--Yah, I didn't like Pulseaudio for a while but it actually comes in handy for HDMI video output and volume control (pavucontrol). Systemd I don't like (and use the Antix distro to get around it) and haven't used GNOME regularly since about 2.4.
--YEP. ZFS on Linux is mature enough for the past several years to trust my irreplaceable/important data to. ZFS+Samba is the killer app for file sharing on my LAN.
--Cron Snapshots every day (auto-deleted after a month) for an extra layer of protection, monthly scheduled scrubs and SMART tests. Most of the time the server runs with the drives spun down to save power, and boot/roots off a USB3 thumbdrive.
--Apart from tape, I just don't trust "offline" data storage. DVD backups get bitrot (not enough data on Bluray life expectancy yet, although I would tend to trust M-DISC), disconnected hard drives can fail to spin up again after years of storage.
--Keep it up and running on a UPS and checked semi-frequently, replace disks that go bad, and grow your disk capacity (number of drives) and sizes when you need to, all in-situ. ZFS rocks.:-)
--I've been using Palemoon for the last couple of years now (mainly on Linux, but also on the Win side occasionally) and it definitely uses less memory and crashes less often than Firefox in my experience.
--Personally I don't care which browser is the fastest, PM has been meeting my needs and is more STABLE.
--I bet somebody's getting "compensated" in some way to bring this forward. Not only would they be giving up flexibility for a corporation-centric solution, but they would be giving up privacy as well. This site alone is full of Win10 articles detailing what a POS bit of spyware it is, masquerading as an OS. Not to mention random reboots due to upgrades.
--I can only hope this doesn't get approved, but in this world currently nothing is apparently safe or predictable.
Good points, but this doesn't even address the problems with *motorcycles.* Millions of bikes on the road aren't built to run on anything over *E10.* Along with that, you can't just use Sta-Bil in your gas tank over the winter anymore like you could with 100% regular gasoline.
We need new leadership in the EPA -- the current clown is catering to the ethanol lobby at the expense of the rest of the US!
...If you REALLY want to own your PC, you don't run Windows. But take a look at jpsoft.com as mentioned above, they have a free CMD replacement called tcc/le.
+1 for jpsoft. From the first time I used NDOS from Norton Utilities, then moved on to 4DOS, I *instantly* preferred it to "command.com" and "CMD.EXE". Left it largely behind when I went to Linux as my primary OS, but still install it on all my Win7 legacy stuff.
The free version is called "tcc/le" on the site and there is also a 64-bit version "tcc/le x64".
Hopefully he will get more business from this (yet another!) asinine decision by MS, they have been really overtly stupid since Win8 came out and are continuing to get worse every month from the news I've been paying attention to. Honestly don't know why anyone would still plan to stay on a Windows platform after Win7 drops support; long-term, would be better to transition to Linux or Mac in the next 3 years and pay for software you need to be ported over.
There needs to be end-user outrage and blowback over crazy, out-of-touch decisions like this. NOBODY I know prefers Powershell over CMD, and older users are going to go nuts with frustration.
--With a drive that size (8TB) I hope you are at -least- mirroring it; and if you're not using ZFS or btrfs, you should have several backups *and* checksums on your files. The chances of bitrot and unrecoverable reads on a single spinning disk with that much storage are much greater.
--You can speed up Win7 updates A LOT just by using WSUS Offline Update. Download once, burn to DVD and update the client PC with that.
--Win7 "official" update process is horribly broken and CPU intensive, to the point where the CPU fan on a laptop I inherited had basically failed due to 100% continuous use.
--Note that you may have to run the WSUS updater on the client multiple times and reboot/repeat, but this is still *much* better than doing it the traditional way. After updating, I'd recommend doing a full bare-metal backup with Veeam or Aomei or the like.
--Just fyi, you can copypasta in a Linux TTY using ' gpm ' + mouse, or GNU ' screen ' ( Ctrl-[ , space to mark beginning, arrows to move, space again to mark end, Ctrl-] to paste. )
> I am thinking about doing some work on joe myself.
--Any new work on ' jstar ' would be welcome, it's my favorite text editor.;-) Especially documenting how to turn off Word Wrap and Auto Indent by default in the config file... It's been a while since I tried googling stuff like that, but it seems like there are some broken features in Joe's jstar.
--Some people may want optical to die out, but I think that's premature. I still use it a lot -- all of my PCs, laptops and servers have optical drives. (Not necessarily hooked up for security on the servers, but at least available if needed.)
--Creating a reliable USB-based boot media is still something of a black art, it seems to be different for every distro; altho System Rescue CD is pretty easy. Optical is cheap and Just Works 99.98% of the time. The media is cheap enough to give away or only use once if needed (altho I do try to use R/W media for that) and if you get a bad burn or you use it enough that it wears out, you can just burn another one.
--I do a lot of Linux installs and lately have been doing Disaster Recovery tests (bare-metal restores) to VMs and new drives. Years ago, I took the time to learn how to burn from the Linux command line, and most of my stuff is burned right from Linux with scripts; Torrent ISO downloads coupled with ZFS has been doing a great job of keeping the ISOs from bitrotting. Burning the recovery-environment ISO is dead easy since I have spare media, and I don't have to spend $$ for a reliable high-speed USB thumbstick or three to re-use for that purpose.
--Yes, a good USB3 thumbstick is faster. But in my experience, optical is easier, as long as you buy good media -- I buy and recommend Taiyo Yuden wherever possible. You have to buy specialized models of USB thumbstick if you want to block Writes, and quality on some drives is iffy; Optical is write-once by default unless you go out of your way (not finalizing the disc, packet writing, using RW media.) So yes, I intend to keep using optical because it meets my needs.
> Btrfs is a lot more flexible about expanding the filesystem, especially in mirror mode.
--Yah, most of the confusion about expanding ZFS filesystems OTF stems from RAIDZ. You *can* expand RAIDZ, but if you want your I/O to stay "sane" you need to duplicate the configuration to another vdev and add it to the pool. E.G. you have a RAIDZ of 5x1TB disks, you kinda need to create another vdev of 5x1TB disks and add that to the pool, or else it won't be balanced right.
--Expanding a *mirrored* ZFS pool however, is dead easy. You can start with a single disk, add a mirror to it, wait for resilver, and then add another set of (same-size/brand) disks to make it zRAID10. Then add another similar-hardware set of mirrored disks whenever you need to expand. ZFS also makes it easy to replace disks in-place AND will "see" the extra space every time you complete a mirror "column" (2 disks in the same set) if you set the pool properties right (autoexpand=on, autoreplace=on). You can also do triple mirroring, which I would definitely recommend if you have 8TB+ disks.
--So who cares if you lose 1/2 your disk space with RAID10, I would argue that with anything 1TB+ you *need* that real-time mirror - and disk prices have come down, you can get a 2TB NAS drive for under $90 these days. RAIDZ rebuild times (at least on Linux) are reported to potentially be extremely long since they haven't worked on the "speed" part of ZFS yet; rebuilding a RAID10 column/mirror is orders of magnitude faster since it doesn't have to replay every transaction or do a bunch of calculations.
--Took me a while to do the research on Linux+ZFS, but if you implement it correctly you can get a *lot* of benefits.;-)
--I bought that exact drive (Kanguru 16GB USB3 with write-protect switch) and it has been a *great* little drive. Very fast read speeds; I mostly use it for client-PC troubleshooting and carry around all my utility software on it. Handy if you're not sure a client's PC might be infected, and more space than a standard DVD. A tad pricy, but well worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
--Easy solution: OS Disable the accelerometer when prompting for a pass code.
https://freedompenguin.com/art...
--If you have an old Vista rig that has a 64-bit CPU, at least 1-2GB RAM and would like to make it more useful... Turn it into a ZFS+Samba file server
--Yah, I didn't like Pulseaudio for a while but it actually comes in handy for HDMI video output and volume control (pavucontrol). Systemd I don't like (and use the Antix distro to get around it) and haven't used GNOME regularly since about 2.4.
--Will the USG device protect against a thumbdrive that would fry your *computer* (electrically) if you plugged it in?
--I wonder if anyone has ever thought of porting par2 to a FUSE filesystem? ;-)
--Here's the closest thing I found with a quick search:
http://askubuntu.com/questions...
> ZFS doesn't even have an fsck. It is IMPOSSIBLE for it to get corrupted
--As much as I love ZFS, I wouldn't use the word that you use. Take a look here:
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/...
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/...
--Complex software always has bugs somewhere. Can't say for certain on FreeBSD or Solaris implementations, but I do track the Linux bug reports.
--YEP. ZFS on Linux is mature enough for the past several years to trust my irreplaceable/important data to. ZFS+Samba is the killer app for file sharing on my LAN.
--Cron Snapshots every day (auto-deleted after a month) for an extra layer of protection, monthly scheduled scrubs and SMART tests. Most of the time the server runs with the drives spun down to save power, and boot/roots off a USB3 thumbdrive.
--Apart from tape, I just don't trust "offline" data storage. DVD backups get bitrot (not enough data on Bluray life expectancy yet, although I would tend to trust M-DISC), disconnected hard drives can fail to spin up again after years of storage.
--Keep it up and running on a UPS and checked semi-frequently, replace disks that go bad, and grow your disk capacity (number of drives) and sizes when you need to, all in-situ. ZFS rocks. :-)
--I've been using Palemoon for the last couple of years now (mainly on Linux, but also on the Win side occasionally) and it definitely uses less memory and crashes less often than Firefox in my experience.
--Personally I don't care which browser is the fastest, PM has been meeting my needs and is more STABLE.
--Do you want Cylons?? Because this is how you get Cylons.
You gotta FIGHT... for your RIGHT... to RE-PAIR!
--I bet somebody's getting "compensated" in some way to bring this forward. Not only would they be giving up flexibility for a corporation-centric solution, but they would be giving up privacy as well. This site alone is full of Win10 articles detailing what a POS bit of spyware it is, masquerading as an OS. Not to mention random reboots due to upgrades.
--I can only hope this doesn't get approved, but in this world currently nothing is apparently safe or predictable.
--Maybe we should start giving people the "flying V" (like the Brits do) for photos...
--I'm with you. But how do we *change* anything at the EPA?
Good points, but this doesn't even address the problems with *motorcycles.* Millions of bikes on the road aren't built to run on anything over *E10.* Along with that, you can't just use Sta-Bil in your gas tank over the winter anymore like you could with 100% regular gasoline.
We need new leadership in the EPA -- the current clown is catering to the ethanol lobby at the expense of the rest of the US!
...If you REALLY want to own your PC, you don't run Windows. But take a look at jpsoft.com as mentioned above, they have a free CMD replacement called tcc/le.
+1 for jpsoft. From the first time I used NDOS from Norton Utilities, then moved on to 4DOS, I *instantly* preferred it to "command.com" and "CMD.EXE". Left it largely behind when I went to Linux as my primary OS, but still install it on all my Win7 legacy stuff.
The free version is called "tcc/le" on the site and there is also a 64-bit version "tcc/le x64".
Hopefully he will get more business from this (yet another!) asinine decision by MS, they have been really overtly stupid since Win8 came out and are continuing to get worse every month from the news I've been paying attention to. Honestly don't know why anyone would still plan to stay on a Windows platform after Win7 drops support; long-term, would be better to transition to Linux or Mac in the next 3 years and pay for software you need to be ported over.
There needs to be end-user outrage and blowback over crazy, out-of-touch decisions like this. NOBODY I know prefers Powershell over CMD, and older users are going to go nuts with frustration.
Why isn't he being prosecuted for perjury - lying to Congress - that's what I want to know
--With a drive that size (8TB) I hope you are at -least- mirroring it; and if you're not using ZFS or btrfs, you should have several backups *and* checksums on your files. The chances of bitrot and unrecoverable reads on a single spinning disk with that much storage are much greater.
REF:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/w...
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
--You can speed up Win7 updates A LOT just by using WSUS Offline Update. Download once, burn to DVD and update the client PC with that.
--Win7 "official" update process is horribly broken and CPU intensive, to the point where the CPU fan on a laptop I inherited had basically failed due to 100% continuous use.
http://www.wsusoffline.net/doc...
--Note that you may have to run the WSUS updater on the client multiple times and reboot/repeat, but this is still *much* better than doing it the traditional way. After updating, I'd recommend doing a full bare-metal backup with Veeam or Aomei or the like.
--Oh, for mod points today... +2
--Just fyi, you can copypasta in a Linux TTY using ' gpm ' + mouse, or GNU ' screen ' ( Ctrl-[ , space to mark beginning, arrows to move, space again to mark end, Ctrl-] to paste. )
> I am thinking about doing some work on joe myself.
--Any new work on ' jstar ' would be welcome, it's my favorite text editor. ;-) Especially documenting how to turn off Word Wrap and Auto Indent by default in the config file... It's been a while since I tried googling stuff like that, but it seems like there are some broken features in Joe's jstar.
--Some people may want optical to die out, but I think that's premature. I still use it a lot -- all of my PCs, laptops and servers have optical drives. (Not necessarily hooked up for security on the servers, but at least available if needed.)
--Creating a reliable USB-based boot media is still something of a black art, it seems to be different for every distro; altho System Rescue CD is pretty easy. Optical is cheap and Just Works 99.98% of the time. The media is cheap enough to give away or only use once if needed (altho I do try to use R/W media for that) and if you get a bad burn or you use it enough that it wears out, you can just burn another one.
--I do a lot of Linux installs and lately have been doing Disaster Recovery tests (bare-metal restores) to VMs and new drives. Years ago, I took the time to learn how to burn from the Linux command line, and most of my stuff is burned right from Linux with scripts; Torrent ISO downloads coupled with ZFS has been doing a great job of keeping the ISOs from bitrotting. Burning the recovery-environment ISO is dead easy since I have spare media, and I don't have to spend $$ for a reliable high-speed USB thumbstick or three to re-use for that purpose.
--Yes, a good USB3 thumbstick is faster. But in my experience, optical is easier, as long as you buy good media -- I buy and recommend Taiyo Yuden wherever possible. You have to buy specialized models of USB thumbstick if you want to block Writes, and quality on some drives is iffy; Optical is write-once by default unless you go out of your way (not finalizing the disc, packet writing, using RW media.) So yes, I intend to keep using optical because it meets my needs.
> Btrfs is a lot more flexible about expanding the filesystem, especially in mirror mode.
--Yah, most of the confusion about expanding ZFS filesystems OTF stems from RAIDZ. You *can* expand RAIDZ, but if you want your I/O to stay "sane" you need to duplicate the configuration to another vdev and add it to the pool. E.G. you have a RAIDZ of 5x1TB disks, you kinda need to create another vdev of 5x1TB disks and add that to the pool, or else it won't be balanced right.
--Expanding a *mirrored* ZFS pool however, is dead easy. You can start with a single disk, add a mirror to it, wait for resilver, and then add another set of (same-size/brand) disks to make it zRAID10. Then add another similar-hardware set of mirrored disks whenever you need to expand. ZFS also makes it easy to replace disks in-place AND will "see" the extra space every time you complete a mirror "column" (2 disks in the same set) if you set the pool properties right (autoexpand=on, autoreplace=on). You can also do triple mirroring, which I would definitely recommend if you have 8TB+ disks.
--So who cares if you lose 1/2 your disk space with RAID10, I would argue that with anything 1TB+ you *need* that real-time mirror - and disk prices have come down, you can get a 2TB NAS drive for under $90 these days. RAIDZ rebuild times (at least on Linux) are reported to potentially be extremely long since they haven't worked on the "speed" part of ZFS yet; rebuilding a RAID10 column/mirror is orders of magnitude faster since it doesn't have to replay every transaction or do a bunch of calculations.
--Took me a while to do the research on Linux+ZFS, but if you implement it correctly you can get a *lot* of benefits. ;-)
--I bought that exact drive (Kanguru 16GB USB3 with write-protect switch) and it has been a *great* little drive. Very fast read speeds; I mostly use it for client-PC troubleshooting and carry around all my utility software on it. Handy if you're not sure a client's PC might be infected, and more space than a standard DVD. A tad pricy, but well worth it.