Mininal skills

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 2020-06-04 at 11:19 +0100, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 at 09:39, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> > On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 09:04:45 +0100, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> > > Install, uninstall, break, fix, reinstall, configure.
> >                      ^^^^^ :D
> >                      I don't know what this is. Never happened to me.
> > 
> > For those who "decide" to "break", first becoming familiar with backup
> > strategies might be a good idea.
> 
> You missed the "do it in a VM first". If you've never broken a system
> maybe it's because you haven't tried hard.
> 
> By being able to use virtualisation, one also picks other skills. I've
> learnt a lot by using qemu, setting up virtual serial consoles,
> virtual interfaces, ssh forwarding, etc. Things you can not usually do
> on bare metal.

I'm kidding ;). It's not that hard to break an install.
For example

  # rm -Ir /tmp/foo/*

could easily become

  # rm -Ir / tmp/foo/*

or

  # rm -Ir /tmp/foo/ *

due to a human typo or failure of an aged keyboard. A prompt before
removing recursively not necessarily does prevent against continuing
with the next mistake.