Posts by Sudosu

Neptune OS is Debian made easy but, boy, does it need some housekeeping

Re: Psudo security

I generally use sudo su for a terminal when I am doing administrative maintenance or troubleshooting requiring several commands or activities during the session (which may be over days in some cases)

Once I am done I exit-exit to close the terminal and then open an new one if I am doing oddball stuff and use su if needed for individual commands that need escalation.

If I log back into a machine of mine and find a terminal open from a previous session I always exit-exit it and open a new one just to be safe, its a habit now since I've done it for so long.

Not sure if that is exactly best practice, but I haven't mucked up anything by being in the wrong terminal account since I started working that way.

If there are better ways or options I'm always open to hearing about them since I am mostly a self taught Linux guy.

PS - I always use Sudosu on the Reg.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: What is REALLY needed...

Porting may be irrelevant at some point as, at least from my experience rolling them out, they are really really pushing people to use the "cloud" versions of their 365 software.

Re: Not obsolete if you monotask singlemedia

I put Puppy Linux on some of my netbooks back the day and it was at least as performative as the Windows I took off them.

Re: Skill issue

The real question with any large scale "creator" tools is:

Does it steal your work without acknowledgement or compensation to train AI's to generate similar work compete against you?

What does your EULA say on the matter I wonder?

You almost need a lawyer to buy "creator" software these days to protect your work.

I wonder if you could install your Photoshop under Steam\Proton as a standalone game?

The only issue is you may only be able to use that single app if it is running similar to running a game.

Re: not so great for a casual user, grandpa and grandma

Create a shortcut a link to a network file share and put that on their desktop.

Re: not so great for a casual user, grandpa and grandma

I tried Thunderbird many years ago and I was not really impressed by it as it was clunky feeling.

I've reinstalled it recently to access a Gmail account for some testing and I really like it now.

it feels a lot more polished and I don't mean Fisher Price Windows polished, I mean it is intuitive to use.

Re: TODO

As a Gen X, I know what a register shift is and have used them.

Re: TODO

This reminds me of one of my favorite Star Trek TNG episodes, from a technical support point of view at least: Samaritan Snare.

Short clip demonstrating the gist of the episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hSmsrixcUM

At least the aliens are polite, but they are kind of insistent that everything get fixed before he leaves.

Re: TODO

This is what has become the difference between someone who is "good with computers" and someone who is "good at using computers".

The first means you can configure and\or build a computer; the second means you can consume things on a computer.

There is a marked difference, and I am not saying one is better than the other, they are just different areas of expertise.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Re: It's hard enough remote supporting kit from a few hundred or thousand miles away

I mean, how many times have they had to select NO to the Windows 11 upgraded prompt even though it has no TPM chip.

:P

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

Re: Physical Write-Protect Switches

I have to confess; One time, long ago, when I was having some crackers with spread on cheese, I bumped my butter\cheese knife and it sailed right into one of the USB ports on my laptop.

It was a perfect shot!

There was a loud snap, some smoke and the laptop turned off.

After a deep breath I hit the power button and fortunately it came back alive and the USB port was still functional.

More modern laptops with USB-C power scare me more as I've had two of them suddenly catch on fire.

This was due to the charge ports being damaged from being frequently moved around at customer sites while trying to keep them charged up for high power use over long days.

These were not big fires and I was able to blow them out. One of them looked exactly like a lighter flame coming out of the side of the laptop.

I've now gone back to laptops with larger round power connecters as they seem to be far more durable for portable use especially when they experience bending forces on the connector.

Re: Not just the bios

"This was only a few years after the big bang."

Ah yes, the good ole days..I do miss them sometimes..

Re: Physical Write-Protect Switches

Wait for the slew of toaster fork challenges on TikTok.

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Re: Where is the website suggesting more outlandish uses for AI ?

A general history of controlling equipment:

1800's - Slap some complicated precision manually designed control gears on it

1900's - slap a computer on it and build it less precise

2000's - Slap an AI on it and forget all precision

Paul McCartney, Elton John, other creatives demand AI comes clean on scraping

Re: Opt out

True, but a lot of the current lot of music publishing companies seem to be trying to trick their customers into giving away their music for the company to scan with AI and create derivative works.

Essentially its an Opt-in to protect yourself from AI by using our AI which will use your music to make music to compete against you on our platform.

This lady has some very good information on Artists vs AI ingestion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9DvY-nYFtI

Users advised to review Oracle Java use as Big Red's year end approaches

Demolition Man

"Oracle"

You are now fined 100,000 credits under the Oracle licensing agreement.

One of my clients has big managed desktop environment (35000+ seats) with software only allowed to be deployed by software package.

Special administration accounts are used for any ad hock package installs.

This all the techs with that access were explicitly warned and signed off that if they install it without an escalation for review they would have their access (and maybe their job) revoked.

Logs are checked every month for installs.

Been working great so far.

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: "Someone Else's Computer" is nonsense

One other thing to consider;

Not that it has happened yet (or has it?) but what position is your organization in the queue when a cloud provider has a major prolonged outage incident?

With on premise you have some control on what you bring back up first if you have built it reasonably well and have decent testing procedures.

Just like cars, the correct answer for the best option today is Hybrid.

Re: Press X to Doubt

Redundant Inexpensive Array of Datacenters?

Re: "Someone Else's Computer" is nonsense

Part of the difference with what you did, compared to any others I have witnessed, is that you performed a validation and cleanup before or as part of your cloud migration.

Most places do a "forklift" move and migrate all the old unused and redundant crap as well so they can get their cloud checkbox marked as quickly as possible.

On premise garbage becomes cloud garbage.

Remember, the Executives buy products and services from whomever "treats" them the best.

‘Infuriated’, ‘disappointed' ... Ex-VMware customers explain why they migrated to Nutanix

Re: How long...

What if Broadcom buys them?

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

Re: Fun stuff

I was calibrating a radar unit a long time ago and accidentally reached past the potentiometer while looking into the viewer (it was like a periscope goggle) and gently touched a 2000VCD (yes 2k) low current circuit.

The next thing I knew my arm was hanging by my side with every muscle hurting like crazy.

Being young, I was more embarrassed than hurt, but it definitely took me a few days to get over my instant workout.

Re: Fun stuff

I think an appropriate term would be arc-welding.

Re: Fun stuff

Rule 1, when turning on a breaker, no matter the size.

Stand to the side and face away (and/or have protective gear) and preferably use a wooden stick.

I've seen 15A breakers spray metal fireworks out...mainly the old blue Stab-Loks.

Re: Fun stuff

A fellow electrician once shorted some large gear in a high-rise with a metal fish tape.

It melted the fish tape, it melted part of the bus gear, it melted the main breakers for that bus, it melted the fuse in the transformer down the block.

The boss was less than impressed, but we did get an early lunch.

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Is my mind that broken; that I immediately thought of OnlyOffice as a website where you go watch people type naughty things.

Oh yeah use that Interrobang...

Upvote for EasyScript!!!

I think I still have it somewhere in my pile :)

So, Essentially...

"All your resources are belong to us!"

- Microsoft Word

PS - Take that Word readability score!

Re: Bring back the BBC B.

I miss applications on cartridges.

I have seen this when I run my cleanup utility

"Edge is running and will need to be shut down to proceed"

"WTF, I haven't used Edge in 5 years, where is the uninstall for it?"

Getting that computer up and running before the start of business Teams meeting is always a crap shoot as it is.

I'm to the point where I think I will hit the power button at start of day instead of 5-15 minutes before.

Maybe they will give me a new one...though I doubt it will help much.

Re: Andy & Bill's law is alive and kicking

This is so true!

Personal computers are incomprehensively mind bogglingly fast comparted to what they were a couple decades ago yet they feel slower than my first 486.

I've said this before, but the quickest feeling computer I ever encountered was a Pentium 90 in the store that would open Office applications before you could get your finger off the mouse after the second click.

Office today is bigger than any triple A game from the 90s...and maybe early-mid 2000's. Let that sink in.

I could do functional document editing fine on my Commodore 64, a 40+ year old computer that is far less powerful than your smart watch.

I could do without all the pretty; if software ran securely, reliably and fast.

OpenBSD 7.7 released with updated hardware support, 9Front ships second update of 2025

I often wonder

Why many governments do not run an OS like OpenBSD as it is far more secure than many of the alternatives, especially for basic workload types.

I use it for my WordPress sites (moved from Ubuntu a while back) as I had some upgrade issues with Ubuntu over the years.

I have been contemplating moving from my Exchange server to OpenSMTPD on OpenBSD but it is a big switch, so I have been procrastinating.

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Re: This is your brain

Now we know your password.

I was going to mention this but you beat me to it.

I was supporting an implementation for a large client of the full 365 suite a few years back...and I did all my work from from my Linux desktop.

To be fair I did some testing on Windows VM's in their environment (remotely from Linux) for confirming\documenting end user experiences on the full clients, if they existed.

Any of the 365 apps, for my daily use, had web versions which all worked fine on my QubesOS laptop...though Teams took a bit of fiddling for outboard devices due to QubesOS strictly managing peripheral access.

IIRC, all of the control panels for everything were all web based.

The great thing with QubesOS was that I could spin up different disposable VM's for each test ID I had and jump between them quickly without having issues.

They had locked down "anonymous" browsing in the environment so you had to use a different web browser for each account I used to run them at the same time. (I had 5 accounts in addition to my daily driver)

I did get a call one day from one of my admin buddies there asking if I was actually in Zurich as I had grabbed a disposable Tor browser instance by accident instead of the ones I usually used. :)

If you are using an SMB server or, internet storage service, make sure it is one with a ZFS back end.

I've had customers get hit with ransomware, and once the source of the intrusion was secured it was a couple button clicks (or commands) and 2 seconds to roll back to a known good\safe snapshot of the data.

Data loss was restricted to that which was stored while the intrusion source was dealt with. This was minimized by communications to the staff on what was happening and what to or not to do.

Other systems took weeks to try and get back, if they were even recoverable from backups.

Re: Windows and I...

The update cycles on most of the distros are far better than they used to be.

Ubuntu LTS used to cause me much grief but I have been through two upgrades now without problems...but upgrades are always a risk for any OS.

Debian is supposed to be pretty stable for release upgrades, but I have only been wiping and installing for those machines.

Re: I'e already said this

Have you tried getting the Epic, Blizzard or EA App launchers to run under Steam\Proton by any chance?

I had Origin added as a game under Steam on Ubuntu and it worked fine, but that was a while back.

There was one workaround I had to do for "ping" (aka latency) to show in some of the older networked games.

I did hear rumors of some people getting their accounts blocked by EA early on, but that was running EA games they bought on Steam under Steam\Proton.

That was fixed a few years back.

Most of my gaming now is Steam or Epic so I would be interested to know if someone has a creative workaround or two.

Re: I'e already said this

Proton on Steam is pretty good these days, though I have not tried any recent AAA games on it.

I even got EA Origin running under Steam at one point, but haven't played those games in a long time.

AI-driven 20-ft robots coming for construction workers' jobs

Re: Looks like it has the ol' Dalek problem..

Daleks and ED209

Decades-old bug in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas finally shows itself

Re: Oh my pile...

I was more af a GTA Vice City guy.

The commercial sold me, it was; "HOLY SHIT! TAKE MY MONEY!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdzja8VLtx0

...and I raaan, I raaan so far aaawayyy,

MX Linux 23.6 brings Debian freshness, without the systemd funk

Re: HyperVM and Audio

You are right about dual booting with something like GRUB being smoked randomly by Windows, it has happened to me so many times.

I dual boot Windows (for games) and QubesOS (for everything else) on my desktops and laptops; but I either go into the BIOS or spam the boot option key to select which one I want.

This gets rid of the bootloader issues and you can have a "hidden" OS on your machine if you are the paranoid type...and yes I am that type.

Technically you can also test Linux using a live distribution this way just to see if it works for you.

New SSL/TLS certs to each live no longer than 47 days by 2029

Re: Sounds more like a money making scheme

Nice certificate you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Re: God help the academic sector

Certpocalypse

I love it, have a beer!

Re: Why not...

I thought Let's Encrypt was not accepted by Microsoft anymore for not meeting some standard?

Or was that another provider?

Re: Why not...

Does copy-lot (aka Copilot) snort notepad contents yet?

VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor in an utterly obscure way

How are you finding Proxmox at larger (i.e. DC) scales?