I setup a media PC with an SSD for boot / OS and spinning rust for the videos, music, etc.
So, I thought LVM would be a good idea... put the whole lot into a logical pool and then carve out large parts for the media which could be adjusted in the future.
No.
Resizing actually just chops up the drives even more (so, partition fragmentation)
Gparted can't see it, so adjustments are terrible CLI commands
And my favourite system backup tool (clonezilla) cant backup the OS without backing up the entire system.
Depends on your usecase... for a single user laptop, maybe... for a multiuser device or a server... nah.
I prefer partitioning away the user data for all usecases as that will fill up one day, and I don't want that to down the machine.
How has your week been?
Went away for a couple days over the Easter weekend, came home to a leaking hot water cylinder.
Turns out the welding on one of the connections has cracked, but fair enough the manufacturer is going to replace it.
That's taken a while to appear... I think I was watching the Grand Designs series about that place ~2 years ago...?
But, I'm all for it. Too many horrendous future slums being built at the moment, all with with colour coded doors for the size of the home.
Thanks for the links, I'll take a look as I've never actually played with port knocking.
Is this for internal facing servers? Not much more than CIS and the usual Best Practices (no root for SSH, etc)
For a DMZ node, minimal software (ie Arch) and automated defenses like fail2ban, key authentication, etc...
Firewalls with Geo-IP blocking also help, but that's not technically what you're asking for.
Would you use that on internal LAN connections or only external internet facing connections? I'm not aware (not checked) if any firewalls support it... not sure why?
Agree.
Years ago, I was troubleshooting something (can't remember what) on Ubuntu and realised the package had fixed the bug, but it wasn't in the repos yet.. like months behind.
Looked at Arch with it's up to date repos, moved over and never looked back.
I've reported bugs since, watched the package get updated and seen the improvement on my system... now that's what it should be like.
Critical Synology Vulnerability Let Attackers Remote Execute Arbitrary Code
Just build your own. It's easy. Move on.
Ah, I see what you're asking now.
I have a Hauppauge TV dual-tuner card for terrestrial TV.
Dual tuner so we can watch one thing whilst recording something else, or record 2 things at once.
Myth picks up the card and also uses that for the schedule guide, so we can just set up the scheduler with a TV series or some key-words and leave it to it.
We've not watched live TV for ages and it's weird sitting through adverts now when we're at friends / family
We also have GBs of films and music on the same machine, so it's our central AV device. The Audio is sync'd off to other devices from here rather than having a 2nd NAS for it.
I had a 2nd MythTv frontend on another box in another room for a while and that worked well too.
Good god, is ActveX still alive?
TV programs...
Similar here.
MythTv + Firefox + VLC - all on Arch
Used to be easier when Myth was in the main repos, now I have to compile from AUR, but it's still ok
Thanks for the TL;DW, I can go about my Arch updates without fear now...
I saw a bird on my lawn today...
Yeah, that's all fine - when it works, it works well... But sometimes it just seems to get caught up in an error and can't seem to reset for a few minutes. But ok, looks like your setup's working ok, so must be just mine. I disabled a load of Google stuff and run trackercontrol (a local VPN on the phone that blocks stuff), so maybe I've broken something...
Yeah, I kinda thought, well, technically the floor plan's correct - there's the round part there and another there and, ahhh...
Hmm... I'm using gotify with a Ras Pi to send the alerts and I sometimes get long delays...
AFAICT it's the phone, not the Pi, but all I can see are lots of websocket errors in the gotify client the time.. are you not getting those then?
Never heard of it, but still, sad to see something ending... seems like it was a good learning resource.
It does seem like a hardware issue to me too...
It might be a driver issue... Windows does have the resources to test them more than Linux community, so - kinda hardware related - but Framework should be able to help here.
And as others have said, try memtest, I did on a laptop with similar issues to yours and found the RAM was the culprit. Personally, I recommend using this version, not the passmark version: https://memtest.org/
It'll boot from a USB stick
It will take hours.
For Linux use 'sudo journalctl -xe' (from memory) - it'll explain the issues it finds, as best it can. You'll probably see something in there
If you're dual booting with Windows open the event log viewer and check under System (from memory) and see if there's any red X warning logs... esp. Hardware ones.
Vivaldi, now with added VPN
Vivaldi is now the first major browser to ship with Proton VPN built right in, giving uncompromising privacy from two of Europe’s most trusted tech companies.
Just found my Vivaldi update contained a little more than just bugfixes... it now has Proton VPN built in.
It's actually part of the browser, not an extension, so I'm in two minds whether I like that... or not.
You need either a Vivaldi account or a Proton account, so it's not completely anonymous, but it's a start.
The free-tier of Proton VPN also appears to be bandwidth limited and your exit point is randomised, so... yeah, it's ok...
Options for "iPlayer will stop working on this device"
"On 11th November BBC iPlayer will no longer be available directly on this device."
OK, so, I didn't purchase this particular (Blaupunkt) TV, but as it's my mother's then, well, I'm the one that has to "fix" this.
Personally, I use TVs as a simple screen and watch everything through other devices (Roku, or a Linux PC running MythTV).
I see the BBC website has some links to review sites, but I thought this might be another place to ask for - preferably open source - devices that could be used.
Comments?
Any MythTV Users Here?
As a long-term MythTV user, I read all the discussion about Plex vs Jellyfin, but I'm still here... recording Live TV, watching films, listening to "me choonz" all on free, open-source software. What am I missing? Any other MythTV users out there?
NAS vulnerabilities
Seems like as good a time as any to upgrade older hardware
Just stumbled across this (overly dramatic?) article and thought I'd just post it here...
It's more to act as a reminder that if you've got a NAS that is serving content to the interwebs, then make sure it's behind a proxy of some kind to prevent weaknesses (ie in the management Web UI) being exposed.
Obvz, this article is pointing to Zyxel, but it could be your DIY home-built NAS with Cockpit: CVE-2024-2947 - just an example, not bashing that project at all.
I've used Squid and HAProxy over the years (mostly on my pfSense box) - but I'd be interested to know if there's other options that I've not heard of
Sanity check: Vivaldi high CPU usage
Before I dive headlong into debugging and throwing bug tickets around, I just needed a sanity check from someone else..
I have an old Lenovo laptop as my daily driver / experimentation box (ie it gets a lot of paclages installed and removed)
Recently I've been using Vivaldi's built-in calendar to use as a CalDAV client for my radicale installation.
It's the only open tab and Vivaldi's using ~20% CPU (according to htop)... actually, I just closed that tab... even with 1 blank tab the CPU's the same.
Is this just my battle weary laptop needing a good clean, or can someone else confirm?
TIA
pfSense DHCP (& DNS) Performance
pfSense... Anyone have much experience with the new Kea DHCP server?
I'm using 2.7.2 (Community Edition) on a fairly good Celeron based system that's not heavily loaded, but I have 7 network segments (VLANs and physical interfaces), so I have 7 DHCP pools / configs.
Just adding 1 more static reservation can cause a significant delay when reloading the service and because I register static reservations in DNS, the network loses DNS so I "break the internet" for a short while.
Would Kea fix this?
pfSense DHCP / DNS performance
pfSense... Anyone have much experience with the new Kea DHCP server?
I'm using 2.7.2 (Community Edition) on a fairly good Celeron based system that's not heavily loaded, but I have 7 network segments (VLANs and physical interfaces), so I have 7 DHCP pools / configs and just adding 1 more static reservation can cause a significant delay when reloading the service and because I register static reservations in DNS, I can lose comms.
Would Kea fix this?
Pause alerts during the night
Well, as the title says, I've had a few notifications that alerted over night and I'm wanting to sleep instead
These are ntfy alerts, but driven by Uptime Kuma... and I can't find a programmatic / config option that says "don't notify between 11pm and 7am" (but willing to admit I've just not found it... yet...)
I need my (Android, ofc) phone to be on in case of family calls / messages, so I can't use "Do Not Disturb", and remembering to manually mute the ntfy app each night just doesn't make sense to me - computers are quite capable of automating my requirements for me.
So... any pointers? I'm sure you're not all getting alerts at 2am because your ISP dropped a few packets...
Desktop Security
I secure systems for my day job. That means installing AV software, ensuring Windows Firewall is ON, etc. (Plus many other things...)
I've seen discussions around disk encryption here, but I don't recall much about a malware protection. Maybe a little about personal (desktop) firewalls.
I'm aware of Clam, etc, but is anyone actually using these tools much?
Or are we just presuming we're all immune from the bad guys targeting Windows?
XMPP... on a Pi?
So, I've had it up to here (^^^) with the family using WhatsApp, etc and I'm heading off into the land of XMPP to find a better solution.
I've got a Pi3 hanging off my pfSense firewall acting as a kinda DMZ box, so thought I could setup an XMPP server on it (Prosody?)
Any advice? Will the Pi crumble (see what I did there) under the pressure of 4 people using it?
Issues with proxying outside with a Lets Encrypt cert on the pfSense box, but maybe not inside the network?
"Better" server software?
Thanks
AUR with Ansible
I've started looking at Ansible to manage all the laptops, VMs, SBCs that I have running Arch Got the ol' pacman installs / updates working fine, but I'm having some problems understanding how to setup AUR to install some of those packages.
Main issue is where Ansible is basically doing everything as root, and AUR helpers don't want to run as root, so ok, create a 2nd non-root user first...
But even installing an AUR helper (yay) brings problems:
I can setup a folder in /tmp/aur , I can git clone the yay package, but then I have no idea how to run makepkg or then yay as that non-root user.
Does anyone have this already figured out?
Or... am I going about this the wrong way?
HA redundancy options
I'm currently running HA on a Pi3... it works fine, but it's now a single point of failure.
I have some new hardware arriving to run VMs in and was intending to move HA to it, but now I'm wondering if I can have HA in 2 places for fault tolerance.
I'm aware that there's no built-in failover options, but has anyone done something similar?
Sonoff S26 R2 Zigbee
Ok, I've done a fair bit with wifi devices, now I'm waking up to zigbee.
Got myself an S26 R2 to play with, but just wanted to clarify a few things...
So, if I had a few of these around the house, would they form the man backbone of the zigbee mesh network? Or do they not provide that function?
And also - possibly n00b question - I presume there's still a need / benefit to flash with esphome? Couldn't see anything obvious on the site and only searched online for a few mins before giving up and asking for experience rather than random sites...
Traccar Integration
Has anyone used the Traccar integration with a full Traccar server vs the webhook Android client?
There's an issue with the latest version of the Traccar client sending more data than HA can understand (Traccar Integration: extra keys not allowed #84540)
So, I was wondering whether it's worth setting up a full Traccar Server?
It seems like total overkill, but maybe it has other benefits?
PacDiff comparisons
I have a few devices running Arch... Rasperrys, laptops, a NAS, etc
After an update I'll run pacdiff to check for any updated configurations to look out for.
On the laptops I'll use meld to compare and it's nice to visually pick and choose what to update.
But for the headless units, I'm using vimdiff and it's sometimes difficult to see what to change - esp. when a few lines in a block of changes needs picking and choosing.
What other approaches are you using for this?