Just a geek, finding my way in the fediverse.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • clif@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mllooking for half-stable Linux distro
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    5 months ago

    I’ve been on mint for ages but when I updated my RAID this year it originally wouldn’t recognize it. I eventually got it recognized but it capped the 16TB drives at 999GB for some reason. For fun, I went up the chain to Ubuntu… Same thing

    In frustration I went to Grandma’s house with Debian and it worked perfect out of the box. I’d spent hours researching it but the best I found was a potential RAID related bug (lvm, specifically, I think) introduced in Ubuntu that, of course, filtered into Mint. Even fdisk reported the physical drives as 999GB in Mint/Ubuntu.

    I still don’t know the exact cause but I got it up and running so I’m a Debian guy now, I guess.

    Granted, my use case isn’t super normal since I’m using a BIOS RAID1 (and we all know how fun BIOS RAID can be) with full disk encryption.

    Worked out in the end but it made me sad to ditch Mint



  • The relationship with the instructor is something I wanted to touch on but thought I’d maybe rambled too much already.

    If it’s a good program, they WANT you to succeed and they want to give you every possible advantage. You can show up to class, do the bare minimum, and maybe pass. But going the extra bit and asking good, useful, questions will get you much further.

    I’ve never met an instructor who cares that isn’t up for side discussions, private tutoring, and literally anything that helps the student squeeze as much info as possible before, during, and after the class. I have zero respect for anyone who teaches a class and refuses to do anything outside of the prescribed class hours… Makes me angry just thinking about it.

    Edit: also if the instructor is working in the industry then they have a network that you can tap into… which is often more important


  • Be careful about “boot camps”, and I say this as someone who teaches at one on the side (coding, not security). A lot of them are kind of like degree mills - pay money, get stamp, maybe worthwhile or maybe worthless.

    If you go that route, do a lot of research. The biggest thing I’d look for is that the instructors work in the field full time and teach on the side (because they love sharing info and teaching the next generation). Hire rates for grads is also a good indicator… But take close note of where those hires are at and ask if it’s not published.

    Any time I’ve come across these kind of programs where the boot camp instructors only job is teaching, the info is usually 10+ years dated and relatively useless past the absolute basics.


  • Occasionally it’s caused some problems with the tracking crapware that the spouse’s company uses in their web platform. Since they work from home and it breaks the main site they use for work, I’ve had to add some exceptions.

    I’ve also seen it occasionally cause problems on websites that rely on tracking garbage and outright fail when they’re blocked. Usually I just never go there again but in a few cases it’s been something I was forced to use so I just disable the pihole for five minutes, do what I need, and hope to never visit that site again.

    I think there have been maybe eight of these occurrences in the past five years so it’s not a continual annoyance. No big deal and definitely worth it.




  • clif@lemmy.worldOPtoLinux@lemmy.mlTopics for a Linux intro course
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    10 months ago

    Excellent suggestions.

    I’ve got one example for the shell scripting section - a script I wrote decades ago called serial_killer.sh that’s used to terminate “bad” processes that spin up tens to hundreds of copies of themselves. You do something like serial_killer.sh my-bad-program and it will use a few CLI commands to find the PIDs for all processes named “my-bad-program”, ask you to input the signal (sigterm/sigkill) to use, ask you for confirmation that you want to send that signal to the list of processes (listing all of them with program name, owner, PID, PPID, etc), then kill all of them in one go if you confirm.

    That was a hacky fix to a bad approach/configuration, but it was a fun script : )


  • clif@lemmy.worldOPtoLinux@lemmy.mlTopics for a Linux intro course
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    10 months ago

    That is an excellent idea on time management.

    Yes - I’m planning to walk them through a real install to a VM and have them follow along so they have a local instance that they can play with on their (win or mac) system. It requires me to spend a little extra time for setting up VirtualBox, but I think it’s worth it since they can then play along and experiment as we discuss each topic. I know that’s how I learn best - you can tell me something multiple times but it’s only when I truly do it that it’ll stick in my memory forever.

    Covering the intro, history, etc would be perfect topics to go over while the install runs.

    EDIT : I should point out that I’m going to distribute thumb drives to the students that will contain VirtualBox (win+mac) installers, a Linux ISO that we’ll use (probably Ubuntu), as well as that thumb drive being a live Linux bootable drive in case they ever want to plug & boot without using a VM. This will hopefully cut down on wasted class time for “now everybody go download this 4GB ISO” - they’ll already have it available and all in the same drive/directory/etc for every student. From past teaching experience, there’s always at least one that doesn’t come prepared with downloads and such no matter how much I harp on it… that and the ever present “I saved it somewhere and now I can’t find it” 😆


  • Now I’m learning something. I’ve defaulted to using ifconfig for so many years I didn’t even realize that ip and ss were around. I’ll look into them, thanks for the pointers.

    And yeah, good idea on file editing. Maybe I should move nano up to the essential category for basic editing and keep vim in the “extras” since it takes a little more training to use effectively, while providing a lot more functionality if you know how to take advantage of it : D