Random Tech Questions you want answered.

Malor wrote:

< snip >

It's not as intense as it used to be, but spammers still constantly try to phish for valid accounts they can bombard, and they always succeed at least some of the time. If you're using a single email address, then if anyone who knows it has bad data hygiene for even one click, it may end up being heavily spammed.

It's an ongoing, small time investment to keep your inbox almost 100% pristine.

I'm reading all this and thinking "yeah, but I also get roughly 3 or 4 spam messages in my inbox a year, and that's on a primary Gmail account that I've had for nearly 20 years."

Spam isn't the thing that's going to drive me to set up my own server, is all I'm saying.

bepnewt wrote:
Redherring wrote:

...
The example for how to mount the persistent storage doesn’t apply to the file system I’m working with, and I don’t know how to translate it. I understand Windows file systems well and Linux file systems not very much at all. And this is running on a NAS with I guess some proprietary Linux version. I’m doing this in ssh with root access.
...

Is this on a Synology NAS, by chance?

-BEP

It’s a Netgear ReadyNAS.

Jonman wrote:
Malor wrote:

< snip >

It's not as intense as it used to be, but spammers still constantly try to phish for valid accounts they can bombard, and they always succeed at least some of the time. If you're using a single email address, then if anyone who knows it has bad data hygiene for even one click, it may end up being heavily spammed.

It's an ongoing, small time investment to keep your inbox almost 100% pristine.

I'm reading all this and thinking "yeah, but I also get roughly 3 or 4 spam messages in my inbox a year, and that's on a primary Gmail account that I've had for nearly 20 years."

Spam isn't the thing that's going to drive me to set up my own server, is all I'm saying.

But, even if GMail has gotten that good.... this is how to be that good on your own, without depending on their massive AI filtering engine.

LeapingGnome wrote:

I have been using fastmail for years. Has been utterly reliable for me and I recommend it. I originally went with it because it is one of the few decent providers that lets you setup custom sending identities for your own custom domains, at least when I last researched it.

I moved my wife over to it a few years ago and she has never had problems either.

I knew they had a referral program but I had to dig it up... if anyone does want to try Fastmail you can get 10% off at this link: https://ref.fm/u11920349

Redherring wrote:

In docker-speak I think it’s trying to tell me:

1. If I start a docker container the storage will be inside it, so if I delete the container the storage will be deleted too. I’m not sure why I would want to delete the container but maybe that’s because I don’t know enough about docker yet.
2. I can mount a directory outside the container for persistent storage that will survive destroying the container, and this is the correct way to do it.

I have tested and the storage does persist if I stop the container or reboot the host device.

The example for how to mount the persistent storage doesn’t apply to the file system I’m working with, and I don’t know how to translate it. I understand Windows file systems well and Linux file systems not very much at all. And this is running on a NAS with I guess some proprietary Linux version. I’m doing this in ssh with root access.

The example line is “ -v /mnt/data:/data” which I think means use /mnt/data as the storage location. In windows the equivalent is “-v d:\data:/data”

My data volume is called /dev/md127/data (I think)

I tried “-v /dev/md127/data:/data” but it throws up all sorts of errors. Maybe docker just isn’t allowed to write there or I am reading the syntax wrong.

Apologies to anyone who didn’t want the tech questions to get this techy

Edit ...
Is /dev/md127/data says “cannot access; not a directory” so yeah I am not getting it.

Containers feed your processes a pack of lies: where things are, how much memory there is, what networks are connected, etc., so focus on what you're providing to the container. /dev is for devices, so /dev/md127/data is not a directory in the same way that /dev/sda3 is not a directory. "-v /mnt/data:/data" just means to lie to the process in your container that what's at /mnt/data on the host is available at /data. How to do this in the The Cloud varies.

Thanks, Kurrelgyre and billt721 nailed it, the file system isn’t dev/md127 at all - it’s mounted as /data so all I need is "-v /data/subfolderwhereiwantmystuff:/data" and it works correctly.

I'm not sure if you actually need to know this, but just in case: a filesystem typically means "the organization of data on disk". There are lots and lots in Linux. Ext4 is the most common, but there are oodles of others, like XFS, JFS, ZFS (an aftermarket addon), btrfs, FAT32, and so on. A filesystem is written onto a block storage device of some kind, and serves as library of sorts, giving you shelves to hold data and a card catalog to find where that data is actually put. Filesystems are then typically mounted into the root file hierarchy somewhere. The point at which it attaches (in your case, /data), is the "mount point".

You need to be very clear about mount points. The filesystem serving that mountpoint is usually not very important, although you might end up surprised if it's, say, a 'tmpfs', something held only in RAM, which disappears when the machine reboots. Filesystems are all supposed to look the same in use, so usually it doesn't matter much what you choose.

Unless you know otherwise, ext4 is a pretty sane default, most of the time. Different filesystems are better at different things, but ext4 is solid, not notably bad at anything, and readable by almost any Linux machine, so moving your disks around is pretty easy.

I should also say that the Docker syntax for file storage is weird. With most programs, you would just -v /data/subfolder/data, without the colon. I'm not sure what that's doing there, but it's a Dockerism, not a Linuxism.

edit: oh, I get it, the part after the colon is the path visible to the guest. I should have read the "lies" post more carefully.

Yeah I am not going to mess with mount points or file system types at all, because it will likely break the NAS configuration. What I’ve done shouldn’t affect anything else. It’s all working the way I wanted it to.

Is this a good laptop?

I’m looking for something I can use for work- I currently have 2 external monitors (1 hdmi and 1 using a docking station). I also like playing the occasional game - currently playing torchlight and I store all of the family photos

Not sure about Walmart, I’d rather buy through Costco for their exchange policy and warranty policy

The Y540s are decent, check them out on notebookcheck.net for a detailed review that discusses the trade-offs. I know Costco has some of the Lenovo models but maybe those are the Legions instead of Y540s.

For me personally when I was shopping around Thanksgiving I went with an HP Omen for around that same price with similar specs except for a Ryzen vs i7 and I have been happy with it.

Lenovo has had serious security/supply chain issues, so if that matters to you, or if you're going to use this for work, you might want to avoid them.

Robear wrote:

Lenovo has had serious security/supply chain issues, so if that matters to you, or if you're going to use this for work, you might want to avoid them.

What sort of issues? I know my employer uses a pretty secure virtual desktop but I don’t want to make anything worse

Lenovo had a trend of installing malware / spyware on their PCs, under the guise of performance improvement / customer updates type tools, and they were at a level that it was very difficult or impossible to remove. Most of those scandals came out in the 2015-16 timeframe, I don't remember any recent ones.

I had thought about mentioning it, but that is a judgement call that each person has to make about if they want to support a company with a history of doing things like that. Similar it is a judgement call if you want to buy from a US company like Dell or HP, or from a Chinese company like Lenovo or Huawei.

Ego Man, the DoD identified "cybersecurity risks" with Lenovo products as recently as 2016, and as of mid-2019, these had not been corrected. Further, if you go to their US website, they don't even list Federal under their Government solutions category. And none of my customers will touch Lenovo (my company sells only to the Federal government.)

Remember, an endpoint vuln can circumvent VPNs. That's kind of the whole point...

Food for thought.

Huawei and Xaiomi are among the companies that have been banned for use in the DoD, based on classified tests. I will gently suggest that those folks know what they are doing...

While I don't know enough to comment on security issues, I have a Lenovo (Legion) laptop, and that thing has been a nightmare from a technical standpoint, and I likely won't buy from them again.

The most annoying issue: If I have a USB thumbdrive or HD plugged into the thing, the keyboard (also USB) starts acting up, missing or repeating keys. This is a stupid problem that should not exist, and yet even reinstalling the whole system did not fix it.

I've had good luck the last few years with Dell's midrange. Back in the 2000's, it was true that if you bought 20 of them, you'd buy 4 more to replace the faulty ones. But today, they are reliable (and they just recently completed their supply chain certification if I understand them correctly; you can get TAA ones if you need them).

Thanks all. I’ll keep on looking.

Nvm

billt721 wrote:

For the moment, I'm doing the 14-day free trial at hey.com (from the Basecamp people).

Following up a bit here -- hey.com seems neat, and I like some of what they're doing, but it's 1) twice as expensive as either protonmail or fastmail (you do get more storage space, but it's also missing some features that the other two have) and 2) is really for people who actually use email a lot. I often go a week without checking mine, so I'm moving onto trying out protonmail via their free tier.

So, my wife ended up surprising me with a laptop for my birthday, the HP envy x360. It seems to have everything I need except for no graphics card - it uses the built in intel XE graphics.

2 questions, will I be able to do games on it? I mostly play old games, though I’m playing Torchlight 3 on my old laptop.

Will I be able to run 3 monitors? Currently I use the laptop screen, 1 monitor via HDMI and 1 via a docking station

Thanks

You should be able to connect a USB 3.1 to a USB to HDMI adapter, then connect that to an HDMI compatible monitor. Pretty sure that model does not have a second external port.

I would try the games and see how they do. If it's rough, maybe consider a remote gaming service that just streams the video to you?

Ego Man wrote:

2 questions, will I be able to do games on it? I mostly play old games

Define "old".

You're looking at performance in the ballpark of the GT 1030 desktop card. So you're talking lightweight e-sports titles and maybe some 720p low/medium detail play on some other semi-recent titles.

*Legion* wrote:
Ego Man wrote:

2 questions, will I be able to do games on it? I mostly play old games

Define "old".

You're looking at performance in the ballpark of the GT 1030 desktop card. So you're talking lightweight e-sports titles and maybe some 720p low/medium detail play on some other semi-recent titles.

I believe 7 years old. If I remember correctly, it originally a Vista laptop. Most of my gaming is turn based but I don’t even do that much anymore because I spend my whole work day at it.

With a laptop like that, I find that the answer to "will it play my favorite game" will usually be "no", but if the question is "can I find something to play that I will enjoy" the answer is always a resounding "yes". I'm thinking of all those pixelart indie games, or sports management games, or 90's/00's games, ...

I'm a Verizon cell phone customer in Vermont (where they're the only provider whose cell performance is "mediocre" instead of "bad"). However, I saw recently that the Xfinity mobile offerings piggyback off of Verizon's network, and their plans appear to offer me something like $30-40/mo. cheaper service. It seems like a no-brainer to switch... Is there anything I'm missing, some reason to think that my service could be worse even if Xfinity is just selling me Verizon's network?

Xfinity has a tendency to jack it's prices over time and limit bandwidth. Read the fine print. Closely.

Did some research and found a pretty strong consensus that performance with Xfinity Mobile is more or less identical to Verizon, so at about $37/mo. savings, a free iPhone SE for my wife and half off the Pixel 4A 5G for me, seems like it's worth the risk. Robear, I hear you about Xfinity being a bad company and such, but I don't get the sense they're meaningfully worse than Verizon or anyone else. I read the payment terms closely enough (particularly on the deals re the phones) to assure myself it's as safe as anything is, but otherwise followed the advice of my contracts professor from law school and did not read anything else I signed!

I've used both Comcast/Xfinity and Verizon wireless, and also Internet services. I'm now with Sprint/T-Mobile, and FIOS for Internet, and I can tell you that I rank them from worst to best in the order I've listed (although for wireless, if I had to drop Sprint, Verizon is not that far behind). For what it's worth. I've used Sprint in the Burlington area (St Albans and environs) and the service was fine.

I'm sure you'll do fine, though. $37 a month is a decent chunk of change.