this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025

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After almost half a century, I'm still doing it... (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

81 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So I'm working on a server from home.

I do a cat /sys/class/net/eth0/operstate and it says unknown despite the interface being obviously up, since I'm SSH'ing into the box.

I try to explicitely set the interface up to force the status to say up with ip link set eth0 up. No joy, still unknown.

Hmm... maybe I should bring it down and back up.

So I do ip link set eth0 down and... I drive 15 miles to work to do the corresponding ip link set eth0 up

50 years using Unix and I'm still doing this... 😥

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I formated an OS drive by mistake last night, thought it was my flash drive...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Almost did the same last night on a device that has its internal drive (flash) mounted as mmc and the USB drive was sda

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If it makes you feel any better, I did something just as infuriating a few years ago.

I had set up my home media server, and had finally moved it to my garage with just a power cable and ethernet cable plugged in. Everything was working perfectly, but I needed to check something with the network settings. Being quite new to Linux, I used a remote desktop tool to log in and do everything through a gui.

I accidentally clicked the wrong item in the menu and disconnected the network. I only had a spare ps/2 keyboard and mouse, and as the server was an old computer, it would crash if I plugged a ps/2 device in while it was running*.

The remote desktop stayed open but frozen, mocking me for my obvious mistake and lack of planning, with the remote mouse icon stuck in place on the disconnect menu.

*I can't remember if that was a ps/2 thing, or something specific to my server, but I didn't want to risk it

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago

Every network engineer must lock themselves out of a node at some point, it is a rite of passage.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Did this once on a router in a datacenter that was a flight away. Have remembered to set the reboot in future command since. As I typed the fatal command I remember part of my brain screaming not to hit enter as my finger approached the keyboard. 🤦‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Have remembered to set the reboot in future command since

That's not a bad idea actually. I'll have to reuse that one. Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I have a failsafe service for one of my servers, it pings the router and if it hasn't reached it once for an entire hour then it will reboot the server.

This won't save me from all mistakes but it will prevent firewall, link state, routing and a few other issues when I'm not present.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

There, but for the grace of god....

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

@[email protected] You're doing it wrong. Just setup a KVM behind your server. So then you never need to leave home again.

[–] [email protected] 103 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I knew a guy who did this and had to fly to Germany to fix it because he didn’t want to admit what he’d done.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago

This hits....

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Remember what Bruce Lee said:

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Why don't you use chained commands, or better yet simply create an alias that chains down/up, then use the alias instead?

[–] [email protected] 90 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Because I plain forgot I was remote. It's as simple and as stupid as that.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago

We've all been there. If you do this stuff for a living, you've done that way more than once.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

time to setup a console server so that you don't do that again.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Until they have to troubleshoot the console server ..

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

then setup a super console server. lol

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I have once actually used a console server console server to troubleshoot a misbehaving console server.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

i once worked at a place that had something like this and; it sounds silly; but i got a live demonstration that it was the smartest thing ever.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It's console servers all the way down (up?)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

and you make each one geographically closer than the previous one until there's one right next to you. lol

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

That is why you have KVMs..

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Fair enough. I've done worse in my time as a keyboard jockey.

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[+] [email protected] -14 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Or use some kind of molly guard. Or have an OOB management channel.

You'd think you'd learn from your mistakes after one or two of them, not fifty years' worth...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You’d think you’d learn from your mistakes

Yes, that what you'd think. And then you'll sit with a blank terminal once again when you did some trivial mistake yet again.

A friend of mine developed a habit (working on a decent sized ISP 20+ years ago) to set up a scheduled reboot for everything in 30 minutes no matter what you're going to do. The hardware back then (I think it was mostly cisco) had a 'running conrfig' and 'stored config' which were two separate instances. Log in, set up scheduled reboot, do whatever you're planning to do and if you mess up and lock yourself out the system will restore to previous config in a while and then you can avoid the previous mistake. Rinse and repeat.

And, personally, I think that's the one of the best ways to differentiate actual professionals from 'move fast and break things' group. Once you've locked yourself out of the system literally half way across the globe too many times you'll eventually learn to think about the next step and failovers. I'm not that much of a network guy, but I have shot myself in the foot enough that whenever there's dd, mkfs or something similar on the root shell I automatically pause for a second to confirm the command before hitting enter.

And while you gain experience you also know how to avoid the pitfalls, the more important part (at least for myself) is to think ahead. The constant mindset of thinking about processes, connectivity, what you can actually do if you fuck up and so on becomes a part of your workflow. Accidents will happen, no matter how much experience you have. The really good admins just know that something will go wrong at some point in the process and build stuff to guarantee that when you fuck things up you still have availability to fix it instead of calling someone 6 timezones away in the middle of the night to clean up your mess.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago

Don't be shitty.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In my defense, I just installed the machine. I was configuring it from home after hours.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (1 children)

after hours

I've configured PAM to not let me login remotely after hours, because I just know that someday I'll want to fix "just this tiny thing" and I'll break production because I'm too tired. I clearly need protection from myself, and this is one slice in Dr.Reasons's Swiss cheese model.

Don't let the people drag you down, this happens to all of us.

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