For me, my high bar that I have yet to beat, was the time I pivoted the running OS (ubuntu) into RAM over SSH so I could unmount and image the boot drive without rebooting and loading a live USB (Which would have required a ticket with my provider to enable IPMI)
When the whole shebang of piping/redirection landed, thinking of all the possibilities!
Disabling CPUs by writing a zero to some file under
/sysmdadm
Recovered a legacy COBOL 911 dispatch system after the hard drive containing the root filesystem died, which wasn’t RAID protected at all and had no complete backups except for a few days prior when I started running daily rsync backups out of paranoia because the idiot dipshit sysadmin who set it all up left the company to work directly for one of our customers.
Thankfully the data volume was RAID protected and didn’t die so the critical data was pretty much all there ready to go again after some rebuilding of shit.
Still, took 15 hours to recover. Was a RHEL 4 system when RHEL 6 was current, and we had no way of obtaining the install media or licensing, so I dug up an archived CentOS 4 iso and installed from that, and got stuff working mostly just by copying various files from backup.
Fucking nightmare come true. Drive crashed at noon and we didn’t go home until about 4am.
I used to be a build engineer at an enterprise Linux company that built custom Linux distributions for various device manufacturers.
I built a whole build automation system that used what would be the equivalent of a Docker container for the build system, and it was distributed across the whole company to make simultaneous build in parallel and a system that would check how many build systems were in use or available with a queueing system.
All written in Bash, Perl and Python.
Probably installing a different kernel and adding it to systemd boot manually a while back.
Oh and the very first was most likely installing Arch manually.
I tripped over a cord once and broke the screen on my laptop. I salvaged the disk for another purpuse. But I got some prime hardware here, it’s got video output, it’s got ram, and a cpu! I used it for my lectures; liveusb with some persistent storage on, put my slides on there and fire it up. Did not have to unplug the normal laptop from my office. Nothing magic really, but some students were puzzled.
Once upon a time I was installing Linux on a tiny little laptop, whose brand name I’ve forgotten. It was probably a Lenovo. Anyway, it was extremely difficult to install anything on it, and they went to great lengths to make sure no one would be able to install Linux on it. I spent an entire day messing around with the grub terminal, and began to suspect that it had a built-in cut off for the USB port during boot. I think I saw some log output to that effect, but I couldn’t find any way to disable it. After some thought, I got back in grub, unplugged the USB stick that I was installing Linux from, and plugged it back in. The laptop detected and mounted the external drive and I tried to install again.
Worked perfectly.
Not quite as impressive, but I somehow fucked up something with my bootloader lately and couldn’t boot anymore into my main drive. Loaded up a live usb stick and made a new ESP partition, arch-chroot and grub-install/grub-makecfg and it worked again.
Yes, I just followed a guide, but I am still fascinated this just worked on the first try.
I used the aircrack-ng tools to capture wep packets and decrypt my neighbors WiFi because I was broke and needed internet to study back in college…I was a total noob (still am) and when I saw the password in the terminal I felt like I was a total hackerman. It was great!
2 that stand out to me:
When I successfully got virtualbox to boot my windows xp partition inside Linux because I needed to run some software for school.
When I figured out how to use qemu-nbd to mount a qcow2 image backed by a physical block device in order to run non-destructive filesystem repair and file recovery with test disk. Did that for a while for my university IT help desk to quickly save files off failing disks.
Moving from old to new Laptop by piping /dev/sda3’s content through netcat and into /dev/nvme0n1p3
How did you do it? Did you run a live distro on the new laptop to receive and overwrite the SSD ?
Livebooted (Arch) on both, I think you can even remove the install media after it copied itself to RAM, though I’m not sure (especially with Ventoy in between).
Using dd to move-resize a partition by writing down the cylinder numbers and moving it piece by piece like some Tower of Hanoi. Wanted to add more space to my root after deleting the Windows partition, which happened to be first. There is apparently no built-in command to do that.
Booted up fingers crossed and everything worked.
I always liveboot debian and just use Gparted, faster than figuring out the commands manually, and much less risky
Honestly, im suprised everytime I blindly follow an online tutorial, copying and pasting like a madman, and my hard drive isn’t wiped.
I made a custom Linux image to run inside a web browser. No particular distro, just a Linux kernel (compiled with a custom configuration to produce a tiny binary), a shell, and a few small apps.
When reading from the filesystem, it made HTTP requests for each file (+ browser caching), so no need to load a disk image all at once. IIRC, I got the cold boot time down to <1 second (after assets were already cached from a previous load though).
I also got NixOS to run in the browser, but even after stripping out as much as possible, it was still really slow due to systemd. (I’m not a systemd hater, resources are just very limited when running this way.)
I used an x86 emulator called v86. It’s a very cool project 🙂
When I actually get an awk/sed command to work.
I’ve had the 1980’s awk book seemingly “forever”, but use awk so infrequently I always need to look things up.
