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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • A couple thoughts. Assuming your motherboard is capable of SATA hot-swap and has it enabled (look in your BIOS), you should be able to umount the game drive, and swap it without shutting down. Assuming the game drives are partitioned using GPT, you should be able to add individual entries in /etc/fstab using the partition UUIDs and control mounting and umounting to specific mount points for different drives. Personally, I would add the noauto option to those entries, so that mounting is done manually and can be controlled easily.

    OS drive swapping may be simpler, depending on your BIOS. With the system powered off, swap the drives and assuming the BIOS picks up the new boot partition cleanly, you’re off to the races. The only issue would be if the BIOS just doesn’t want to recognize one of the drives’ boot partitions. I had this issue with my Arch install and my MSI motherboard. The motherboard won’t recognize the default install location and I had to move the boot files around to work in a fallback mode. Annoying, but solvable.

    Finally, as others have said, this could all be a matter of over-complicating things. Why not just stuff all the drives in the case and always have everything? You can configure the primary drive’s boot loader to let you pick between which OS to boot. And you can have any and all data drives mounted at the same time. Unless you are struggling with physical space or power requirements, it saves on having to muck about with swapping stuff.


  • do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!

    What is this “sort” thing you speak of? I don’t sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I’ll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year’s photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn’t happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.

    As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don’t sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.


  • The first issue with running a coin miner is using company resources for your own profit. Your own system, using your own electricity, go for it. Running it on a company owned laptop, while at a company building, burning electricity the company is paying for. Ya, that starts to get uncomfortably close to fraud or theft. There is also that whole, “running unauthorized software on a company system, doing who knows what else in the background.” There is a very real possibility that the coin miner has unknown vulnerabilities which could allow remote code execution; or, just outright be malicious and contain a remote access trojan. Maybe he was smart enough to audit all the code it was using and be very sure that’s not the case. More likely, he just grabbed a random implementation of XMRIG, put his wallet in the config file and ran it. Either way, he also made a point of refusing to remove it, so we escalated up to management. With the recent ransomware outbreak having been in the multi-million dollar (possibly low tens of millions) damage range, refusing to remove unauthorized software went over about as well as a lead balloon. There may have been other factors at play; but, the unauthorized software and being a dick about removing it was what got him out the door.


  • If you spin it up, fucking own it. When you’re done with it, shut it down. I have long lost count of the number of times I’ve reached out to a team to ask about the coin miner they are running on some random EC2 instance only to find out that some jackass spun it up for a test, gave it a public IP, set the VPC to allow any inbound traffic, installed all kinds of random crap and then never updated it. Nor did it get shutdown when the test ended. So, a year and a half later, when the software was woefully out of date, someone hacked it and spun up a coin miner. Oh, and the jackass who set it up didn’t bother to enable logging or security monitoring. But, they sure as hell needed the ability to spin stuff up on their own. Because working with IT to get it done right would be too hard for their fragile little ego.


  • You joke, but I’ve actually been responsible for a coder getting shown the door for running a coin miner on his work laptop.

    In his defense, cyber security at that company was crap for a long time. After a ransomware outbreak, they started paying attention and brought some folks like myself in to start digging out. This guy missed the easy out of, “hey that’s not mine!” The logs we had were spotty enough that we would have just nuked the laptop and moved on. But no, he had to fight us and insist that he should be allowed to run a coin miner on his work laptop. Management was not amused.



  • Ya, sadly there is still a lot of useful content in the technical subreddits. So I find myself ending up there via search engines on a fairly regular basis. But, I specifically use the Redirector plugin for Firefox to auto-magically force the use of old Reddit. If I hit the site on my work computer, I’m quickly reminded about why I quit the site.







  • Personally, I prefer that it’s all in one place. It’s hard enough to get teams to update any sort of asset inventory in one place. Getting them to update it in two, and keep everything in sync, sounds like a disaster begging to happen. And, as a heavy consumer of my organization’s CMDB (I work in cybersecurity), I much prefer having only one place to look.

    The most successful CMDB I’ve ever seen was a single, unified asset tracking system which included all relevant asset details, asset owner, technical PoC and compliance documentation. The reason it was so successful was that NAC was tied to the CMDB. If a system wasn’t in the CMDB, it got dumped in a very locked down VLAN which was really only useful for new system setup. Once a system was configured, the appropriate paperwork submitted, and the system added to the CMDB, it would then be automagically moved to the appropriate VLAN for it’s location/function. When a system owner or technical PoC left the organization, one of the required workflows was reassigning all assets in the CMDB. This all worked surprisingly, especially considering that the CMDB was a bespoke Classic ASP website written in VB6, with some newer pages being VB.Net in C#.