Stupidest thing you have done on a computer?

Celestial Nostos said:
I've destroyed a few PCs in my younger years by deleting important files without realising what they did.

Whoopsies.
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Surprisingly though doing that taught me more about how windows works and what various things do than most other sillies :) (i had a P1 with a 540mb hard drive, so removing everything i could to fit a game on was my aim :p)

One of the most stupid things i did were onyl recently actually.....teachers wanting access to all students home folders, now luckily 3 years ago i split them into seperate years...had i not done that this could have gone very different. 250 folders, all set NOT to inherit parent permissions, i had to give the parent folder permissions for the specific security group........of course i didn't untick the "replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object"

Luckily i noticed after about 5-6 folders had applied but if had i walked off after applying that, it could have caused quite a nuisance :p oh and thank god for setACL


EDIT: also getting exchange 2010 service pack one "ready" before you click next for the install in the approved time window.....not a good idea, i clicked next by accident and the exchange server went down for about 30 minutes mid day :o
 
I fried a DVD+RW drive by forcing the molex in upside down.. Wasn't even that long ago. The smell stuck around and was awful until I was forced to bin it.
 
Installed CS:S and waved goodbye to my A-Levels.

I also managed to dribble on my motherboard once during a rebuild.
 
chaosdestro0 said:
Quite simple actually.
In linux files have permissions assigned to them which controls what can be done to them. That command it changes the owner of the files to "user" and the group to "user" in the root file-system.
Usually all the files in the root filesystem belong to the user "root " and the group " root" and changing these to anything else will cause a lot of problems.
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paddy said:
Code: 
chown -Rv user:user /
Starting at the root of the drive - /
recursively -R
change the ownership of any files chown
to user "user" and group "user"

the v I'd guess is verbose mode, but I didn't know chown had that option?

It's been 5 years :)
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I guess you can call it the root of all problems :D
/coat

Anyway, the my biggest mistake was installing itunes
 
Installed Windows Vista.

After a completely unnecessary reinstall of Windows on mum's PC I realised I had no way of getting back both her and my sisters email accounts. No idea what the passwords were or how to get at them via BT's rubbish software/webpages. That was awkward.

Started reinstalling windows and went down stairs for a well earner cuppa. Then had the 'oh no' moment when I remembered I hadn't backed anything up. :eek: MP3's, game saves and who knows what else from a 18 month old install were lost. :(

Flicked the infamous 110/240 switch on the back of a PSU.

I did lots of stupid stuff with PC's back in the early days, but that's how I learnt. :D
 
I remember being sent out to clean a PC keyboard about 20 years ago at an agricultural site and they would'nt allow me to turn the PC off. I tentatively cleaned it but did press a key which promptly dumped several tons of smelly compost onto a conveyor belt.
 
Installed CS:S and threw away my GCSEs.

Accidentally moved a folder in Outlook while at work and deleted some quite important emails at the same time. Luckily after a while we managed to get the emails back but my jaw dropped to the floor and a "Noooo!" was broadcast when I first saw what I'd done.

Not much else to note other than downloading some files from obviously dodgy looking websites because I was that desperate to get something working, resulting in 28,000 viruses/trojans and a prompt reformat of the computer.
 
Not what i did, but a mate of mine got stupidly drunk on Christmas Eve about 6 years ago.
He got up in the night and did a weewee on his keyboard and desk.
Silly boy.
His girlfriend wasn't impressed, as she awoke to watch the whole ordeal
 
Installed a load of rubbish themes for windows xp back in the day (when I was ~14), Every time I booted my computer to a robotic "Welcome wish you a great day" instead of the windows start up tune it got a bit annoying :p
 
Discovered that killall on FreeBSD and Solaris are very different commands.

On FreeBSD (and Linux) killall <process name> kills all instances of that process name, for instance killalll chrome would kill all instances of Google Chrome.

On Solaris, killall is the last command run by the operating system as it is shutting down, it ensures that ALL processes are dead and kills them if not before unloading itself and turning the machine off.

Needless to say this is not a fun command to mix up on a production Solaris box.
 
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