I thought Debian didn’t include firmware and other binaries by default. I remember having a separate firmware CD for installs on weird RAID controllers. Did that change?

I’ve been trying to learn K8s and more recently the Gateway API. The struggles are that most Helm charts don’t know Gateway (most are barely Ingressroute) and I’m trying to find a solution to one service affecting the other gateways.when a service cannot find a pod, the httproute fails and when one route fails, the ingress fails. It’s a weird cascading problem.

Right now, I’m considering adding a secondary service to each gateway that resolves to a static error page. I haven’t looked into it yet; it cane to me in the brief moment of clarity before I fell asleep last night.

Also, I may be doing everything wrong, but I am learning and learning is fun.

I landed on Tandoor. I had a bunch of recipes on one of those web sites and they switched to a subscription model and locked me out of my recipes. I don’t remember why I chose Tandoor over Mealie, but having full ownership over my recipes is freeing.

I do on all my devices that can as a matter of practice, not for any real threat. I’m interested to learn about how to set it up and use it on a daily basis including how to do system recoveries. I guess it’s largely academic.

Once I switched to linux as my daily driver, I didn’t have a need to do piracy anymore since all the software I need is FOSS.

I am interested in compression. I may give it a try when I swap out my desktop system. I did try btrfs in it’s early, post alpha stage, but found that the support was not ready yet. I think I had a VM system that complained. It is older now and more mature and maybe it’s worth another look.

Those are some good points. I guess I was thinking about the hardware. At least where I do RAID, it’s on the controller, so that offloads much of the parity checking and such to the controller and not the CPU. It’s all probably negligible for the apps that I run, but my hardware is quite old, so maybe trying to squeeze all the performance I can is a worthwhile activity.

Generally, if a lower level can do a thing, I prefer to have the lower level do it. It’s not really a reason, just a rule of thumb. I like to think that the lower level is more efficient to do the thing.

I use LVM snapshots to do my backups. I don’t have any other reason for it.

That all being said, I’m using btrfs on one system and if I really like it, I may migrate to it. It does seem a whole lot simpler to have one thing to learn than all the layers.

I’ve got raid 6 at the base level and LVM for partitioning and ext4 filesystem for a k8s setup. Based on this, btrfs doesn’t provide me with any advantages that I don’t already have at a lower level.

Additionaly, for my system, btrfs uses more bits per file or something such that I was running out of disk space vs ext4. Yeah, I can go buy more disks, but I like to think that I’m running at peak efficiency, using all the bits, with no waste.

Take some time and really analyze your threat model. There are different solutions for each of them. For example, protecting against a friend swiping the drives may be as simple as LUKS on the drive and a USB key with the unlock keys. Another poster suggested leaving the backup computer wide open but encrypting the files that you back up with symmetric or asymmetric, based on your needs. If you’re hiding it from the government, check your local laws. You may be guilty until proven innocent in which case you need “plausible deniability” of what’s on the drive. That’s a different solution. Are you dealing with a well funded nation-state adversary? Maybe keying in the password isn’t such a bad idea.

I’m using LUKS with mandos on a raspberry PI. I back up to a Pi at a friend’s house over TailScale where the disk is wide open, but Duplicity will encrypt the backup file. My threat model is a run of the mill thief swiping the computers and script kiddies hacking in.

You’re doing God’s work!

Over my career, it’s sad to see how the technical communications groups are the first to get cut because “developers should document their own code”. No, most can’t. Also, the lack of good documentation leads to churn in other areas. It’s difficult to measure it, but for those in the know, it’s painfully obvious.

I’m not as enraged by this as most, but I think the true test will be to see if this feature is disabled by default in future releases. If they actually do listen to their users, that’s better than any of the other big players.

I read a bit about the new “feature” and it seems to me that they’re trying out a way to allow ad companies to know if their advertisement was effective in a way that also preserves the privacy of the user. I can respect that. I did shut it off, but am also less concerned because I have multiple advertisement removal tools, so this feature is irrelevant.

The fact that it’s enabled by default isn’t comforting, but who would actually turn this on if it were buried in about:config? In order to prove its effectiveness to promote a privacy respecting but advertisement friendly mechanism, this is what they felt that they had to do.

Of course, I could easily be all wrong about this and time will tell.

I had one from Sony a long time ago. It even had a cable you could attach between two of 'em (600 CDs!) so that it could seamlessly start playing another track while loading the next song. I dropped it during a move and the next time I opened the door, it spit gears at me. I had intended to fix it some day, but started watching Hoarders and decided it wasn’t worth it.

Hi! I’m not having any problems with linux. I just thought you’d like to know.

There. Now there’s a message in the support forums about a person not having problems!

Can you elaborate on the scenario this is solving for? Isn’t software RAID a performance hit?

I have the Debian netinst disk, but it doesn’t include the dm-cache modules, so I downloaded the live DVD last night. I only get about an hour a day to work on stuff.

🤦‍♀️ I’ve never considered this, but it’s the simplest solution and makes perfect sense. I’m always so diligent to keep my system clean to save a few megs.

This particular server is an old PowerEdge server I’m using to learn server stuff on and a practice home lab. Unfortunately, it won’t boot from SD card, so I have a few DVD RW’s in a drawer. I’ve read that there’s a SD slot inside that you can emulate a floppy, but haven’t explored it.

This may be the push I need to migrate to Nextcloud. I’m struggling to identify my use cases, though and am wondering if all I really need is Syncthing.

I’m using mandos with the server on a raspberry pi. Unfortunately, mandos doesn’t work with my Fedora boxes as far as I know.

It depends on what you do with Docker. Podman can replace many of the core docker features, but does not ship with a Docker Desktop app (there may be one available). Also, last I checked, there were differences in the docker build command.

That being said, I’m using podman at home and work, doing development things and building images must fine. My final images are built in a pipeline with actual Docker, though.

I jumped ship from Docker (like the metaphor?) when they started clamping down on unregistered users and changed the corporate license. It’s my personal middle finger to them.

I’m using Kubernetes and many of the apps that I use require environment variables to pass secrets. Another option is the pod definition, which is viewable by anybody with read privileges to K8s. Secrets are great to secure it on the K8s side, but the application either needs to read the secret from a file or you build your own helm chart with a shell front end to create app config files on the fly. I’m sure there are other options, but there’s no “one size fits all” type solution.

The real issue here is that the app is happy to expose it’s environment variables with no consideration given to the fact that it may contain data that can be misused by bad actors. It’s security 101 to not expose any more than the user needs to see which is why stack dumps are disabled on production implementations.