I’m the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • There’s a certbot addon which uses nginx directly to renew the certificate (so you don’t need to stop the web server to renew). If you install the addon you just use the same certbot commands but with --nginx instead and it will perform the actions without interfering with web server operation.

    You just then make sure the cron job to renew also includes --nginx and you’re done.



  • I think this overall is a better idea. I’m going to say this because, I thought I’d look into rust today. So I installed it, setup vscode to work with it etc. And it’s all up and running. I thought I would port over a “fairly simple” C# project I wrote recently as a bit of a test.

    While I’ve generally had success (albeit with 30+ tabs open to solve questions I had about how to do certain things, and only making it about 20% into the task) I’m going to say that it’s different enough from C, C++ and C# (all of which I can work with) that I really don’t think it is fair to expect C developers that have day jobs and work on the kernel in their spare time to learn this. It’s fundamentally different in my opinion.

    Now, I don’t condone any bad attitude and pushing away of rust developers from the project. But there’s no way they’re going to want to do anything to help which involves learning a new language. It’s just not going to happen.

    Likewise, C is not a language most new developers are learning. So, I feel like over time there won’t be so much of an influx of new kernel developers and any Rust based kernel could find itself with more contributors over time and taking over as the de-facto kernel.

    In terms of Redox (not looked into it yet). So long as there’s a different team working on the userspace tools. I would say the main task should be getting a solid kernel with drivers for most popular hardware etc in place. The existing GNU tools will do until there’s a kernel that is able to compete with the C one. But that’s just my opinion.



  • Here’s what I think. Both opinions are correct.

    Rust is sufficiently different that you cannot expect C developers to learn rust to the level they have mastered C in order to be working at the kernel level. It’s not going to happen.

    I don’t really know too much about rust. Maybe one day I’ll actually mess around with it. But the one time I looked at a rust git repo I couldn’t even find where the code to do a thing was. It’s just different enough to be problematic that way.

    So I think probably, the best way IS to go the way linus did. Just go ahead and write a very basic working kernel in rust. If the project is popular it will gain momentum.

    Trying to slowly adapt parts of the kernel to rust and then complain when long term C developers don’t want to learn a new language in order to help isn’t going to make many friends on that team.




  • When you post in a thread you get an ID for that thread. When you post in a different thread you get a different id.

    That’s what I said. You don’t need any ID to federate the messages. If you reply to a comment the nesting is based on the comment/post ID and not the usernames.

    You couldn’t track a users posts after the fact, and I think that’s kinda the point.


  • Not so sure that’s true though. If you look at a 4chan threads in some boards, you can recognize the individual anonymous’ from the ID next to them.

    I suspect it’s using either a cookie, or the IP address to track a user and while not storing that info, generating an ID hash from perhaps a unique ID for the thread + their details.

    No reason you couldn’t federate using the same. But, even without that, each post and comment has a post ID and replies would be tracked that way. Just, you’d need to remember which replies were your own.

    The home instance could store for a thread some info about posts/comments from an IP or cookie too and highlight them. But that info wouldn’t be federated.

    I actually don’t think it’d be a problem, really. But, is this something missing from our lives? I’m not so sure.


  • I mean, while they can block most things, to give people a usable experience they’re going to allow http and https traffic through, and they can’t really proxy https because of the TLS layer.

    So for universal chance of success, running openvpn tcp over port 443 is the most likely to get past this level of bad. I guess they could block suspicious traffic in the session before TLS is established (in order to block certain domains). OpenVPN does support traversing a proxy, but it might only work if you specify it. If their network sets a proxy via DHCP, maybe you could see that and work around it.

    I did have fun working around an ex gf’s university network many years ago to get a VPN running over it. They were very, very serious about blocking non-standard services. A similar “through” the proxy method was the last resort they didn’t seem to bother trying to stop.



  • I would agree. It’s useful to know all the parts of a GNU/Linux system fit together. But the maintenance can be quite heavy in terms of security updates. So I’d advise to do it as a project, but not to actually make real use of unless you want to dedicate time going forwards to it.

    For a compiled useful experience gentoo handles updates and doing all the work for you.




  • Read the article. It’s the UK (which still has most EU employment law active). Now, I don’t think it’s illegal to do what they’re doing. Effectively, I can bet I know exactly how they’re framing this, and it’ll be totally legal.

    The calls were almost certainly initiating the redundancy process. That is, technically EVERYONE (probably below management) is being made redundant. As part of the redundancy process, an employer is expected to attempt to find internal opportunities for the employees to be culled, and this new position is what they are likely offering as said opportunity. I suspect this is working around a bit of a grey area in redundancy law. But, I don’t think they’re falling foul of any law. But, I’m not a legal expert.

    So, at the end of the required redundancy period (it varies based on employment duration) they will either be let go (with whatever statutory redundancy pay they’re owed) or re-employed under the new zero hours contract.

    Personally, I think this has the potential to blow up in their face a bit. It’s not allowed in the UK to employ someone on a zero-hour contract and not allow them to work elsewhere. Such a clause in a contract may be ignored. Now, this could well mean they say “Oh we need you on Wednesday” and you say “Well, actually I’ve already agreed a shift elsewhere on Wednesday” and there’s really not much they can do about it. I also hope the people working there just move on.

    The worst thing that can happen is that the parent company benefits from this. It’ll just make other retail companies do the same in a race to the bottom.



  • Yep. While it has been decades since I had a home SSD failure. But I have had 2 SSD failures in the last 10 years in server hardware. In the first case it was RAID striped and I needed to restore from backup. In the second case it was part of a raid 1 array and I just requested a replacement and got on with my day.

    In my house, I have non raid SSDs on my own PC. But important stuff is on my NAS made up of 4xHDD drives in raid 5 (that also has the important folders backed up to an encrypted cloud).

    RAID still has a place in an overall data security solution. Especially for servers that you want to keep up.