In my system, the raid arrays seem to do periodic data scrubbing automatically. Maybe it’s something that’s part of Debian, or maybe it’s just a default kernel setting. I don’t think it helps much with data integrity – I think it helps more just by ensuring the continued functionality of the drives.
When it’s running, you can type cat /proc/mdstat to see the progress.
That command will also show you if there is a failing drive, so that you can replace it.
Just about anything. IRC, XMPP, Discord, whatever you call the chat built into Steam. AIM is discontinued now, but it used to be better than Teams is today.
Sure. First you set up a RAID5/6 array in mdadm. This is a purely software thing, which is built into the Linux kernel. It doesn’t require any hardware RAID system. If you have 3-4 drives, RAID5 is probably best, and if you have 5+ drives RAID6 is probably best.
If your 3 blank drives are sdb1, sdc1, and sdd1, run this:
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 -n 3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
This will create a block device called /dev/md0 that you can use as if it were a single large hard drive.
mkfs.btrfs /dev/md0
That will make the filesystem on the block device.
mkdir /mnt/bigraid
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/bigraid
This creates a mount point and mounts the filesystem.
To get it to mount every time you boot, add an entry for this filesystem in /etc/fstab
The man page at https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mkfs.btrfs.html says:
RAID5/6 has known problems and should not be used in production.
So those profiles have unknown, unspecified problems.
But btrfs is safe on top of md-based raid1/5/6. It also has the advantage that you only need to encrypt one volume.
Have you imported the tails-signing.key yet? Usually you can double-click on that to import it using whatever graphical gpg frontend is set up on your system. It may ask you how well you trust the owner of the key. You can answer that question however you want without affecting this verification process.
Next, it looks like you run the instructions from this page: https://tails.net/install/expert/index.en.html#verify
Some of those command line parameters look a little paranoid. The basic command you want to run is: gpg --verify somefile.sig somefile.img
The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)
To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.
If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.
Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.
NTFS is considered pretty stable on Linux now. It should be safe to use indefinitely.
If you’re worried about the lack of Unix-style permissions and attributes in NTFS, then getting BTRFS or ext4 on Windows may be a good choice. Note that BTRFS is much more complicated than ext4, so ext4 may have better compatibility and lower risk of corruption. I used ext3 on Windows in 2007 and it was very reliable; ext4 today is very similar to ext3 from those days.
The absolute best compatibility would come from using a filesystem natively supported by both operating systems, developed without reverse engineering. That leaves only vfat (aka FAT32) and exfat. Both lack Unix-style permissions and attributes.
draw .io is closed source.
Sorry if this isn’t what you’re looking for, but my answer is basically “no”.
I can take a 10mg Adderall 4 hours before bed, and fall right asleep. Sometimes, I can take a 10mg Adderall in the morning, and fall asleep at my desk at work, only 30 minutes later.
Adderall makes me feel relaxed and totally unstressed. I’ve never had HRV stress measured, though. What is the experience like, to you, when you are having high HRV stress levels?
Wellbutrin and most other SSRI’s and SNRI’s make me feel a little TOO relaxed. Some of them make me feel less conscious, and a little bit brain fogged. At the time, I described it as if my soul was detached from my body.
To me, methylphenidate (Ritalin) gives the same effects as Adderall.
How did you get into TSA Pre without providing fingerprints? I tried once, and they strictly refused to let me apply because I wouldn’t give fingerprints.
I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.
Second, you could switch your display manager to “nodm”. The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn’t use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.
I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I’m not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it’s pretty easy to configure.
Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).
I cannot recommend any USB-connected drive for long-term use. (Only for portable devices that get plugged in for a little while at a time.) In the long term, any USB drive will randomly reset during periods of heavy use – including heavy writes, meaning some data will get lost.
USB enclosures tend to just crap out completely after a year or two, if used continuously on a server. I know because I twice used 1TB external drives with OpenWRT (home router) devices. The data will be safe on the drive, but you’ll have to replace the enclosure.
Is there possibly an NVMe slot on the motherboard? Or an open PCIe slot where you could put an NVMe adapter?
My second recommendation would be using a 2.5" hard drive. Newegg has a 5TB one for $135, but unfortunately that’s as large as they seem to go. It will be a bit slower than an SSD, but still probably around 150MB/s for sequential access.
My third recommendation, if money is really tight, would be an additional server, with a large 3.5" hard drive. This will be a lot cheaper than an 8TB SSD, but adds complexity, electricity use, space use, and possibly fan noise.
I fucking guarantee that Linus Torvalds DOES believe in cryptography. Stop calling cryptocurrency “crypto”, because “crypto” is short for cryptography, not cryptocurrency.
Haha. I sent them an opt-out notice by email, and it bounced!
They are using Google email servers for discord .com and Google has apparently shadowbanned me. It gives an error message saying “The account [my email address] is disabled.” but I have never created a Google or Gmail account, and my email address is on a domain not associated with Google at all.
So I’ve completed my obligation to opt-out. Discord will have no record of it, but I have the email server logs to prove I sent it.
If, in the future, anyone needs to sue Discord and forgot to opt-out, feel free to use this same excuse.
Microsoft has enforced mandatory digital signatures for drivers, and getting a digital signing key from Microsoft costs a ton of money. So, presumably they do care.
In contrast, consider nProtect GameGuard, the anti-cheat system in Helldivers 2. It is a rootkit, and runs in the kernel. Why does Microsoft permit this? Shouldn’t this be blocked? It must be using either an exploit like the article, or a properly signed driver. Either way, Microsoft could fix it – by patching the exploit, or revoking the signing key.
The fact that Microsoft hasn’t done anything about malicious anticheat rootkits is a sign that they really don’t care. They just want their payment.
The good news is: the error shown there was a PCIe bus error, which means the error is somewhere between the NVME controller and your processor’s PCIe interface. Also good news: the errors you experienced were fully corrected, so you probably lost no data.
So the flash memory in the drive isn’t failing. That’s good because if the flash memory starts failing, it’s probably only going to fail more. In this case, your errors may be correctable: by replacing the motherboard, by replacing the processor, by reseating the NVME drive in its slot, by verifying that your power supply is reliable…
However, if your NVME controller actually does fail, it will be little consolation to tell you that your data is all still there on the flash chips, but with no way to get it. So now might be a good time to make a backup. Any time is a good time to make a backup, but now is an especially good time.
If you keep getting these errors at the same rate, then you probably don’t need to do anything, since the errors are being corrected. If you’re worried, you could use BTRFS and enable checksumming of data.
Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.
My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.
My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.
You know that stuff that appears on the screen before the operating system? That is the computer’s firmware. Sometimes it shows a brief memory check, sometimes it has a silly error message like “No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue.” Sometimes it’s just a big image of the motherboard’s manufacturer’s logo. That firmware exists independently of the operating system, and will run even if you don’t have any operating system installed.
Most people refer to the firmware as the “BIOS”, but technically, BIOS refers to an API between the firmware and the operating system. About a decade ago, some people decided that “BIOS” was going to be replaced by “UEFI”, and operating systems would start having a new way to boot. What ended up happening is: the firmware on all recent computers supports both UEFI and BIOS interfaces (and everyone still calls it “BIOS”). Recent Windows versions seem to only boot in UEFI mode, but most Linux distros can boot in either UEFI or BIOS mode. The GRUB bootloader can also start itself up in either UEFI or BIOS mode.
USB live operating systems are limited in size and may have less functionality than other operating systems, so maybe they are only able to boot in one method or another. Try looking around in the firmware (or “BIOS” if you prefer) to see if you can change the boot method to allow both UEFI and BIOS operating systems.
It may help if you can take a picture of some of the firmware’s boot configuration menus.
How would me joining a union help with the Amazon problem? My pay and benefits (and my coworkers’ pay and benefits, to the extent of my knowledge) are very good, so we don’t currently need a union. My job is completely unrelated to Amazon, and my employer isn’t a customer of Amazon or its competitors.
I’m not going to stop complaining about Amazon.
I just hope federal services (like applying for a passport) don’t become Twitter-only after Trump appoints Elon as Secretary of Enshittification.