My RaQ3 is known locally as 'Lazarus Raq' due to the miricles and its apparant mutiple returns from the dead

Some of these are JOKES and some are real, either way I strongly suggest that what you read on this page, you take with a pinch of salt and don't actually do !! 
And if you do, then you deserve a "Stuffed Raq"
Its also been pointed out to me that the Raq's are very similar to Red Hat, so this means that many of these tips'n'tricks are transferable, then we have Mandrake, which is reportedly the most popular beginners version of Linux, which is based tightly around Red Hat Linux, but with more "newbie" stuff in mind.  So even you Red Hat and Mandrake users can share in our discoveries....

Maybe I should create a hall of fame for who can send me the most creative ones ?
And another for whom can send the most (Fully TESTED I mean!) ?

1. TOP ~ Install iASP on a RaQ3 and don't upgrade to more than 64 meg of RAM
   


2. TOP ~ Shutdown PostgreSQL, and leave it off
   


3. TOP ~ Upgrade Perl
   


4. TOP ~ Install Apache 2.0
   


5. TOP ~ Follow UK2's advice on SSH1 Compatibility Issues 
   


6. TOP ~ cd /usr/local;rm -r php * (note the space before the *)  This ones a "REAL" accident that Steve Bassi just sent to me ( that he may have done :-p )
   


7. TOP ~ Purchase a UK2 RAM upgrade (256mb + is best) - and preferably for £400+ (don't do the cheap £100 one, as you wont get your moneys worth), but you need the correct motherboard version (currently unsure of the revision number) for the full and utter destruction to begin to set in (approx a week from the beginning to the software reload is about normal) - (another Bassi one this)
   


8. TOP ~ Steve's quote: "oh and one I did as well ... was I saw a cobalt script to fix all your site admin pages .. and I thought that looks cool .. must be like meta verify ... so I ran the script and it replaced every Vsites index with a nice new fresh cobalt ones" - now this one sounds good :)
   


9. TOP ~ Steve's quote: "another one that f****d my Raq for weeks ... was when I discovered cobalt upgrade site quite late in the day ... and decided what was the point in starting at the bottom .. I may as well start from the top ... saved scrolling .. " - funnily this one is quite common, and I think we can all admit we have bodged the order of one or two updates
   


10. TOP ~ Install Raq4 updates on a Raq (or vica versa)
    


11. TOP ~ Write "UK2 are F*****g W******s" on the LCD screen, and have them switch your Raq off for a wee while.
    


12. TOP ~ cd /home/sites/siteX; chown -R someuser ..  (the ".." was meant to be "./") - This ones a good one, that I experimented with.... took 3 days to sort 70 sites files ownerships out.
    


13. TOP ~ Chris B's contribution (tested): "Add a group, and assign it a user that doesn't exist, then try to add a site via Brian (GUI) and watch it take the server down"
    


14. TOP ~ Lukes FULLY tested contribution: "Letting BB/Bassi/Kul test there new programs/updates on Lukies RaQ" - This one works good I should add. ...and Luke wanted this added (he insisted) "i only let u test coz coz coz u are bigger then me :-p "
    


15. TOP ~ One of Lukes customers did this accidentally sometime back (took us hours to find the offending code): "create an index.php with this in it <?php require 'index.php' ?> and visit it with your browser"
    


16. TOP ~ Chris B's suggestion on a RaQ tidying up session: "rm /etc/gshadow" why do I need this file anyway ?"
    


17. TOP ~ kill -9 1
    


18. TOP ~ shutdown -f now   (should be "shutdown -rf now") or   shutdown -h now   also works well
    


19. TOP ~ Try installing the Cobalt restore CD for a RaQXTR on a RaQ3 .. and watch it fry the FLASH the BIOS
    


20. TOP ~ Chris B's and Steve Bassi's best yet ..... 'trying to upgrade remotely from RaQ3 to RaQXTR software with a live server!!"
    


21. TOP ~ Simon fully tested this one: "register non-standard (but valid) ports at powerraq.com and spend 2 days rebuilding after UK2 trash your machine for you..." - UK2 entered and replaced all the binaries with a copy from their own toolbox, but never considered some may have been upgraded in the past year of owning the Raq!
    


22. TOP ~ Chris B's Testing reveals: "Post the private IP of UK2 staff member to a public mailing list, and watch your server disappear for over a week'
    


23. TOP ~ Install ColdFusion software on a Raq3
    


24. TOP ~ Change your Raq's IP address in Brian (GUI) and scratch your head for an hour wondering why you cant see your Raq any more
    


25. TOP ~ How to get on the GOOD side of UK2 (Chris B - again <g>):  "phoning demon.co.uk, informing them someone just logged into your server as root from one of their accounts, and having demon complain and reprimand their customer ...... then later finding out it was UK2 staff' :)  Does wonders for your reputation at UK2 - And you get FREE random reboots as the prize.
    


26. TOP ~ Backup your Raq through the GUI to an FTP server, but use your Raq as the FTP server, then repeat until you have no disk space left.
    


27. TOP ~ Backup your Raq through the GUI to an FTP server (externally), and when it fails to complete, forget to delete the file that is stored in /home/tmp, then await the next weeks backup, and the same failure.  Then attempt to calculate how many backups before you run out of space (each backup contains ALL of the previous ones)
    


28. TOP ~ Chris B (he just loves this testing of the Raq stability): Create a named pipe (i.e. run screen) and then try to get the cobalt backup script to get past it .... the Cobalt backup script will try to md5sum the pipe... which it will wait forever.. and ever.. oh that's why my backup didn't complete in over a week...." :)
    


29. TOP ~ from Bassi ..... what's a backup - is that the same as a reload ??? 
    


30. TOP ~ cd /;wget LARGEFILE   (preferably above 300meg)   or   cd /;mv LARGEFILE ./
    


31. TOP ~ <? print `find /home/sites/ -type f -name '*.php' -exec grep mysql_connect {} \;` ; ?>   finds all PHP files with mysql_connect lines in across all sites and prints them  i.e. the ones with the passwords in.
    


32. TOP ~ Write an Apache DSO module to intercept all incoming web requests and then watch for the same page leaving the server and add your own special part to each page (i.e. a comment), and don't allow it to timeout for requests in that never seem to be returned to the visitor, then visit the Raq and load a page or arrive using a domain.com rather than www.domain.com .  This is especially nice (and has been fully tested to the MAX) as apache does some not so clever request duplication and rewriting, and send the responses to domain.com or pages out on a newly spawned process and your DSO will hang around awaiting the original to leave the Raq.  This takes about 20 - 25 minutes to get the load averages to this sort of levels:  3:04pm up 20 min, 2 users, load average: 343.10, 316.02, 245.69    (which are extremely critical)  awe and expect that Raq to crash a few times in succession.
    


33. TOP ~ Steve Bassi's best experiment (before Apache): "When I was experimenting moving /usr/local to /home/local I zipped up usr/local copied it to home/local made a link from /usr/local to /homelocal and then removed usr/local. This part was fine and all worked fine. Until I decided that I must have got it wrong cos I could type ls -al /usr/local and all the files were still there. So I deleted /home/local to start again and discovered that /usr/local was no where to be seen.   I had to get into Perry's RAQ and download the whole lot and mess with them to get it back .... I have a working script for that now .... is all automated"
    


34. TOP ~ Chris B's suggestion: "Altering the Rewrite in httpd.conf to a CAPITALISED version for the ServerName directive"  .....   'right round like a record baby'
    


35. TOP ~ "Enabling APOP3 on your mail accounts and expecting standard POP3 to work'
    


36. TOP ~ Anonymously added: "I wont mention the time. I decided a reload was in order ... so logged in as root and typed rm -r * in the root directory and then went to power Raq and asked them to reboot .. after 2 reboots for some odd reason it didn't come back and they suggested I needed a reload I thanked them gratefully............ I had always wanted to do it on a live machine .."  :-D
    


37. TOP ~ Set the 'if you want to send a copy elsewhere' bit on powerraq.com to raqnoc@uk2.net, which CC's them a copy sure to get a phone call if you need communication in a hurry" - This REALLY works too !!
    


38. TOP ~ Press the Page Engineer thing on powerraq.com 300 times, this will gain your raq sufficient attention to get an engineer to switch the f***ing thing off immediately....please wait 1 too 3 weeks for power on again though.  - FULLY tested !
    


39. TOP ~ Forward your ADMIN mails (well at least one copy of the mail) to another user account on your raq3, then give that account only 2gb of space (whole site). Then fill half the space with boring www stuff, and a few wee log files. Then when it gets really full (just as webalizer/split logs does its thing and dumps a monster file in the logs directory), have Brian (GUI) send "admin" an email, warning the site is close to being over quota.
    And with any luck that little 2kb mail will tip the balance and throw you over quota, and cause the mail to be rejected.
    Then as seen as admin mails (this includes postmaster) are forwarded (a copy) to this over quota user, it sends another one.... which is nice! A quick bit of maths and you can see how quickly you can build up to the thousands of emails being queued & rejected can grow to an unmanageable state.
    But just to top it all, the mails to my external email account also began to reject, so the issue has really been compounded now <g>
    


40. TOP ~ One from Eddie, NOTE the important part about this one is to use a 2 hour cut-off dialer and to do this on New Years eve adds to the excitement:
    "From a directory no longer required and with a subdirectory called 'etc' I typed rm etc/* to empty it.
    People say don't use wild cards like that but what do they know?
    If I hadn't typed rm /etc/* everything would've been fine.
    The screen-staring lasted several eternities whilst I acknowledged there isn't a friendly 'Are you sure?'  nor any chance of aborting, nor Recycle Bin.  Worst of all it didn't say 'No such directory'.
    The passwd command wouldn't reset unless I typed the old password first but it no longer knew that itself so couldn't verify.
    This was at 8 pm before getting ready to go to a New Year party.
    My ISP Freeserve Anytime cuts off automatically every 2 hours, so I had 1 hour 55 minutes ... to type 'Can I have a reload please'."
    


41. TOP ~ Really Dangerous one, that can force you to require a reload, after it trashes amongst other things, your RPM database, causing you NOT to be able to upgrade anything ;(  !!  "find / -exec strip {} \;" .... Oh, the idiot decided we needed more disk space and stripped all executables. However, he didn't realise it also strips libraries which, of course, NEED the symbols intact! :( ... courtesy of TiG (IRC)
    


42. TOP ~ Bassi strikes again..... Mr Bassi is currently creating RPM files for distribution ;-) .... I am so lucky i am doing this on my home RaQ,  I just made a mistake and entered rpm -e *  instead of rpm -i *  and took out almost every rpm on the RaQ !!! ;-)   oh that's priceless .....My first rpm building experiences..... I wouldn't mind but I haven't had a f/ing drink yet, its so dangerous doing this sober.
    


43. TOP ~ One from my own collection....   chown 600 /*    ... what i meant to type was chmod 600 *  but sadly I made two typos in it, chown instead of chmod (I do this a lot), and the  / key is next to the * (numeric keypad) and in the excitement I pressed both.  Luckily I immediately noticed that I had changed the whole / directory to be owned by user 600 instead of root ;-)  Glad I didn't reboot.
    


44. TOP ~ How to Kill your PostGresSQL database (the backend behind the GUI/ Brian/SaBrina) ...This is what the RAQ owner said to me after I fixed it .... "I bet that was me!!! When I wanted to transfer the database files from the server to my hard drive I had to change the permissions as it wouldn't let me download. So I used the chown command but also I put the -R in there" Silly me didn't think to check that they were still owned by postgres.
    


45. TOP ~ "mkswap /dev/hda1 " no warnings about it being mounted. 5.4.3.2.1 bang ext2 errors are us. It turns the 'root' fs into a 'swap' partition.
    


46. TOP ~ Cathal Garvey has found a really good one here....
    vi /etc/password, only make sure your TERMCAP is wrong so that extra keys like the arrows don't work (and don't start with the use "hjkl").. use the arrow key to move down, only to realise it doesn't work. Then use the hjkl keys to navigate to make your changes (and make sure to not notice that the arrow key has changed the r of root to R), save and exit. Logout. Now, log back in again and try and su....
    


47. TOP ~ One from my own books (23/12/2002): Login too your RaQ, change the administrator password via the GUI, but make a typo in the password, and then in the confirmation password box repeat as above, but ensure you can not remember the typo. Save and quit. Now try to log into SSH, begin to guess the password, repeat for about 20 minutes and finally begin to panic as your heart rate begins to exceed 300bpm. Concider what day of the year it is...how quick will UK2 do a OS reload 2 days before Christmas? Start concidering alternatives...Begin Server Cracking attempts...after a few minutes, suddenly remember you have setup SSH Passwordless PassPhrases for the 'root' account from you local Linux machine... :)
    


48. TOP ~ Install OSupd5 on your RaQ3 and wait...and wait...and wait...If you discover that libc.6 is misssing, PANIC. It seems a small number of RaQ's loose this file during the update, this is pretty 'fatal' position to be in and DONT reboot, and DONT logout, just PANIC, and wonder how on earth you will repair it. From Philip on the day before Christmas. I think this explains his RaQ's current situation - 'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the server not a library was stirring not even a mail'
    


49. TOP ~ ChrisB found this in some Geek TW@T's email signature... and ran it on wrong remote server: echo '. ./_&. ./_'>_;. ./_ then the box was toasty :) reboot required as the server goes into an infinate loop, it wont even ping :-|
    


50. TOP ~ Delete the /etc/shadow or /etc/group files and see if you can log in again.
    


51. TOP ~ Waiting for some fool to mail me their efforts...Could this be your spot?