Hmm maybe shouldna done that...

[patman]

In the vein of the historic 'ways to destroy your linux box' thread: Done anything that made you eyes bug out after it was done?

Don't cat /var/log/wtmp

Effect: Relatively harmless, but renders one tty useless until reboot unless you can read gibberish :eek:

[nouse66]

cat /dev/random does the same thing :)

[JohnT]

Yea, woke up one morning early and there was a salamander in my bed, smoking a cigarette. It's eyes bugged out too, when it realized the possibilities.
Oh! Linux box.

[khankell]

Here's a fun one:

cp /dev/zero /dev/mem

Crashes your system pretty efficiently, but nothing too terrible that can't be rebooted.

[Dun'kalis]

Try some of this with user-mode Linux.

Very safe.

[Strogian]

Originally posted by patman
In the vein of the historic 'ways to destroy your linux box' thread: Done anything that made you eyes bug out after it was done?

Don't cat /var/log/wtmp

Effect: Relatively harmless, but renders one tty useless until reboot unless you can read gibberish :eek:

Or until you press Ctrl+V, Ctrl+O
(or run reset, I think it's called to reset the terminal)

:)

[hlrguy]

Originally posted by patman
In the vein of the historic 'ways to destroy your linux box' thread: Done anything that made you eyes bug out after it was done?

Don't cat /var/log/wtmp

Effect: Relatively harmless, but renders one tty useless until reboot unless you can read gibberish :eek:

Added the shred command to global applications in Redhat 7.0. Downloaded a 60 Mbyte tar file over 3 days. Accidentically clicked on it, no built in mime type for .tgz, shredded the file. Redownload after a few expletives. Removed shred from the global apps to a text type app that is NEVER the default app when selecting. :D

hlrguy

[bwkaz]

Install a kernel circa 2.4.14.

Run it for a few weeks straight, until kswapd dies.

Watch as most of the commands that haven't been run recently just sit there waiting for kswapd to pull in the correct kernel page! Since kswapd is zombieized now, it can't do that, so you get to wait forever!

It makes it even more fun if /proc/mounts is one of those places that needs to be swapped in. Because then, you can't umount devices to reboot, without SysRq support. And even that fails from time to time. Hours of entertainment ... or, well, something.