NixOS in a VM for a few weeks and made it how I liked, copied that VM to server to VNC in (laptop battery was suffering), kept customising until i had it nice… and then when it came to wipe my laptop for the nixos setup, I was bit scared.

But low and behold, nixos-build switch and then it was all there, just like the VM. Fucking amazing.

exiting out of vim

Ubuntu like 10 years ago, drop to terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F5 or something), vlc video.mp4 Aand it started playing it with ASCII graphics. Magic

When I actually get an awk/sed command to work.

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 🙂

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.

If you have binary that is hardcoded to look for some files/libs in a certain path, you can overwrite that path with sed directly lol. You just need to make sure to keep the string length the same.

sed -i s|/usr|././|g will change /usr for the current working dir for example.

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.