How to kill Ubuntu

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Fuzzy
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11 May 2009, 4:05 am

Orwell was ready to try something new, red hat, so he resolved to un-install Ubuntu in an extreme way.

A few weeks ago we had laughingly discussed using rm -rf / which will recursively delete every file filesystem. In windows it would be closest to format c:\

Of course there is a protection against using rm(which means remove) that way, so it is also needed the addition of --no-preserve-root.

The idea is that he would see how long it would take to crash and what would happen. And what it would look like. What follows is our pidgin chat during the process.

It was actually quite surprising.

Quote:

(01:52:34 PM) orwell_42: ok
(01:52:39 PM) orwell_42: time to wipe
(01:52:41 PM) orwell_42: later
(01:52:45 PM) Fuzzy: luck
(01:53:05 PM) orwell_42: the option is --no-preserve-root, right?
(01:53:15 PM) Fuzzy: yup
(01:53:32 PM) Fuzzy: let me know.. i am interested
(01:53:37 PM) orwell_42: if I go offline in a minute, you know why

(01:53:38 PM) Fuzzy: how it goes
(01:53:42 PM) Fuzzy: haha
(01:53:54 PM) Fuzzy: data backed up?
(01:54:01 PM) orwell_42: several times
(01:54:14 PM) Fuzzy: well, shotgun the sucker
(01:54:57 PM) orwell_42: dammit
(01:55:11 PM) orwell_42: still won't let me kill it
(01:55:48 PM) Fuzzy: message?
(01:56:03 PM) orwell_42: a ton of cannot remove errors
(01:56:15 PM) orwell_42: about half and half "permission denied" and "operation not permitted"
(01:56:24 PM) Fuzzy: ah, sudo su first?
(01:56:29 PM) orwell_42: but I killed something, because my wobbly windows are no longer wobbly
(01:56:31 PM) orwell_42: no, I'm root
(01:56:52 PM) Fuzzy: its probably running out of ram right now.
(01:57:05 PM) Fuzzy: ticking time bomb. start doing stuff
(01:57:15 PM) orwell_42: "A Package Manager is working" says my taskbar
(01:57:18 PM) Fuzzy: try a fork bomb
(01:57:28 PM) orwell_42: how's that go?
(01:57:33 PM) Fuzzy: second
(01:57:39 PM) orwell_42: or better yet, the dd command might do it
(01:57:58 PM) Fuzzy:

){

:& };:
(01:58:02 PM) Fuzzy: oops
(01:58:09 PM) orwell_42: whoa
(01:58:13 PM) orwell_42: I killed something
(01:58:25 PM) orwell_42: I don't have any applications left that weren't loaded into RAM already
(01:58:39 PM) Fuzzy: that is colon (){ colon | colon & } semi-colon colon
(01:59:02 PM) Fuzzy: yup. you are running from ram. it cannot kill those,, prolly the errors
(01:59:12 PM) Fuzzy: this is fun
(01:59:46 PM) orwell_42: well, my system is definitely no longer usable
(01:59:51 PM) Fuzzy: haha
(01:59:55 PM) orwell_42: Compiz is dead, but my emerald theme is still on
(02:00:00 PM) Fuzzy: its amazing that its up
(02:00:17 PM) Fuzzy: i will copy this chat, ok? lets post it
(02:00:27 PM) orwell_42: all my apps except pidgin and OOo are dead
(02:00:36 PM) orwell_42: OpenOffice had the systray quicklauncher to save it
(02:00:46 PM) orwell_42: sure, no problem
(02:01:03 PM) Fuzzy: so you must be stable but crappy right now
(02:01:08 PM) orwell_42: my main menu now just has "System" and "Places"
(02:01:16 PM) orwell_42: system does not have preferences or administration
(02:01:38 PM) orwell_42: ooh, I still have Guake
(02:01:45 PM) orwell_42: forgot about that background service
(02:02:11 PM) Fuzzy: try the fork bomb then
(02:02:17 PM) orwell_42: I believe Nautilus is gone, since I can not navigate anywhere
(02:02:21 PM) orwell_42: what are the spacings for it?
(02:02:36 PM) Fuzzy: you should be able to cut and paste what i had directly in
(02:02:49 PM) Fuzzy:

){

:& };:
(02:02:52 PM) orwell_42: it auto-rendered as smilies though
(02:02:55 PM) Fuzzy: type sh

){

:& };:
(02:03:01 PM) orwell_42:

){

:& };:
(02:03:05 PM) orwell_42: ah, but I can still copy
(02:03:07 PM) orwell_42: cool
(02:03:10 PM) Fuzzy: yeah, but its text still.
(02:03:19 PM) Fuzzy: this will fill your ram with processes
(02:04:04 PM) orwell_42: executing in three... two... one...
(02:04:19 PM) Fuzzy: nice seeing ya!
(02:06:37 PM) Fuzzy: poke poke
(02:07:57 PM) Fuzzy: i think hes dead!

---

His whole operating system, all the contents of the disk were gone. I dont know how stable he was, but we could still talk. He was running from ram. What he did next is a fork bomb. That funny string of characters,

){

:& };: essentially writes a tiny program into memory which only does one thing: it duplicates itself. Like rabbits in Australia, it overran the whole computer pushing out the functional stuff that was persisting in memory. Then the computer finally crashed.

Fork bombs are not harmful. They actually disappear when you restart the computer. rm -rf / on the other hand... dont mess with that. Unless you are crazy like Orwell.

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davidred wrote...
I installed Ubuntu once and it completely destroyed my paying relationship with Microsoft.

Orwell
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11 May 2009, 4:19 am

I'm wishing now that I had tried to reboot (or at least log out and log in again) before reformatting so I could see if that would have any effect.

Note: The command we used to kill Ubuntu should work on any UNIX-based OS. You too, Mac users. I might actually rm -rf / my OS X install in the next few days as well, since it's accumulated a lot of stubborn crapware and other assorted refuse. I always like a fresh, clean system to play with.

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Izaak
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11 May 2009, 6:24 am

lol, nice work.

lau
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11 May 2009, 6:29 am

Argh! Too late now, I guess, but it would have been really interesting to hear what had been left behind. I.e. boot from a live CD (or another partition) and see what files had remained. I would image that there was very little that really didn't go. I.e. I suspect that a lot of the "permission denied" and "operation not permitted" messages were for things inside /proc - where nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.

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Dussel
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11 May 2009, 8:12 am

Fuzzy wrote:

Not really - the equivalent to format c:\ would be

Code:

mkfs /dev/hda1

Orwell
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11 May 2009, 9:41 am

lau wrote:

Who knows, we might get another opportunity with OS X. :wink:

It's still UNIX-based. Anyways, as far as what was left: all applications not stored in RAM were gone, as were all my documents, folders, files, etc. Nautilus was gone, as I found out when I tried to navigate to the locations listed in my "Places" menu in GNOME. Of course, the default locations there would have contained nothing. All of the items listed under "Administration" and "Preferences" were gone, and the items under "System" pointing to things like "Help" or "About Ubuntu" were unresponsive. It was like an old West ghost town.

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Fuzzy
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11 May 2009, 1:55 pm

And I have 5 computers, 3 of which have nothing of importance on.

We can do it again.

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kip
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11 May 2009, 11:04 pm

This is awesome. It really would have been awesome to see what had been left behind. Oh well.

I almost want to try this on the crap comp now. Would be fun.

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GustavHolst
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12 May 2009, 12:51 am

Orwell, you're gonna buy red hat? Cent-OS is the same, no?

I didn't read the thread at all, except maybe the first line or two.

Orwell
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12 May 2009, 1:03 am

GustavHolst wrote:

Orwell, you're gonna buy red hat? Cent-OS is the same, no?
No, I'm not buying RHEL, that would be a waste of money. I downloaded Fedora, which Fuzzy must have been referring to as Fedora and Red Hat are closely related. I'm still a bit hesitant to throw Fedora on my machine, since I normally triple-boot and my partition scheme requires that Windows go on before Linux, but my Windows 7 disk still won't boot. I also know I'm going to have a hassle getting my wifi drivers working, since Fedora is stricter on proprietary stuff than Ubuntu is. But I'm interested in trying something new and Fedora seems like a solid choice. Plus, my university uses RHEL in the computer science lab, so I figured it would be advantageous to familiarize myself with something similar.

Quote:

I didn't read the thread at all, except maybe the first line or two.

Synopsis: I used rm -rf / to kill Ubuntu after Fuzzy helped me find a workaround to the protection against that.

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Fuzzy
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12 May 2009, 12:23 pm

Oops. Thanks for the correction. I did mean fedora core.

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davidred wrote...
I installed Ubuntu once and it completely destroyed my paying relationship with Microsoft.

Fuzzy
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12 May 2009, 12:35 pm

Dussel wrote:

Fuzzy wrote:

Not really - the equivalent to format c:\ would be

Code:

mkfs /dev/hda1

I was comparing the other end. I dont think that windows command line "del" can do recursive deletes with assumptive permissions the way that rm can. So the only way in windows is the format command, which wont format the C drive in an active system.

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davidred wrote...
I installed Ubuntu once and it completely destroyed my paying relationship with Microsoft.

TheKingsRaven
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12 May 2009, 3:55 pm

rm -rf / would only remove the references to the files, not clear the hard disk. The only noticeable diffrence is that programs your running should stay alive unless they need to open a new file.

UberElvis
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18 May 2009, 7:33 pm

That would be fun to do just to see what happens (I'm sure the outcome would vary from person to person depending on configuration, hardware setup, and programs installed). I would try it with one of my Ubuntu setups. But unfortunately even if I did back up all data, I'd probably be too lazy to reinstall so I'm going to wait until I have a good test machine with enough RAM for Ubuntu. Then again, I could try it with smaller distro like puppy but I'm to lazy too burn another disk whereas I've already burned an Ubuntu disk.

DentArthurDent
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19 May 2009, 5:22 am

:lol: I had no idea reading pidgin computer chat could be so much fun

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Fuzzy
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19 May 2009, 6:30 am

We have tons of fun in pidgin Mister Dent.

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davidred wrote...
I installed Ubuntu once and it completely destroyed my paying relationship with Microsoft.

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