More than a decade ago a user came into #ubuntu-server on Freenode (now libera.chat ) and said that they had accidentally run “rm -rf /* something*” in a root shell.

Note the errant space that made that a fatal mistake. I don’t remember how far it actually got in deleting files, but all of /bin/ /sbin/ and /usr/ were gone.

He had 1 active ssh connection, and couldn’t start another one.

It was a server that was “in production”, was thousands of miles away from him, and which had no possibility for IPMI / remote hands.

Everyone (but me) in the channel said that he was just SoL and should just give up.

I stayed up most of the night helping him. I like challenges and I like helping people.

This was in the sysv-init (maybe upstart) days, and so a decent number of shell scripts were running, and using basic *nix commands.

We recovered the bash binary by running something along the lines of

bash_binary_contents="$( </proc/self/exe)"
printf "%s" > /tmp/bash

(If you can access “lsof” then “sudo lsof | grep deleted” will show you any files that are open, but also “deleted”. You may be surprised at how many there are!)

But bash needed too many shared libraries to make that practical.

Somehow we were able to recover curl and chmod, after which I had him download busybox-static. From there we downloaded an Ubuntu LiveCD iso, loop mounted it, loop mounted the squashfs image inside the iso, and copied all of /bin/ , /sbin/ , /etc , and so on from there onto his root FS.

Then we re-installed missing packages, fixed up /etc/ (a lot of important daemons, including the one that was production critical, kept their configuration files open, and so we were able to use lsof to find the magic symlinks to them in /proc/$pid/fd/ and just cp them back into /etc/.

We were able to restart openssh-server, log in again, and I don’t remember if we were brave enough to test rebooting.

But we fucking did it!

I am certainly getting a lot of details wrong from memory. It’s all somewhere at irclogs.ubuntu.com though. My nick was / is Jordan_U.

I tried to find it once, and failed.

It’s at least gotten a bit better.

There was a time when Photoshop and other programs used a copy-protection scheme that overwrote parts of grub, causing the user not to be able to boot Linux or Windows.

They knew about it, and just DGAF. I don’t remember their exact FAQ response, but it was something along the lines of “Photoshop is incompatible with GRUB. Don’t dual boot if you use Photoshop.”

Grub still has code for BIOS based installs that uses reed-solomon error correction at boot time to allow grub to continue to function even if parts of its core.img were clobbered by shitty copy protection schemes for Windows software.

Got it.

So we’re both in agreement that calling for people to be stomped out like cockroaches, as the comment you replied to does, should raise huge red flags.

Holy fuck dude.

My leftist values tell me that anyone talking about “final solutions” is a fascist at best, Nazi at worst.

You know what’s easy though?

Not bypassing congress to sell arms to a country specifically for genocide. (Biden and Israel)

Democrats will break rules / norms, it’s just almost never for causes that help people.

He could have simply not done anything, and it would have been better.

If “Don’t go out of your way to support genocide.” is asking too much, then don’t be surprised when people aren’t excited to vote for your candidate.

Or you can recruit heavily in areas where folks are disadvantaged and have few options, dangling education in front of them in exchange for being willing to kill or die for you.

This is absolutely what we do in the U.S. and it’s abhorrent.

I guess what I want is for nobody to be so desperate for their basic needs that they feel compelled to kill and die in war.

And if we had a country that cared for all of its citizens and didn’t start wars of aggression, maybe more people would want to enlist as they have real values to protect and have a reasonable expectation that they won’t be committing atrocities?

Honestly not a criticism of you or your comment. Lot’s of people are advocating for the same thing; You just said it plainly.

…Anyway, this is all terrible and we absolutely can do better, starting with building community locally, mutual aid, protesting, and listening to marginalized and oppressed people’s.

Why do you have “Stormfront” under the parody Wikipedia globe?

(Literally just asking for clarification. It’s not obvious to me and I’d like to understand your intent.)

It the implication that Wikipedia is as bad as the infamous neo-nazi website Stormfront?

Development of the Wayland specification and multiple Wayland compositors is funded by the X.org foundation, and done largely by current and former Xorg developers / maintainers.

So it still works!

She works in “criminal justice” for the U.S. military.

You can be pedantic about the ‘C’ in ACAB applying, but the Bastard bit inescapably applies.

No single person should be your moral barometer.

Stanning is bad.

(I also appreciate everything I’ve heard of Greta Thunberg saying and doing.)

A concrete example of this is doctors and hospitals creating guidelines about how to triage care when ICUs were/are full because of unmitigated spread of COVID.

It is definitely an “interesting” phylisophical question to ask:

“If a long term ventilator user comes into the ICU, with the ventilator they own and brought from home, and they are less likely to survive than an otherwise healthy young man who needs a respirator due to COVID infection, is the morally best choice to steal the disabled person’s ventilator (killing them) and use it to save the young man’s life?”

The policy question that should be asked instead, and never really ways, is “How do we make sure that we never get to the point where we have so many people in the ICU from a preventable disease that we run out of respirators and need to start choosing who to let die?”

This is not just a hypothetical question:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/long-term-ventilator-users-lose-bid-revive-suit-over-ny-emergency-guidelines-2022-11-23/

Disabled people continue to plead with us for the bare minimum, like requiring doctors who work with immunocompromised patients to wear N95 respirators while treating those patients.

We continue to chose to stack more people on both sets of tracks instead.

This is a really weird point to argue about.

Trump may or may not eventually end up in prison, but it’s naïve after the past 8 years to assume that there are only two ways this could all shake out, and that you can predict them.

A possibility that will almost certainly be less absurd than whatever actually happens:

Trump wins a second term, manages to get the FedSoc 6 to rule that a sitting president can’t be imprisoned because it would violate separation of powers. So multiple states are just waiting for his term to end so they can actually arrest him. (Feds can’t arrest him because he has pardoned himself for all past, present, and future crimes)

Then in the last month of his presidency he takes a diplomatic trip to Russia and just never comes back.

So far the worst outcome for landlords that you have posed is that they “realize that their investment was a poor one”.

And yes, I want that landlord’s grandchildren to be able to afford college (which I think should be free for all, paid for by tax increases on the rich).

But you have to admit that we’re talking about vastly different worlds here, right?

What percentage of renters live paycheck to paycheck and are at risk of living on the street?

What percentage of landlords are at risk of living on the street?

What percentage of renters expect to be able to leave enough in money and assets to their children, so that those children can afford to pay college tuition for the renter’s grandchildren?

I agree with you that dehumanizing people is wrong. I agree that landlords can struggle too.

I agree that there are worse people / entities that could own apartment complexes and houses.

But you haven’t really convinced me that I should worry about the general well-being of the landlord class, or that it’s worth my time and energy to chide renters who say mean things about them online.

Ok, now what conclusions do you want people to take away from this information?

Possible takeaway: There are worse people / entities that could own the apartments and houses that are being rented out.

If that’s the only takeaway, it’s still not going to make me feel sad for landlords.

If they created an LLC, then whatever happens to their business, they can always just get a different job and their own housing situation will remain stable.

If they didn’t, maybe because they couldn’t get a large enough loan to buy property without putting up their own collateral, that was presumably their choice.

I don’t want anyone to lose access to housing (or food, or healthcare), but I’m much more worried about renters ending up unhoused than landlords.

Considering some humans to be “not humans” is a primary tool of fascism.

Probably best to avoid de-humanizing anyone if you truly want to end fascism rather than re-create it under a different name.

Humans can do terrible, abhorrent things. It’s good for us to remember that, as we are also human; And capable of the same atrocities if we aren’t careful and vigilant.

If you can take multiple large, failed, risks without ending up on the street then you have immense privilege.

It’s hard for most people to “learn from their failures” and keep taking “big” risks, unless the risk to their own life circumstances was never actually that “big”.

Please list some of the top “culture war” issues.

I think you’ll find a pattern.

Hot take:

With genocide and eugenics on the rise again in the real world, maybe we shouldn’t be celebrating a movie whose entire premise is eugenics.

“Here’s what horrible things could happen if we continue to let the wrong people breed while the right kind of people breed to little!”

I don’t know why people have such a negative opinion of Jizz.

Just because it’s played at the most wretched hive of scum and villainy doesn’t mean that the music itself is scummy or villainous!

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Jizz/Legends