Bought this Lenovo thinkpad netbook a while ago.

I was told it has 4gb ram.

Just did a free and free -m command.

It shows nearly 8gb of ram.

😯😍

Congrats! Now you can finally run chrome xD

@MateTea42 Never 🤢 :P

Hdd encryption, sticker on the cam, csf firewall setup == 💕

@linuxxx the highest security is to be disconnected from the net.

A friend of me hhad me inspect his pc once. It said it had 1TB of storage which indeed did but half of it got used up as a predefined backup partition.

@JFK422 so the ‘backup solution’ was a partitioned half of the same physical drive? Amazing....

@namenlossss a ‘backup partition’ on the same physical drive helps 0%. In the scenario you put forth where some non-catastrophic failure occurs ‘somewhere’ on the disk, the files on the backup partition are no more or less likely to be written in failed sectors. It’s just as likely that a random error will occur in sectors in the backup partition as in the system partition. Not 10%, not even 1% less likely. The only possible advantage to this scenario would be if one wanted to wipe out and reinstall the OS, leaving the ‘backup’ partition in tact (assuming the user is smart enough to not make any mistakes resulting in a new partition table being written, etc.). And even then, I’d say ‘backup’ is a terrible choice of terms, it’s more of a system/data scheme (and not a clever one). This sort of scenario is why people loose years of hard work, it creates a false sense of data security.

@agaskins it counts as one copy. A backup only exists after 3 copies (on different mediums). Due to the fact that it is random when errors appear.

@MateTea42 I’m sorry, but I don’t see what your bringing to the conversation here in regards to my point that no partitioning schemes on a single physical drives can reduce the likelihood of data loss. This 50/50 system/backup scheme do es NOTHING for data integrity, not even the 10% mentioned. There is ZERO advantage, in terms of data integrity, to be had from making a ‘backup partition’ on a single physical disk. If you are not able to grok this then go meditate on it please! Because I fear for your data if you believe this is a useful scheme for data security, haha :P

@agaskins There are different kinds of backup schemes including snapshots which I classify as a soft backup. It can help users return to a previous state in case anything goes wrong with the data on the active partition. This is however not a complete backup solution since as you stated the hdd will have faults after a random period of time. This is why you make backups in multiple places. In my opinion it can bring something to have backups on the same drive as long as it isn't the only backup. Even if you have something like a NAS server for backups, I have heard of 3 HDD failing with in 2 days. Point is the more backups you have on seperate systems ( / mediums) the better.

@MateTea42 that’s all well and good... but it’s irrelevant to what I said.

The only point I stated here was that placing data in a partition on the same drive has no real advantages opposed to putting it in a folder on the same drive. The partition brings nothing to the table (pun intended) and only harms users with a false sense of data integrity. Of course there are things advanced users can do to minimize risk with only one drive, and it might involve partioning schemes... but the topic was a user who needed help finding where ‘half his drive’ went... we’re talking basic backup mechanisms at most here. Even with more advance schemes I’m not entirely sold, though. When you start replicating and doing crc checks all the time you also work the drive harder... thus it’s more likely to fail than if you just left it all alone and used another solution. Bottom line: partitioning a single driving on a new pc and calling half of it a ‘backup’ location is a bad idea.

@linuxxx
Have you reflashed without Intel IME?

These things have the best build quality

@linuxxx sticker on camera? Why?

false advertising

@Mjack So any intruder that can access the camera can't see anything...?

@nik123 I honestly have no clue 😅

@nik123 I like LUKS because i can use an inconspicuous file mounted via loopback as a drive as needed, and easily transport the file anywhere with a thumb drive or back up to cloud, etc. It’s a bit cumbersome to mount by hand, but I made a script to handle mounting/unmounting it much like starting a systemd service. I also have a script to help remind me to not leave it mounted and do maintenance, etc. My only fear is that I’ll forget how to do some of the steps if I go on relying on these scripts for too long (although it helps in this regard that I ‘rolled my own’, at least in this case ha). But I’m not too familiar with encryptfs, does it simplify a lot of this? It sounds like you might have some worthwhile opinions of your own on the two. Personally I would’t mind hearing them! :P

@nik123 hmm, sounds interesting, I’ll have dig a little deeper in to encryptfs! When you say 0.5/5.0 sec for SSD/HDD(respectively), what does that mean really? Time to mount the encrypted fs? Time to decrypt a, say 500mb, file? Just curious of the context of those numbers so I can better understand what they mean. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

@nik123
Encfs it's the most portable, all its needed is the folder and can be mounted anywhere, Linux, Android or Windows. I use it for data, not bookable solution.
For system, on most IBM/lenovo there's FDE on sata level and it's good enough for me at least.
Since I do sysadmin mainly I tend to think like you, what's more recoverable in case of disaster :)

@nik123
They're very similar, but no,I don't think they're compatible in any way.

@nbamaral & @nik123 I think I’m going to give encryptFS a go this weekend, you’ve both peeked my interest! Thanks.

Still not enough to run slack and chrome together.

@praveenpuglia I hate slack and Chrome both so I'm all good :)

Welcome to this awesome place, @Carlos-C!

@linuxxx
Thank you, i'm happy to be here.

@MateTea42 if u r selecting HDD it should be different manufacturer and different batch no if same manufacturer other wise if manufacturer defect is there every HDD fail at same time

@mansoorkn true but it just reduces the probability of them failing together. The chances are still not 0 that enough HDDs fail in a short period of time to kill a raid setup.

@Nanos SMART, I believe, is the answer you’re looking for. smartctl (part of smartmon-tools, iirc) can be configured to email you, or run a script, the moment a self check discovers a problem, and even at first sign of something indicative of an impending failure (like read or seek errors). Of course it only helps if you configure it to actually run the self checks regularly. And be careful that you don’t end up with setting that wake a disk just to run checks. and make sure your disk isn’t spinning down more often than needed, if it’s needed at all, depending on the out usage patterns. The Arch Linux wiki page for smartctl has some great info that should be helpful on any OS you can run smartctl (maybe even OS X, but I’m not sure).