SpaceCadet

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

The worst part is to change some things it adds like an extra 4 clicks to the old method.

And then at the final click, it takes you to that control panel screen anyway lol

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

I’m pretty sure that it’s not hardware related

Random segfaulting is not something that “just happens” because of an OS misconfiguration, then if the same problem happens on Arch as well as on a clean EndeavourOS live image it convinces me that it is in fact hardware related somehow. As you have already replaced the RAM, my guess is CPU or motherboard issue.

Zen2/B450 is a widely used and well supported configuration on Linux that you normally shouldn’t have issues with, but Zen2 CPUs are rather notorious for having fragile memory controllers, and sometimes dodgy AGESA firmware releases that can cause issues on some CPUs. I used to have a 3600X myself that started crashing at idle around a particular firmware release of my motherboard, and it was fixed by a subsequent release.

BTW the fact that it doesn’t happen on Debian doesn’t necessarily mean that Arch is the culprit. It could just be that Debian is not triggering the fault because of different, perhaps more conservative, compiler optimizations.

As a last ditch effort, you could try resetting your entire UEFI (bios) settings to default, preferably by pulling the CMOS battery.

BTW, is it only GUI applications that are segfaulting? Or other programs as well? Do you have an old spare GPU you can test with?

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

Heh the comparison also holds if you use 10=Windows 7 and 11=Windows 8

Or 10=Windows 98 and 11=Windows ME

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

This reaction wants to redefine adulthood as post 25

It’s even more than that, it wants to make adulthood some kind of sliding window where the age of the older partner defines how “adult” and “capable of making decisions” we see the younger partner, and the older a person gets the more people at the lower end of the age range get excluded for them from this fictional adulthood. For example: 60 and 30 would also be seen as inappropriate.

Now it’s perfectly normal for younger people not to find much older people attractive or suitable to have a relationship with and vice versa, and they may even find the idea repulsive, but this is still a personal preference. It’s probably even the preference of the majority of people, but that does not mean we should take away the agency of adults to choose their partners when they have a different, non-conforming preference. At that point it has nothing to do anymore with protecting vulnerable people from predators, but about imposing your own preferences and dating standards on other people, and you’re quite right in calling it out for the neo-puritanical and conservative thinking that it is.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

You’re good. That’s the latest image, it’s just the confusing Debian version scheme where the package version is not the same as the kernel version. Debian package version 6.1.0-17 = kernel version 6.1.69-1

See:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ uname -a
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Linux debian12 6.1.0-17-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.69-1 (2023-12-30) x86_64 GNU/Linux
</span>

And:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ dpkg-query --list linux-image-6.1.0-17-amd64
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
</span><span style="color:#323232;">| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
</span><span style="color:#323232;">|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">||/ Name                       Version      Architecture Description
</span><span style="color:#323232;">+++-==========================-============-============-=================================
</span><span style="color:#323232;">ii  linux-image-6.1.0-17-amd64 6.1.69-1     amd64        Linux 6.1 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
</span>

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Realistically it’s not super dangerous, and no you probably don’t have a virus just from browsing a few tech support sites, but you do eliminate your last line of defense when you run software as root. As you know, root can read/change/delete anything on your system whereas regular users are generally restricted to their own data. So if there is a security problem in the software, it’s made worse by the fact that you were running it as root.

You are right though that Firefox does still have its own protections - it’s probably one of the most hardened pieces of software on your computer exactly because it connects to the whole wide internet - and those protections are not negated by running as root. However if those protections fail, the attacker has the keys to the kingdom rather than just a sizable chunk of the kingdom.

To put that in perspective though, if there is a Firefox exploit and a hacker gets access to your regular user account, that’s already pretty bad in itself. Even if you run as a regular unprivileged user they would still have have access to things like: your personal documents, your ssh keys, your Firefox profile with your browsing history, your session cookies and your saved passwords, your e-mail, your paypal account, your banking information, …

As root, they could obviously do even more like damage like reading all users’ data, installing a keylogger or screengrabber, installing a rootkit to make themselves undetectable, but for most regular users most of the damage is already done when their own account is compromised.

So when these discussions come up, I always have to think about this XKCD comic:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/authorization_2x.png

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

That’s what I said yes.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

uBlock can do much more refined and targeted blocking than a pihole because it has access to the entire page that is being served and can selectively filter elements. The pihole only has access to the DNS name, and DNS blocking is a rather crude tool to block ads that can be defeated by serving the ads from the same domain.

For example: a pihole doesn’t work for blocking YouTube ads, because they come from the same domain.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

I agree that at some point you have to be able to ditch technical debt, but you still should be able to do more or less the same things with the new system as with the old system and that’s currently still not the case.

The problem is that the architecture of Wayland and the organization around it themselves impose limitations that have a chilling effect on development for it. One issue is that Wayland has been deliberately left very slim, leaving a lot of complexity and implementation details up to the compositor. A compositor can be seen as something that approaches the size and complexity of an entire X display server. This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.

Naturally this also leads to a lot of duplication of effort. For example: GNOME, KDE and the window managers that have implemented a wayland version each have their own compositor that by and large does the same thing.

Another issue is the standardization of the protocols and interfaces that the different compositors use, or lack thereof. There is a steering group containing the major stakeholders that votes on proposed extensions, but good proposals often get shot down because the major stakeholders can’t agree on it and sometimes ego or principles gets in the way. And then you have cases where one compositor just goes their own way and implements something regardless of what the others do.

For example, as a result of this there’s still no standard screen capture API, so if you want to do things like screenshots, remote desktop, desktop streaming, … whether or not you can do that, and with which tool, depends on the compositor you use. Another example: they’re currently still bickering over whether or not an application should be allowed to place windows with absolute coordinates, and how that should be implemented. We’re currently 15 years after initial release of Wayland…

In my opinion, this is all completely backwards. Both in an organizational and technical sense way too much has been left up to the individual compositors that should have been a core part of Wayland itself.

Unfortunately, it’s all too late to fix this. We’re 15 years into Wayland development, and the flawed architecture has been set in stone. Wayland isn’t going to go away soon either, too many parties are invested in it. So for me the reasonable thing to do is to wait and stick with X11 until the dust settles and something emerges on the other side that is better than what I currently have.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

they cannot access the data from software because it is blocked by login screen

The system may still be vulnerable to over the network exploits. So for example, if the system is running sshd, and a couple of months from now a root exploit is found (à la heartbleed), the attacker may get inside.

It’s somewhat of a long shot, but it’s still a much larger attack surface than butting your head against a LUKS encrypted drive that’s at rest.

they cannot access the data from hardware because it is protected by FDE.

RAM is not protected by FDE. There are (obviously non-trivial) ways to dump the RAM of a running system (Cold Boot attacks, and other forensic tools exist). So if the attacker is dedicated enough, there are ways.

One of the misconceptions I had before is that I assumed that the disk will be decrypted when you enter the LUKS password. This is not true, the password is loaded into the ram, and only decrypts necessary parts to RAM. All the data on the disk is never decrypted, even when you are working in your OS.

Hah! That would be impractical :) Imagine having to decrypt your entire 32TB drive array everytime you booted your computer.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I ditched Ubuntu LTS for my homelab virtual machines around 20.04 when they started to push snaps, netplan and cloud-init, meaning I would have to spend a significant amount of effort redoing my bootstrap scripts for no good reason and learning skills that are only applicable in the Ubuntu ecosystem. I went with debian stable instead, and was left wondering why I hadn’t done that sooner. It’s like Ubuntu without all the weirdness.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

nowadays egrep is not recommended to use. grep -E is a more portable synonim

Not directed at you personally, but this is the kind of pointless pedantry from upstream developers that grinds my gears.

Like, I’ve used egrep for 25 years. I don’t know of a still relevant Unix variant in existence that doesn’t have the egrep command. But suddenly now, when any other Unix variant but Linux is all but extinct, and all your shell scripts are probably full of bashisms and Linuxisms anyway, now there is somehow a portability problem, and they deem it necessary to print out a warning whenever I dare to run egrep instead of grep -E? C’mon now … If anything, they have just made it less portable by spitting out spurious warnings where there weren’t any before.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

Not sure if this is the root cause of your boot failure, but underscores in hostnames are not allowed. A- Z, 0-9 and - are the only allowed characters.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

The trouble is that my workload doesn’t decrease with an amount equivalent to the outage time. I still have the same tasks to accomplish, so if the network is down for half a day, it just means I have half a day less to get my work done and meet my deadlines.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

So little is done by others that, if Red Hat stops, Xorg is effectively done.

Source?

As far as I know the X.org foundation is an independent non-profit organization, and while Red Hat is a sponsor and they have 1 member in the board of directors (out of 8), they don’t appear to be the main contributor.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

Who made Red Hat the arbiter of when xorg should end?

I mean, sure they’re a major Linux vendor but their market is servers with hardly any foothold in the desktop market. It would be more interesting to see how long Debian, Ubuntu or Arch will keep xorg alive.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Just use rsync -va

NO STOP!

The default quick check algorithm of rsync is not safe for this. It only checks filesize and modification time to determine if files are equal. After a b0rked copy, these are not to be trusted.

You should add the -c flag so that files are properly checksummed, unfortunately if you have slow storage on either end, this often negates the speed advantage of rsync.

For example, consider this example:

<span style="color:#323232;">mkdir source
</span><span style="color:#323232;">mkdir destination
</span><span style="color:#323232;">echo "hello" > source/file.txt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">echo "world" > destination/file.txt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">touch -r source/file.txt destination/file.txt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">rsync -avh source/ destination/
</span><span style="color:#323232;">cat source/file.txt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">cat destination/file.txt
</span>

Contrary to what you might expect, the rsync command copies nothing and the output at the end will show:

<span style="color:#323232;">hello
</span><span style="color:#323232;">world
</span>

If you change the rsync command in the example above to rsync -c -avh source/ destination/, it will work as expected.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

I think there may also be a cultural angle here. Anglo-Saxon culture really places a much higher emphasis on “not causing offense”, whereas other cultures place a higher emphasis on speaking truthfully, even if harshly.

So Linus, who grew up in Finland, may have thought of his message as harsh but fair, whereas to native English speakers it comes across as incredibly rude.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

What a toxic ass message

dickriders

Oh the irony…

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

I’ve found that NFS gives me the best performance and the least issues. For my use cases, single user where throughput is more important than latency, it’s indistinguishable from a local disk. It basically goes as fast as my gigabit NIC allows, which is more or less the maximum throughput of the hard disks as well.

A benefit of NFS over SMB is that you can just use Unix ownerships and permissions. I do make sure to synchronize UIDs and GIDs across my devices because I could never get idmapping to work with my NAS.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

Afterstep on Red Hat 5.1

Story: I started a new job as a system engineer in December 1998, it was the heyday of Windows 9x and NT 4.0. First day on the job, the guy who was sitting across from my assigned desk was running something strange and insanely cool looking on a giant CRT monitor. I was mesmerized by the spinning window animations, the virtual desktops, the cool icons, the falling snow… I struck up a conversation with him, asked him what kind of system he was running there. He told me he was running Linux and this was the Afterstep window manager. Turns out he was the local sysadmin there as well as a Linux evangelist and someone I got along with instantly.

I had already been curious about Linux and wanted to try it, so he gave me a copy of Red Hat 5.1 to install on my home PC and I started my journey there. 25 years later I still run Linux, the expertise I developed with it has helped me immensely in my career and I’m still friends with my former coworker.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

I’m really sad there isn’t a French press on here

Nor a moka pot, which is my preferred way.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

Differ t rights holders in different regions

Just call it greed.

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

This is not a chrome vs firefox issue. People using an adblocker on firefox are getting blocked just the same.

See:

https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/ee8a3abd-4cb6-452e-bcfe-339c3fe33b8b.png

source (sorry for the reddit link)

SpaceCadet, 1 year ago

I haven’t seen it yet either, not on firefox nor on chrome. From what I hear it’s being rolled out gradually, so if you didn’t get a notice yet, it doesn’t mean that you won’t get one in the future.