Skip Navigation
Jump
Beware of security risks!
  • I'm not feeling too genocidal at the moment and I'm not too sure what a big blob of capitalism looks like but it sounds like you are impugning me (int al) in some way.

    If you are going to deliver a stinging attack on something you dislike, why not deploy an impassioned and pithy argument rather than ... that. You do at least manage to spell it's correctly, which is nice.

    -5
  • Jump
    Problems with Arch upgrade
  • What on earth went wrong?

    Arch is just as safe as any other distro, sometimes more so. Being a rolling jobbie, smaller bits tend to break at a time. If you want to live life on the edge then Gentoo is your man but even Gentoo is becoming pretty safe. You might lose your windowing system for a while but you still have links2 to get to a search engine.

    2
  • Jump
    Rust for Linux revisited (by Drew DeVault)
  • "Every subsystem is a private fiefdom, subject to the whims of each one of Linux’s 1,700+ maintainers, almost all of whom have a dog in this race. It’s herding cats"

    There are three similes in that quote. When your considerations are that disorganized, you have not finished thinking everything through. Fiefdoms, dogs and cats ... oh my! That's on top of wild west and other trite, well worn and rather silly similes.

    Make your argument without recourse to inflammatory terminology and similes and you slighten the risk of pissing people off.

    Clarity is in the eye of the beholder or as someone once said: "You do you".

    -2
  • Jump
    Whats your go-to naming convention?
  • I like to use my enterprise number and a UUID (all in lower case, for legibility). Here's an example:

    .1.3.6.1.4.1.33230.0d456e46-67e6-11ef-9c92-7b175b3ab1f1
    
    

    Now you might say that the UUID is already globally unique or at least pretty unlikely to turn up anywhere else, so why bother prefixing it with more stuff? To that I say: "I need to be absolutely or at least reasonably sure ... OK nearly sure".

    Anyway, you maintain a database of these things and then attach documentation and meaning to them. An editor could abstract and hide that away.

    I started this post as a joke. Not sure anymore. Why get your knickers in a twist with naming conventions for variables and constants. Programming is already a whopping layer of abstraction from what the logic gates are up to, another one wont hurt!

    12
  • Jump
    Companies that use desktop Linux
  • Windows GPOs are a right old mess. I've been managing them for over two decades. The first fuck up is the word "Group". You cannot assign Group Policy Objects to AD groups unless you use something like ZENworks or some funky WMI filters!

    Settings are applied to computers or users. Many settings are available to be set for both but only make sense or even work for one or the other. MS bought out some solution providers and that's why you get the Control Panel and other handy stuff, rather roughly bolted on.

    AD with GPOs with the extension to "local machines" is a great idea but dreadful in execution. MS didn't want to nobble third party apps in the past so that's why we have this nonsense. Now its all about Azure/whatevs ie MS's cloud and subscriptions.

    Now you belong us!

    Linux being a Unix has NIS(+) for a directory or LDAP or AD or anything else you fancy. Ansible works for all mainstream OSs, including Windows.

    So often I see people confusing and conflating authentication and authorisation, machine and session state configuration databases.

    2
  • Jump
    Networking Novice: Setting up VM - How can I bind it to a VPN?
  • There are so many options it is almost impossible to know where to start!

    Which distro is the VM running (is it even Linux)?

    If you want the VM to use the host's VPN then you will need some routing and perhaps NAT/masquerade. This is non trivial to sort out. Can the VM have its own VPN connection to your supplier?

    You are starting to reach the point where VLANs/subnets and separate routers (real or VM) may be required. Depending what you use as your ISP router, we might be able to get a solution together - so what model is it and do you have any switches?

    3
  • Jump
    How to Switch From Chrome to Firefox (and Why You Should)
  • Lemmy is quite good at not being too "tribal". Why not embrace a message as expressed, instead of worrying about where it is ... posted?

    For me, one of the worst issues affecting t'internets is tribalism. Us humans are hardwired to go all in on tribal affiliation. It is generally harder to find inclusive measures than it is to find exclusive measures.

    If you are here then you may not be exclusively: Firefox user ⊆browser user ⊆human. Note that browser user can have multiple browsers.

    6
  • Jump
    Kroger unveils AI-powered automatic price gouger.
  • IANAL but I do have a fair handle on consumer rights in the UK.

    In the UK the price displayed is "an invitation to treat". There are other laws requiring the price stated being the price paid, ie it must include all taxes etc. Prices per unit seem to be an industry "lol" sorry "best" practice here, rather than legislated for - it is a bit randomly applied.

    If you keep your wits about you, you can do real comparative shopping. For example: in Somerset, Somerset produced Brie is cheaper in Tesco than French Brie. I can't remember if French Cheddar is cheaper than Somerset Cheddar or even if it exists. Obviously, there is the brand thing too to consider.

    Anyway, the "invitation to treat" is not a binding contract. It is only a form of introduction to one. You see the price and might think OK, I like that and take the item to the check out. If the item was miss priced the shop may try to amend it. If you pay for the item then you are considered to have accepted the invitation to treat, the bargain is made and related duties are discharged.

    That's sort of the central doctrine behind how you flog stuff for money hereabouts. There are lots of fluffy consumer related legislation to try and ensure it is all fair but in my opinion, no one has bothered to teach us proles about how a sodding contract is formed. All that extra legislation would be no longer needed if everyone understood ... where they stand!

    It doesn't help when you hear stories of firms required to honour ridiculous prices due to silly accidents. You do not get to buy a Dyson Funky Biscuit Crumb Sucker 1000 for 20p because you Sno Pake'd out a few decimal places or an employee answered a phone call mid reprice. You get the idea.

    Invitation to treat (price tag): £10.99 for a bottle of wine (with a £9.49 Tesco card offer price writ large) Go to check out: £10.99 - 1.50 (but we get to suck on your data, sorry you get a discount via your Tesco brand loyalty card) Pay: £10.99 now and get a £1.50 rebate as a voucher that only works at Tesco, probably. The voucher will expire in three weeks time.

    Here the contract was successfully formed. A good was transferred from Tesco to you for ... some money and you might be 1.50 better off too. All a bit murky. That's why we have consumer legislation and why you and I need to now what on earth it is and how it protects us.

    2
  • Jump
    Enabling Antenna Aggregation Might Make Big Difference If Your Laptop Has An Intel Wifi Card.
  • Please do a little research before trying random stuff. After checking to see if you are actually using the iwlwifi module, why not find out a bit about whether the mentioned param. is available to you and what it does:

    Am I using the module. If the output from this is blank, then no:

    $ lsmod | grep iwlwifi
    iwlwifi               622592  1 iwlmvm
    cfg80211             1331200  3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211
    
    

    Also verify with lspci -k as above:

    $ lspci -k | grep iwlwifi -A2 -B2
            DeviceName: WLAN
            Subsystem: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake PCH CNVi WiFi
            Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
            Kernel modules: iwlwifi
    00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 01)
            Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Alder Lake PCH Serial IO I2C Controller
    
    
    # modinfo iwlwifi
       ...
    parm:           swcrypto:using crypto in software (default 0 [hardware]) (int)
    parm:           11n_disable:disable 11n functionality, bitmap: 1: full, 2: disable agg TX, 4: disable agg RX, 8 enable agg TX (uint)
    parm:           amsdu_size:amsdu size 0: 12K for multi Rx queue devices, 2K for AX210 devices, 4K for other devices 1:4K 2:8K 3:12K (16K buffers) 4: 2K (default 0) (int)
    parm:           fw_restart:restart firmware in case of error (default true) (bool)
    parm:           nvm_file:NVM file name (charp)
    parm:           uapsd_disable:disable U-APSD functionality bitmap 1: BSS 2: P2P Client (default: 3) (uint)
    parm:           enable_ini:0:disable, 1-15:FW_DBG_PRESET Values, 16:enabled without preset value defined,Debug INI TLV FW debug infrastructure (default: 16) (uint)
    parm:           bt_coex_active:enable wifi/bt co-exist (default: enable) (bool)
    parm:           led_mode:0=system default, 1=On(RF On)/Off(RF Off), 2=blinking, 3=Off (default: 0) (int)
    parm:           power_save:enable WiFi power management (default: disable) (bool)
    parm:           power_level:default power save level (range from 1 - 5, default: 1) (int)
    parm:           disable_11ac:Disable VHT capabilities (default: false) (bool)
    parm:           remove_when_gone:Remove dev from PCIe bus if it is deemed inaccessible (default: false) (bool)
    parm:           disable_11ax:Disable HE capabilities (default: false) (bool)
    parm:           disable_11be:Disable EHT capabilities (default: false) (bool)
    
    

    sysfs is a pseudo filesystem with lots of info in it. cat the files here:

    $ ls -l /sys/module/iwlwifi/parameters/
    
    

    ... to see what your current values are set at. You can install sysfstools and run this for a neat report:

    $ systool -vm iwlwifi
    Module = "iwlwifi"
    
      Attributes:
         ...
      Parameters:
        11n_disable         = "0"
        amsdu_size          = "0"
        bt_coex_active      = "Y"
        disable_11ac        = "N"
        disable_11ax        = "N"
        disable_11be        = "N"
        enable_ini          = "16"
        fw_restart          = "Y"
        led_mode            = "0"
        nvm_file            = "(null)"
        power_level         = "0"
        power_save          = "N"
        remove_when_gone    = "N"
        swcrypto            = "0"
        uapsd_disable       = "3"
    
    
    18
  • Jump
    What file systems are you using on your devices and why?
  • xfs has reflinks. That means you can copy huge wodges of data nearly for free on one filesystem. For backup systems this is a killer feature. Veeam rolling up incremental backups into the last full happens in seconds because pointers to blocks are juggled around rather than the data blocks themselves.

    xfs has been around for a very, very long time. I use it for larger filesystems eg Nextcloud, Zoneminder and the like (and Veeam backup repos that are not object storage). I use ext4 by default.

    pfSense boxes - zfs because the alternative is ufs.

    RPi - OverlayFS (with ext4 and tmpfs) gets you a generally read only filesystem with changes held in RAM. Ideal for kiosks, appliances and keeping memory sticks alive.

    Windows - NTFS, it works well and has streams and there aren't many other options (ReFS is a bit new but it does have reflinks)

    1
  • Jump
    Home Assistant 2024.8: Beautiful badges!
  • That looks like a cherry picked starting point. Read the whole thread for the full context.

    fwiw, I don't think anyone comes out looking particularly good. However, attempting to describe Frenck as infamous here and now is a bit rich. That minor disagreement all happened during the pandemic and I'm sure we have all passed a lot of water since then.

    9
  • Jump
    My boss gifted me an old thinkpad x31
  • This is from 2004: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/ibm-thinkpad-x31 It will chew amps (electricity). Recycle it as best you can. Grab a modern box instead.

    Unless sparks are free where you live, this beast will become a liability very quickly.

    2
  • Jump
    How to move from Windows to Linux?
  • You can find one for $100.

    You can get them substantially cheaper than that! but your point holds. A USB stick is also rather cheap - you can get a 128GB SANDisk jobbie for £10 a pop on Amazon.

    4
  • Jump
    What is happening in Norway, and how do we spread it?
  • I run (one of three partners) a small IT company in the UK. I've always Linuxed since around 1998. After messing with RedHat, Mandrake, Yggdrasil and others I settled down and ran Gentoo for many years and then Arch for some more.

    I'm gradually dumping the Windows servers and replacing with Linux based beasties. We are also in the throws of replacing VMware with Proxmox.

    I also have a pretty decent Kbuntu based desktop/laptop effort. I've done Windows client deployments in the 1000s so I have quite a good idea about compliance etc. An Ubuntu based box can run several AV solutions, secure boot and full disc encryption. Buzz words perhaps but also audit points and will get you over the line for Cyber Essentials Plus (UK).

    Libre Office works for me and I used to teach office suites in the 90's! Things have moved on since but a decimal alignment stop is a decimal alignment stop today too (do you know what that means?). I run our Exchange system, and I migrated it from GroupWise back in the day because the kool kids "required" it. Anyway, Evolution with EWS will get you full functionality for a client but with far less faff.

    I'm taking my time. I already have at least two employees who are dyed in the wool Windows officianados begging me to migrate them to Linux. I will but it takes time. For example - "drive mappings" or in English: Remote mounts.

    CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ . This is an easy to add Windows compat thing. Its rather good. For static desktops its fine but for laptops that move around a lot it can be hard to get the file system mounts working again quickly in a dynamic environment.

    CID uses a PAM mount based system and in the past I used another one (autofs I think). However it seems to me that mounts are not dynamic or responsive enough. In the end it is Samba and that might need some fettling as well.

    As I said earlier, I'm taking my time (I'm an engineer) but be assured that Linux is quite capable of driving your desktop.

    6
  • dm.hn Hacker News Blogroll

    A simple blogroll collection from the the Hacker News community.

    Original announcement on Hacker News

    There was a thread on HN asking for people to post their personal blogs. Another HNer scraped the thread to create a website with a list of blogs with an intro in the words of the blog owner.

    It reminds me of the olden days, pre Altavista when you depended on curated lists and indices to find stuff on the internet. Pre that we had WAIS and Gopher. I started out "browsing" with telnet.

    0