#vm laptop

[crowcryptid]

1 AM is the perfect time to try to revive this laptop that doesn’t function due to windows bloat (presumably)

Last time I tried to login it froze for an hour and when I finally got in and tried to open anything it would freeze up completely.

Let’s see if it works

[tetranymous]

Oh yeah I was FINALLY able to reel in the thinkpad's cooling issues last night!!!! At first I didn't believe it because it was still as loud as ever, but checking the temps confirmed it! Hovering around 60°c rather than before where it was idling at 80°c with nothing open! :D

Also whoever decided to make the windows power options Like That? Curse of mega diarrhoea. Why is there THREE separate options for power mode???? One in the slider in the battery taskbar icon, one in control panel's power settings, and one in the BIOS?????? And they all act independently of eachother. Like... Would it not be easier to have a general one and then options for fine tuning??? (like the one in control panel but with more options. Would be nice not to have to go into device manager for some of them. I FORGOT DEVICE MANAGER POWER OPTIONS (only sometimes lets you change it though!) THERE'S FOUR)

In conclusion:

[arataneo-a]

i completely forgot that the main point of my final year project was to analyze malware and to do that i have to. run malware

[soongsoup]

Got an android phone for the birthday and im not sure if i prefer it to apple. Like the customization but overall it's just mostly different. Not bad different or good just different

[vms-community]

Foldable Laptop Table: Convenience And Comfort In One Piece Of Furniture

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[cryptic-rainfall]

Very interesting discussion! You are all missing one very important thing: the secure test browser that students take the standardized state exams on. All the student Chromebooks come with this ready to go, just like the regular student account sign-in & the restrictions you did talk about above. Until we get rid of mandated testing, or just testing on computers in general, everything discussed here is just fantasy talk.

Of course the district wants control over all the students' (and staff issued) computers, that's the compromise they have for providing them in the first place. (I'd even encourage folks to show up at their local school board meeting and bring up any concerns you have, the meetings are public in the U.S., see what they say about it.) But even if the district decided it didn't care and that it would relinquish control, they still probably can't due to state regulations.

Also, machine misuse is a bit of a moot point when the primary way the students misuse their Chromebooks is by slamming them on the desk with maximum force in every class until they break, or just plain losing them. Also, it depends on the district, but in my experience nothing happens when a kid loses or breaks their Chromebook, they just get issued another one. This has eaten through our school's budget like nothing else.

Signed, a high school computer science teacher who had to fight to even get a set of classroom computers that could run VSC.

taking control of a school-managed laptop shouldn't be a fucking crime. literally so many kids learn about technology and gain an interest in it from trying to bypass school restrictions

[lizclipse]

just realised how weird it is to use my kinda old work laptop instead of my more modern and powerful desktop to work on everything on (ive been ssh-ing in for years now). so i'm installing arch linux in a vm and will report back on how well it goes

[mesetacadre]

once again gonna try to set up a dual boot on my pc (so installing windows directly to the machine instead of using a vm like in my laptop). I hope that now that i know where to get the ISO properly, it won't have the same issues as last time

[gubbles-owo]

FUNNEY LIL LAPTOP ACQUIRED

damn i am so excited to have a funney lil laptop again!! this will be my first time using linux as the sole OS (as opposed to a dualboot or fucking around in a vm), so hopefully everything i've learned up until this point will give me the know-how to set this thing up lol

[kuromi-hoemie]

oh yeah no Pantheon/Elementary OS literally is just linux in a MacOS trenchcoat lol

it looks and feels... fine. I’m sure this is made for ppl who are more familiar with macs because the keyboard shortcuts are a little too awk and different for me. I still have the Deepin one downloading but yeeeah I’m pretty sure I’m just gonna keep my laptop on Debian/GNOME.

i understand ppl who use Linux and want the Windows 7 look but I've always thought KDE looked kinda weird/dated and clunky tbh (⁠´⁠-⁠﹏⁠-⁠`⁠；⁠)

I've liked using GNOME the most so far, but looking more into the different types of user interfaces I realize I just. don't like KDE lol. all the other ones seem cool and efficient to me.

If anything I'm really curious to try them out but i don't need to... or. 🧐 i think i have a spare laptop and charger I can use. I wanna see what using Pantheon feels like, there's a distribution called Elementary OS using it that fr looks like MacOS.

I also read briefly about Deepin Desktop that has being praised for its aesthetics. idk i have mixed feelings on the screenshots lol but I'd also be curious to see how it feels. At first glance it just looks like a fusion of Android and Windows but seems kinda clunky idk..

I'm sure they both have a live version u can run off a flash drive :3c probably. but uhh also feeling kinda lazy so i think I'm just gonna run them in a VM actuallyyy lol. at least for checking them out

[utilitycaster]

finally all clear! loving the VM 2.5-shot (presumably). I do kind of wish Matt adopted the modified Colville battle method that NADDPod uses for these big setpieces but also the PCs are so powerful it's still a good vibe. anyway Cooldown and setting up the gaming laptop for Veilguard Purposes time!

[vms-community]

Sitting on your bed in a comfortable yet productive posture adds a lot of value to your work life as well as your health. And a laptop table for bed is an absolute necessity when it comes to choosing a healthy posture and convenient workspace from the comfort of your bed. At VMS cart, you will find a carefully selected range of laptop tables that you can choose from considering your requirements and work style.

[anhedonyan]

Confirmation: it's either a hardware issue or a virtualization issue, and I'm more inclined to think it's the virtualization.

I've successfully installed Dream Chronicles 1 and flash player 8 on my WXP laptop and either I did it badly in my VM or it's something related to hardware. I'll try again just out of curiosity.

Anywayyyyy, I'm on the last chapter.

[agapi-kalyptei]

crowdstrike hot take 5: so who was incompetent, really?

OK so it's the first Monday after the incident. CrowdStrike (CS) is being tight-lipped about the actual cause of the incident, which Microsoft estimates to have affected 8.5 million devices.

Here's an unconfirmed rumor: CS has been firing a lot of QA people and replacing them with AI. I will not base this post on that rumor. But...

Here's a fact: wikipedia listed 8429 CS employees as of April 2024. Now the updated page says they have 7925 employees in their "Fiscal Year 2024".

Anyway. Here's a semi-technical video if you want to catch up on what bluescreen and kernel-mode drivers are in the contexts of the CS incident by a former microsoft engineer. He also briefly mentions WHQL certification - a quality assurance option provided by Microsoft for companies who want to make sure their kernel drivers are top-notch.

Now conceptually, there are two types of updates - updates to a software itself, and a definition update. For a videogame, the software update would be a new feature or bugfixes, and content update would add a new map or textures or something. (Realistically they come hand in hand anyway.) For an antivirus/antimalware, a definition update is basically a list of red flags - a custom format file that instructs the main software on how to find threats.

The video mentions an important thing about the faulty update: while many people say "actually it wasn't a software update that broke it, it was a definition file", it seems that CS Falcon downloads an update file and executes code inside that file - thus avoiding the lengthy re-certification by Microsoft while effectively updating the software.

Some background: On audits in software

A lot of software development is unregulated. You can make a website, deploy it, and whether you post puppy pictures or promote terrorism, there's no one reviewing and approving your change. Laws still apply - even the puppy pictures can be problematic if they include humans who did not consent to have their photos taken and published - but no one's stopping you immediately from publishing them.

And a lot of software development IS regulated - you cannot make software for cars without certifications, you cannot use certain programming languages when developing software for spaceships or MRIs. Many industries like online casinos are regulated - IF you want to operate legally in most countries, you need a license, and you need to implement certain features ("responsible gaming"), and you must submit the actual source code for reviews.

This varies country by country (and state by state, in USA, Canada, etc) and can mean things like "you pay $200 for each change you want to put to production*", or it can mean "you have to pay $40'000 if you make a lot of changes and want to get re-certified".

*production means "web servers or software that goes to end customers", as opposed to "dev environment", "developer's laptop", "QA environment" or "staging" or "test machines", "test VMs" or any of the other hundreds way to test things before they go live.

The certification, and regular audits, involves several things:

Testing the software from user's perspective

Validating the transactions are reported correctly (so that you're not avoiding taxes)

Checking for the user-protecting features, like being able to set a monthly limit on depositing money, etc

Checking the source code to make sure customers are not being ripped off

Validating security and permissions, so a janitor can't download or delete production databases

Validating that you have the work process that you said you would - that you have Jira (or similar) tickets for everything that gets done and put to production, etc, and

...that you have Quality Assurance process in place, and that every change that goes to production is tested and approved

You can see why I highlighted the last point, right.

Now, to my knowledge, security software doesn't have its own set of legal requirements - if I want to develop an antivirus, I don't need a special permission from my government, I can write code, not test it at all, and start selling it for, idk for example $185 per machine it gets deployed to.

And here's the thing - while there certainly is a level of corruption / nepotism / favoritism in the IT industry, I don't think CloudStrike became one of the biggest IT security providers in the world just by sweet talking companies. While there isn't any legal regulation, companies do choose carefully before investing into 3rd party solutions that drastically affect their whole IT. What I mean, CloudStrike probably wasn't always incompetent.

(Another rumor from youtube comments: A company with ~1000 employees was apparently pressured by an insurance company to use CrowdStrike - whether it's a genuine recommendation, an "affiliate link" or just plain old bribery... I do not know.)

WHY what happened is still very baffling

See, this is what would be the process if I was running a security solutions company:

a team is assigned a task. this task is documented

the team discusses the task if it's non-trivial, and they work on it together if possible

solo developer taking the task is not ideal, but very common, since you cannot parallelize (split it between several people) some tasks

while developing, ideally the developer can test everything from start to finish on their laptop. If doing it on their laptop isn't possible, then on a virtual machine (a computer that runs only inside software, and can be more or less stored in a file, duplicated, restored to a previous version, backed up, etc, just by copying that file)

in case of automated software updates, you would have "update channels". In this case it means... like if you have a main AO3 account where you put finished things, and then you'd have another AO3 account where you only put beta fics. So in my hypothetical company, you'd have a testing update channel for each developer or each team. The team would first publish their work only on their update channel, and then a separate QA team could test only their changes.

Either way, after maybe-mostly-finishing the task, the code changes would be bundled in something called a "pull request" or "PR" or "merge request". It's basically a web page that displays what was the code before and after. This PR would be reviewed by people who have NOT worked on the change, so they can check and potentially criticize the change. This is one of the most impactful things for software quality.

Either before or after the PR, the change would go to QA. First it would be tested just in the team's update channel. If it passes and no more development is needed on it, it would go to a QA update channel that joins all recent changes across all teams.

After that, it would be released to an early access or prerelease update channel, sometimes called a canary deploy. Generally, this would be either a limited amount - maybe 100 or 1000 computers, either used internally, or semi-randomly spread across real clients, or it could be as much as 10% of all customers' computers.

THEN YOU WAIT AND SEE IF THERE ARE NO ERROR REPORTS.

Basically ALL modern software (and websites! all the cookies!) collect "metrics" - like "how often each day is this running", or "did our application crash"

you absolute MUST have graphs (monitoring - sometimes this is a part of discipline called "reliability engineering") that show visually things like the number of users online, how many customers are lagging behind with updates, how many errors are reported, how many viruses are being caught by our software. If anything goes up or down too much, it's a cause for concern. If 10% of your customers are suddenly offline after a canary deploy is out, you're shitting your pants.

ONLY after waiting for a while to see everything is okay, you can push the update to ALL clients. It is unfathomable how anyone would do that straight away, or maybe how someone could do it without proper checks, or how the wrong thing got sent to the update.

As ClownStrike is still silent about the actual cause of the issue, we can only make guesses about how much they circumvented their own Quality Assurance process to push the faulty update to millions of computers.

It gets worse

Here's the thing: CrowdStrike itself allows users to create computer groups and let them choose the update channel. You, as a business customer, can say

these 100 unimportant laptops will have the latest update

these important servers will have N-1 update (one version behind)

the rest of the company will have N-2 update (two update versions behind)

CrowdStrike has ignored those settings. According to some youtube comments, supposedly they pushed the update to "only" 25% of all devices - which is worrying to think this could have gone even worse.

Third time isn't the charm

And hey, do you know what happened two years before CrowdStrike was founded? The CEO George Kurtz was at the time, in 2010, the CTO of McAfee, the controversial / crappy security company (IMO offering one of the worst antivirus programs of all times, that was aggressively pushed through bundled OEM deals). In both 2009 and 2010 their enterprise software deleted a critical operating system file and bricked a lot of computers, possibly hundreds of thousands.

And yes, the trigger wasn't an update to the antivirus itself, but a faulty "definition update". Funny coincidence, huh.

[techav]

If It's a Hack and It Works, Is It Really a Hack?

I have a couple servers at home — one running Proxmox VE and one running Proxmox Backup. I use the VM server when I need to spin up a development environment, for running the odd game server, serving files locally, running Home Assistant, etc. I also like to donate spare cycles to Folding@Home. The backup server of course is in case I do something stupid on the VM server.

There's just one problem with that. My second-hand 8-year-old dual-Xeon server runs hot.

It was too much to keep running in my home office. Between the two servers, my desktop, and my work laptop, I was regularly seeing ambient temperatures around 26°C. It was just too warm for comfort.

Last summer I moved my network gear and the two servers into the front coat closet. This was great for me working in my home office, but not so great for my servers. Despite adding a passthrough vent to the closet door and a vent fan to the ceiling, the closet was still consistently in the 26°-30°C range.

The ideal solution would probably be to use an enclosed server rack and run an exhaust vent up from the top. Unfortunately, rack-mount server cases are expensive, enclosed racks are very expensive, and my closet is too small for that anyway.

So I hacked together a solution.

I built a frame out of some cheap 1x2 lumber and wrapped a piece of thin sheet steel around the sides to make a crude plenum. On top, I added a 10x6 register box with a semirigid vent hose coming out of it. This gives me a guide for drawing air out of the servers and guiding it up to the vent fan in the ceiling.

To help things along, I added a 120mm fan inside the register box. But not some whisper-quiet Noctua. This is (if the Amazon listing is to be believed) a 5000 RPM, 210 CFM monster of a fan. It's loud, but moves a lot of air.

Too loud in fact. Its droning could not be silenced by any mere closet door. I had to add a PWM fan speed controller to calm it down. It's a cheap unit from Amazon, but it came with a temperature probe and it has a configurable operating range.

The result? Where previously the entire closet was consistently above 26°C, now it's staying around 23°. There is a difference of 5°C between ambient in the closet and the air inside the exhaust duct, so it is doing its job of redirecting the hot air from the servers.

I call that a successful hack.

[bluastro-yellow]

I can't make my copy of de work.........

damn I did it I installed linux mint again. third time's the charm right? or is this the fourth