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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  • I would very much agree here. I’ve (admittedly mostly server side) been using linux for around 30 years now. But I’m still dual booting on my desktop. There’s just a few things that will still only work in Linux, and also if I break things I can go to windows if I need to do something “right now”

    Dual boot gives you the option of, if you have the time trying to make something work in linux. But, if you don’t have the time, just boot to windows and do it.

    How I do things, is I have drives that are shared between both OS (I use btrfs since there is a windows driver and, so far (around 3 years) I’ve had no corruption problems. But you can share ntfs too and a boot drive for both. But, it’s not a requirement.

    Also yes, it is quite easy to break a linux install. It’s not really because Linux is bad. It’s just because you have so much choice in which drivers to use, which desktop environment (and even the components that make it up) that it’s easy to accidentally select some combination that doesn’t work and you end up with only a console to fix things from.

    I like that the OP is choosing Mint. I’ve not used Mint, but from all I’ve seen it looks a real good option for someone starting into Linux from no experience.










  • 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.



  • 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.






  • What if I told you, businesses routinely do this to their own machines in order to make a deliberate MitM attack to log what their employees do?

    In this case, it’d be a really targetted attack to break into their locally hosted server, to steal the CA key, and also install a forced VPN/reroute in order to service up MitM attacks or similar. And to what end? Maybe if you’re a billionaire, I’d suggest not doing this. Otherwise, I’d wonder why you’d (as in the average user) be the target of someone that would need to spend a lot of time and money doing the reconnaissance needed to break in to do anything bad.