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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Well, yes. Except for the fact that advertisers now have an excuse to try more invasive things to get to their data

    They’re going to do this anyway. As far as Firefox is concerned, it’s the browser’s job to stop them. That’s what Firefox is selling: privacy

    because of they fumble it they are now an untrusted third party

    Assuming I take this for granted, they have already fumbled it by turning on an anti-privacy feature without consent. They can no longer be trusted. Not that you ever should have trusted them because whatever motivation they have for pure moral behavior now, that will change with the wind when more VC money gets involved, or there’s been a change in management.

    And firefox has ALREADY had a recent change in management, which is probably why THIS is happening NOW. They just bought an adtech firm for pete’s sake. Don’t trust other people with your data. At all.





  • Some troubleshooting thoughts:

    What do you mean when you say SSH is “down”:

    1. connection refused (fail2ban’s activity could result in a connection refused, but a VPN should have avoided that problem, as you said)
    2. connection timeout. probably a failure at the port forwarding level.
    3. connection succeeded but closed; this can happen for a few reasons, such as the system is in an early boot up state. there’s usually a message in this case.
    4. connection succeeded but auth rejected. this can happen if your os failed to boot but came up in a fallback state of some kind.

    Knowing which one of these it is can give you a lot more information about what’s wrong:

    System can’t get past initial boot = Maybe your NAS is unplugged? Maybe your home DNS cache is down?

    Connection refused = either fail2ban or possibly your home IP has moved and you’re trying to connect to somebody else’s computer? (nginx is very popular after all, it’s not impossible somebody else at your ISP has it running). This can also be a port forwarding failure = something’s wrong with your router.

    Connection succeeded + closed is similar to “can’t get past initial boot”

    Auth rejected might give you a fallback option if you can figure out a default username/password, although you should hope that’s not the case because it means anyone else can also get in when your system is in fallback.

    Very few of these things are actually fixable remotely, btw. I suggest having your sister unplug everything related to your setup, one device at a time. Internet router, raspberry pi, NAS, your VM host, etc. Make sure to give them a minute to cool down. Hardware, particularly cheap hardware, tends to fail when it gets hot, and this can take a while to happen, and, well, it’s been hot.

    Here’s a few things with a high likelihood of failing when you’re away from home:

    • heat, as previously mentioned.
    • running out of disk space. Maybe you’re logging too much, throw some more disk in there and tune down the logging. This can definitely affect SSH, and definitely won’t be fixed by a reboot.
    • OOM failures (or other resource leaks). This isn’t likely to affect your bare metal ssh, but it could. Some things leak memory, and this can lead to cascading process destruction by the OS. In this scenario you’d probably be able to connect to things in the first few minutes after a reboot, though.
    • shitty cabling. Sometimes stuff just falls out of the socket, if it wasn’t plugged in perfectly to begin with. (Heat can also contribute to this one.)
    • reliance on a cloud service that’s currently down. (This can include: you didn’t pay the bill.) Hopefully your OS boot doesn’t fail due to a cloud service, but I’ve definitely seen setups that could.








  • So an option that is literally documented as saying “all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d/ entry will be deleted”, that you knew nothing about, sounded like a “good idea”?

    Bro, if it sounded like a good idea to someone, you didn’t fucking warn them enough. Don’t put this on them without considering what you did to confuse them.

    Also, nfn, the systemd documentation is a nightmare to read through, even if you know exactly what you’re looking for.

    (I’m still gonna keep using systemd because it’s better than the alternatives, though. OP, don’t write stuff off because 1 guy is a dick.)






  • EDIT: Noticed you’re talking about Gitlab in the question, and I responded about Github, but I’m certain that gitlab does everything the same way, because that’s all the technology is capable of. (I have no way to test the ssh -T command at the end for gitlab, though, so ymmv.)

    To clear up some minor confusion here:

    1. Github knows nothing about your private key. There’s very little metadata stored in the private key, and github.com has access to none of it. That includes email address or identity.
    2. Github has identity information stored for you, and then, separately, you uploaded a public key. The public key also contains no information about you, but github knows it’s part of your account. Additionally, github enforces a requirement that your public key can’t be uploaded to any other account, for the reason I’m about to state below.
    3. Github has an index built of everyone’s public keys (or more likely their digests, although the technical details of the index are not something known to me–and it doesn’t matter). When it sees an authentication request, it looks up the digest in the index, which maps to a user account.

    At this point it already knows who is trying to authenticate. Once your authentication request succeeds with your public key (the usual challenge-response handshake associated with asymmetric cryptography), github interacts with your ssh client (most likely git) applying the permissions of your user and your user account.

    BTW, github has a documented method for testing the handshake without doing any git operations:

    ssh -T git@github.com
    

    Depending on your ssh config, you might also need to supply -i some_filename.pem to this. Github will reply with

    Hi aarkon! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.
    

    and then close the connection.

    Note that the test authentication uses the username git and, again, contains no information about who you are. It’s all just looked up on github’s side.