As a sidenote. This reminds me of a discussion I haver every so often on “tools that make things to easy”.

There is something I call "the arduino effect:. People who write code for things, based on example-code they find left and right, and all kind of libraries they mix together. It all works … for as long as it works. The problem is what happens if things do not work.

I once helped out somebody who had an issue with a simple project: he: “I don’t understand it. I have this sensor, and this library… and it works. Then I have this 433 MHz radio-module with that library and that also works. But when I use them together. It doesn’t work”| me: what have you tried? he: well, looked at the libraries. They all are all. Reinstalled all the software. It’s that neither me: could it be that these two boards use the same hardware interrupt or the same timer he: the what ???

I see simular issues with other platforms. GNU Radio is a another nice example. People mix blocks without knowing what exactly they do.

As said, this is all very nice, as long as it works

I wonder if programming-code generated by LLMs will not result in the same kind of problems. people who do not have the background knowledge needed to troubleshoot issues once problems become more complex.

(Just a thought / question … not an assumpion)

To be honest, I have no personal experience with LLM (kind of boring, if you ask me). I know do have two collegues at work who tried them. One -who has very basic coding skills (dixit himself) - is very happy. The other -who has much more coding experience- says that his test show they are only good at very basic problems. Once things become more complex, they fail very quickly.

I just fear that, the result could be that -if LLMs can be used to provide same code of any project- open-source project will spend even less time writing documentation (“the boring work”)

Hmmm … 🤔 The best way not to make friends with somebody with over 30 years of coding experience: suggest him to use ChatGPT to write a computerprogram 🤣🤣

Wauw! So many answers in such a short time. Thanks all! 👍 (I will not spam the channel by sending a thank you to all but this is really greatly apriciated)

Concerning ncurses. I did hear of it but never looked at it myself. What is not completely clear for me. I know you can use it for ‘low-level’ things, but does it also include ‘high-level’ concepts like windows, input fields and so?

The blog mentioned in one of the other posts only shows low-level things.

No apps at all ???

So it really is like a dumb terminal. Now I know why I never used a Chromebook😀

Sounds like a money laundering sceme!

As I mentioned earlier, I guess chrome is more like android where you have a much more strict seperation between the OS, applications and user data. (I remember reading about all the different partitions on android and what they are used for, but I should bruch up my knowledge on this).

Thanks for the additional into on brtfs! 👍

Just watched some videos on btrfs. I start to understand the conceps. Perhaps I should also look into how exactly

On windows and the “recovery partion”. I guess what you say is that it should always be possiblity to boot in some kind of system, but it will not happen automatically as there is no way for a system to detect that the system completely hangs.

Thinking about it. It kind of strange. Embedded systems have watchdog interrupts that get fired if the system hangs (i.e. if it does not provide a “yes, I still live” signal every “x” milliseconds). Does a PC not have something similar?

just watched some videos on btrfs. Looks interesting indeed. I will look into it and perhaps do a test-installation and see how it goes.

Thanks for the info

OK. That makes a lot more sense.

Thank you for correcting the original post. 👍

Yes, that was indeed the question.

If I read it correct, you need a specialised distro for this. You cannot do this on a off-the-shelf Debian or Ubuntu?

I’ll do some searching on ‘unmutable Linux’. Thanks for the (very quick) answer! 😀

Concerning linux, yesterday I was watching this video on computerphile on the crowdstrike incident. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlaNMJeA1EA (*)

What is interesting is the comment made in the video on how chromebooks do software upgrades with dual “OS” disk-partitions and the ability to rollback to the previous OS-partition.

Question: is something like this also possible on one of the major linux distros? (debian, ubuntu, rocky, …) What would be the procedure to do this kind of “dual partition” system-upgrade?

(*) a great video that explained some of the technical details in a very clear way, including some very interesting ‘lessons learned’ and "what if"s If you ever need to explain crowdstrike to your manager, this video is a good start.

This is a typical mail a phishing campaign would send out, and we have already said to people "never believe this kind of messages. They are all fake.

Now, if a genuine company sends out mails with a genuine gift-cards (what the article on techcrunch seems to indicate) … this is NOT helpfull at all!!!

And that comming from a cybersecurity company (rolling-eyes)

Yes, that’s a very useful idea. Thanks!

If you get your domain from OVH, you get one single mailbox (be it with a lot of aliases, like a different email-address for every service/website you use) for free.

What is your ‘deleted files’ policy? How long do you keep them? I had a similar issue but then found out that the nextcloud cron-process wasn’t running so files in the ‘deleted files’ folder where never really deleted.

Well, based on advice of Samsy, take a backup of home-server network to a NAS on your home-network. (I do home that your server-segment and your home-segment are two seperated networks, no?) Or better, set up your NAS at a friend’s house (and require MFA or a hardware security-key to access it remotely)

What was that saying again?

“the biggest thread to the safety and cybersecurity of the citizens of a country … are managers who think that cybersecurity is just a number on an exellsheet”

(I don’t know where I read this, but I think it really hits the nail on the head)

I have been thinking the same thing.

I have been looking into a way to copy files from our servers to our S3 backup-storage, without having the access-keys stored on the server. (as I think we can assume that will be one of the first thing the ransomware toolkits will be looking for).

Perhaps a script on a remote machine that initiate a ssh to the server and does a “s3cmd cp” with the keys entered from stdin ? Sofar, I have not found how to do this.

Does anybody know if this is possible?

Yes. Fair point.

On the other hand, most of the disaster senarios you mention are solved by geographic redundancy: set up your backup // DRS storage in a datacenter far away from the primary service. A scenario where all services,in all datacenters managed by a could-provider are impacted is probably new.

It is something that, considering the current geopolical situation we are now it, -and that I assume will only become worse- that we should better keep in the back of our mind.