing a "read-only check" as the first step in the shrink. I figured that it hadn't actually started to shrink it, and it was just performing a test. So there I go, and I click the "cancel" button.

GParted's dummy proof UI warns me that I am being an idiot and that cancelling a partition resize may result in errors. It was late at night, I was having a bad day, and I was really anxious to get this server up. So, I go ahead and ignore GParted's warnings, almost out of spite, knowing it was a bad idea.

If you're still reading this (despite my longer-than-necessary intro), you probably know what happened already. For some reason (probably the fact that I was tired and it was about 1 AM), I didn't expect the data to be damaged. Well, I sure was wrong. All the data was corrupted. I spent the next week trying to recover what I could. No filesystem repair tools could fix it. I used photorec, which was able to recover about 20-30 photos, but nothing else. Luckily, my music collection was still on my iPod, but all of my videos, documents and most of my pictures were gone for good.

It's kind of funny how one click out of anxiety can cause so much inconvenience. Well, not that funny to me.

I hope somebody gets some entertainment out of this story, and anyone that doesn't keep backups will learn from my mistake.

I keep backups now.

[ubunterooster]

Editing grub from sda to sdz "because z looks higher up"

In my defense I was tired then and did not know that much

[Zoot7]

Accidentally deleted my Windows partition which contained quite a bit of essential data with fdisk over the command line about a year ago.

[samalex]

Some great stories! For me the biggest 'Oh Crap!' moment I had was about 9 years ago when I was the tech on call one night and got a call that one of our servers, a Dec Alpha, was acting up. The drive was on the verge of going out, but after talking to support we got it going well enough to get us through the next day until a new drive could be overnighted to us.

After about 3 hours of testing at 8pm we were good to go home, and as we were turning off the lights to the data center I stepped backwards and bumped the UPS just right (or wrong I guess) and hit the kill switch shutting down power to the entire data center. Being in a data center that's dead silent is not fun.

Needless to say I was up there until 8am the next morning verifying the servers all came back up, and yeah that drive I was initially called out to check died with the power outage. THe company giving us support had to call out an emergency repair guy to drive 90 miles and bring a new drive that night.

Not fun...

[blueturtl]

Reading the previous post, my story now looks fairly insignificant.

Anyway, after first being introduced to Ubuntu/Linux I ran into the whole 'everyone on Windows is still stuck on western locale'-problem when IRCing with my friends. The umlauts wouldn't display properly, so I looked and came up a with a pretty stupid solution: change the system locale from UTF-8 to western. I was able to pull it off, but as a result a lot of strange stuff started happening. File name crazyness on a system that cares about naming conventions a lot more than Windows does is probably one of the stupidest things I have ever done, but was luckily able to revert the change once the magnitude of it all hit me. :D

A simple character map setting in X-Chat would have fixed the whole problem initially. :oops: