tallship

tallship, 4 months ago

@gabriel

Just making sure that I correctly understood your request...

>Give me backup tips like I just lost all my data and you want to rub it in

You mean like the time I arrived on a client site to find that a second HDD on the Sun Enterprise Server Solaris box in the RAID 5 Array had failed, yet they chose to run the machine in that degraded state w/o calling me to simply plugin a hotswap drive and rebuild the array before the second drive failed?

Or maybe when I told them, no problem, I'll just rebuild a fresh array from scratch, and then just run a full restore from the previous night's DLT tape?

Or perhaps when I saw that look in their eyes and they admitted that they hadn't been swapping tapes each night for about three or four months?

Their CFO looked at me as if everything was still going to be okay (Coz I'm a fucking Rock God) and said: "Well, we've never had a problem before." to which I did my best to respond without letting loose a condescending gufaw....

"Well.... you do now."

Stupid goes all the way to the bone.

https://duplicity.gitlab.io

#tallship #BOFH #IT_nightmares #tech_support_recollections #funnies #nightmares

tallship, 5 months ago

Some Fediverse platforms already correctly render Gemini URI's as valid links

tallship, 5 months ago

@simplifiedprivacy

OH! Cringe!

But true, lolz.....

>"At the end of the day, distros DON’T matter that much and anything is better than Windows… even snaps =)"

That having been said, I'm a firm believer that "Friends don't let friends run ewb00ntew!" Yah, that's kinda a little disparaging tagline I came up with a decade or so ago. I think it's cute, but it does express my sentiments.

I was sooooooooo tired of answering the same question for about twenty years, searching for new ways to say it, and shifting from one fav distro of mine to another, and then back again. But I really failed to acknowledge the need for #n00bs to experience instant gratification to hold their interests long enough to just ditch the #Satan of Redmond (Windows) for that of freedom and privacy in the form of one of the most incredibly steep learning curves I was actually expecting those people to climb after having their questions answered.

#Slackware still tops the list to this day - it is so powerful and.... yes, simple - but that's what us sysadmin's say. Concepts like sbin/lilo and fdisk partitioning or manually editing etc/fstab real quick coz I know what I want as special mountpoints over NFS or whatev.... "OH the Horrror!", is prolly what any of those n00bs seeking to escape the apron strings of #Microsoft likely said, right before making a pinata in my effagy to bludgeon.

#Debian, and I am a proud and self-described Debiantard, isn't (wasn't) really much better back in the day, even with auto provisioning of partitions and the #GUI based install it sported... "non-free-firmware... huh? Why am I looking at a blank terminal with a command prompt's blinking cursor, instead of pretty little windows with a mouse pointer?"

#Arch_Linux, #Gentoo, and others not historically worth mentioning at this time weren't any better, because they were better, and far superior to the semi-n00b-friendly distros at the time. #Redhat 5.0 - 7.22 weren't that bad actually, the newcomer could actually fumble their way past the installation (and even choose the Redneck language for foshizzles and giggles), but like you mention above, obsolescence loomed imminently with gobs of #RPM Hell, especially if you went out to somewhere like RPMfind.net or another place where you could do an rpm -ivf <packagename> and then discover you broke your google... (prolly Alta Vista back in those days), but you could seriously want a really good application and find out that you have to put the lotion on its skin - or at least have a current copy of the AutoTrader to take your mind off the predicament that landed you in the bottom of a pit.

Enter #LMDE... Lemme say that again: Enter LMDE!!!

Now I had something I could recommend to n00bs that split the difference between a rolling distro and a plug & pray installation! All that non-free firmware that was so confusing for so many back then (can't get your display to work, can't this or that and aaarrrrgggghhhhh).

LMDE tracked Debian Testing but installation was as easy as just installing Mint with all of the firmware you needed - people started thanking me twice (they always thanked me once, and then a week later swore to unleash painful, bloody vengeance upon me for burying them in documentation that they could in no way comprehend). The problem, previously, was one of the tenants of my religion - "You can do it right.... Or you can do it twice!"

The truth was, they couldn't even do it AT ALL the first time, and I'm telling them to use a simple distro like Slackware or Debian - nevermind the the 3 stages of Gentoo (They don't even offer those staged platforms anymore, it was too involved for even seasoned aficionados of source based distros).

There was SuSE, but it was as ephemeral as Redhat, and for a while in those early days, I was able to wholeheartedly recommend Mandrake Linux, which had a beautiful DE and easy install, but they went public just prior to that big "POP" of the dotcom bubble and were vaporized.

Yes, When Mint came along I was elated. I could recommend LMDE, and the user could install and easily manage their desktop - and it was a rolling distro too!

Then came the realization by Clément Lefèbvre that without considerable funding there was no way the team could even have a life of their own or watch their kids grow up if they continued to support what was almost effectively two separate, but equally in appearance, distros. I must applaud the Mint team because they did gracefully migrate the LMDE folks back into the mainline Mint over a period of a couple of years.

Then I stopped recommending Linux Mint - "Friends don't let friends run ewb00ntew!"; Remember? Then, a couple of versions back, I caved with the announcement that Clément had decreed those evil "Snaps" would be disabled (If you tell me what you want what you really really want... as the Spice Girls said...). Yes, of course, you could manually enable it - just like Shuttleworth hiimself defended the Shopping Lens malware because the users could simply disable it - Huh? Disable shopping Lens? How in tarnation could a n00bie even know what to look for in the package manager to make that malware go away????

But I digress. If you really wanted to, you can enable Snaps in Linux Mint, but it's disabled by default - and for good reason, as you pointed out. Now, it's been a couple of years since I've looked, coz I no longer can be persuaded to answer that question anymore (um.... Okay, I'm back to recommending Slackware, Debian, or Arch again, but prefer to just set up a laptop for friends and say, "see? Just like Windows, huh?"). But here's what I would really like to see.

Now that non-free-firmware (since the pre-Bookworm vote in the community) is a very easy option in Debian proper, I would really like to see Linux Mint migrate back to a Slick Debian and just fricken' ditch Ubuntu altogether. My thoughts have always been that the firmware was the major issue that prevented them from getting 100% behind the upstream in the first place (I could very well be wrong about that).

Things I like about Ubuntu??? Um..... gimme a sec... Lemme think... Errr...

• Byobu

That's it. #Byobu. And IMNSHO, that's really just a pretty skin over #tmux anyway, but it's got some kewl status widgets you can embed at the bottom of the screen. Speaking of #screen, Byobu IS NOT screen - it's tmux underneath, but it does default to ^A instead of the tmux default of ^B, but that's easy enough to change. What I really like about it is that it's a bit more user friendly in that you can customize it for your users and have it AutoStart sessions as soon as they log in - but there I go again, imposing what I think is kewl on people who really just need things as close to point and click on next ==> next ==> next ==> next as we can get it for them.

You see it wasn't all that long ago that even Windows needed an occasion tuning from your local PC Field Tech, much like our pianos do. I see no reason why we can't at least instill the responsibility for having a third party on retainer for quarterly or bi-annual maintenance of our Linux laptops either - I mean, just look how assimilated everyone still running Windows has become since Windows is free to pillage your privacy in the wake of Win10 forced updates?

Well, I'll close now, but did want to mention that your profile's stated mission sounds really refreshing to me - and I might just doing a copypasta of the link to your profile the next time someone asks that age old question.... Which Linux distro should I start off with?.

All the best!

#tallship #FOSS #Privacy #Linux

tallship, 4 months ago

@simplifiedprivacy

Here's something I thought might be kewl to add to the mix :)

Now, I haven't vetted, tested, trialed, or reviewed #ZorinOS, but I have skimmed reviews in the past and it gets decent marks.

As with anything, YMMV, and remember, most newer #distros in the contemporary space really expect the user to do things the way the maintainers have intended administration, care and feeding, and operation to be performed - each distro may have it's own particular methods that require a bit of a learning curve peculiar to those intentions...

Having said that, and without further adieu...

https://blog.zorin.com/2023/12/20/zorin-os-17-has-arrived/

Enjoy!

#tallship #UNIX #Linux #FOSS

tallship, 8 months ago

@notesnook

Thank you for putting out that query - short answer is...

Yes. You definitely have a use case here, but first, being just a little familiar with your product I'd like to welcome you to the #Fediverse even though your arrival coincided with the November Rain phenomenon that was much todo about nothing, and in the end, most Twitugees simply returned there after creating accounts here - I'm glad you stuck around! You're product is FOSS, and this is a #FOSS world here in the Fediverse, so it makes sense, this being your natural home and where people can expect to find you :)

Ever since I decided to ditch the proprietary Evernote, I've been using a #Vim Plugin that uploads my buffer to a Gist in an easy peasy way - it would be really kewl if I had a way to send (encrypted or unencrypted) notes to myself as a Fediverse DM, or share some of them with a select group of others in such a manner - Maybe (if it's textual in nature) actual clips I've saved. The graphics, well, if they are uploaded as a graphic that will work too, and they can even be sent to #Pixelfed accounts (if there is a graphics or movie file).

So, you're concerned about having to setup a centralized server or something that your userbase can be recognized on or something? Perhaps like a relay of sorts? I don't think that's the way to go actually. It sounds like a lot of heartache that might not even surivive beyond the intial proof of concept is rolled out - Spam being just one reason that makes the likelihood of failure a distinct possibility.

Here's what I think you can try doing, and it will alleviate any grandiose plans you may have been kicking around - Keep it in the client. A feature mechanism that either lets you clip and post it as an #ActivityPub NOTE to a user's actual instance (server) where they already have an account - You can collect the user's Fediverse account credentials and use that to post to their own existing account - no additional infrastructure is required on your part.

Those posts can be a single post to oneself (a private Fediverse DM to themselves) or it can include a list of recipients - just like any other post you can make.

This will also afford you the absolute maximum in #Spam_control too! You don't have to accept any registrations obo your Fediverse features - you're merely allowing people with existing Fediverse accounts to enter their credentials into your client and then your users make the decision as to whether they want to use your existing store or their Fediverse account to publish the clips to their stores there.

Since you've been around here for a while now, I'm sure you've realized how severely limited mastodon is when it comes to ways you can exploit the existing capabilities in the Fediverse - I've already mentioned Pixelfed, but there's a lot of other platforms that support HTTP signatures necessary for backfills and e2ee constructs; the support for BBCode and/or Markdown; post containing text with character counts greater than the paltry 500 characters that masto can muster, #LaTEX (actually, only Misskey and Firefish support that at this time AFAIK); local only posts (shared only with those who have accounts on the same instance), and a host of other unsupported features in masopub.

I appreciate that you made the effort to address this as an ActivityPub and Fediverse capability, and not simply, "yet another mastodon branded feature". Especially when mastodon won't be able to take advantage of many of the advanced features you already offer that other more capable Fediverse platforms can make use of :)

Platforms like #Friendica, #Firefish, #Mitra, #Hubzilla, #SocialHome, #Soapbox, #Peertube, Pleroma, #Epicyon, #Castopod, #WriteFreely, #Quanta, #Drupal and even #WordPress - those latter three have potentially, especially ambitious use cases with clips and notes being able to be actually published on platforms already built for long form or 'blobs' to be pushed to them. Hubzilla, #Streams, and Friendica have special features to accommodate your products notes too :)

If you focus on adding support for people to enter their Fediverse account credentials, or multiple accounts like #Takahe and #Fedilab and #Misskey support, Then those are the servers you need right there! The spam problem remains as it is with the particular instances, since they control the new account registrations.

There's also the rapid adoption of #smolweb and single-user focused Fediverse platforms too, such as:

• MicroBlogPub
• Tapir
• Bovine
• And of course, any platform, now matter how heavy or resource intensive can be deployed as a smolweb or single-user instance (even the klunky kludgey mastodon). And speaking of which, there are several popular forks that don't have these limitations that are very popular like #Hometown and #Glitch-soc, Etc.

There may even be some use cases for #Lemmy and #Kbin too, as link/discussion boards too - perhaps posting from a users vault/store to those platforms? There's a lot of different possibilities but ActivityPub can open up a huge market for you while at the same time Fediverse is exposed to large numbers of people who will discover that they too may have a good use case to adopt for themselves a Fediverse account :)

tl;dr: Basically, yes! there's a huge use case for your thoughts there - and if you're reading this on a Mitra, #Pleroma, Soapbox, #Akkoma, Firefish, Friendica, Hubzilla, or Misskey server, you'll see some very pretty formatting in Markdown - if you're reading this on a regular mastodon server (not one of the really good and popular forks), then... not so much - but at least mastodon does degrade Markdown and HTML somewhat gracefully :)

Well I hope that helps and do feel free to reach out to me via my contact methods listed in my profile or in the Fediverse-City Matrix room, and I'm sure that we can get a few of some of the more prominent Fediverse platform devs to round-table with you for some wire framing sessions.

I'm confident that you'll find a lot of support in your endeavor to achieve this initiative.

Well I hope that helps. Enjoy!

#tallship #Notesnook #Federation

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attached: Fediverse logo in gummy bear jelly colors

tallship, 1 year ago

@RyunoKi @forgejo

One can redact, especially since Loïc Dachary will need to have regular GPL so his twice failed GNA can effectively embed proprietary code into the Forĝejo flavor he intends to run for his hosting service.

You see, if it's AGPL3 - which Forĝejo is and has been since 15 April following a duly held election - then he would have to make available any changes to that code on the hosted service to anyone that asks... Such is the reason for the AGPL itself, because SaaS providers must make the modifications to any hosted AGPL daemons available on demand, while you don't have to do that with plain old GPL code (only the code you distribute after you modify it).

I suspect this is why Loïc Dachary artificially extended the adoption of any Copyleft license.

After his GNA was a miserable failure (twice, after trying to carry Savannah to that domain name after the leadership itself of the FSF initially had to wrest control away from him), first, with a Savannah clone followed by an unsuccessful attempt to provide hosting services for devs using Gitea, he's turned now to try and give it a go with Forĝejo - so from a hosting provider's perspective it's very convenient to modify the code and not have to reveal it make available for inspection any of it.

So he bowed out the Forĝejo project after half a dozen active community members left in disgust, (at least) one founding member after promising a salary and then performing a rug pull (his first offer to resign in disgrace after being called to the carpet for that transgression).

Finally, after mishandling the move to Copyleft and dragging it asking for over three months he left there project and community completely. Perhaps he was surprised that an orderly affect for rotation of the organization's 🗝️ keys 🔐 with business carrying on as usual, getting underway without him or the infrastructure he had deployed that wasn't even community controlled (since taken offline and replaced) , he returned, after a day and a half...

His org admin/owner privs still had not yet been rescinded - at this point her literally claimed he was, himself, going to reboot the community as he saw fit, and usurped and gutted the community status quo, reshaping governance and rules to suit himself... The parallel to that same type of usurpation by general Pinochet just a couple of days after the President of Chile promoted him to commander of all the armed forces -subsequently deposed and replaced with a Junta by Pinochet... was... astounding.

Like I said, one can redact - but you cannot erase. You cannot erase any of these truths as they are all archived... Including the real reasons why Loïc Dachary's wiki pages were removed, as per the Wikimedia editors who state why, and not simply as Loïc Dachary stated... But that's a really embarrassing topic for another time, not particularly pertinent today.

One can redact https://archive.is/7v7Ax

Butt you can't erase. Archives of all of Loïc Dachary's antics are archived and screenshotted in convenient redundancy.

This is all so very unfortunate, because Forĝejo is otherwise a good thing, save for the damage to good people and then project itself in his destructive wake.