I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I’ve got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

  • @inetknght@lemmy.ml
    49•2 months ago

    1. have an nvidia GPU

    2. have Fedora

    3. download RPM package of drivers for Red Hat (after all, Fedora and Red Hat are… compatible, right?)

    4. Everything goes fine

    5. Six months later, upgrade to a new version of Fedora

    6. oops, kernel panic at boot after the upgrade, and no video to troubleshoot after UEFI boot

    7. figure out how to boot into a recovery partition from UEFI

    8. figure out how to enable a serial console over a USB device

    9. figure out how to connect to the serial console from another computer using another USB device

    10. figure out what the kernel panic is from (not the upgrade, but the driver which wasn’t upgraded)

    11. figure out how to uninstall the incorrectly installed driver

    12. figure out how to install the correct driver

    That was a fun three week OS upgrade.

      • macniel
        9•2 months ago

        You attach a secondary computer via serial (COM port) with your primary computer and then you can open a console on that one. You can access the primary computer as if you would be sitting in front of it.

      • @AngryPancake@sh.itjust.works
        5•2 months ago

        Adding to what DmMacniel said, it’s a hardware interface, often accessed via a USB port (which after all, is the universal serial bus).

        • @FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          6•2 months ago

          Christ you guys are making me feel old. I remember back in the day when a serial connection was made through an actual serial port. I know I have some serial cards around here somewhere. I have also used the tar command on an actual tape… Here’s a fun fact, if your tape drive (big reel to reel looking thing, not a cassette or other kind of ‘tape’) has an issue with rewinding, do not use your finger to manually spin the reel. Use a pencil. I finished reeling my tape back up once and realized I now had a blister on the end of my finger.

      • @inetknght@lemmy.ml
        4•2 months ago

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_console

        tl;dr:

        Serial ports are (for example) commonly RS-232, although other types of ports exist. Imagine it to be a very slow Ethernet device. Because it’s so slow (and the technology predates Ethernet and also has different requirements), it’s usually attached directly to a device instead of to a network. But you could connect a modem to it and it becomes connected to a network device.

        It could also be connected to a system console device. These are commonly called terminals. Such devices are often monochrome (especially older ones) because a serial connection is often bandwidth limited (eg, measured in kilobits per second instead of megabits or gigabits). Since it’s so slow, it’s not practical for video, so it’s generally just text-only.

        Note that your GPU might also output a system console but rendered on your display at very high resolution and with graphics-drawing capabilities. So a system console would be any console that connects to the system.

        What is a console? Well, Wikipedia presents several valid articles and the common theme as far as computers go is that a “console” is typically something that a human and a computer use to interact with each other.

        For serial consoles, you might find device files for them at /dev/tty*. But for general serial devices, it could be any of several different types of device files.

        Wikipedia’s article on /dev devices has a pretty decent listing of what kinds of devices you might find and several of them might be classified as a serial port. Any serial port might be connected to a serial console.

        So in my case, a serial console is:

        1. 2x USB-to-RS-232 (USB is a serial protocol and is basically “just” another (Universal) (and perhaps high speed) Serial port (Bus), so conversion is super cheap)
        2. 1x RS-232 null modem cable

        That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Then

        1. System 1 (the failing system) UEFI boots into repair system partition on a separately attached disk (eg, boot from CD or live USB) to get a local system console
        2. System 1 repair system mounts the failing system partition
        3. System 1 modifies failing system grub configuration to enable a serial console on the attached USB-to-serial device file and saves changes, then unmounts failing system partition
        4. Power off System 1
        5. Remove repair partition device
        6. Open terminal window on System 2 (recovery system)
        7. Connect System 2 terminal to the attached USB-to-serial device file using screen (oh wow those were some old days)
        8. Power on System 1
        9. System 1 boot enters grub recovery menu which allows fixing the system remotely

        To be fair, a lot of that complexity could have been done by either reinstalling, or removing the hard drive and attaching it to another computer. But doing it this way allowed me to poke around and try different ways of solving the issue, rebooting, etc. It was a learning experience worth exploring.

        It was years ago though and I think there was some complication with trying to understand what device file (or device number or something) needed to be to work on the correct serial device (there are often multiple)