I was doing some VMware debugging and I issued

from my USB keyboard!!! DOH!!

Luckily I have sshd up and running so I could modprobe it back in, but that was a rather "blonde" moment.

Does anyone else have stories about abusing the power of root? I would like to here them. It would help me mend my poor ego.

i have a machine that amongst other things acts as a gateway for 3/4 computers, im am not normally on site. went to install a network printer on this machine, so being lazy i recompiled the kernel as follows

make menuconfig (added support for usb printer)
make dep
make modules
make modules_install

now not thinking properly i forgot that "make modules_install" would clear out all the extra modules in /lib/modules/kern_version including the one for the dsl modem. a few weeks later the dsl modem buggered up which causes the machine to restart automatically, which it did without a modem driver, leading to a couple of hours of downtime and an expensive mobile phone call.

after that i put a normal modem in the machine so even if dsl goes down i can still log into it.

wouldn't this list become a big mess soon I am sure people will contribute to this. As for me, I was fortunate enough to read through such threads/articles at some time and so I am always a user