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Linux on servers and desktops: shells, services, permissions and troubleshooting.

22 posts

Posts tagged #linux

  1. Question

    Which Linux for an 84 year old neighbour who wants email, photos and the footy?

    My neighbour Margaret is 84 and sharp as a tack. Her laptop is a 2017 HP with an i5-7200U and 8GB of RAM, running Windows 10, which stopped getting security updates last October. Windows 11 will not install on it. The shop told her to buy a new laptop. She does not want a new laptop. She wants this one to keep working. What she uses it for: Email (a Gmail account, she uses it in the browser) Photos the grandchildren…

    Graham Whitfield5likes9comments

  2. Update

    systemd haters will tell you their 14 shell scripts and a…

    systemd haters will tell you their 14 shell scripts and a cron job are "simpler" than one unit file with a proper dependency graph and logging. they are not simpler. they are just yours, and you are emotionally attached to them. one unit file. please. for me

    Lena Hoffmann12likes5comments

  5. Question

    Python script works when I run it, does nothing in cron. What am I missing?

    Quick one. Practicing Linux for the transition (ETS in 7 months, SkillBridge after that if it gets approved). Wrote a Python script that pings a list of hosts and writes the results to a CSV. Works fine when I run it from my home directory. Put it in crontab -e to run every 5 minutes. Nothing. No CSV, no error, nothing. */5 * * * * python3 pinger.py What I checked: cron is running ( systemctl status cron says…

    Ray Alvarez10likes6comments

  6. Question

    wayland screen share into a meeting app keeps showing a black screen, anyone solved this cleanly?

    ok i am asking for help in my own topic, which is humbling. setup: arch, sway (wlroots based), nvidia (i know, i know). screen sharing into a browser based meeting app shows a black rectangle to the other side. my camera works, audio works, just the screen share is black. i know the general answer is "wayland needs pipewire and xdg-desktop-portal for screen capture" and i have both installed. but something in the…

    Lena Hoffmann4likes4comments

  7. Question

    Vets in tech: how did you translate your MOS into a resume a civilian recruiter actually reads?

    Roger, first real question post. Context: Army, 12 yrs, 25U (signal support systems specialist), SSG. ETS in about 6 months. Doing SkillBridge in the spring if it gets approved. Learning Python and Linux at night. Have Security+ from the Army (they made us). Problem: my resume reads like an NCOER. "Supervised 9 Soldiers. Maintained 100% accountability of $2.1M in signal equipment. Ensured COMSEC compliance." Brett…

    Ray Alvarez13likes10comments

  8. Article

    UPS + NUT: auto shutdown 3 Proxmox node and the NAS when the power cut (rainy season guide)

    Rainy season in HCMC. Some weeks we have 2-3 power cuts, 10 to 40 minutes. My APC Back-UPS 1000VA can run my 186W lab for ~18 minutes (UPS says), so for long cuts everything must shut down cleanly by itself, even when I am at work or asleep. This is how I do it with NUT (Network UPS Tools). Plan The UPS USB cable goes to one machine. That machine is the NUT primary (server) All other machines are secondary (clients)…

    Nguyễn Minh Hiếu10likes8comments

  9. Article

    We moved our nightly jobs to the greenest hours of the grid. Here's what it saved (spoiler: less than you'd think, and that's the point)

    I'm a data analyst at a community energy co-op in Bristol. We're small: about 400 member households, a few solar roofs, a share in a wind turbine, and one Linux box in a rack in a shared data centre that runs all our nightly jobs (meter data imports, billing calcs, the dashboards members look at). People in this topic keep asking about carbon-aware scheduling, so here's an honest write-up of doing it for real,…

    Freya Collins41likes17comments

  10. Article

    gaming on linux in 2026 is genuinely fine now, here is my actual setup

    i get asked "can you game on linux" more than anything else and the honest 2026 answer is: yes, for most games, better than you expect. here is what i actually run. distro: arch, sway, amd... no, i kept nvidia, because i am stubborn, see my other post. steam installed from the official package. proton is the whole trick proton is valve's compatibility layer, it runs windows games on linux through a bundled wine +…

    Lena Hoffmann24likes2comments

  11. Article

    Jellyfin hardware transcoding in a Proxmox LXC with Intel iGPU: the config that finally work

    Problem: when my parents watch something on the phone, Jellyfin transcode on CPU and the i5-8500T go to 95%, fans loud, and everything else on that node become slow. The iGPU (UHD 630) was sitting there doing nothing. It took me 2 evenings to make Quick Sync work inside an unprivileged LXC, so here is everything. 1. Check the host ls -l /dev/dri crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 0 ... card0 crw-rw---- 1 root render 226,…

    Nguyễn Minh Hiếu10likes8comments

  14. Experience

    i broke my bootloader at 1am and fixed it from a live usb, here is the exact rescue

    classic arch evening. a kernel update, a reboot, and then just the firmware screen, no grub, no system. my fault, i had been messing with the EFI partition. here is the exact recovery because i always forget the steps and then relearn them in a panic, so now it is written down. distro: arch, systemd, grub, encrypted root. hardware: thinkpad, UEFI. step 1: boot a live usb any arch live usb. boot it, get to the shell.…

    Lena Hoffmann17likes4comments

  15. Article

    ZFS mirror NAS: what I learn when a drive die at 2am (humidity edition)

    Last month one of my 8TB drives die at 2am on a Tuesday. Nothing was lost, because ZFS mirror, but I learn a few things that I want to write down before I forget. The pool TrueNAS SCALE, one pool called tank , 4 × 8TB in two mirror vdevs . Each mirror is one WD Red Plus + one Seagate IronWolf, bought from different shops in different months, so they are not from the same batch. TrueNAS does this in the UI, but this…

    Nguyễn Minh Hiếu20likes7comments

  16. Article

    the XZ backdoor was not a hack. it was a hostile takeover of a tired volunteer.

    everyone remembers the XZ backdoor (CVE-2024-3094, March 2024) as "the thing that almost backdoored SSH on every Linux box". that part is true and it was caught by luck, a Microsoft engineer noticing a half second of latency. but if you only remember the clever technical part you learned the wrong lesson. here is the short technical shape of it, and this Seytonic video does the timeline well if you want the full…

    Karl Lindqvist40likes7comments

  17. Article

    nvidia on wayland in 2026: it mostly works now, and here is the exact config that got me there

    i have complained about nvidia on wayland for years (see my torvalds clip) so it is only fair to say: in 2026 it mostly works. not perfectly. mostly. here is the actual config that took me from "unusable flicker and dead external monitor" to "daily driver", on arch with sway and an nvidia 30-series card. distro: arch, kernel 6.x, sway, nvidia proprietary driver (not nouveau, not yet). 1. the driver and the kernel…

    Lena Hoffmann28likes5comments

  18. Article

    My homelab in a Saigon apartment: 3 node Proxmox, TrueNAS, 41 container, 186W

    Many people ask in my Self Hosted topic "what do you actually run", so here is the full tour. It start 4 years ago as one old laptop under the TV. Now it is a 12U wall cabinet in the corner of our spare room, and my wife call it "the heater". Hardware pve1, pve2: Lenovo M720q Tiny, i5-8500T, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe each. Bought second hand, very good value pve3: HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini, i5-8500T, 32GB, 512GB NVMe NAS:…

    Nguyễn Minh Hiếu37likes15comments

  20. Experience

    The Novell server under the desk that nobody was allowed to reboot

    In 1997 I took a job looking after the systems at a mid-sized firm in Hobart. On my first day the office manager walked me round, pointed under a desk in accounts at a beige tower with a handwritten sign taped to it, and said: "That one runs payroll. Nobody touches it." The sign said DO NOT TURN OFF in capitals and was signed by a man who had left the company two years earlier. It was a NetWare 3.12 server. It had…

    Graham Whitfield7likes8comments

  21. Article

    my sway setup, explained part by part (so you can steal the good bits)

    people keep asking what my setup is so here is the whole thing, in parts, so you can take what you want and ignore the rest. this is arch + sway (wayland tiling compositor) on a thinkpad. dotfiles are linked at the bottom, PRs welcome, font comments are not. the compositor: sway sway is i3 but for wayland, same config syntax, so if you know i3 you already know sway. the config lives in ~/.config/sway/config . the…

    Lena Hoffmann15likes5comments

  22. Experience

    Seven dead SD cards in two years. Here is what finally fixed it

    G'day legends. Went through the shed drawer on the weekend and counted seven dead microSD cards, all out of Pis that run 24/7. The weather station, the chook house door, the Pi-hole, the garage camera. Every one died the same way: fine for months, then one morning it boots read-only or doesn't boot at all. Parts I use now (AUD, roughly): second hand 120GB SATA SSD ($20 at the tip shop / marketplace), a USB 3 to SATA…

    Matt O'Brien29likes10comments

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