This is really cool. I appreciate you sharing it. I'm currently building out my homelab to try out various softwares and scenarios, and one of the things I'm worried about is malicious software sneaking in, and compromising my LAN.
In the case that something does, this essentiallyy provides a tripwire which leaves all the evidence intact while stopping the bleed (unless it has a VM escape, but that's another story).
In any case, this is very useful and I'm really glad you made it. Thanks!
I think you're trying to insinuate that the US government is the only one that's buying data from data brokers to spy on its own citizens. I hope we can both agree that that's bad and we don't like that idea, but I don't know what makes you think this isn't also happening elsewhere. Do you have reason to believe it's not?
I'm great, thanks for asking. I had just woken up and I haven't been sleeping much lately. It's very possible that what I percieved as a perfectly normal way to state that I was taken aback that you could say that about this math problem, came across to you instead as an assault. Please know that wasn't my intention, and I regret the way I phrased that. Thank you for your concern.
Just fucking read the content before you comment next time, okay pal? 😂
In the early days of the internet, well, I should say, in the early days of the social internet, generating engagement was not so easy. Most people treated the internet as a passive activity, like a newspaper or bulletin board. Something to read, find information, be entertained by, but not contribute to. Most sites were just beginning to implement visit counters, so they could see they were generating hits, but not very much new content. How to address this? How do we get those passive readers to touch the keys and contribute to this beautiful online collaboration engine? Deep in the SomethingAweful forums, a new online behavior was formulating. Something that would soon become known as trolling. No, not like the trolls of today who oftentimes do it to promote some political ideology or cast another asunder. No not like those others who use the term for simply cyberbullying. What I'm talking about takes brains. It takes effort. It takes craft. You're not trying to bully someone off a platform, you're trying to get them to add to the conversation. You're not just trying to provoke any reaction, you're trying to get them to be human online. Anger? Spite? Annoyance? Yes. Those are all tools in the trolls's toolbox, but so are complements, flattery, playing dumb, and confusion. Trolling is an art. It's more chaotic than evil. If you've trolled correctly, nobody will know you've trolled at all.
Just imagine needing to give a company-wide demo of a newly completed platform initiative, so you wanted to make sure your camera and mic were working, but you care about privacy so you want to do it locally.
You dont have an app for that, as this is a purpose-built, minimal, Arch Linux workstation, so you use pacman to install a local webcam GUI. While you're using pacman, you think, might as well update too.
Update, reboot, uh oh.
WHERE'S THE ARCHISO USB?!?!
You can't find it anywhere! And you even check that weird place you found it last time! Think! ... Your phone has a USB-C port and a terminal right? And right there is a USB-C Flash Drive... Surely you can just flash - Ah shit, not without rooting the phone!
Thinking quickly, you unscrew the back panel and replace the M.2 SSD with the one from your personal Librem 14 laptop [you care about privacy, remember?] that's currently out for repairs for the (now infamous) power issues. It's Arch too, but it hasn't been updated yet -- thank the good Dennis Ritchie, so you're able to boot with it and check the ArchWiki homepage...
Those dreaded words... MANUAL INTERVENTION NEEDED... Ugh! Why does this only happen when I need it not to!
You frantically download and flash the archiso to your available usb stick, swap ssds, boot up, decrypt the drive, mount it manually (remembering fondly the carefully chosen partition layout), chroot in, perform the "intervention", and reboot.
Perfection. Smooth as freshly polished glass. Smoother even -- probably -- with these sweet new updates! You log in, slide directly into the meeting, you were only 30 seconds late. You give the presentation expertly, they're all impressed by your fancy words like "kubernetes" and "admission controller". "What a genius" you know they're thinking. They have no idea.
You sign off, and wipe the cold sweat from your brow. These are the moments when you remember why you run Arch at work. Not because it's easy -- because it's hard. Because every time you're faced with a situation like this, you get a little bit better.
Sure, you could be an Ubuntu Urchin, a Debian Dweeb, a Mint Mistake, but you're not. You're better than them. You're an Arch Assassin, because you know the moment you lose your edge -- is the moment you lose your job.
You sit back and start your favorite database UI tool, DBeaver. It full screens instantly thanks to your tiling window manager. You love how it's always been reliable on Arch Linux. Why anyone would bother doing anything else is beyond you.
I mean, that's essentially how it works at every scale. When it says thinking, the first part of that wait is your query waiting in a queue