Honestly, im suprised everytime I blindly follow an online tutorial, copying and pasting like a madman, and my hard drive isn’t wiped.

When the whole shebang of piping/redirection landed, thinking of all the possibilities!

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.

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!

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.

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.

mdadm

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.

Installing Linux on the Nintendo DS (https://www.dslinux.org/) was pretty impressive for me.

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.

In the early 2ks, computer were ugly grey box with noisy fan and a hard drive that gave the impression a cockroach colony were trying to escape your case. I wanted to build a silent computer to watch Divx movies from my bed, but as a broke teen, I just had access to disposed hardwares I could find there and there.

I dismantled a power supply, stuck mosfets to big mother fucking dissipator, and I had a silent power supply. I put another huge industrial dissipator on CPU (think it was an AMD k6 500Mhz) and had fanless cooling. Remained the hard drive.

Live CD/USB weren’t common at that time. I’ve discovered a live CD distrib (I think it was Knoppix) that could run entirely from RAM.

I removed hard drive, boot on live distrib, then replace CD by my Divx and voila.

Having a fanless-harddriveless computer was pure science fiction for me and my friends at that time.

Random one recently:

Turned my gaming box into an impromptu audio mixer by connecting my PS5 audio into the line in and routing it with pipewire to the speaker output so I could game while watching endurance racing on the same speakers.

Later found it was easier to do visually with qpwgraph.

The first time I learned about PDFGrep, I was able to track down a purchase order that would have taken hours otherwise.

Maybe a little specific, but the first time i used autorandr, I was wow it does exactly what it sounds like it does.

Oh! I just thought of a better one. The first time you run vim scp://user@server//home/user/.