Blind leading the blind

One of the problems many veteran users have with the rise of Ubuntu is how message boards and communities get polluted with the clueless new users.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with looking for a little help or offering some of your own knowledge.  But the old adage holds water; one can know just enough to cause trouble.

That’s what happens in a lot of circumstances.  Communities get filled with those who know just enough to lead the new user astray.  At least check your advice before espousing your knowledge!  This post is an excellent example of just that.  It recently hit Digg and Reddit and no doubt ruffled a lot of feathers with its lame tips.  Not only are many of those “50 ways to impress your geeky linux friends” just plain incorrect, they’re asinine.  That post is the rambling of someone who’s just discovered wobbly windows and the command line.  If it’s text-mode, it must be leet!

It’s the blind leading the blind, and it ain’t pretty.

Let’s take this author’s example of ripping a DVD:

What’s wrong with this?

1. Encrypted DVDs will not be ripped with this command.  All you’ll get is a logfile and STDERR filled with errors as your drive gets confused by the CSS studios use to encrypt their content
2. The output file, for as far as it may get, is created in the root of the filesystem.  Classy.
3. No blocksize specified.  Unless you’re willing to wait an eternity for your disc to rip, better crank up the BS option to a sane level.  Lord knows this post has enough BS of its own…

The correct advice would be to make sure you have the De-CSS encryption cracking library installed and to use handbrake, or another such utility to get the content from the disk.  The author mentions none of this.  Likely result?  A frustrated user, banging their head on their keyboard after some terrible advice.

But that’s not all — how bout this gem?

This is when bad advice gets dangerous.  What’s wrong with this?  From shred’s own –help output:

CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption:
that the file system overwrites data in place.  This is the traditional
way to do things, but many modern file system designs do not satisfy this
assumption.  The following are examples of file systems on which shred is
not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in all file system modes:

* log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied with
AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

Oh, hey, how about that?  shred is telling you in its own goddamn help output that it’s useless on journaled filesystems.  What’s the default these days?  Oh, yes… a journaled filesystem.  Once again, the author fails to mention a very important caveat.  Now there’s a false sense of security.

Another example of just enough information:

That command will accomplish one thing:  a single html file downloaded to your system.  What the author meant was no doubt something like this:

wget -m -p -np http://example.com/interesting_subsection/

Otherwise, you get none of the interesting content on the page, like… images, stylesheets, linked pages.

Oh, you want to disable root logins via SSH?

Since we’re all running GNOME and X on our servers, I guess gedit is fine… But guess what?  Wrong file!  /etc/ssh/ssh_config exists, but that’s not quite where you want to add that option. Try /etc/ssh/sshd_config.  And don’t forget to restart sshd!

Well, maybe we should give the author some slack.  After all, this is supposed to be impressive stuff.  If I were looking over your shoulder, and I saw you perform this next act of god-like mastery, I don’t know how I’d react:

Yes.  Holy shit.  This is it.  Mecca, you are found.  Should we mention how to query your package manager for installed files from a particular app?  Nah…

The net and social bookmarking sites are all littered with inane crap like this.  20 of the coolest command line utilities!  30 of the best alternative free software packages!  75 ways to jack off with a terminal for fun and profit!  And most of them are utter drivel.

Tags: bad advice, blind