My 40th Thread...Linux Life

[target2019]

Old Uncle Lubuntu

Decided to take another cleaning run at the wine cellar. That's kind of a joke around here as there may be just a few bottles of wine. But there's always been a pretty large (at one time) collection of computers and associated repair parts.

Uncle Lubuntu is an old Dell Dimension 4600 (see below). I set up this reclamation project from a client with Lubuntu 14.04 LTS. That was back in December 2014, about the time of megacorp layoff #2.

• Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.60GHz
• Memory 2063MB (433MB used)
• Release 14.04 -> Dec 2014

The box was useful since it had two IDE ports as well as two SATA ports. I set it up to boot from IDE so there were still IDE and SATA ports to plug old drives into for a quick look and erase.

Lubuntu (or lightweight Ubuntu) is described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubuntu

Without built-in wireless I had to re-run a Cat 5e I had removed last year. After an hour or so I booted and then updated to Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS. Next stop will possibly be 16.04 LTS. Right now the desktop runs with LXDE, but I see that will change if I upgrade. I don't plan on doing much with this, except maybe look at spinning drives and diagnose problems. That's like fixing old wagon wheels...

Worth keeping are the “knowledge” notes and links I saved back in those days. Here's a couple of ATA secure erase articles.

https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase
or
https://tinyapps.org/docs/wipe_drives_hdparm.html

 

[target2019]

Hardinfo System Profiler

Installed hardinfo, a GUI app similar to Windows system information.

Is a system profiler and benchmark for Linux systems, that gathers information about the hardware and operating system, performs benchmarks, and generates reports. The information gathered is presented on an simple and intuitive GUI.

The app has a button to generate and save an HTML version of the report.

 

[target2019]

5-year old Dell desktop - update to Windows 10 2004 at 1 hour and still going...
10-year old HP notebook (Core 2) - Mint update less than 5 minutes...

 

[target2019]

5-year old Dell desktop - update to Windows 10 2004 at 1 hour and still going...
10-year old HP notebook (Core 2) - Mint update less than 5 minutes...

And a day or two later a 1-minute excursion to update MS Office 2010 for whatever reason.
Wish I still got the big bucks to watch the progress dialog boxes!

 

[ckelly78z]

We have old computers, and phones all over the house, along with power cords, TVs, VCRs, charging cords, and speaker wire cluttering up drawers, and cabinets. I think my wife has been so busy with her home building project manager job over the last few years, that the house has become a catch all for old technology.

Our goal is to get completely out of debt in 2021, so she can retire in 2022, once she is retired, we will start going room to room eliminating old crap.

 

[jollystomper]

I am increasingly using virtual machines (VMware and KVM) and Docker containers for my various home projects. I fnd them much easier to build up and tear down. As a result, I have been getting rid of any tower servers in my home computing center that cannot support at least 32GB of memory, for consolidation purposes. By the end of December I should be down to 8. At least I have physically consolidated all except one in my basement office and not spread throughout the house.

 

[target2019]

I am guilty as charged. We have a backlog of old electronics since the county recycling program went on hiatus.

I have 3 iMac all-in-one's. Left is 2011 with all of F-I-L publications and creations, frozen in time. Right is a client's home system with bad video, etc. (I recovered all data and put on a new model a few years back). Middle is family friend's system, which became un-bootable (S.M.A.R.T. errors).

Middle and Right (mid 2010) are nearly identical, so I purchased Firewire-to-Firewire cable to use target disk mode and recover what I could. In the middle of exploration the video went bad on Right (I had forgotten that nuance). No problem, I'll use Left. But it had Thunderbolt only. Order a too-expensive adapter from Apple, and eventually I recovered all user files.

If everything discarded, then latest recovery would not be possible.

 

[target2019]

FX160 and OpenCanary part 1

I found an old friend underneath my desk. Yes, it was that Dell FX160 tiny desktop born in 2011, and later kicked out of his home in 2013 by his parents, The Warrentees. Around 2015 he came to live with me, and has been content to rest most of the time, only seeing a few hours of service that year.

Supporting ‘really’ small businesses I would be given troublesome boxes (thank you Plumber Peter for influencing the original purchases) and told by owner to just get rid of it. After sanitizing, I would take most to the recycle dump event.

But this tiny desktop was an odd find, at least for me. It ran Windows XP, so I reinstalled, maybe recovered, and found an app or two to run on it to monitor remote websites. FX160 was sloooow running the GUI. But running an app in order to monitor pings to various web sites worked ok. Though within a year I had shut down FX160 and did not really have any purpose for it. But it fit nicely on a shelf under my trestle desk, and I left it there accumulating dust...an easy job if I say so.

Last week I found a youtube video (Thinkst Canary with Opencanary) describing how easy to install a honeypot on a newer (3 or 4) Rasbperry PI server, and that got me thinking about a project which would require $100 for a PI, case, and so on.

But it would be a complicated project, and require investigating various Linux subject areas. After all, creating a canary, a product that can sit in your LAN and whistle when an intruder enters, is not simple. For example, Thinkst charges an annual subscription of $7,500 for 5 devices, hosting, support, maintenance and upgrades. The minimum though is just $5,000 annual for 2 devices. And FX160 just sits there, begging to be powered on, and willing to become a canary who sits around in this mine.
(to be continued).

 

[target2019]

Wake up, you server!

After much exploring in 2020, my Linux use dropped off significantly. That happens with many projects around the home. For example, my organized office is now a shambles. All of those pandemic promises made to self have receded like distant mountains in the rear view mirror...

I powered off the Optiplex 160 a few months ago, as my honey pot project failed. Too little knowledge in this admin's head. As I was skulking about in the basement network closet I decided to power it on. There were many updates, reboot and so on. I have never had the need to use a magic packet (or WoL). What is that, you ask?

"Wake-on-LAN (WoL) is an Ethernet or Token Ring computer networking standard that allows a computer to be turned on or awakened by a network message." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

I adjusted the ancient BIOS in the 160 to expect this magic packet. I had read that the next steps were to install and configure a few things in LTS 18.04 to allow WoL. But being the guy who wants to find the flaws in every document, I just installed gwakelan on my Linux notebook, typed in the 160's MAC Address, and the bloody thing woke up, just like that.

 

[Sunset]

Months ago:
I upgraded to a 1000 GB drive from my smaller drive, via clonezilla.
It was a many hour effort as of course the partitions were wrong.
I finally found the answer and got it working fine.
Of course I saved the steps for when I move to a bigger disk.

I bought a second 1000 GB SSD to clone my existing one.
After 2 hours of it being stuck I killed the process.
Downloaded a new clonezilla as the "old" one was a year old.
Fortunately that solved the issue and it cloned the SSD in 2 hours.
Then I tested the clone.
Since the clone looked fine, I upgraded from Version 18 to 20 for Ubuntu.

Now I'm getting used to the new Ubuntu, and of course, need to clone the new version in a week, after making sure everything works well.

 

[ERD50]

Months ago:
I upgraded to a 1000 GB drive from my smaller drive, via clonezilla.
It was a many hour effort as of course the partitions were wrong.
I finally found the answer and got it working fine.
Of course I saved the steps for when I move to a bigger disk. ...

That's what I don't like about many of these cloning apps, they are too literal, and won't clone to a larger partition (or smaller if you were only using a portion of the partition - say that 10x fast!).

The app I used to use on Macs was "SuperDuper!", which would clone to a different size partition - that was nice.

Something that should make this simpler, and is a good idea anyhow, is to keep separate partitions for root and HOME (done during install, but I think you can re-do it w/o too much trouble). That way, you could do a clone of the (usually smaller) root partition, sized the same. And just use grsync or rsync for the data (won't care about partition sizes as long as there is room for the data).

-ERD50

 

[skyking1]

ALUH- another linux user here
I supported many small businesses over the 90s and into the teens with headless servers for files and applications. I was fighting a one-man battle against the Microsoft server army LOL.
Pretty much everything I do is headless although I do have a desktop management system on my little home server. I was going to recycle old hardware but the power demands just chapped my hide, so I spent $100 to save 10
I have a super low profile case with 70 watt built-in power supply, and a little Intel quad core with 10 watts TDP. Currently it hosts some files for me and zoneminder, a security camera DVR application that I have installed for 20 years now. Biggest setup was 20 IP cameras and 10 old analog cameras through a card, on a 24/7 facility with 200,000+ motion events over 4 weeks. That thing is still going I think the last time I built it was 12 years ago.

 

[homestead]

Months ago:
I upgraded to a 1000 GB drive from my smaller drive, via clonezilla.
It was a many hour effort as of course the partitions were wrong.

I did this kind of thing a lot in my working days. Didn't use clonezilla a lot though.
I would put the new drive on the bus and then partition it the way I wanted.
Then at the command line use dump on the old drive partitions and pipe it to restore for each partition on the new drive.
Then build the boot blocks for the boot partition.

Then you could shutdown and remove the old drive and reboot.

 

[jim584672]

Clonezilla can expand the partitions to fill a drive. It also can shrink down if the data isn't too large.

 

[target2019]

Macrium Reflect
Clonezilla
Acronis
Ghost

How many ways to clone? Might find out later this year.

 

[easysurfer]

A Distro For The Private and Paranoid

I'm still happy with MX Linux as my go to distro. No longer consider myself a distro hopper (at least for now ). But doesn't mean I don't notice when something interesting comes along.

The other night came across a distro described as built for security in mind and you don't have to be a linux geek to use. So, thought I'd read more and give it a try.

The distro is called Linux Kodachi. From what I see, I like. Don't plan to use as my daily driver (though can be if one really want's a private system), but nice to have available should I feel the need to poke around without feeling like someone's watching over my shoulder.

Seems friendly, can use via a liveDVD, usb and even loaded into memory and I believe "poof" gone when computer restarted.

The operating system serves as a Live instance, so you don't even have to bother installing it. You create a bootable USB drive (with a tool like Unetbootin), insert your USB drive and boot up Kodachi. As soon as the OS boots it:

• Changes your MAC Address
• Establishes a TOR connection through a VPN
• Routes all internet traffic through TOR plus VPN with DNS encryption
• Regularly changes your MAC Address to avoid detection and tracking

All of the above happens automatically, so you don't have to do anything. You simply boot up and, once the connection is established, open a browser and start doing whatever it is you want or need to do.

https://www.techrepublic.com/index....o-value-privacy-but-dont-want-to-learn-linux/

 

[target2019]

Thanks for the link. It looks interesting. I'll try it on USB boot when I get free time.

I've been almost 100% Windows for the past few months. I took a reel deep dive into genealogy, and I'm looking at very large HTML files from GEDMatch website. Many twists in this research, courtesy of the various site tools one can find.

After retrieving results (45538 matches (rows), with a dozen columns of data) on this site, there is no CSV export, unfortunately. So I save the HTML page, but every app I tried just gave up trying to open or imort it.

After a few days I decided to look at the HTML source to figure out a few things. The problem, which I solved with Notepad++, was that the 40 MB file had a table, with no LFs as you'd expect for structure. In this file line 636 was an incredibly large blob of HTML.

Since it was a table, I went to the end of the file, and searched backwards for "</td><td" and replaced all with </td>/n<td>. File size did not grow much, and the HTML file now loads in a few minutes. I needed this so that I could search a local file instead of logging in, running an analysis, waiting for far too long, etc.

If I need to process more saved files, I'll probably go visit my lonely linux box in the basement. I was reading about AWK, and how it can do this type of find/replace in an instant.

 

[statsman]

If I need to process more saved files, I'll probably go visit my lonely linux box in the basement. I was reading about AWK, and how it can do this type of find/replace in an instant.

I used UNIX at work quite a bit, with AWK being one of my favorite UNIX tools for one-time or quick processing of text data. I liked AWK so much that I have installed MAWK on my Windows PCs since WinXP.

In your instance, you would process the file with AWK commands and generate an output that can be re-rerouted to a second file. You might want to also look at sed (stream editor) for LINUX.

 

[jim584672]

If you are on Win 11 you can get Linux command line commands by typing wsl --install as Admin. It will install a base Ubuntu prompt.

 

[target2019]

Interesting problem, and solved now.

Windows programs seem to have a problem with large HTML file - over 40MB. This file started life as an HTML save from genealogy site. The large blob of data (over 40,000 rows and 12 columns) appears on a single line in the HTML.

Notepad++ can enter the necessary line feeds just in that blob. After a minute's processing, it is over 638,000 lines of HTML.

Office programs choke on that.

What to do? What to do?

Upload file to google drive. Import into sheet. Takes a minute or two. Download Excel format. Problem solved.

 

[easysurfer]

I'm having wandering eyes again and thinking about distro hopping.

 

[target2019]

I'm having wandering eyes again and thinking about distro hopping.

What tempted you? MX seemed like a good Linux for you.

“The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.”
― Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1832

 

[easysurfer]

What tempted you? MX seemed like a good Linux for you.

“The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.”
― Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege, 1832

Was happy with MX as MX jumped all the hurdles til yesterday.

Recently, I decided to as my main linux machine go desktop instead of laptop. With the desktop, I like to use hard drive swap bays. That is, to treat external drives like floppies, swapping in and out and to/fro a Win desktop also with swap bays.

From what I've discovered, MX currently doesn't handle the use of swap bays correctly. But Linux Mint does. With mint, I can just swap in/out and the system knows, whereas MX gets lost.

I know there are other ways of moving data like external USB. But still not as smooth as just swapping back and forth.

One time, Peppermint OS was the distro I favored til at that time, it really didn't handle flash drives properly, which led me to MX.

So far, I'm still only at the temptation stage. Not lusting over another distro, but thinking that may be better, at least for my desktop.

 

[jim584672]

Archlinux now has a new installer built into their ISO. I tried it out and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Still Arch is not for newbies. I'm a Manjaro guy as my main driver. Manjaro is Arch based.

 

[target2019]

From what I've discovered, MX currently doesn't handle the use of swap bays correctly. But Linux Mint does. With mint, I can just swap in/out and the system knows, whereas MX gets lost.

I know there are other ways of moving data like external USB. But still not as smooth as just swapping back and forth.

So your boot OS drive stays and you swap external for various reasons?

In the 2000's I was working on a desktop that had a boot drive for unclassified work. Then we encounter classified chapters and have to go to a locked file cabinet, fetch our red drive. Shut down, place red in the swap bay, and start up. So the swap was a complete OS. So that is the extent of my experience with swap bays.