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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Now that you mention it, I find systemd messing with my DNS settings incredibly annoying as well, so I can’t help but agree on that point. At this production system at work, when troubleshooting, I often need to alter DNS between local, local (in chroot), some other server in the same cluster, and a public one. This is done across several service restarts and the occasional reboot. Not being able to trust that resolv.conf remains as I left it is frustrating.

    On the newest version of our production image, systemd-resolvd is disabled.


  • Oversimplified: It’s the service that handles starting and stopping of other services, including starting them in the right order after boot. Many people hate it because of astrology and supersticion. Allegedly it’s “bloated”. But still it has become the standard on many (most?) distros, effectively replacing init.

    I like init. It’s simple. I like systemd as well. It’s convenient. Beyond that i don’t have very strong feelings on the matter.

    Also, see important answer by topinambour-rex.



  • vettnerk@lemmy.mltoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldISP put me behind NAT
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    1 year ago

    I’ve had plenty of rants about Norwegian broadband (or lack thereof) over the past 25 years. It’s a bit of a long story, but the gist of it is that during the 90’s there was this one company (Telenor) which had practical monopoly on telecom (it was the private remnant of what used to be part of the government), and of course they didn’t want to develop broadband 8nfrastructure as the made shitloads of money by selling ISDN at the time. Broadband was available in the biggest cities only, and even there it was limited. And the punchline of that joke was that when I was on dialup I had to pay by the minute. During that time, hearing about not having to pay by the minute in the US sounded like paradise to me.

    But luckily competition happened, and Telenor realized they had to allow modernization or be left out of the market entirely. Small communities could sign up to have broadband “delivered”, and once enough people had signed up for an ISP to considet it profitable, digging would start. Today, twenty years later, I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out. I live practically in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny industrial town sqeezed to fit into the terrain, where three of the cardinal directions are blocked by mountains and the fourth being a fjord. And I have 1gbit both up and down.


  • vettnerk@lemmy.mltoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldISP put me behind NAT
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    1 year ago

    Ouch, I was not aware of that. Here in scandinavialand we have a few local or regional ones in each area, plus a few big ones that cover the entire country.

    Once the fiber is in the ground, “any” ISP can use them, regardless who buried it. I think it’s a remnant from 20ish years ago when the default was ADSL over copper, and the telecom cables were considered public infrastructure.






  • I used to be a reseller of this highly specialized navigation software. The licensing was handled via hardware fingerprinting of the harddrive. I’m not 100% sure on how it worked, but it grabbed some raw data off of the boot device, and from that generated a fingerprint. This fingerprint was then sent to the guys who made the software, and they would then send us a license key and a hefty bill. The license key only worked with syatems running off of that particular harddrive. If a customer had a harddrive failure, we had to send them the actual harddrive for them to verify, so they would issue a free key to whichever replacement drive was used.

    I did a lot of experimenting with that software. It was linux based and very tweakable, but the licensing part of it was a bit of a mystery. I managed to crack it through some surprisingly simple out-of-the-box thinking, but one limitation I could never figure out how to circumvent was its refusal to generate a fingerprint from virtual drives.

    For starters, it only worked with drives registering as /dev/hdX or /dev/sdX. Anything outside of that and it wouldn’t generate a fingerprint.

    This was especially frustrating when a well-paying customer offered a nice bonus if we could install it on a macbook for him. After a few days of tweaking I managed to install and run it, only to discover that fingerprinting the drive couldn’t be done due to the device node being/dev/nvmeSomething. And after avfew more days of hacking I managed to fake that too, and they outright refused to issue a license due to them not wanting to support our unofficial hacks.

    Where was I going with this? Oh, right, vmware… i never managed to get it to run in vmware. We had this other well paying customer who wanted the ability to alt-tab between the software and Windows. Unfortunately, any fingerprinting done from within vmware, regardless how I set up the storage, resulted in a fingerprint file with no data.

    Fun fact: the software ui was written in raw xlib. I got to know the owner and lead dev fairly well, and he hinted that the codebase was a complete mess to the point where something as simple as an input dialog for a config option I recommended was A LOT of work.



  • Depends on which aspect of you needs to be ready. Use case and functionality? Meh, now is as good time as any. Might as well get used to the differences from a desktop to servers early on. Especially if you still don’t really have the knowledge. Learn by doing!

    Budget? True, they can be pricey, even on the after market. But if you or a friend works anywhere that had servers, chances are that the IT department might have something that’d otherwise end up in the trash. A good example here is this VM server with rather old CPUs and 256G of RAM. It wasn’t fit for its pyrpose anymore, and its hardware configuration made it a bad match for our storage clusters. Today it’s a minecraft server for my kids and their friends.

    EDIT: Actually, the older PowerEdge servers feom Dell aren’t that pricey on my local marketplace.