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rowinxavier ,

Working for a VoIP company in the early 2010s I rm -rf’d the /bin/ directory. As root. On a production server. On site.

I ended up booting from my phone (android app for iso booting) then manually coppied over the files from another machine. Chrooted and some stuff was broken but rebuilding from the package manager reinstalled everything that was missing. Got the system back up in around 40 mins after that colossal screw up. Good fun and a great learning experience. Honestly, my manager should not have had me doing anything on a root shell with no training.

dejected_warp_core ,

I ended up booting from my phone (android app for iso booting)

Impressive. I had no idea that was a thing. That’s easily the most “Star Trek” sounding fix I’ve heard in a good while.

back up in around 40 mins […] on a root shell with no training.

… and you intuited that fix, or at least pulled it together from scratch/google with no training? Doubly impressive.

fossphi ,

You might enjoy this ;)

www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html

azvasKvklenko ,

I was trying to setup Timeshift for system snapshots on a work computer with Ubuntu. It didn’t work for some reason so I tried to first get rid of it. After uninstalling it, I wanted to remove, what I though, were remains of TS files in /run/timeshift, but the root partition was still mounted, so I rm-rfd the whole root, luckily except for home. And the computer has BIOS password with secure boot, so talking to IT dep about what I’ve done that is…. Or is it? The /boot and the initramfs was still in place, so it was dropping me to emergency shell when trying to boot. Connecting external USB to see if I can mount it, hmm doesn’t show up. Quick search on my private computer what kernel modules are required for USB storage, modprobed couple of xhci_* and bang, was able to mount it. I saved result of ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid on the drive and moved to my private PC, where I created VM and installed exact same Ubuntu with exact config (LVM+Luks) and after it was done I copied all of / content to the (now formatted as ext4) external drive using cp -a, then edited fstab and crypttab to put proper UUIDs there, set up hostname and user account accordingly. Then moved back to the borked laptop, copied the newly installed Ubuntu back to the root partition, rebooted and it worked perfectly on first try and continues to work. All of that roller coster in just a single hour.

Honytawk ,

That not a thing on Linux?

SFC /Scannow on Windows

Custodian1623 ,

so called free-thinking Microsoft help lines when presented with any problem whatsoever

Honytawk ,

Well, the command was designed to fix the most common Windows problems like corrupted files and weird settings. So of course help lines are going to ask to run it. It was made to automatically fix problems.

It also works amazingly well.

Custodian1623 ,

to answer your question, Linux systems tend to be more stable than windows when it comes to just leaving it running and different distros have different tools for repairing files. Funny enough I actually fixed a windows installation using a equally user friendly tool that shipped with Ubuntu

SanndyTheManndy ,

I installed nixos on my laptop. That was four weeks ago. I am still configuring it.

BlueDwaggin ,

Getting WiFi to work in 2003

TooLazyDidntName ,

For me, it was getting WiFi to work in 2023

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

NDISWrapper: we're just gonna trick the Windows driver into thinking it's running on Windows and intercept the system calls.

That was certainly an era.

hardaysknight ,

God what a nightmare that was

lightnegative ,

Oh god I remember that. Luckily in 2003 my main computer was scraped together from discarded parts at my father’s day job, so it was ethernet only

In 2024 on a laptop I still have wifi problems though. Most recently, if I closed and opened the laptop lid (suspend + resume), the wifi hardware just disappeared off the face of the kernel.

Turns out that the iwlwifi kernel module just irreversibly crashes when the laptop suspends and can only be fixed with a reboot.

So I had the fun task learning about systemd pre-suspend hooks to unload the driver before suspend and load it again on resume.

Turns out wifi drivers still suck in 2024

ConstantPain ,

I have had an issue for years that I couldn’t pinpoint to a root cause (I’m strongly inclined to think it’s a kernel issue). I bought a CM Storm Quickfire TK keyboard with ABNT2 layout.

The issue is: every time I try to type any key that is not a letter or number one, the computer freezes for a full ten seconds before acknowledge the press and showing the character. Tried a bunch of Linux distros through the years and the issue persists. On Windows it works flawlessly.

Just give up trying to debug the problem, but I still have this hole in my heart where the cause of this issue lives.

rob_t_firefly ,
@rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world avatar

If the keyboard has the same problem in multiple distros, surely the problem lives in the keyboard? Maybe you had a bad one.

ConstantPain ,

Why does it work in Windows though?

rob_t_firefly ,
@rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe there’s some glitch going on that Windows can ignore or self-correct for but Linux can’t. Such things are not unheard of in hardware.

lil ,
@lil@lemy.lol avatar

I had to fix so many booting problems using live usb, grub, xorg, login managers, they’are all difficult

gamermanh ,
@gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

My mint install won’t let sound through my sound card. Drivers are there, it knows exactly the brand and model of card and shows it, it even knows when I plug/unplug stuff from it, but 0 sound, ever.

The solution?

Just plug my headphones into my new speakers that have their own DAC, anyway.

Still no idea why the card doesn’t work right

Suavevillain ,
@Suavevillain@lemmy.world avatar

Fixing Grub issues when I was first starting out.

dejected_warp_core ,

At one point, my laptop’s Nvidia drivers were all tangled up. The package dependency graph had portions of the screwy, we-don’t-need-your-stinking-standard-version-scheme, binary blob drivers both in front of and behind the currently installed version. I had to basically gut everything Nvidia related, by performing surgery on the filesystem and Apt database, and then build it back. At one point, I was flying in text mode only; not hard, but worth mentioning since it shows how deep a cut this was.

Related: getting the above nonsense to cooperate with containers that also want to do GPU things. As much as I wanted this work with coding up a one-and-done solution (e.g. docker-compose or BASH script), you can’t get away with mounting the host Nvidia driver and tools via volumes. The software on the container image itself must be built against the specific version you’re running - no exceptions. So, I now rebuild these containers after every Nvidia package upgrade (from the author’s git repo), which is a stupid way to achieve containerization. If Nvidia had a stable API/ABI across releases, this would just work. /rant

Agility0971 ,
@Agility0971@lemmy.world avatar

At some point I’ve installed rust implementation of the coreutils from the AUR, they worked for a long while until some ssl vulnerability were discovered and everyone had to update the library. As you can imagine, without working coreutils system were hard to use. troubleshooting were also a pain in the ass because who could blame coreutils of all things? :P

areyouevenreal ,

It’s been a long time but generally network issues and reinstalling bootloaders or kernels. Fairly easy if you can chroot.

ulterno ,
@ulterno@lemmy.kde.social avatar

A recent one:

/var was almost full and I ran pacman -Syu and left the comp to go and make dinner. This was also at the time Plasma 6 was rolling out.

It was a big upgrade along with a new kernel. Download seemed to go smoothly, but during installation, it didn’t have enough space to unpack stuff and there was no kernel available to boot. Even the “previous kernel” options didn’t work.

It wasn’t too hard to fix because I had learnt how to use pacman in a chroot env, but my dinner got cold by the time I was ready to eat.

I still haven’t learnt the lesson though. This is the third time I am having a problem with paccache and I still haven’t setup a removal daemon/cron job.

johannesvanderwhales , (edited )

Back in the day, I upgraded a Slackware install from kernel 1.3 to 2.0. That was a fucking adventure.

The fun part about back then was that if your machine wouldn’t boot or if you couldn’t get your modem or pppd working, you probably didn’t have another internet connected device so you might have to drive somewhere with a computer…or try to figure it out through books.

megabat ,

You probably remember the libc5 to glibc swap. Bad times to DIY distros.

johannesvanderwhales , (edited )

Yep. I remember at the time I saw a lot of advice saying “you know you might want to seriously consider just installing your distro from scratch with a newer version.” Tracking down all of the dependencies (some of which had to be installed as binaries) was a very manual process.

Edit: Oh and another fun aspect of that time period was that since downloads were so slow on a modem, if you wanted a newer version or to try out another distro, you would go and order a cdrom from a place like Walnut Creek.

dlok ,

I feel seen here, I was building a Ubuntu server and messed up the firewall settings not being able to get an internet connection, hours of trying to get back to where I was I gave up and plan to just start from scratch next time.

Is there a way of taking system snapshots with Linux?

Schola ,

For system snapshots-- Timeshift I think.

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