[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]

Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.

That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.

If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!

I taught my 9yo sister to SSH from my Arch Linux system to an Ubuntu system, she was amazed to see terminal and Firefox launching remotely. Next I taught her to murder and eat all the memory (I love Linux, as Batman, one should also know the weaknesses). Now she can rm rf / --no-preserve-root and the forkbomb. She's amazed at the power of one liners. Will be teaching her python as she grew fond of my Raspberry Pi zero w with blinkt and phat DAC, making rainbows and playing songs via mpg123.
I made her use play with Makey Makey when it first came out but it isn't as interesting. Drop your suggestions which could be good for her learning phase?

2 weeks ago I was writing an `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` oneliner as a joke - as an answer to a question "I have access to my competitor's server; what should I do?". I was crafting it so that it'd do as much damage to the business (not the server) as it could.

And I accidentally executed it on my work laptop. In the background (with an `&`).

It ran for a good 5-7 seconds on an i7-11850H with an SSD, until I issued a `kill %%`

Good thing it ran as a non-root user. Bad thing - I have no idea what it may have deleted nor whether it touched my /home.

I'm afraid to restart my laptop now :)

whoopsie :)

The goal of one of my CS assignments was to learn about makefile, and during the last minute - literally while I was waiting for the professor to come over - I was just making everything presentable and getting rid of noise. I figured putting rm -r *.* in clean would be a good way to get rid of all the debug output.

To be fair, my project folder was indeed pretty clean afterwards.

One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.

On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).

Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.

I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".

Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.

There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.

Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

First day as teacher - ok guys we're going to learn good lesson today, open up your terminals and write the next command sudo rm -rf /

-I just visited my nephew, I wasn't their teacher

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

"Sudo rm -rf / "ed my build server at work today... Died of laughter when i found out there was no snapshot.

We all had a good laugh. 😂😂😂

I own my grandfather's Victorinox Swiss Army Knife, probably from the eighties. I absolutely love it — it's just like the standard Unix toolkit. Minimalist, multi-purpose, efficient. This is what I have in my knife:
1. Two blades. I call them master (yes) and slave
2. Corkscrew. I call it "ed".
3. Hole puncher, but not just any hole puncher. Mine has an angular sharp edge to carve holes instead of just punching them. Super efficient for wood, plastic and thick fabric. It also has a hole so it can be used as a needle. I call it "vi".
4. Bottle opener which is also a screwdriver. I call it "more".
5. Can opener. This is my favorite one.

It can help you open just about anything. Any type of cans, closed pistachio nuts, oysters, your barely legal girlfriend's virginity — anything. When I eat pistachios, I'm holding my Victorinox in my hand opening tough ones with the speed of rm -rf ripping through your files. Oh, and it's also another screwdriver. I call it "cat".

But let's take a look at modern Victorinox. Maybe it's better? No, not at all. It's totally metrosexual featuring nail files, nail clippers, nail scissors and a flash drive (not even a good one).

Newer doesn't always mean cooler.

(I have the exact same one, photo from the internet because I'm too lazy)

Just ran rm -rf ~

Only good thing is I ran it without sudo.

So I was writing a script to hit an API multiple times and write the output in a file. Instead of providing the absolute path like /User/.... I gave the path as ~/..., So it created a folder named ~ inside the directory I was inside. Now I wanted to delete it and the file inside it. And so I did it.

I am an idiot

So I made an update to my React Native app. I changed UI of a couple of screen, added a few animations here and there, refactored how my graphQL resolvers work in the backend(no breaking changes), changed how data gets loaded into the database etc.

It worked in dev so I figured hey let's deploy it. Today is(was because it's now 3am but more on that later) a national holiday so no one goes to work so no one will use my app so I have an entire day to deploy.

I started at 15:00(because i woke up at 13:00 lol). I tested the update once again in dev and proceeded to deploy it to prod. I merged backend to master, built docker images, did migrations on the db, restarted docker-compose with new images. And now for the app. I run ./gradlew assembleRelease and it starts complaining that react-native-gesture-handler is not installed. Ugh, rm -rf node_modules && yarn install. It worked. But now gradlew crashes and logs don't tell me anything. Google tells me to change a bunch of gradle settings but none of them work. Fast forward 5h, it's around 20:00 and I isolated the issue to, again, react-native-gesture-handler. They updated from 2.2.4 to 2.3.0 which didn't fucking compile. 2 more hours passed (now 22:00) and I got v2.3.1 working which fixed the problem in 2.3.0 but made my app crash on startup. YOUR FUCKING LIBRARY GETS 250K WEEKLY DOWNLOADS AND YOU DONT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING IF IT COMPILES IN PROD ON ANDROID?! WHAT THE FUCK software-mansion?

After I solved that, my app didn't crash. Now it threw an error "Type errors: Network Request Failed" every time I fetch my legacy REST API(older parts use rest and newer use graphql. I'll refactor that in the next update). I'll spare you the debugging hell i went through but another 5h passed. Its 3am. My config had misspelled url to prod but good for dev... I hate myself and even more so react-native-gesture-handler.

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

I really like helping other learn how to use a programming language or solve problems on general. I often go out of my way and stop working on my hobby projects, just to help someone.

Thag being said, I'm no prgramming god. I myself am striving to become a better programmer.
I make mistakes, I can't always help you, I am still learning, but I only have good intentions. And you are by no means obligated to follow my advice. Quite the contrary, fight me, try to prove me wrong or say point out possible flaws. THINK ABOUT WHAT I TELL YOU. DON'T JUST BLINDLY FOLLOW MY ADVICE AND BITCH ON ME LATER.

This happens rather often and I can see why you want to blame me. And I can't deny that part of this is also my fault.
Situations like these don't really tilt me.

But today someone had the fucking nerve to pop a file into the chat and get mad at me for sugvesting a cleaner, shorter and more efficient solution. LIKE I DON'T FUCKING CARE THAT IT TOOK YOU A WHOLE DAY TO IMPLEMENT SOMETHING I CAN DO BETTER IN MINUTES, I JUST WANT TO HELP YOU.
But the best thing I get afterwards: "But you told me to do it like that" BITCH WHAT!?
I have chat logs telling me loud and clear that the concept we never talked about before in private nor on a public server (bless discord's search function). And I will not accept your lousy excuse of having me cobfused with someone. You disrespected me greatly, you put words in my mouth, just to justify your pity anger, when I'm trying to help you?!

Get crucified and put on a shooting range!

I offer you out of pure goodwill. Something you'd normally have to pay for. And this is the treatment I get in return?
Just rm -rf your disastrous, dd -if=/dev/urandom your harddrive and sod off!

Current directory:

upstream
potatoecode

find ./upstream -maxdepth 1 -type d -ls >> potatoecode/.gitignore

pushd potatoecode
git add .gitignore
git commit -m 'Updated gitignore" .gitignore
git rm -r --cached .
git add .
git commit -am "Purgatory"
popd

*watching with a big smile the burning CI*

--

Story of how I made some devs today very sad. They now have the joyful task to think of a better way to code than to create a nightmare blob of modified source code from upstream - where upstream has ...

- a rest API
- an extension / plugin system
- an system to even modify db schema via an API.

But nooooo.... That would be too good.

Instead one just creates an potatohead of upstream source code with modifications without any version tracking or stuff like that.

Sometimes I really wonder if the devs at our company are masochists and want to be punished....

Fun story:

I once was in some kind of SSH-ception, my machine and two remote machines where the same, as in the username and hostname (local name) where equal. All with and Hitachi 500 GB disk.

I was going to nuke the remote machine 1, so later that day I would rebuild the system and all that good stuff, so it would be equal to remote machine 2.

I check the disks and see that it is what I expected, and proceed with the so called "sudo rm -rf /".

Turns out, in my madness, I was doing this on the remote machine 2, not on remote machine 1 (too many terminals), and after I pressed the button and 5 minutes are passed, I realize my mistake...I had just killed a big part of some research I was doing for college (100 or so simulation files, 2GB each).

LESSON: Always triple check your drives and sessions.

P.S.: Something similar happened with me once doing dd to make a ubuntu bootable flash, I ended up erasing 800GB of backup files.

My fucking god!! I swear if i meet the guy who implemented Array.reduce in javascript!! I'll tear his god damn head clean off and stuff it down his throat!!

From the spec: "if the initial value is omitted, the first value of the array is used instead and skipped"

WHO TF THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA!?!!?!

One freaking hour that stuff cost me today RRREEEEEEEEEE

# rm -rf $JAVASCRIPT

Please and thank you!

I'm feeling guilty.
I've a lot of fun hearing the flautolence wich comes out from the mouth of my brain farters collegues in my university. I usually fake being a mediocre student who never worked nor programmed anything else except the stupid exercises related to the exams. Yesterday a collegue come out saying: WOAH, YOU'RE USING LINUX!
Good, nice deduction my dear Sherlock.
The best had to come.
The genius decided to mocks me up telling: YOU KNOW IF YOU TYPE sudo rm -rf / IN THE CMD YOU MAKE YOUR COMPUTER FASTER?
Before I processed that he's not serious i answered "no, rm just remov..." and I saw the beaten look in his eyes because the joke misersbly failed. So i proceeded: "hahaha, fun. Anyway i could rm -undo to fix the mess".
As soon i finished the sentence he ran on him laptop and boots up the VM to try...