I don't know if this helps anyone but here are some crisis resources:

🇺🇸 United States 🇺🇸

Emergency: 911
National Eating Disorders Association: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support/contact-helpline
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1- 800-799-7233
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255); www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
Suicide Prevention, Awareness, and Support: www.suicide.org
Lifeline Crisis Chat: https://www.contact-usa.org/chat.html
Crisis Text Line: Text REASON to 741741 (free, confidential and 24/7)
Self-Harm Hotline: 1-800-DONT CUT (1-800-366-8288)
Family Violence Helpline: 1-800-996-6228
Planned Parenthood Hotline: 1-800-230-PLAN (7526)
American Association of Poison Control Centers: 1-800-222-1222
National Council on Alcoholism & Drug Dependency: 1-800-622-2255
GLBT Hotline: 1-888-843-4564
The Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386 or text “START” to 678678. Standard text messaging rates apply. Available 24/7/365. (Provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning—LGBTQ—young people under 25.)
Veterans Crisis Line: https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/
International Suicide Prevention Directory: http://suicideprevention.wikia.com/wiki/International_Suicide_Prevention_Directory

🇨🇦 Canada 🇨🇦

Emergency: 911
Hotline: 1-888-353-2273
YourLifeCounts.org: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines

🇬🇧 UK & Republic of Ireland 🇮🇪

Emergency: 112 or 999
Hotline: +44 (0) 8457 90 90 90 (UK – local rate)
Hotline: +44 (0) 8457 90 91 92 (UK minicom)
Hotline: 1850 60 90 90 (ROI – local rate)
Hotline: 1850 60 90 91 (ROI minicom)
YourLifeCounts.org: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines

🇦🇺 Australia 🇦🇺

Emergency: 000
Lifeline.org: https://www.lifeline.org.au/Get-Help/Online-Services/crisis-chat
LifeLine Australia: 1-300-13-11-14
YourLifeCounts.org: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines

🇳🇿 New Zealand 🇳🇿

Emergency: 111
Lifeline 24/7 Helpline: 0800 543 354
Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)
YourLifeCounts.org: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines

Not that I’m advocating for Apple’s inexcusable behaviour, but as someone who’s worked in IT managing fleets of hundreds of Thinkpads (among others like Apple, Dell, Acer, HP), respectfully, they are far less reliable and durable than a MacBook. The only devices I had with higher failure rates than ThinkPads were Acer laptops.

They are certainly more repairable, but so are others like Dell and HP. Lenovo were one of the earlier manufacturers to pull some anti-repair moves such as soldering memory to the mainboard (on the Yoga models).

I think your statement is far more accurate in the days when IBM owned the ThinkPad brand, but unfortunately Lenovo have run it into the ground as far as quality goes.

All that said, I certainly hope we see more projects like Framework so that these big manufacturers can get some sort of reality check.

Worked for an MSP, we had a large storage array which was our cloud backup repository for all of our clients. It locked up and was doing this semi-regularly, so we decided to run an "OS reinstall". Basically these things install the OS across all of the disks, on a separate partition to where the data lives. "OS Reinstall" clones the OS from the flash drive plugged into the mainboard back to all the disks and retains all configuration and data. "Factory default", however, does not.

This array was particularly... special... In that you booted it up, held a paperclip into the reset pin, and the LEDs would flash a pattern to let you know you're in the boot menu. You click the pin to move through the boot menu options, each time you click it the lights flash a different pattern to tell you which option is selected. First option was normal boot, second or third was OS reinstall, the very next option was factory default.

I head into the data centre. I had the manual, I watched those lights like a hawk and verified the "OS reinstall" LED flash pattern matched up, then I held the pin in for a few seconds to select the option.

All the disks lit up, away we go. 10 minutes pass. Nothing. Not responding on its interface. 15 minutes. 20 minutes, I start sweating. I plug directly into the NIC and head to the default IP filled with dread. It loads. I enter the default password, it works.

There staring back at me: "0B of 45TB used".

Fuck.

This was in the days where 50M fibre was rare and most clients had 1-20M ADSL. Yes, asymmetric. We had to send guys out as far as 3 hour trips with portable hard disks to re-seed the backups over a painful 30ish days of re-ingesting them into the NAS.

The worst part? Years later I discovered that, completely undocumented, you can plug a VGA cable in and you get a text menu on the screen that shows you which option you have selected.

I (somehow) did not get fired.

Not a distro but maybe Plasma Bigscreen is in the ballpark of what you're after?

What did they just fucking say

(Jk ofc)

Corporate offices might make good housing, malls could be useful for community services. Medical centres, libraries, hackerspaces, community courses (volunteer led), open up skylights in some of the old stores and build greenhouses for community gardens, temporary accommodation, kitchens for homeless people (and other services), market stall spaces and short term storefronts for small businesses so people can have a fair go at selling their stuff without being locked into years-long contracts. So many good ideas in this thread!

It doesn’t say how to decline it in that article, will it just pop up after the shutdown date?

Jumping on the OpenSUSE bandwagon. I use it daily, have been running the same install of Tumbleweed for years without issue. I'm using KDE Plasma which it let's you choose as part of the installation which fulfils that requirement for you as well.

If you're familiar with Redhat you'll feel at home on it. Zypper is the package manager instead of yum/dnf and works really well (particularly when coping with dependency issues.

I've worked with heaps of distros over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, old school Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Oracle, even a bit of Alpine and some BSD variants) and OpenSUSE is definitely my favourite for a workstation.

Where my download accelerator plus gang at

Why did I open this comment thread

This for sure. As a general rule of thumb, I use XFS for RPM-based distros like Red Hat and SuSE, EXT4 for Debian-based.

I use ZFS if I need to do software RAID and I avoid BTRFS like the plague. BTRFS requires a lot of hand holding in the form of maintenance which is far from intuitive and I expect better from a modern filesystem (especially when there are others that do the same job hassle free). I have had FS-related issues on BTRFS systems more than any other purely because of issues with how it handles data and metadata.

In saying all that, if your data is valuable then ensure you do back it up and you won’t need to worry about failures so much.

Servers are a different story but for Desktop, OpenSUSE.

Because:

• It's stable even on their rolling OS (Tumbleweed)
• Gaming works exceptionally well
• CUDA works with little effort
• RPM-based (personal preference)
• zypper is an excellent package manager and my experience has been better than that of yum/dnf
• Extensive native packages and 3rd party repos
• No covert advertising in the OS
• Minimal (no?) Telemetry
• Easy to bind to active directory
• it feels polished and well built
• I do not have to mess with it to make it work

Part of my transition from Windows to Linux was that basic tasks like installing software or even the OS itself shouldn't be a high effort endeavour. I should be able to point to a package file or run a package manager and be able to go about my day without running "make" and working my way through dependency hell.

I say this as a Linux user of all different flavours for well over 15 years who has a deep love for what it brings to the table. If we want it to be common place with non-IT folks, it needs to work and it needs to be simple to use.

Whilst I agree and sympathise with people on how difficult it is to change your primary email address (been there), the outcome will be better for them. They are no longer wedded to an ISP purely because all their mail goes there.

To liken it to something more tangible; when you move house, you need to change your mailing address. For renters, that can be often and is just as painful. Or when your phone number changes and you have to update your contacts. The difference here is who is pulling the trigger; the end user vs the provider.

Gmail is a great option, as is Proton Mail for the security conscious and tech savvy.

This isn’t to excuse the ISPs; it’s a shitty move on their part and the people using these mail accounts will likely be older technically challenged folks, but it is a logical one from a technical perspective. They may have also inadvertently taken the only thing away that’s creating stickiness between them and their customer and driven them into the arms of another ISP.

Nice try, detective

Its very much still needed and heavily utilised in the enterprise world. Volume size is usually the lowest priority when it comes to arrays, redundancy and IOPS (the amount of concurrent transactions to the storage) is typically the priority. The exception here would be backup and archive storage, where IOPS is less important and volume size is more important.

As far as replacing sectors goes, I've never heard of this and I might just be ignorant on the subject but as far as I know you can't "replace" a bad sector. Only mark it as bad and not use it, and whatever was there before is gone. This has existed since HDD days. This is also why we use RAID - parity across disks to protect data.

Generally production storage will be in RAID-10, and backup/archive storage in RAID-6 or in some cases RAID-60 but I'm personally not a fan.

You also would consider how many disks are in the volume because there is a sweet spot. Too many disks = higher likelihood of total array failure due to simultaneous disk failures and more data loss in the event it does, but too few disks and you won't have good redundancy, capacity or performance either (depending on RAID level).

The biggest change I see in RAID these days is moving away from hardware RAID cards and into software-based solutions like Microsoft Storage Spaces, md, ZFS and similar. These all have their own way of doing things and some can even synchronise the data with other hosts.

Hope this helps!

Don’t have an answer for you but just wanted to say thanks for highlighting the existence of this software, it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for

What’s driving the change for you? Just curious as I’ve been considering jumping the other way (to an undecided model of Pixel running GrapheneOS from an iPhone 11 Pro).

Sort of, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I started on OpenSUSE Leap but had issues getting things like GPU and Steam working. Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.

TW works great for gaming and the enterprise features I care about (like domain joining) work out of the box. Its certainly harder to set up than something more geared towards home use (typically one of the various the downstreams of Debian or Arch) but that doesn't bother me.

Authelia is popular, as is Keycloak. I believe Red Hat develops Keycloak or at least has a hand in it.

I'm on this journey as well, figuring out what I'm going to use. Currently most of my services just use LDAP back to AD but I'm looking to do something more modern like SAML, oAuth or OpenID Connect so that I can simplify the number of MFA tokens I have.

Just as an anecdote you may find useful - Personally I used to run an Active Directory for Windows and FreeIPA for my Linux machines and have managed to simplify this to just AD. Linux machines can be joined, you can still use sudo and all the other good stuff while only having one source of truth for identity.

Whilst some might not find it a huge deal, not being able to shuffle all episodes of a specific TV show is a deal breaker for me. I do have Jellyfin deployed and configured, ready to go for when the feature arrives. Plex feels a lot more polished as well, but I can get over that.

Will be better when it’s over. Last week in a job that my days are numbered in, hopefully the next adventure will be more energising.

By the way, when I upgraded from 0.17.4 to 0.18.0, I noticed the UI for blocking instances changed and was missing my list in the admin panel (still visible on the /instances page). I added a blocked instance and it nuked my entire pre-0.18 list. Might have been a freak accident but it might be worth making a copy of Beehaw’s first just in case. Oh and it’s no longer comma-separated, you have to add them one-by-one

The two aren't even in the same league. I'm a big open source advocate don't get me wrong, but VirtualBox is horrible to use and its not what OP asked.

What sort of fish?

ADHD Jesse’s channel is a trove of information for understanding more about the ADHD mind works. Another great one is How to ADHD, incidentally her name is Jess. Her videos have gotten some extremely emotional responses from me because she explains things I’ve never known how to and that no psychologist has been able to pinpoint or explain.

To unlock that understanding of yourself and have an explanation for how you think, feel and operate after struggling for so long with it is a powerful emotion

The unplugged live version of About A Girl by Nirvana

Likewise the live acoustic version of Layla by Eric Clapton

Nothing manual required, you can federate with any other instance as long as you're not on their ban list.

You basically use your instance's search to search for a community on the remote instance, then your instance requests the top (5?) posts from the community on the remote instance. Once a user subscribes, all new posts going forward will be sent to your server via the federation.

At least I think that's how it works, haha.

I came here just to say this but wasn’t expecting to see it at the top of the thread, I’d seen scary movies before but holy hell this one chilled me to my core and even as an adult I still squinted when I watched it

I need this on a t-shirt

This dude kernel panics

As others have mentioned its important to highlight the difference between a sync (basically a replica of the source) vs a true backup which is historical data.

As far as tools goes, if the device is running OMV you might want to start by looking at the options within OMV itself to achieve this. A quick google hinted at a backup plugin that some people seem to be using.

If you're going to be replicating to a remote NAS over the Internet, try to use a site-to-site VPN for this and do not expose file sharing services to the internet (for example by port forwarding). Its not safe to do so these days.

The questions you need to ask first are:

1. What exactly needs to be backed up? Some of it? All of it?
2. How much space does the data I need backed up consume? Do I have enough to fit this plus some headroom for retention?
3. How many backups do I want to retain? And for how long? (For example you might keep 2 weeks of daily backups, 3 months of weekly backups, 1 year of monthly backups)
4. How feasible is it to run a test restore? How often am I going to do so? (I can't emphasise test restores enough - your backups are useless if they aren't restorable)
5. Do you need/want to encrypt the data at rest?
6. Does the internet bandwidth between the two locations allow for you to send all the data for a full backup in a reasonable amount of time or are you best to manually seed the data across somehow?

Once you know that you will be able to determine:

1. What tool suits your needs
2. How you will configure the tool
3. How to set up the interconnects between sites
4. How to set up the destination NAS

I hope I haven't overwhelmed, discouraged or confused you more and feel free to ask as many questions as you need. Protecting your data isn't fun but it is important and its a good choice you're making to look into it

I think that’s what got me too, I was expecting sci-fi and whilst I technically got it, I also got traumatised in the process lol. Credit where it’s due, it’s a fantastic movie because of the horrors I never imagined possible, but I watched it once more as an adult and that’s enough for me

Switzerland, Norway, Italy, England, Scotland, New Zealand. Mostly Switzerland.

I feel like it would do wonders for my state of mind to go see the natural beauty the world has to offer.

This is the method I use in your scenario, OP. You can use Folder2iso to get the files in that you need. If the OS has official VMware tools, you can also mount the VMware Tools ISO straight from workstation into the VM and this will give you the clipboard service so you can copy and paste files between the host and VM, if this scenario is permitted within your isolation needs.

Otherwise, go the ISO route. You just can't bring stuff out of the VM back to the host is all.

Back in the day when the self-hosted $10 license existed I was using JIRA Service Desk to do this. As far as ticketing systems go it was very easy to work with and didn't slow me down too much.

I know you don't want a ticket system but I'm just curious what other people will suggest because I'm in the same boat as you.

Currently I haphazardly use Joplin to take very loose notes and sync them to Nextcloud.

If you want a very simple option with minimal setup and overhead you could use Joplin to create separate notes for each "part" of your lab and just add a new line with a date, time and summary of the change.

I do also use SnipeIT to track all my hardware and parts, which allows you to add notes and service history against the hardware asset.

Other than that, I'm keen to see what everyone else says

I’m the admin of krabb.org, honestly I’m loving it. There is a learning curve, particularly for non-technical folks, but that will get easier as time goes on.

As an admin, it is far easier to “jump start” an empty Lemmy instance with content from other instances than it is to do with Mastodon and Pixelfed.

Where we need to improve is the mobile apps, documentation and providing ways to make it easier for small instances to get new users. These are all very much in the spotlight and improving every day (especially the apps), so I’m confident we can get there

Tldr: it good, do like

Same here lol. I’m keen to keep this instance going even if I end up being the only user. I’ve toyed with the idea of what I might do if I did end up with a bunch of users (would i cap at a certain amount of usrrs, how would I put the feelers out to get mods, etc).

The “niche” I’m going for is no reliance on public cloud. I run everything on my own hardware, back it up myself, scale it as needed and maintain it myself. That won’t appeal to everyone, but I’m not trying to be the biggest instance.

Sure, I’ve used it both in Server and NAS scenarios. The NAS was where we had most issues. If the maintenance tasks for BTRFS weren’t scheduled to run (balance, defrag, scrub and another one i can’t recall), the disk could become “full” without actually being full. If I recall correctly it’s to do with how it handles metadata. There’s space, but you can’t save, delete or modify anything.

On a VM, its easy enough to buy time by growing the disk and running the maintenance. On a NAS or physical machine however, you’re royally screwed without adding more disks (if its even an option). This “need to have space to make space” thing was pretty suboptimal.

Granted now I know better and am aware of the maintenance tasks, I simply schedule them (with cron or similar). But I still have a bit of a sour taste from it, lol. Overall I don’t think it’s a bad FS as long as you look after it.

Yep, sure do. I’ve no real benefit for the features it adds, or I’m completely ignorant to the benefits is probably more accurate :)

For the things you’ve mentioned it is useful. I think the main thing I’ve been warned to never do with BTRFS is use it for RAID and to use md under it instead. That said, that could be old info and it may be fixed now.

Can’t argue with you there :P but I guess what I mean is from a service standpoint, Gmail is mail, ISPs provide internet.

For me personally, Google is not my friend and I run my own mail server on my own domain and have for years. It’s quite involved though if you want good deliverability.

I think Proton is probably the happiest medium between privacy-respecting and all-out DIY mail server. Though I’m sure there are many others too :)

Thank you! I realised my mistake briefly after and edited but its still a bit busted up. Hopefully its legible enough now :)

Edit: I love your username haha