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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Locking a company out of their systems isn’t the most lucrative part of ransomware anymore. Data exfiltration and threatening to release the data to the highest bidder is now the norm.

    Ransomware also typically sits on a system doing nothing for ~6 weeks before ever starting to encrypt and upload data. Even if companies have backups to restore from, they need to choose whether they’re going to restore entire machines quickly and risk still having the ransomware on the restored machine. Or they can take the long a painful route of spinning up new machines, then restoring just the data itself to individual apps/services to ensure you don’t still have ransomware after the restore.


  • This is actually the worst type of end-user.

    Doesn’t make a ticket or notify anyone that there is a problem and then proceeds to try and fix it themselves incorrectly. When it does become a ticket, they won’t remember exactly what steps they took to troubleshoot and will waste 5x as much time from support staff trying to fix it than if they just didn’t touch it in the first place.

    Guaranteed didn’t wipe the machine from the built in reset/recovery screen and instead used a windows installer that was created on a different computer and doesn’t have the correct network drivers in the image.







  • The Oracle Cloud VPS only has SSH key authentication enabled by default. You can also set it to only allow SSH from your home IP in the virtual firewall before the machine is ever spun up.

    Their current free ARM offering is 1 machine with 4-cores and 24gb RAM for life. You can also add another 2 AMD machines with 1-core and 1gb RAM and still be in their free-tier.

    If you’re going to set it up and take advantage of the ARM machine, make sure you pick a home location for your account that has multiple availability zones. San Fran right now only has 1 zone, so if the shared ARM instances are all used up, you’ll have to wait a few days and try again. Phoenix I think has 3, so you can try with another zone right away.


  • M1 and M2 Macs have some of the worst pre-boot and recovery options I have ever seen.

    If a BIOS update fails on them, they don’t have any redundancy to fail back to a working BIOS. This has been standard on every business machine for at least 5 years. On any Dell or Lenovo machine, if your BIOS becomes borked, it either auto-recovers from a previous BIOS that is stored on your HDD/SSD, or it allows you to insert a USB drive with the BIOS on it and recovers from there.

    The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you’ll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason.

    I had someone with a failed update on an M2 Mac that left the machine without a BIOS entirely. To recover, you need another Mac machine with USBC so you can plug them into each other and run Apple Configurator 2 to start a complete redownload of the OS to recover from.

    It’s at least an hour long process for something that should take 5 minutes to fix. Also, it requires another Mac, you can’t run the recovery from any other OS.

    Absolute baloney from Apple.




  • Somehow you hit an unpopular opinion landmine with the greybeard devs.

    For the greybeard devs: Try asking ChatGPT to write you some Arduino code to do a specific task. Even if you don’t know how to write code for an Arduino, ChatGPT will get you 95% of the way there with the proper libraries and syntax.

    No way in hell I’m digging through forums and code repos for hours to blink an led and send out a notification through a web hook when a sensor gets triggered if AI can do it for me in 30 seconds. AI obviously can’t do everything for you if you’ve never coded anything before, but it can do a damn good job of translating your knowledge of one programming language into every other programming language available.



  • Using a Pi3b to run AdGuard Home and a TailScale subnet router.

    I’ve got another Pi3b running Octoprint/Klipper for a 3d printer, but I’m currently migrating that to Mainsail running on an old SFF PC so I can run multiple printers with Klipper off the same PC.

    The rest of my stack is on an actual server running UnRaid with like 50tb raw storage.

    I will say that TailScale has been annoying asf with their subnet router setup not actually forcing the correct DNS for AdGuard Home so I can have ad-blocking while away from home. I had to move back to a pure Wireguard setup directly on my router for DNS to work properly.




  • I’m surprised more people in the selfhosting community aren’t recommending Mikrotik.

    Their cheapest routers have all the same software features as their enterprise gear. They’re also one of the only companies who makes most of their routers and switches capable of being powered with POE in and redundant DC power.

    All of their newer ARM based routers support running docker containers natively on the routers extra features. You can run PiHole/AdGuard, nginx, tailscale, etc. directly on your routers hardware.

    I’ve been running a hexS for 3 years without any issues. I run multiple VLANs and wireguard directly on it, and it has an SFP port that I can use for an ONT module to get a fiber connection directly to my router from my ISP. I think it cost me $60 when I bought it.



  • Lahaina is fucked, not all of Maui. Power went down for all of Lahaina, Ka’anapali, Napili, and Kapalua on Tuesday (8/8/23) morning. All those towns are connected with a single road back to the rest of Maui, and Tuesday morning at 5a-ish, something like 30 telephone/power poles fell on that road and blocked up traffic in and out. There was a fire Tuesday morning, then the fire department said it was 100% contained in the afternoon and everyone let their guard down. Once the fire sparked back up later that night, all hell broke loose.

    The rest of Maui has power and internet without issues. I didn’t even lose power or Internet at all on the other side of the island.