Shdwdrgn

@Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz

A person with way too many hobbies, but I still continue to learn new things.

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Linux file transfer speed bottlenecks?

I’m currently watching the progress of a 4tB rsync file transfer, and i’m curious why the speeds are less than the theoretical read/write maximum speeds of the drives involved with the transfer. I know there’s a lot that can effect transfer speeds, so I guess i’m not asking why my transfer itself isn’t going faster....

Shdwdrgn,

You didn’t mention if this is a HDD or an SDD. If it’s a HDD, you will never even reach SATA 2 speeds, although you should be able to saturate SATA 1. Realistically you might be able to push around 200MB/s on newer HDDs but that’s assuming nothing else gets in your way.

Shdwdrgn,

This right here. As a member of the OpenNIC project, I used to run an open resolver and this required a lot of hands-on maintenance. Basically what happens is someone sends a very small packet requesting the lookup of something which returns a huge amount of data (like DNSSEC records). They can make thousands of these requests in a short period, attempting to flood out the target domain’s DNS servers and effectively take them offline, by using your open server as the attacker.

At the very least, you need to have strict rate-limiting controls on DNS lookups. And since the requests come in through UDP, they can spoof their IP address so you can’t simply block an attacker. When I ran into this issue, I wrote up scripts to monitor for a lot of requests to the same domain name and outright block those until the attack stopped. It wasn’t a great solution, but it did at least make sure my system wasn’t contributing to an attack.

Your best bet is to only respond to DNS requests for your own domain(s). If you really want an open resolver, think about limiting it by creating some sort of sign-up method (for instance, ddns servers use a specific URL to register the changing IP of known users), but still keep the rate-limiting in place.

Shdwdrgn,

I think it was around FF78 that they changed this behavior. Before that a single click just placed the cursor, double-click highlighted a word, and triple-click highlighted the entire address. This is the behavior for anything I click anywhere on my desktop (debian/mate) so I suspect what happened is the firefox devs decided to hard-code the behavior instead of letting the desktop handle it. I know there was a bug report for the issue which the devs repeatedly closed as won’t fix, at one point literally saying this was the way things worked in Windows and they were following that path for consistency across all operating systems, despite multiple examples given to show this was NOT the expected behavior on any Linux platform.

I’m not too surprised Chrome does this too, but it does make me wonder if Chrome following this path is the reason why the FF devs decided to copy it? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean that is the correct or expected behavior. ;-)

Shdwdrgn,

They all do it NOW. They did not always do it this way. Firefox is what I’ve always used, so I know they used to let the desktop handle how clicks were managed. Literally anything else on my desktop, if I click once it simply places the cursor where I clicked. And since I need to copy partial URLs multiple times a day, this change is something that constantly aggravates me. Now I have to click the address bar four times quickly in order for it to finally place the cursor where I’m clicking at. It’s not nitpicking if they intentionally changed an operation to no longer follow the rules of everything else on the desktop. Being inconsistent is not user-friendly.

Shdwdrgn,

Open any document. Single click somewhere within that document. What do you expect to happen? Do you expect your cursor to be placed where you clicked, or do you expect the entire line to be highlighted? My guess is that you expect consistency in every application doing the same thing for a single click.

Just because one browser decided to change how they react, and everybody else copied that behavior, does not mean it is the correct or expected behavior. You’ve just gotten used to the difference that was forced on you, but imagine if every application on your desktop reacted differently depending on how many times you clicked a spot? What happens when they also start modifying the results of a right-click into something unexpected like clearing your cookies? Is that also OK just because one browser started doing it and every other browser copied that function?

Shdwdrgn,

Maybe because it WAS consistent until the FF devs made the choice to change it? As I said before, if they decided to change the role of the right-click to no longer bring up a context menu, would you be ok with that as well? What about the difference between clicking on text in a browser article or clicking into a textarea? Those also have different roles, so if the devs decide that a user single-clicking into the textarea should automatically select the entire field, would that make sense to you? If I click on any text anywhere in any application, I expect to get the same results, and not have to remember how every application handles that click differently. Sure if I was clicking on something other than text then different actions might make sense in different applications, but the idea of a single click on the address bar selecting everything is akin to clicking an icon on my desktop and having all the surrounding icons also getting selected – it just doesn’t make sense and it’s not consistent with a single click in any other application.

Shdwdrgn,

It certainly helps, that was already mentioned by someone else and wasn’t an option I was aware of.

Shdwdrgn,

So it’s ok that it works for your use-case and screw consistency? My point is that if you say it’s ok for one application to do things their own way, it basically invites every other app developer to ignore the standards and just do whatever they want. And no, single-click selecting the entire URL shouldn’t be considered a standard, it’s just something that changed in the last few years when one browser made the call and everyone else played follow-the-leader.

By the way, you mentioned that “all” of your browsers behave the same way . I’d like to remind you that Chrome, Chromium, and Safari all use the same engine so they’re basically the same thing. I think Opera stands alone but I don’t have that installed here so I can’t check it immediately. I’d ask if anyone had checked Exploder, but who in their right mind uses that except for work-related stuff where their developers can’t write HTML, and Microsoft is probably the ones who started this mess anything since they’re well know for ignoring standards. That really only leaves four unique browsers though. Not saying you didn’t consider this already, I just wanted to point it out in case you hadn’t.

If you want an example similar to an address bar, how about the current path in any file manager – I have Caja, Dolphin, and something called PCManFM here (not sure where that came from)? Once again, a single click does not select the entire path, it just places the cursor exactly where you clicked and nothing is selected. I can’t think of any other types of applications where you have some kind of a navigation bar, but that’s the closest example I know.

Shdwdrgn,

I found it annoying when FF no longer showed the http part of an address, but since nearly everything is on https these days it very rarely bounces back and forth for me any more.

Shdwdrgn,

So does that mean they’re finally going to make clicking on the address bar compatible with the Linux method of doing things (a single click puts the cursor where you clicked, NOT highlight the entire address, which is completely different from every other application on the desktop)? Because this whole business of “we’re not going to fix this even though it previously worked correctly because we insist everyone should do things the Microsoft way” has been an annoyance for the past few years since they changed the basic function on that one thing.

Shdwdrgn,

KVM has been my go-to for many years of running servers because it is extremely lightweight. Like for example, last year I finally ditched the old poweredge 860 servers (very early 2000’s machines which topped out with a dual-core CPU and 8GB of memory), however from these servers I was running half a dozen virtual linux boxes handling websites and email. Of course running a Windows vm is going to take a lot more resources but any desktop computer that is less than a decade old would easily handle it while still managing your regular linux desktop.

One caveat about KVM, however, is that there’s not really a great GUI interface for it. There IS a monitor to manage the VMs you have up and running, but I always launch new VMs from the command line, which is pretty much just a matter of setting the name and memory, pointing it to an existing image file or ISO, and then using the GUI monitor to launch a VNC remote connection to handle getting a new OS installed or make changes to an existing image to get it on the network. I don’t consider this a burden, but then again I grew up on the command line.

Shdwdrgn,

I used to run Ubuntu on my servers but abandoned it because it was so unreliable. Things like a “security” update that completely broke the network card drivers, or another one that caused NFS connections to reboot the machine under a heavy load. I switched over to Debian at that point and have never had any problems in the past decade. Since so many people run Arch, I’m guessing it is similarly stable and will be a good choice for you (at least I think you said you were running it in your OP?). I’ll have to look through those services you mentioned, I haven’t heard of most of them.

Shdwdrgn,

I’ve always preferred Konsole because it handles several tabs pretty well and I keep a bunch open to my servers. The only issue I have with it is that it has a habit of detaching tabs if I click on one while my computer is running something heavy in the background.

Ending support for Windows 10 could send 240 million computers to the landfill. Why not install Linux on them? (gadgettendency.com)

With support ending for Windows 10, the most popular desktop operating system in the world currently, possibly 240 million pcs may be sent to the landfill. This is mostly due to Windows 11’s exorbitant requirements. This will most likely result in many pcs being immediately outdated, and prone to viruses. GNU/Linux may be...

Shdwdrgn,

Was it EVER faster though? My experience with Windows has always been that they release new versions based on upcoming hardware specs and unless you spend top-dollar on the very latest hardware for their next release, you are going to see things moving slower on the new desktop. That’s one of things I’ve enjoyed about linux, you can pretty much always upgrade the OS on an older machine without concern of taking a hit on the performance, and sometimes you even get a boost.

Shdwdrgn,

Does anyone know of a linux tool that can immediately ban an IP address if they try to log in to ssh with specific user names? I see a ton of attempts in my logs for names like fax, mysql, admin, and of course root. Fail2ban only works if the same IP makes repeated attempts but I’m betting if I could generate a list from these failed attempts it would probably correlate with standard blocklists of compromised hosts. For that matter, is there a way to use an RBL to limit addresses that ssh will even accept? Of course none of these attempts have a chance of logging in, but it would still be nice to further limit my exposure for any future attacks.

Comparing compression in AV1, x264, and x265 (kbin.social)

I recently got it into my head to compare the various popular video codecs in an effort to better understand how av1 works and looks compared to x264 and x265. I also had ideas of using a intel video card to compress a home video security setup, and what levels of compression I would need to get good results....

Shdwdrgn,

You might want to use a code block instead of bullet points for your table, the way you presented it is unreadable but I found the info on your blog page.

One of my criteria for video formats is the portability. Like sometimes I might watch something through a web browser which natively supports x264. Yeah x265 provides better compression, and AV1 certainly looks interesting, but they both require the addition of codecs on most of my viewing devices and in some cases that’s not possible.

For most cases I’ve found that CRF25 with x264 works reasonably well. I tend to download 720p videos to watch on our 1080p TV and don’t notice the difference except in very minor situations like rapid motion on a solid-color background (usually only seen on movie studio logo screens). Any sort of animated shows can go even lower without noticeable degradation.

Shdwdrgn,

I would second Debian for stability, it’s what I use for all my VM servers. I have always preferred KVM however, as I had a lot of trouble with VMware hogging my cpu years ago. KVM has the virtual machine manager available for GUI monitoring but I’m not sure how far it goes for creating new VMs as I’ve always handled the setup directly from command line.

Shdwdrgn,

Thanks for the link and an interesting article!

Shdwdrgn,

Wow does anyone know where that first picture comes from? That mountain range looks like someone just jammed a bunch of glass shards into the ground!

Shdwdrgn,

Good luck! And don’t get stuck on the software I use, you may find something else that is better suited for your type of data. Like if your content is wrapped up in PDFs or some kind of zipped files then the best solution is one that can peer into those files to give search hits on the given text. Of course if your content is already fairly plan text then pretty much any solution would work.

Shdwdrgn,

One easy solution might be to check into a self-hosted search engine? I’ve used mnogosearch in the past which worked well for spidering a single domain, but it only created the database and didn’t have a web page front end. Still, if you let it go crazy across your nextcloud pages and add a search bar to your website it could provide what you’re missing. They provided enough examples at the time for me to write my own search page pretty easily.

Shdwdrgn,

Crap, I knew I forgot something important.

Shdwdrgn,
  • Buy larger storage drives
  • Download content
  • Repeat
Shdwdrgn,

I mean, a community is made up of its members, so it still seems to fit?

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