A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

Now, I work at a hosting company in the UK, as a linux support engineer. I've seen many cases where a number of clients ran one of the following:

rm -rf / something
rm -rf /var/cache (attempt to magento)
chmod 777 /var
chown -R user:user /*

Half the time, they're like "Hey guys, I dun did fuck up, please help!". The other half of the time, they piss me off. Here's a number of responses that really grinds my gears:

"Such a harmful command should really prompt for input before running" -- From the buy you "forced" a recursive rm command, which mutes such a feature.

Client: "I did no such thing"
Me: "I've seen the command history, and at the time the command was run, you were the only person logged in"
Client: "You're mistaken, You're reading the information wrong"
Me: "I assure you, I'm not, I know what I'm looking at"
Client: "Well you're a shit engineer"
Me (thought): "Says the fucker who doesn't know how to linux"

I like people who own up to fuck ups. But the ones that don't, are just making their lives harder, since we have all the evidence in front of us.

Most of these people are the developers, and in some cases, the sysadmins...

Docs: If you get a 500 error [...] you may need to run chmod -R 777 storage[...]
I: wait *reads again*
Doc:s chmod -R 777
I: 😲
Docs: 777
I: rm -rf ./

When you do a 'sudo rm -r /*' instead of a 'sudo rm -r ./*' on ubuntu

PS : I just did it :'(

Worst advice?
That must have been that time my boss asked me how to restart rsyslog (Windowsguy and I was on vacation)
- "just do rm -r /var/log haha"
And ONE SECOND LATER I SENT THIS
- "haha jk dont"
Waiting a minute and I get this:
- "well that did not work"

Damnit

Most used git command for starters:
rm -R repo
git clone repo

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.

sudo rm -R /Boltons_army/*

rm -r all/my/studentloans

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.

I've got a puzzle! How well do you know the weird GNU coreutils error messages?

$ rm foo/
rm: cannot remove 'foo/': Is a directory

$ rm -r foo/
rm: cannot remove 'foo/': Not a directory

What am I?

$ alias please="sudo"

$ please rm /* -r

One shouldn't use 'rm -r' late at night -_- just deleted my entire NAS storage thinking I was in another directory

...5 minutes ago per ssh on the productivity server...

"ok, let's delete this old test directory ..."
*types rm -r www*
....*thinking* ...*realising* ... "FUUUUUCK!!11"
*quickly types git clone gitadress"
*checks website* "phew!"

Difficult tasks, dog is sick, S.O. suffering from depression, sleep deprived, and now I accidentally type "rm -r / ./" instead of "rm -r ./" on the production server. Whyyyyy

Such a small difference can make such a big difference.
sudo rm -R ./;
sudo rm -R /;

WARNING MAJOR SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS INFINITY WAR

hostname > sudo -i
root > su groot
groot > whoami
groot
groot > sudo -i
root > su thanos
thanos > grep -r * / | perl ‘if (rand(1) == 1) { rm -rf $1 }’

TIL that sudo chmod -R 777 /* is the new sudo rm -rf /

So like a couple days ago I was trying to clear the Var directory of my Symfony project.
I wrote
cd /var
rm ./* -R
Linux: are you sure you want to delete write protected blah blah blah?
Me:AHA! SO ITS A PERMISSIONS ISSUE
sudo rm ./* -R

Quickly realized I was no longer in my project directory.

Took a fat L. Had to reinstall.

rm -r * makes me nervous every time

Do you have 1000000000 node_modules folders and no space on your machine? This command will help. Just NPM install in the folders you actually use:

rm -r **/node_modules

Professor: with rm -r /* you can delete everything on your pc

Me: ou boii lets try it can't be so bad🤪

Prof: pls never try this, when i say everything i mean everything

Me: ou frick what did i do 😱

Note for me: Next time do a backup

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....

It's obviously a Friday because to delete the file I accidently made called ~ I decided to run rm -r ~

Fml

simple things can be dangerous .. like simple command ' rm -r *'

Be vary of entering commands from history (Arrow Up), especially if you did a destructive command not long ago.

Did this in a database for a game. I cleaned the clan tables not long before release. Then a short while after the release I searched for a clan related query and ended up clearing one of the tables again (ofc on autocommit). :|

So had to delete the related tables and notified people they had to claim their clan name yet again really quick.

---

Never had the issue on linux yet, but I'm usually vary when doing a generic destructive command (like "rm -r *"). The problem rarely happens with zsh (you can arrow up based on what you already typed) but I'm often still vary and prefix the command with a space to prevent it showing up in my history.

It's okay to slow down. Seriously it's fine. You can write 203 wpm... as long as the command you enter includes all necessary limits. Nothing is worse than having ansible rm -r the wrong directory or the wrong server because you missed a limit and put all.

$fml: rm /* -R

Instead of /devtemp/*

Yes it was a crazy recovery!