What the...!

My GF just selected all files on her harddrive and clicked "Open".

The look at her face when she figured out what she have done.

BONUS: She restarts her computer, and upon start she selects Yes to the "Your computer shutdown unexpected, would you like to re-open the applications" popup 😂

I was looking for about a month for a laptop. Then on this one magical day I open kijiji and see a Toshiba Thinkpad T450s with 20gb of ram, 138 ssd and an i5-6300U cpu going fo 500$ (value 2000+).

My first thought was. Okay. Scam alert. But you know. What if?

So I call up this person. And its a girl who got a pc from her bf, but really she wanted a mac so she is selling it.

This straight up blew my mind. I decided, fuck it. Got 500. Ran to her. Ran a systems check on the laptop. Checked for any attempts at opening it up. Checked the harddrive. Checked the ram. Everything is solid.

Long story short. Thank god for apple fangirls!

We were talking about harddrives at work when someone was wondering if filling them with helium would make them spin faster... Then imagination took over!

"But helium balloons float, right... So would helium filled hard drives float..? Probably not due to weight but imagine dropping a hard drive and seeing it float towards the ceiling.."

"John, the delivery guy has a box with new harddrives downstairs, could you go get them?
*shouts* John did you get them? Just don't open the box outside!! No, no, NOOO DON'T OPEN IT OUTSIDE! JOHN, THE HARDDRIVES, BE CAREFUL, DON'T OPEN THE BOX OUTSI.....
*harddrives floating by the window into the air*
NOO, JOHN, WHAT DID YOU DO?!

"*walks into the office, harddrives floating against the ceiling* goddammit John, not again"

"John, why are you putting one kilometer long cables on those harddrives?
*John let's them float into the air towards the clouds*
We offer cloud storage!"

(We have a usual office building ceiling)
"John, I need a 1tb harddrive, where are those?
Uhm... C12!

*takes a ladder and walks towards c12 to pluck one from the ceiling*"

😆

Had a former customer call a few (10) years ago, furious that we shut down their website.

Me: but you moved your website to another provider 2 years ago? We dont even provide webhosting any more?

Turns out, when they moved we put a redirect to their new site on our server.

During the summer this server was decommisoned due to a failing harddrive but since we no longer had any active customers on it we just pulled the plug.

The customer had never actually redirected their domain name. :)

When we sent them a copy of their own cancellation letter we got an "oh hell, sorry".

:D

So the new mass surveillance law will be going into effect from the 1st of January.

Of course, since I'm very keen on my security/privacy, I'm going to implement some precautions.

- A few vps's connecting to tor, i2p and VPN provider so that I can always use a secure connection.

- Setup anti tracker/ads/etc etc shit on the VPS's. Probably through DnsMasq and the hosts file.

- Use Tor browser by default. I've tried this for a while now and damn, the tor network has become way faster than only even a year ago! Some pages literally only take a few seconds to load.

- Wipe my laptop, encrypt the harddrive and at least put QubesOS on it together with probably a few other systems.

- Ungoogle my new phone, use it with VPN by default.

- Get rid of all non encrypted communication services. I think that only leaves me with a few account removals because I haven't chatted unencrypted for nearly a fucking year now.

If anyone has any more ideas, please share!

I accidentally flashed Linux on the wrong partition of my harddrive. Lost 300Gb of anime 😭

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

Turns out my 4chan image scraper has been running for 6 months without interruptions. I now have 106k pictures and webms of highly questionable content on my harddrive. This is how Oppenheimer must have felt.

Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.

I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.

Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.

Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"

Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"

NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!

"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"

I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!

(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")

When you have to figure out whether it's better to transfer 85GB of data via internet or to load it onto a harddrive and drive it 600 km/ 370 miles in your car.

I decided to setup a little server on my local network just to make use of a 2TB harddrive I use to store videos.

Told everyone in the house I planned to grow the library over time and that they could access it all in a browser using my system name. It's become quite a fun venture and my video library is shaping up nicely.

Using nginx on a Dell XPS 17 with Ubuntu 16.04 to host a server that just auto indexes a shared directory on my external 2TB harddrive. Kind of an embarrassing rig, but it's just a hobby activity and I do plan to upgrade shit later.

The real fun has been getting to understand a bit more about video files. They used to be magic to me, as complex as their file extension. Now I run a script on all of my torrents which checks the video and audio codecs, converting them if they aren't supported by Chrome's and Firefox's web players, and outputting mp4s using ffmpeg. I feel like I have this stuff down fairly well now. Becoming more and more automated.

Next step is to port forward so I can access it from anywhere, but we'll see about that later down the line.

IPod didn't sync well on my Linux machines so decided to give windows - in a highly isolated environment disconnected from the Internet behind a firewall and sandbox - a shot with itunes.

- during the installation it wouldn't detect the fucking harddrive multiple times (genuine unlicensed copy) and after the 4-5th time it's random-fuckingly recognized out of fucking nowhere; I didn't change shit.
- crashes (blue screen and freezes) multiple times during the installation, multiple retries and suddenly it works(?!)
- it took about 10 minutes (!!!!!!!) to install 10+ drivers for an iPod and an external hdd:
Installing Apple iPod drivers... Done
Installing seagate drivers... Done
Installing apple iPod drivers... Done
Installing seagate drivers... Done
Installing Apple iPod drivers... Done
Installing seagate drivers... Done
Installing Apple iPod drivers... Done
Installing seagate drivers... Done
Installing Apple iPod drivers... Done

WHY INSTALL THOSE FUCKERS 5 FUCKING TIMES?!

- iTunes installation fails multiple times without error code (unknown error occured, restoring to original state...),just said fuck it and clicked the shortcut after the ***th fail and it works just like this, THANKS FOR NOTIFYING ME (NOT)!
- iTunes has to restore the entire ipod, this was done with iTunes in the store I bought it already, thanks for nothing.
-restore takes 30+ minutes?!
-syncs the iPod 3 times afterwards.

*clicks close button*
*are you sure you want to quit? Sync in progress*
*oh shit, cancels*
*itunes quits*
*?!?!?*

*tries to import media library*
*seagate hdd suddenly not detected*

I'm fucking tired of this bullshit, windows and iTunes can go die in a fucking corner after getting ass raped while their genitals are being scraped off layer by fucking layer and dipped into fucking acid.

Tip #4 Use a magnet to keep your harddrive clean!

Linux gives you so much freedom, for example the freedom to fuck your system.
When i was experimenting with bootsticks i typed the following in the terminal:
sudo dd if=bootstick.iso of=/dev/sdb

Where is the mistake? The usb-stick was already plugged in at boot-time and since it was bootable linux mint named it /dev/sda.

You propably already realized it, i wrote the iso the my harddrive. My attempts to restore the partition-table failed, but luckily the kernel still had it in memory and i was able to backup my files via nautilus.
Still, i nearly had a heart attack

A few years ago I was browsing Bash.org, and a user posted that he'd physically lost a machine.

A few weeks ago, I'd switched my router out for OPNSense. I figured it was time to start cleaning up my network.

Over the course of tracking down IP addresses and assigning statics to mac addresses, I spotted an IP I didn't recognize.

Being a home network, I'm pretty familiar with everything on the network by IP, so was a little taken aback.

I did some testing, found out that it was a Linux box. Cool.

I can SSH into it. Ok.

Logs show that it's running fine, no CPU/Memory/Harddrive issues. Nice.

So where is it?

Traceroute shows its connected directly to the router... Maybe over an unmanaged switch...

Hostname is "localhost"... That's no help.

I've walked the network 4 times now, and God knows where it is.

I think maybe I'll just leave it alone. If it ain't broke...

You know those post boxes that are popular in europe that have a slit at the top and you drop the delivery in and it falls a bit? Yeah, guess how my new harddrive just got delivered.

The manual for this harddrive is on pages 1-5 of this 40 page thing for any language

So I spent the last two days wondering WTF I did wrong, because my Laptop (Debian STABLE mind you...) would only boot in read-only mode and therefore only TTY (which btw sucks donkey-balls on a 4k screen (see image for visualization)) but on the earlier Kernel 4.9.0-7, everything was dandy.

So apparently laptop-mode-tools managed to fuck shit up in a way yet unknown, but as soon as I yeeted that bitch off my harddrive, everything was working flawlessly again...

I was cleaning up my hard drive and deleted some old directories.
I was notified that my backup just started and wanted to look how far along it was.
However, instead of 'ls -l /mnt/DATA/Backup' my shitpile of muscle memory typed 'rm -rf /mnt/DATA/Backup'... That's when my harddrive suddenly had 750GB of free space and I decided that I probably need some sleep.

Before any of y'all wanna lecture me on off-site backups, funny thing: Today I implemented a new daily backup routine (praised be borg) and therefore deleted my somewhat chaotic Backups on my NAS "Because if shit hits the fan, I still have my local Backup"

Warning: This contains spoilers for Silicon Valley S4 E10:
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At 5:35 Gilfoyle says: "In order to hold that much data we would have to go RAID 0. [...] If we lose even one platter, we lose Melcher's data. Permanently."
But my question is: Why use RAID at all? Just storing the data without RAID would reduce the complexity, and if one disk fails, only the data on that one disk is lost. Also, I doubt speed is a priority at that point, since the whole thing is running on a home broadband connection, which something like a WD Gold data-center-harddrive (200+ MB/s) can easily max out.

Also, wouldn't it be easier to pay the broadband bill out of their own pocket, instead of moving tons of server equipment to Stanford?

My first real exposure to a PC was when my father and me built one for myself. Y'know, some AMD Athlon 64, some MSI board, 2 GB of RAM, an NVIDIA 8600 GT, everything was nice.

I never put malware on that thing even though I heavily used it for things like games, I was really cautious with that even when I was like 6 years old (but my father once accidentally did, he killed it by damaging the filesystem on the harddrive which, funny enough, only took the malware with it)
I still have that PC, but it now has weird issues with memory management ;-;

I honestly can't remember what the hell was wrong with me when I configured my laptop. Now I am stuck with a very decent laptop with a 200something GB hdd that is even slower than any hdd I use in my other computers. Wtf. It is ok for most Situations because I only ise it to write emails or browse the internet on the go and for the demanding jobs I have several very powerful pcs at home. But for travelling it is such a pain in the ass! I can't always upload everything to a cloud and I often don't have reliable internet connection, so I help myself with usb harddrives but that sucks as well. Argh, I need to get myself to buy a 1TB ssd. But they are so expensive!

Linux.
I love you and hate you at the same time. If something breaks with the boot sequence, usually it involves using a live USB to fix the existing installation, which I directly did once I got a kernel panic.

Checked out the hard disk uuids (I was partitioning), tried chrooting but couldn't get further. Then, I booted again into the faulty Linux installation and the frikkin page said I had to run fsck on my harddrive manually. Did that in the handy provided terminal and guess what, it boots again.

Linux, you can't help people who assume issues, like me. I still like you though

This is the worst possible thing that can happen, when you setup a new computer.

I live for about a decade on ubuntu. I got an invite for a LAN where games are being played that I cannot run with wine or are not ported to linux.
Fine I get an old harddrive and setup a fresh Windows 7. I have a little update script that takes care of updating and restarting.
BUT I CAN NOT DO ANY UPDATES.
As you can see in the picture the original Windows 7 installation disc that was part of my computer did not carry the matching NIC drivers.

A friend of mine gave me a spare WiFi dongle. That did not bring its drivers on the USB dongle but on disc that he lost.

WHY?! HOW?! This is not plug and play. This is a part that SHOULD be plug and play.

After I got an other WiFi dongle that was plug and play, I could finally download the right drivers.

Why can the Windows 7 disc that was part of the computer setup not contain the right drivers, but a ubuntu 12.04 live disc can?!
ARGH

So Windows released a faulty update that broke the driver for my external harddrive. Now I don't have enough space for the update...

I did a backup of my computer on a new harddrive. I know it's on me for not checking this, but how difficult it could be for the software to check if there is enough space on the hd for the whole backup BEFORE starting it, instead of in the middle of it?? 😥

Whenever I have my mac crash and corrupt its OS, I just get a backup harddrive and it copies itself FLAWESSLY. I have all my programs, settings, settings in programs and files.

When Windows crashes, and I use the recovery tool, I LOOSE EVERYTHING. The only thing I get to keep are my files, and they most of the time have permission issues after a restore.

Windows is like the toddler that stares out to void of existance and can't do anything but drool on their shirt, while its parents say he's highly gifted.

Fuck me we're able to choose between only a few OS'es that my clients know and allow me to work on but things like this just make me want to go be a chicken farmer or something.

I really like helping other learn how to use a programming language or solve problems on general. I often go out of my way and stop working on my hobby projects, just to help someone.

Thag being said, I'm no prgramming god. I myself am striving to become a better programmer.
I make mistakes, I can't always help you, I am still learning, but I only have good intentions. And you are by no means obligated to follow my advice. Quite the contrary, fight me, try to prove me wrong or say point out possible flaws. THINK ABOUT WHAT I TELL YOU. DON'T JUST BLINDLY FOLLOW MY ADVICE AND BITCH ON ME LATER.

This happens rather often and I can see why you want to blame me. And I can't deny that part of this is also my fault.
Situations like these don't really tilt me.

But today someone had the fucking nerve to pop a file into the chat and get mad at me for sugvesting a cleaner, shorter and more efficient solution. LIKE I DON'T FUCKING CARE THAT IT TOOK YOU A WHOLE DAY TO IMPLEMENT SOMETHING I CAN DO BETTER IN MINUTES, I JUST WANT TO HELP YOU.
But the best thing I get afterwards: "But you told me to do it like that" BITCH WHAT!?
I have chat logs telling me loud and clear that the concept we never talked about before in private nor on a public server (bless discord's search function). And I will not accept your lousy excuse of having me cobfused with someone. You disrespected me greatly, you put words in my mouth, just to justify your pity anger, when I'm trying to help you?!

Get crucified and put on a shooting range!

I offer you out of pure goodwill. Something you'd normally have to pay for. And this is the treatment I get in return?
Just rm -rf your disastrous, dd -if=/dev/urandom your harddrive and sod off!

Thanks a lot NVidia... Kinda feels like this is becoming a weekly thing for me 🙄

(Also tfw you find your backup-file in the trash-directory of the ext. harddrive)

Since i hard problems with a slow harddrive i've been asking for a SSD. It took 6 weeks for a SSD to arrive.
It has been laying on my desk for another 4, because busy projects etc.
Last friday i decided to install it. I have to do everything about the install myself. No IT support nothing.
I've been trying to install windows on the SSD For over a day now. And now im fucking done with it. FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE SSD. FUCK THE FUCKING PROJECT AND FUCK THE FUCKING CLIENT. Goddamn morons around here.

So simple but so hard.
Having a bad cold I'v been home for a few days. Finally I could bend down without my head exploding so I could replace a harddrive in my ceph system.
I took everything off line, installed the new drive and did all the right things,
but afterwards it didnt come up.
It didn't make sense so I googled for hours while my fever were getting stronger without finding the answer.
So I gave up and reverted my changes and plugged in the old harddrive...
It still didn't work... a bit of panic. I mean... its all my files!
After a lot of sweating (no caused by fever) I realised I moved two ceph-mon processes a few weeks ago but I never rebooted the system afterwards, to fix it all I had to do:
systemctl enable ceph-mon
on two machines.

Summary: make sure things work after reboot and don't do challaging stuff while your brain is all scrambled.

Windows 10 is just a bad joke at this point. First it doesn't show any text in the menus, now it fucks up all the drivers. I really need to scrap it and install literally ANY other os in order to improove my experience but I keep telling myself that it doesn't really make sense until I have a new harddrive and I keep wondering if the Evo850 is worth it. Fuck the saturday night struggle.

Hi fellow devranters,
Just started working for a small engineering company ~10 employees. They have a single guy that have done most og the development work and version control management. Turns out everything was stored om his personal harddrive with a backup on an USB drive. I'm doing the "dirty work" on porting the version control to a network drive. Not ideal, but the boss was insisting on doing it this way. Have anybody encountered anything like this?

A while a go I bricked my wireless harddrive by symbolic linking busybox what would the best way of recovering it be?

I can't delete stuff!

I am currently sorting through my harddrive(s) and realized I have over 800 gigabytes of raw audio and video from four of our theatre productions lying around. The films have long been edited and there is no use for the source material anymore.
But just in case, I'm keeping it. You never know...

External Storage recommendation questions.

Im in need of some sort of external storage, either a harddrive or a NAS server, but idk what to get.

Price should be reasonable for the security and storage space it gives, so heres what i figured so far for pros and cons:

NAS Server:
+ Bigger capacity
+ Raid option
+ Easily expandable
+ Always accessible via the network (local)

- Difficult to transport (not gonna do that, but still)
- Expensive
- Physically larger
- Consumes power 24/7 (i dont pay for power currently)

Harddrive:
+ Easy to pack away and transport
+ Cheaper

- If drive fails, youre fucked
- If you want larger capacity, you end up with two external backups

What do you guys do? Im not sure what i should do :i
Any advice is appreciated.

It will be used for external backup, as mentioned. For my server and my own pc.

External hard drive reliability question.

Im looking for a 2-4 TB external harddrive, depending on the price (best bang per buck).

I found a Seagate Backup Plus Portable, 4TB. It seemed reasonable, until i googled failure rates of seagate drives.

Do you guys have any recommendations for me? Anything is appreciated :)