What's the most dangerous thing you've done on Linux ?
 

Like the title says, what is the most dangerous thing you have done on you Linux system.

Here's what I did. Today I flashed the DVD-RW firmware running wine as root. Now, I would normally never ever think of doing such a thing. But, it really pissed me off that I couldn't rip DVDs and that vobcopy was being limited to 1x read rate by the demonic firmware of my samsung drive. I wanted to rip it out and smash it. But instead, I flashed its firmware.

Note that by dangerous I don't mean illegal. In this case the dangerous part was running wine as root and flashing firmware with it ... I must be going insane. I was at one point considering flashing the BIOS this way ... that would be the only thing I can think of more dangerous that flashing firmware.

As root: I was in /tmp trying to delete a folder called usr which was owned by root, and accidentally added the slash at the front. It took me a few hours to find all the packages I'd damaged, but I was able to fix it, and as far as I could tell, everything worked fine. It was not long after that that Slackware 12.1 came out, so I decided a reinstall was in order, rather than an upgrade.

Online dating..............?

Hrmmms quick... somebody play a square wave through their speakers at max volume.

Let my brother touch my machine.

Mmm, when I think of "dangerous" things, I think of life-threatening stuff. What can I do on Linux that could kill me?

Even though I have absolutely no use for them, I installed both XP and Vista in VirtualBox.

I've since wiped everything and have decided to never touch any of that crapware again.

Using Midnight Commander as root. Pressed F8 instead of F10 with /bin selected. It only took a second to realize my mistake but it had already begun deleting files.

I also killed one of my old mp3 players. When trying to upgrade the firmware on a Sansa m240 I used wine to run the Sandisk utility. While it successfully downloaded the new firmware the program locked up between removing the existing firmware and installing the new. I was left with a Sansa sans firmware.

Well, I mean dangerous for the computer, not necessarily for you.

Another example although not specifically while running Linux, I had no choice. One day I flashed the BIOS during a hail storm using a USB floppy drive that I was holding in my hand (it had a short cord). As you can imagine many things could have gone wrong ... me dropping the floppy drive during the update, the power going out (I did have a UPS tho :)).

Thinking I didn't have to have a firewall for a while. I got hacked. My 500gb drive was cleared. Never felt more stupid in my life.

When restoring ntfs partition from archived image, I missed one letter.
So instead of /dev/hdc3 I wrote image to /dev/hdc. Which means "oops, MBR is gone".
When I noticed it (50 seconds later), I spent next 30 minutes searching for MBR recovery tools and hoping that electricity won't suddenly fail (Linux partition was at the end of drive, so it was working after complete MBR erase. But it wouldn't work after reboot).

Very dangerous indeed since you do not have access to all of the BIOS when the kernel is up and running (well, at least not on an x86/AMD64 family of machines). I actually have a compactflash card with FreeDOS to run the flash utilities. I'm always extremely paranoid because a power glitch would toast my system (and I just can't afford those UPS gizmos).

Otherwise the most dangerous thing I've done is have the computer control mechanical and large solid state relays. If you flick switches too quickly with a dynamic inductive load like a motor, interesting things can happen.

I suppose the most dangerous thing I've done was when I first dual-booted. Anyway, a couple of articles I read claimed it was a risky process - resizing. I had a Knoppix CD, the first distro I'd seen, and was impressed by the amount of software available when compared to W****ws, but read it wasn't recommended for installation. So I just used it for resizing. No problems. Then I got a magazine that just happened to be giving away 2 CDs with something called Slackware 10 on them. I'd never heard of it, but thought I'd give it a try.

using a koppix cd to allow me to actully do some work on school cluster pc, rather than spend all the time before the deadline fighting with the OS (window$ ME! uggh)

dangerous cause teh sysadmin saw me and nearly killed me for it untill i showed him that it was a live cd and would go away when i rebooted

bungie jumping with my laptop was a bad idea