> finds files called "?" and "?.pub" in home directory. Not sure how they ended up there.
> tries deleting files
> rm ?*
> hits enter and realizes the disaster the very next moment
> cries in corner

When I was in high school, the IT had the bright idea to use the same username/password for each machine in our site, and there was this jerk who knowing this, would occasionally SSH into the computers of the other classmates and wget porn mp4s to their home directory to embarrass them, as some sort of weird-ass prank.

So, in order to give him a lesson, I one day had logged in and set a rule on the class' router to forward all port 22 traffic back to his own IP address, and had SSHed into his machine, aliasing wget with a full-screen kiosk mode chrome, followed by a force disable of the USB HID devices.

It might have been less awkward and he might have seen less scared, if it wasn't for the fact that I had also remotely set his machine to maximum volume, and the teacher wasn't in the middle of a lecture. 😏

To this date, his expression is the most precious reaction I have ever seen.

!rant

So this year I had a subject at university called "Linux internal architecture", and for the last assignment I had to write a kernel module and interact with it with a separate program written in C.

Once I had finished and tested the driver, I went on to write the other program, which was supposed to use system calls to read and write data to the module. While debugging this program (~500 lines of code) I reached the level of frustration where you just start printing absurd messages everywhere in your code to see what's wrong. So for example instead of printing "This error happened in this function", my error messages were more like "Fuck this fucking function it doesn't fucking work".

Guess who forgot to delete all those messages before sending the code to the teacher...

Also, if a specific mode is selected, the program enters a while(1) that, apart from doing what it's expected to do, also creates a file in the user's home directory called something like 'motherfucker' and appends the words 'fuck this shit' to it. INFINITELY.

I really really hope this teacher doesn't try to run the program in his own computer, or he's in for a big surprise.

TLDR; I just screwed a production server and rendered it useless!!!

Long story:

I went to install a product that we built at the customer's site, and was given a Linux running server, to deploy our app.

I work in windows, and barely know the basic Linux commands.

So I look at the files in the home directory, and see that the are a lot of files, so I ask the customer if it is ok that I move all the files to a separate directory.

He agrees, and me thinking that I am smart, proceed to enter the following commands in the terminal:

mkdir old
mv /* old

Of course I got an error that I don't have permission so my next command was:

sudo mv /* old

And that was the end of that computer.

The amazing part of the story is that as soon as it happened, I understood so much about Linux.

The file structure, sudo, the power of the terminal, aliases and so much more...

ANTI VIRUSES AREN'T ALWAYS YOUR FRIEND!

So I'm under a little pressure to get an assignment done so I came home an was planning on working on it but Windows had other plans and decided to finish its update which I suspect copied my hard drive and uploaded it to the NSA at dial up speed because it it forever!!

But anyway back to the text in caps lock... I started working on it then when I hit compile I got an "access denied" error in the console and didn't know what the f*** was going on. So I decided to copy my filed to another directory and tried again... amazingly this worked so I carried on and after about 2 hours I get the same error -_- So instead of messing around and loosing my work I decided to commit it... but I cant... again "access denied" error.

After threatening my computer with a trip out the window, I finally decided to reboot it... cause "have you tried turning it off and on again" kept on rattling in my head.

After logging in I tried again and still the same error... Then I opened up my anti virus dashboard and went through the logs and found the screen shot attached.....

I'm such an idiot!

For a while now, my machine has been kinda sluggish.

Just installed VSCode and a little popup saying that git was tracking too many changes in my home directory. I must've ran `git init` at some point and it's spent fucking forever tracking changes of >3,000 files.

`rm -rf .git/`

Quick. As. Fuck.

Our team changed to Linux about 3 years ago already and I can see some of them struggling to insert some commands when I'm talking to them.

How the fuck do you struggle to `cd` into a fucking directory?

Ok,ok... I've linuxing full time for 8 years already, I understand I've been through this... But come on! If some one said to me on day ONE "dude, you can cd /full/path/of/fucking/whatever" or " ~/ means home" I would be doing it from day one.

Probably I'm overreacting but wtf dudes? 3 years... Step up your game.

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

It officially happened...
Accidentally used rm -rf /*
(Actual command was a bit more involved, but it did pretty much the same thing)

Laptop doesn't boot now. Saved my home directory though.

Hooray.

Back when I migrated my file server to a VM, I used robocopy to copy everything over (and caused quite a few fuckups before it'd behave halfway decent.. or so I thought). Now I tried to add my desktop's SSH key to the authorized_keys on said server but it wouldn't accept my key after that. After a bit of digging I've found that my entire home directory (where the file server hosts its mirror of my D: drive) had everything set to 777, and that's why the key isn't accepted. Great permission mode, isn't it? Much secure, very wow! Thank you so much robocopy!!!

So this just happened. I was working on a project and I just found a weird directory named '~' in there. I am on Linux so I simply did an "rm -rf ~" :/

It was too late when I realized it deleted all my files in my home directory. All my projects and configuration files. The sad part was it did not delete that shitty random directory because permission denied. Thank God I got into the habit of making weekly backups of my system and Thank God I use git.

So turns out getting drunk and installing arch Linux was a bad idea, somehow managed to format the installation USB instead of my secondary hardrive, set my home directory as the root file system and somehow managed to half install the needed packages to the USB so I wasn't booting and had to go back to a fresh windows install just to redo the USB...

Don't drink and Linux kids...

Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"

See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!

Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.

Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.

Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.

"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"

Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.

So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.

But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:

1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!

I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.

Maybe another time I'll talk about those.

OBS is advertised as the expert's screen recording and streaming tool, every list on the internet makes it out to be some incredibly difficult program not recommended for newbies.

It's also the only linux screen recorder that works out of the box on Pipewire, records both microphone and system sounds and all configuration was to
1. select recording as my main use case in the setup wizard which is a very verbose English popup, then accept all defaults
2. add a new source, following the instructions written in the box which are also the only instructions on screen after application launch
3. set the output directory (optional) by going to File > Settings > Output > Recording Path, all of which were the first items I guessed. If I had not done this, it would've written everything to my home folder which is a bit dumb but not confusing at all
4. click Start Recording
5. click Stop Recording when done

Some newbie-oriented screen recorders have a more complicated setup procedure than this super advanced experts' tool don't touch without safety gloves and a degree in video engineering.

Decided to give WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) a chance.........it was a BAD idea.

I go to the directory of my Node project and do "yarn" to install the packages.

Bash freezes while Yarn is linking dependencies. At this point I don't even know if it's still doing its job in the background or not, so I try to Ctrl+C.

Ctrl+C doesn't work either, I have to force-close the console.

When I try to open bash again, it doesn't even open. The only way to solve this is to re-login to Windows.

I appreciate Microsoft's intent in making their OS a better home for developers, but they still have a long way to go.

P.S.: No, this isn't a Yarn issue, everything works perfectly in both Linux and Windows :)

September 13th, 2013 at 06:20 AM
===========================

~$ cd /mnt/backupdisk
backupdisk$ make_backup --output=./~
Cannot access storage: /mnt/backupdisk/~
backupdisk$ ls
~
backupdisk$ rm -rf ~
^C ^C ^C ^C ^C

...never name your backup same as your home directory.

How to be evil: Execute `touch -- '-rf *'` in their home directory.

They'll probably will run `rm` on it before realising their mistake.

Hey, looks like some employee of this hosting company failed to 750 his home directory and 640 the files...
I was SSHing around on our hosting account when I slipped into his home direcory where at least two(!) SSH public keys of his admin account for the server were readable!

Being an honest guy, I had to call them...
It's fixed now.

Thanks for messing up my home directory!!!

Edit: Tell me when you have to scroll 2x your display height

who the fuck decided macos not showing the file path in finder etc is the default

also not having a home directory available by default in the side bar

i fucking hate you so much

Bower, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF CRAP PACKAGE MANAGER!

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

This asshole software is fucking with me and steals my time!

bower mapsjs-core#* cached e-tag:64e4e0850

bower mapsjs-core#* resolved e-tag:41af792c9

bower mapsjs-core#* install e-tag:41af792c9

What would you think is the installed version? WRONG! It's the fucking old cached version.

What the fuck is happening? Probably it's thinking "oh, this is the cached version, I'm looking if there is a new version for it. Yep, new version. I'll download it. But I have a cached version in the user home-directory, I better tell the that I installed the new version but take the old one."

Crap software.

macOS fuckup continued. Today I used a camelcase name for some new file and a directory. Later I didn't like it and wanted to change to lowercase. Pushed it to bitbucket: now I had both versions! Hold my goji berries, what's going on? Maybe some git config screw up? After a bit of fiddling I remembered an old Linus' rant on Apple's file system when they wanted to adopt case insensitivity. So wait, did they actually do that shit? I thought I was on a unixoid, bastardized BSDish system, that apart from all the oddities that Apple bestowed on it, that there was still some sanity left... But, no there isn't. AFP really defaults to case insensitivity.
I have no words.
So switched to my Debian, where I resolved the duplication in two secs. Now Linux feels even much more comfy and home.

It's Friday and you're tired. You're working beyond 8 hrs already. Sure it's paid OT but you want to go home. Just finishing the last 10 API endpoints. But you execute the wrong script the overwrite the directory of the last 10 API endpoints instead of the swagger doc generator script. GRRRrrr.... NO!!!!! T_T

I'm a bit late I know (only 10 years or so), but I never use windows explorer and especially not the home directory with its ridiculous location... but why the heck is it not possible to access the home directory from windows explorer? There are bullshit categories like videos and music, but no direct link to the home directory. The small arrow at the "root" of the adress bar seems to be the only way to access users home. WTF?

You win Linux. That was the last straw. I will never install ANY linux distribution ever again.

Setup a simple FTP server. What can possibly go wrong ?

Ok now I want it to point to /media/ftp

Easy, right ?

Just add local_root=/media/ftp

Weeeeellll nop.

Not working. Completly ingnoring this setting, all users log to home directory.

#chroot_local_user=YES

tried, no effect.

I'm wiping this server and installing windows server there.

Too bad, the process started very well, the machine is fully confiogured, ready to go, DNS working every thing working. Except this shitty FTP.

So FUCK YOU linux wioth config files, WELCOME windows with nice GUI where I can just SELECT the default ftp folder

Fuck XCode! -
Yesterday I had the stupid idea to rename an icon file. Checked that XCode was building the application still fine. Ran it over the build server: Failed, complaining about the old missing icon file! Checked again and again, but there was no friggin' reference to the old file in the whole repo.
Log in to the machine clear the build folder and try to build the component again. Bang still same error and the references to no longer existing files reappear.
Turns out XCode was caching those references somewhere in the home directory as "DerivedData" and after deleting those, I could build again... but why on earth are you building a cache if you cannot properly invalidate it? Just to waste our time?
(@xcodesucks)

Never! ever! EVER!!! run sudo rm -fr * inside your home directory! Hard lesson learned on a Monday :(

P.S it was not intentional at all!

Note to self: Always do a dry run first when you have --delete-before using rsync.

Long story short I wanted to restore some folders from my external HDD to the home directory on my laptop XD I should have specified the exact folders 😹

>"rm -rf ~/"
>Wonder what the exact name of the file I'm deleting is
>*presses tab*
>*presses enter multiple times*
>accidentally presses "enter" when the choices are finished
>delete entire home directory
>fuck.

Settings be like..
yo dude you want your home directory on C: or D:?

Me: let's use D: pls.

Every program uses D, cus there is HOMEPATH.

Cmd be like..
C:\Users\Mofo>

I failed to recognize that svn import does not download the repo to my laptop but "imports" the directory I'm currently in into the repo. That was my /home...

I don't know how much of this can be considered data loss but one one of my uni classmates frustrated by some hellish tasks (cleaning some old code files probably) decided that everything in that particular directory won't be of any further need, so she procede to rm -rf it.. only to discover that the terminal opened in that dir was another one and her current one (the one she bashed that unforgiving rm) was in fact a standard freshly opened term where any term would open.. in the user's (only user) home dir... such a face she had when all her codes, homeworks, projects and everything went to oblivion 😂😂 jokes aside it was a good thing that the semester was almost finished, all hws submited and no important data was there as she dual booted with ubuntu and some windows, but funny thing how such a honest mistake can ruin not only your day, but maybe your entire semester

Ok I take back what I said about having luck with hardware and software sometimes, why is it so fucking difficult to setup a linux distribution with your home directory on a seperate drive... Just why...

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Tux be with me

(Please feel free to enlighten me if you are aware of a way I can do this)

macOS' Finder says I have 24 files and directories in my home directory. 'ls -lah | wc -l' says I have 172. That's a lot to keep hidden from me. :)

I executed "chmod -R go-r .*" on my home directory at the university server.

Only to realize that ".*" also considers ".." so I chmodded out files for many other students before I hit ctrl-c.

I must be the DUMBEST person on the planet to constantly have problems with being able to drag one Mac directory in Finder to another one without taking everything OUTSIDE of that directory also and dumping it where I don’t want it. Or the file or folder ending up somewhere else than my intended destination. This time I wanted ONE folder from my downloads to go into ONE other folder in my home. Instead, it took EVERYTHING in downloads and dumped it into the target folder. It was impossible to sort out what didn’t belong so I had to delete everything and now all my downloads stuff (some of which I was still using) is gone.

I've created instructions for myself the next time I encounter cpanel.

rallen@rallen ~ $ cheat cpanel
#SSH'ing into the fucking cpanel
#Figure out combination of 5 usernames and passwords given by client to log in.
#Pray that WHM isn't involved.
#Ignore several ssl warnings and cancel several .htaccess password prompts.
#Call in to enable that shit.
#Wait no less than 15 minutes on hold.
#SSH enabled.
#Create public private key pair.
#Notice the ppk conversion for windows 'devs'. Sigh.
#Copy key pair to ~/.ssh/
#chmod that shit to 600.
#Note for the user name it's not anything the clients given you or what you've named the key. Look in the cpanel for the /home/<user> directory.
ssh -i ~/.ssh/key <user>@<dedicatedip>

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

Is there a Linux distribution without a lot of problems with Nvidia drivers? I'm currently using elementary os, because I like the look of it, but I'm getting a lot of graphical glitches and black screens all the time and I was wondering if changing to another distro would help. Is elementary is known for graphical glitches, or is it just the Nvidia drivers? I've also turned my display manager into a mess while trying to customise my login screen, so it might be a good time to change to another distribution. Any recommendations? And one more thing, just out of curiosity, can you install multiple distributions and use the same home directory if home is mounted on a separate partition?

How do you guys manage your dotfiles? How do you organize them and prevent your home directory from filling up?

I remember back when I was in pre calculus I decided to take a class online. So my teacher's website was made by him and run on go Daddy, he taught precalculus, calculus, algebra, algebra ii, and computer science. I decided to penetration test his website and use a web crawler. His directory that had the tests, test answers, exams, exam answers, and homework answer's as well as all the books he's written in PDFs, was unprotected, I could access and download them all. He also had a database directory that contained all the students' phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and their full names.

I alerted him to this and didn't get anything in turn :P

My final year taking a B.Sc. I'm writing up my Distributed Systems project, the day before handing it in. It's on top of Transis, and source code is "stored" in RCS (yes, I'm that old). The project is a reliable system administration tool, that performs the same action across a cluster with guaranteed semantics.
I'm very proud of the semantics, but cannot figure out why the subdirectory installation stuff works almost but not quite. Here's my sequence of actions:
1. Install across all machines.
2. Manually see it's broken.
3. "rm -rf *".
4. Repeat.

What in to discover is that the subdirectory installation always finishes off in a current directory 1 level higher than where it started. Oh, and the entire cluster sees my NFS home directory. Oh, and I'm running each cluster member in a deep subdirectory of my dev directory. Oh, and my RCS files live in a subdirectory of my dev directory.

All of a sudden, my 5 concurrent "rm -rf *"s were printing weird error messages about ENOENT and not being able to find some inodes. In a belated flash of brilliance, I figure out all the above, and also that I've just deleted my dev directory. 5 times, concurrently. And the RCS files.

That was the day a kindly sysadmin taught me than NetApps have these .snapshot directories.

Fuck ssh. It does 4 things at once and i couldn't get it to do one. I have some pi's and want a shared directory on each of them. On a server i created a user for that and mounted its home directory on a pi, it worked. I did some lockdowns (no shell, only sftp allowed, login only via keyfile), but i was still able to mount it on boot.

Now i had to migrate this setup to another server. It took me a while copying all the configuration etc. All i got for that was a error-message. I figured out the users home-directory had to be owned be root, fixed that, got another error message. Somehow scp didn't use sftp but the login shell which is /usr/sbin/nologin. That made scp (and sshfs) fail, even though it perfectly works with the other server.

I gave up and removed all the setup. I'll find another distributed filesystem for that (but not samba or nfs, those are way to complicated). Those are the setbacks that depress me.

I remember the day I used Linux to enforce size quotas on user directories oh what a day
I was surrounded by horrible monsters wearing manho suits that made them appear superficially human... though the sounds screeching forth from their many toothed mouths in whining jarring tones would suggest otherwise and I used this wonderful feature : you can call most of the file systems commands on files !

did a dd to create a disk image specified to the correct size made an fs inside and mounted it straight into the home directory adding entries to the fstab to auto mount and setting the io permissions
It was so wonderful and the little bastards refused to use the server !

I‘m currently trying to get an SFTP user for our school's webspace (preinstalled WordPress, don't hate it - it's "great" for non-"it" people) and our network administrator means that he can't create one for me because I would have access to all files on the server.
WTF, you can create SFTP users on Linux and restrict their access and even set a home directory.

Yeah, now we need to forget about themes and plugins in WordPress.

(He said that he also can't create an FTP user)

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

Docker compose switches users but doesn't update the home directory. Both switching users and not touching envvars are very sensible default behavior, but the result is that the running service has no write access to $HOME - and many programs don't provide sensible error messages for this rather unlikely scenario.

Where do I keep a custom config file?!!!
I have a script in /etc/init.d that runs a program that takes a file as an argument, but I shouldn't keep that file in a user's home directory. Where should it be?

I am not a fan of programs that want to store their libraries in your home directory. It's alright if they store it in a hidden folder at least. I like my home directory to be nice and clean~~

Windows 10 , I just want a flipping built in command line executable to log off another (local) user. I'm not a server, I don't have active directory, I don't want to switch to log in as that user first, i want to just kill their inactive local session because cisco freaking vpn doesn't allow you to connect when a other user is logged in. I can kill the session from admin task manager, I just want to be in the commandline. If your gonna let software check the number of logged in users, let the freaking administration modify the number of logged in users with a cli.

Idk if I could turn it off an on again. On a server I would just issue "query sessions" or "query users" followed by "logoff ##". Why not let me do the same damn thing on my home computer sk I don't have to restart MY SESSION just to close MY WIFE'S session. You stupid fraking company that cannot provide consistent command line programs across various systems. SCREW YOU MICROSOFT AND YOUR UTTER ASANINE DECISION MAKING REGARDING WHAT FEATURES TO INCLUDE IN WHAT BUILDS.

Just helped a colleague. She wanted a list of all files in all subdirectories of a folder. Easy enough, fired up powershell, ls'd everything into a text file in ~\Desktop, jobs done.
About 5 minutes later, she messaged me, telling me she closed the file without saving. So I went over. The file wasn't on her desktop. Quickly recreated the file - again into ~\Desktop but powershell found the file there.
"nah, doesn't matter I'll just overwrite it and be done with it." I thought.
So I did that, and the bloody file still didn't show up.
I had a look at where ~\Desktop is. It's on partition H:. WHO THE FUCK HAD THE BRILLIANT IDEA TO SET H: AS THE HOME DIRECTORY?!

Downloaded Gitkraken in my ubuntu workspace... Like to work with GIT in a GUI interface...
Now trying how to run this GUI as a sudo user so that Gitkraken can edit files in my home directory :p

Another great website error code fail (dumped its full error output to the website):
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/api.py", line 436, in send_error
data, 'text/html')
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/chrome.py", line 808, in render_template
template = self.load_template(filename, method=method)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/chrome.py", line 768, in load_template
self.templates = TemplateLoader(
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/chrome.py", line 481, in get_all_templates_dirs
for provider in self.template_providers:
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/core.py", line 78, in extensions
return filter(None, [component.compmgr[cls] for cls in extensions])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/core.py", line 213, in __getitem__
component = cls(self)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/core.py", line 119, in maybe_init
init(self)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/authopenid/authopenid.py", line 157, in __init__
db = self.env.get_db_cnx()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/env.py", line 335, in get_db_cnx
return get_read_db(self)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/api.py", line 90, in get_read_db
return _transaction_local.db or DatabaseManager(env).get_connection()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/api.py", line 152, in get_connection
return self._cnx_pool.get_cnx(self.timeout or None)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/pool.py", line 172, in get_cnx
return _backend.get_cnx(self._connector, self._kwargs, timeout)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/pool.py", line 105, in get_cnx
cnx = connector.get_connection(**kwargs)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/sqlite_backend.py", line 180, in get_connection
return SQLiteConnection(path, log, params)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/sqlite_backend.py", line 255, in __init__
user=getuser(), path=path))
TracError: The user apache requires read _and_ write permissions to the database file /home/trac/morituri/db/trac.db and the directory it is located in.

I'm fucking tired of my computer having random
2 seconds latency on any basic action and being slow as fuck regardless of powerful processor, ssd and 32GB RAM. Music via bluetooth is basically unusable since every few seconds the music stops for a 0.2s then plays again. I installed this system (opensuse tumbleweed) in February this year and it's just sad that I have reinstall again (any ideas for distro) ?

I made a dummy mistake of buying a CPU without internal graphics and this resulted in having to buy a GPU. So I got myself Nvidia(another mistake) since i though i would be using CUDA on the university. Turnes out CUDA cannot be installed for some retarded reason.
With Nvidia GPU the screens on my two monitors are swapping every time I use a hdmi switch to use other computer. On AMD GPU this problem does not exist. AMD GPU pro drivers are impossible to install. Computers barely fucking work, change my mind. Shit is breaking all the time. Everything is so half assed.

The music player that i use sometimes swaps ui with whatever was below it like for example the desktop background and i need to kill the process and start again to use the program. WTF.

Bluetooth seems to hate me. I check the bluetooth connected devices on my computer, it says headphones connected. BULLSHIT. The headphones are fucking turned OFF. How the fuck can they be connected you dumbass motherfucker computer. So I turn on the headphones. And I cannot connect them since the system thinks that they are already connected. So I have to unpair them and pair them again. WTF. Who fucking invents this bullshit?
Let's say i have headphones connected to the computer. I want to connect them to phone. I click connect from the phone settings. Nothing happens. Bullshit non telling error "could not connect". So I have to unpair from computer to pair to phone. Which takes fucking minutes, because reasons. VERY fucking convenient technology.
The stupid bluetooth headphones have a loud EARRAPE voice when turning them on "POWER ON!!! PAIRING", "CONNECTED", "DISCONNECT". Loudness of this cannot be modified. The 3 navigation buttons are fucking unrecognizable so i always take few seconds to make sure i click the correct button.

Fucking keyboard sometimes forgets that I remapped esc key to caps lock and then both keys don't work so i need to reconnect the keyboard cable. At least it's not fucking bluetooth.

The only reason why hdmi switches exist is because monitor's navigation menus have terrible ui and/or infrared activated, non-mechanical buttons.
Imagine the world where monitors have a button for each of it's inputs. I click hdmi button it switches it's input to hdmi. I click display port button - it switches to display port. But nooo, you have to go through the OSD menu.

My ~ directory has hundred of files that I never put there. Doesn't feel like home, more like a crackhead crib.

My other laptop (also tumbleweed) I click on hibernate option and it shuts down. WTF. Or sometimes I open the lid and screen is black and when i click keyboard nothing happens so i have to hold power button and restart.

We've been having computers for 20 + years and they still are slow, unreliable and barely working.

Is there a cure? I'm starting to think the reason why everything is working so shitty and unreliable, is because the foundations are rotten. The systems that we use are built with c, ridden with cryptic abbreviated code, undefined behavior and security vulnerabilities. The more I've written c programs the more convinced I am, that we should have abandoned it for something better long ago. Why haven't we? And honestly what would be better? Everything fucking sucks. The rust seems to be light in the tunnel but I don't know if this is only hype or is it really better. I'm sure it can't be worse than c or c++. Either we do something with the foundations or we're doomed.

So what about sandboxing wine by executing it and the prefix under a different unprivileged user than your main user account ?

wine shouldn't be able to access your normal users home directory then right ?

I keep seeing goddamn ads for firejail... and then its main site is a wordpress..

I need to have a hosting company upgrade the Debian OS install on a VPS. But I also need to know things like what MySQL or Perl modules were added to the server by other admins prior to me outside the /home directory. I don't have any documentation on it at all. If I don't preserve custom stuff like that, it could result in a dead website. Anyone got any tricks for figuring out what was added and when?

[POOL]
What do you have: a "dev" or a "workplace" directory in your home? I always had a "dev" for my projects and I think I'm not alone, but I can't be sure

Spend half an hour with the "git remote add ..." yada yada after setting up an git repo on a vps where I failed to create the home directory with the user and had to do it manually.

As I was against making a trash commit to win against the Schrödinger repo I begun torture myself with the PowerShell SSH compatibility.

I gave up at the end and made an commit with some libs I am going to use. After a last SSH port fight with git got everything up and running.

Lastly installed the new magical windows git credential manager and I am hoping to see some fairy dust in the next days.

Tl;Dr:
If(windows&&SSH&&git){
throw new EverythingWrongException("Git gud");
}

Ok, so for past 1 whole day I am trying to make vhost work on my brand new laptop, running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS... When I installed OS, I've set hard disk encryption, and on top of it - user home folder encryption. Don't ask me why I did both.

Setting up vhost is simple and straight forward - I did it hundreds, maybe thousands of times, on various Linux distros, server and desktop releases alike.

And of course, as it usually happens, opposed to all logic and reason - setting up virtual host on this machine did't work. No matter what I do - I get 403 (access not allowed).

All is correctly set - directory params in apache config, vhost paths, directory params within vhost, all the usual stuff.

I thought I was going crazy. I go back to several live servers I'm maintaining - exactly the same setup that doesn't work on my machine. Google it, SO-it, all I can see is exactly what I have been doing... I ended up checking char by char every single line, in disbelief that I cannot find what is the problem.

And then - I finally figured it out after loosing one whole day of my life on it:

I was trying to setup vhost to point to a folder inside my user's home folder - which is set to be encrypted.

Aaaaaand of course - even with all right permissions - Apache cannot read anything from it.

As soon as I tried any other folder outside my home folder - it worked.

I cannot believe that nobody encountered this issue before on Stackoverflow or wherever else.

I JUST WANT TO FUCKING EXCLUDE A DIRECTORY....

I run the code cleaner tool, OH CHRIST it's trying to sanitise the automatically generated code, I don't want this.

I try to exclude... takes ages to work out that while specifying the dirs is absolute you can only exclude relative but from what? I want to block a/b but not a/c/b but no it's all you can only block all b b it a/b, b/b, c/b, c/b, a/c/b, etc.

I google for other solutions, nothing but trash, docs a trash, here's some examples but we don't tell you the actual behaviour. All I want is to get everything in /home/hilldog/emails but not /home/hilldog/emails/topsekret how hard can it be?

I use the source but what's this, BeefJerkyIteratorIteratorBananaSpliterator all over the shop how much convolution and LOC does it take to provide a basic find facility?

Screw this...

$finder->in(explode("\n",trim(exec('find '.escape_args(...$good).' -type d ' . implode('
-o ', prefix('\! -wholename', escape_args(..$bad))) . ' -etc | grep -vETC \'pretty_patterns\''))))

So I found one of the most random bugs I've ever come across.

So we have this file management system as part of the website, showing breadcrumbs to the current directory, with 'home' as the root of the path. This path is passed to the back end whenever the user navigates to a new directory etc.. The back end code then does a replace on 'home' with the actual directory path.

Ended up with a directory for a person called Homer. Guess what happened..