Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 7 Posts
  • 341 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Well, we all know how this ends…

    It’s a really sad day for me, I love Bitwarden, it’s easily the best password manager I’ve used, and I’m in IT, I’ve used a bunch.

    Fuck private equity, fuck it to death. But until then, I’ll be moving my test setup for KeyPassXC into production over the coming weeks and months.

    I was happily subscribed to Bitwarden for years for my personal account, I moved several people and a whole company onto it’s platform. We had a good run, time to move on.



  • There are different reasons to run different things. Some apps are not able to be run as containers, or don’t make sense to run containerized.

    VMs offer better isolation between systems, which is important for high-security applications.

    Traditional Hypervisors also allow you to easily run fleets of completely different OSes on the same hardware, which you can’t do with containers.

    On the other hand, if you want/need high scalability, extremely efficient resource usage, and you don’t need to run radically different OS environments simultaneously, containers, especially Docker containers or Podman containers are a great choice.

    Incus containers are a great middle ground that I’m a fan of more than Docker/podman containers or traditional VMs. They are system containers, vs application containers like Docker/Podman.

    That means they are actually full-fledged Linux distros by default, but are still much smaller than a traditional VM.

    Also, for any of these solutions, if you’re constantly doing admin tasks manually, you’re doing it wrong. All modern platforms have APIs or other ways to interact with them via code.

    For my own setup, I have everything. My main server runs XCP-ng for the hypervisor, and I have several traditional VMs on it, including my primary NAS. I also run a virtual Incus host that I have my Minecraft server running in, and some random other system containers. I have a Docker host VM, but I don’t really use it.

    I also have my home media server which is a standalone system running TrueNAS on bare metal with Tailscale and Jellyfin running as Docker containers within TrueNAS.

    My setup is messy because it has been built slowly over several years, and I don’t have enough time or energy to rip it all down and put it back together in a more optimal way.


  • If you’ve already got Qubes and Xen Hypervisor running, your technical level is high enough for sure. And honestly, your security is already probably good enough.

    Qubes has very secure defaults, I don’t think you need to do anything else, honestly what you have already might be overkill, but idk your use case.

    Make sure you can’t see your torrent/download machine VM from any other devices on your network. Use Nmap as long as it’s your network. Don’t use it on a corporate or university network, it will likely get your device totally locked out and you in big trouble.



  • Idk what software you’re using, but most VM software has an easy way to take a snapshot of the VM state. If you’re about to download something risky, take a quick VM snapshot, so if it ends up being some kind of malware, you can just roll the VM back to its earlier state without issue, takes like 2 minutes.

    If you’re worried about malware spreading through your network, you need to isolate your devices. The most common way to do this is with VLANs, but I don’t know what your home network looks like, and if you just have a typical home setup with your ISP’s modem/router and all your devices plugged into it or on the default wireless network, you won’t be able to do that.

    You could also use something like UFW on Linux to only allow internet traffic and block any traffic inbound or outbound to your LAN network, isolating your PC from all other devices on your LAN. This isn’t great, because if your host is compromised, then your host-based firewall could also be compromised and the malware could then get out to the rest of your network.

    You could invert this and have all your other devices on LAN set to block all traffic from your specific PC, which would be more secure, but also a pain to configure, plus it assumes all the other devices are able to be configured in that way on your LAN.

    There are a bunch of other solutions, but it depends on your setup, your technical skill level, and your threat profile. If you’re just torrenting cracked games and random software, that’s somewhat risky, but not really that crazy if you are running it in a VM with rollback snapshots.





  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•Ban Windows at schools
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    36
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    I agree with Stallman and others on this sort of thing, it should be illegal for any public institution to use proprietary, corporate software in any capacity.

    Public institutions are supposed to serve and benefit the public good first and foremost. The idea that they can do that equally well or better by partnering with mega-corps who’s only fundamental drive is to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders, is idiotic.




  • If you’re using a 30+ year old computer in the modern day, you’ve already sacrificed security.

    The price and availability of a 15 year old computer is almost the same as a 30 year old computer, you can get a fully functional 1st gen i5 PC that will sprint circles around the highest end 90’s PC for $40. Honestly, most people are just e-wasting computers that old, I’m sure you could easily get them for free, hell, lots of people would pay you to take them off their hands.




    1. Check your thermals on your CPU and GPU, make sure they aren’t running too hot.
    2. Turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Then check all your physical connections from the power supply to the motherboard and your graphics card. Everything should be fully seated in the sockets and firmly locked in. Loose connectors can cause power delivery issues that freeze or crash a system. In rare cases they can short out, causing severe damage to the components, or even a fire. So it’s important to do anyways.
    3. Check your motherboard manufacture’s website and make sure you’re using the latest BIOS version. Your BIOS screen will tell you what your exact model number is and the current BIOS version.
    4. Check to make sure you’re not running out of system RAM.
    5. Use Furmark to stress test your GPU. If it runs in stress test mode for at least 4 hours straight without any crashes, that’s a good sign that your GPU isn’t the issue.
    6. Use a CPU stress test program to do the same to your CPU. I actually like to go to Lichess.org, open their analysis board tool Lichess Analysis Tool, go into the settings and max out the move search depth, memory limit, and maximum lines calculated. Then I just make 15-20 random moves. The chess engine will sit there and calculate as long as you have that tab open on your local machine, and it will max out every core on your CPU 100% but there are dozens of other ways to stress your CPU, so feel free to search for them.
    7. You may have a lemon of a CPU or GPU chip. All chips are “binned” meaning they are tested at the factory and depending on how they perform, they are accepted or rejected within certain boundaries, but there is a range. Some chips just barely pass the minimum standards brand new. Since all electronics degrade over time, especially modern chips with billions of microscopic transistors, if your chip already was barely good enough to pass the minimum specs when it was fresh out of the box, it can start to become unstable even under normal workloads, let alone more heavy use like what you’re describing. Undervolting and underclocking can help fix this. Using your motherboard’s settings or 3rd party tools (like LACT for GPUs), you can limit the maximum voltage and/or maximum frequency of your chips. This not only will reduce the thermal output of your chips, making them run cooler and slowing the degradation process, but often will make them run much more stable.