Since I’m 57 and have paid some attention to how I’ve changed over the years, perhaps I can add a little insight? Quite frankly, you get tired. I’ve been on the scene since the home computer revolution took off and I’ve seen so many things come and go. It’s not that we can’t learn new forms of communication, etc., but rather that after awhile you start asking yourself why bother when the “next big thing” is going to be another forgotten memory in 5-10 years. It’s not you who are being criticized for wasting items, it’s all the people like you over the years who have collectively wasted so much. Our brains remember all those things and they add up, causing us to fixate on the wrong info (although this last bit isn’t really something that comes with age).

Last night I re-watched The Fifth Element. Afterwards I was thinking about when it first came out in 1997. My god, that’s 28 years ago. I remember things from the 90’s. I remember things from the 80’s and from the 70’s. I remember that after 9/11 the 00’s were boring as fuck. But when you put all of that together, and start thinking about how much you’ve experience… holy hell that’s quite a lot to face squarely. And if I tell you something inappropriate about a co-worker… what? HR will pull me away from the monotony and have a talk with me? Experience tells us what we can get away with, and sometimes it’s fun just to see what people’s reactions are.

So yeah, I’ve observed these things, but I refuse to be pulled down into misery and monotony. Keep yourself busy doing things that you enjoy. Never be afraid to go down the rabbit hole and learn crazy new things. I’m working on assembling a couple swords from parts, looking into bluing some steel pieces I made. And just this week I learned about “rust bluing” which is a crazy concept but is easy to do at home. I learned something new and fun, and I refuse to ever stop learning. I may not care about Instagram or Facebook, but I installed Signal on my phone and I love being able to create my own 3D models and printing them out.

The future is always amazing. Age doesn’t make us care less about it, it just makes us more choosy in what parts are worth investing in. If you don’t want to become a listless old geezer, then don’t… all you need to do is keep enjoying the wonders of the world.

Didn’t you see the Tesla ad on the Whitehouse front lawn?

Ah that’s good. Disk space isn’t an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.

Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu… that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying “commercial support” basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.

I don’t know if I’ve ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?

I’m not sure about other distros, I’ve just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn’t have a direct installer.

That’s a good point… if you can’t read messages and discussions without a login, then it’s not really facilitating public notification.

That’s what I was thinking too… If they’re running Ubuntu then they’re probably installing packages through snaps, and that’s always been the worst experience for me. Those apps lag down my whole system, crash or lock up, and generally are unusable. I run Debian but have run into apps that wanted me to use a snap install. One package I managed to find a direct installer that is rock-solid in comparison to the snap version, and the rest of the programs I abandoned.

Firefox (since it was mentioned) is one of those things I believe Ubuntu installs as a snap, despite there being a perfectly usable .deb package. I applaud the effort behind snap and others to make a universal installation system, but it is so not there yet and shouldn’t be the default of any distro.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… a social media post is NOT an official government communication. I don’t mind it being used in addition to public channels to help spread the word further, but if you are going to use one platform then you should be required to use all of them to ensure all affected people receiving the same information… and I don’t see them posting on Bluesky or Mastodon or even Reddit.

But why doesn’t it ever empty the swap space? I’ve been using vm.swappiness=10 and I’ve tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I’m not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I’m not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space – which adds to my confusion about the differences).

Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn’t all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?

And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.

So ldirectord is kind of a front-end for ipvsadm. The tools allow you to set up load-balancing between internal servers. I run each service in a VM, and I have at least two copies of each (on separate physical servers). Ldirectord lets me configure how frequently to verify each machine is up, a list of primary servers, and an optional backup when the others go down. Overall it works pretty smooth.

Shorewall is similarly a front end for iptables, allowing a more structured set of configuration files. I’ve been trying to start using Webmin for the first time because it has some nice management of shorewall, maybe I’ll be able to clean up some of my config, but I’d also like to get traffic shaping configured.

I have a dedicated firewall (just moved to a poweredge R620 last night), a NAS, and two VM systems to run services on… all run from home. I enjoy setting things up to play with, so this has all been built up starting from old desktop machines and expanded over time.

I tried playing around with opensense awhile back. Wasn’t impressed and kept running into things I couldn’t get it to do for me, so I stuck with my existing setup. I use ldirectord for load balancing between servers and shorewall lets me generally balance the traffic between WAN connections. It works pretty well but there’s a lot of moving parts.

Does anyone else use a Linux firewall to manage dual connections? I run Shorewall here, but I haven’t really had much luck with traffic shaping to keep the majority of traffic on my primary connection while allowing low-speed info like email to split up between connections.

This right here is the main reason why Trump might succeed… The media has been beaten into submission and refuses to report the actual events that are occurring which make Trump look bad.

If your card has an x4 pinout, then it probably needs the additional bandwidth. Plugging it into an x1 slot (if it was possible) would slow down the network traffic. Get a better motherboard with an x4 slot on it so you can use the hardware you want. or find something else that will fit your computer.

Honestly even the 1Gb quad port card I have requires an x4 slot, although I saw some dual-port 2.5Gb x1 cards on ebay. Maybe you could just use two of those?

And to absolutely nobody’s surprise, Twitter was NOT asked to testify about their long and proven censorship of content when Trump or Musk are called out for direct lies in favor of the Trump campaign, and hiding content in favor of Biden/Harris. But noooo, this administration would never use the justice department for retribution. /s

Even the older versions work pretty well, depending on the features you need. I use it for all my 3D modeling, I could never get the hang of other CAD software but this one just “makes sense” to me. I even used it last year to create a model of a trailer I wanted to build, worked out the finer details of how everything would fit together and some options like adding ramps, and once we got to the point of building the trailer it was just a matter of copying the dimensions and cutting out all the steel.

I see they’ve deleted old user accounts. Oh well, I was briefly curious but that’s gone now.

Especially when said government is actively firing the people who reported the fraud and waste? Or maybe you’re thinking about the government who classified tracking active deadly diseases as fraud and is preventing people from getting protection against such things as the flu? Oh wait, I bet it’s the government who is gutting the life-saving weather prediction services that helps guide most of the farmers and fishermen while protecting human lives from deadly storms.

Right? I mean I’m still lamenting the loss of slider keyboards, typing on a screen is so damn unreliable that I was forced to turn on the auto-correction, which itself is highly unreliable and constantly changing real words while failing to fix the words where I hit a number instead of a letter (the word “9f” gets typed a LOT!). I use my phone for phone calls and sending texts, with a secondary usage as a GPS in my truck. If it can’t perform one of three basic tasks then what good is it?