danielquinn

It’s been years since I was experimenting, trying to set things up properly, but at the time I could swear that I’d have the following set:

PubkeyAuthentication yes
PasswordAuthentication no
UsePam yes

and attempts to SSH into the system would still result in a password prompt, even though PasswordAuthentication was set to no. After some experimentation, I found that if I set UsePam to no, you wouldn’t get a password prompt, so that’s what I’ve been doing on every SSH server I’ve had since like, 2000.

Tinkering with it now though, I see there’s also another directive, KbdInteractiveAuthentication, which when set to no, will ensure I don’t see a password prompt even when UsePam is set to yes. I can only assume that 26ish years ago there was no KbdInteractiveAuthentication, or I just didn’t know about / notice it!

Well no harm done in my case anyway, as I don’t generally expose SSH servers to the outside world anyway. But it’s good to know that I don’t have to turn off PAM to disable password logins anymore.

"Didn’t you wear that like, five years ago? "

I’ve been setting UsePam = no for decades because leaving it on meant that it’d still present a password login of keys failed. Is this still the case, was I wrong from the beginning, or is this somehow ok?

I don’t know where you saw this “No”, but all of their code has been up on their (self hosted) GitLab for years: git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux

It was really hard to read without the formatting, so I’ve fixed it below:

One thing Star Trek could never do today is introduce one of its main characters as an unrepentant anticolonial terrorist, and then spend seven seasons stubbornly refusing to make her apologize for having been one.

Major Kira Nerys grows enormously over Deep Space Nine. She learns that individual Cardassians aren’t interchangeable. She befriends some of them. She confronts things the Bajoran Resistance did that were ugly. So the show gives her every opportunity to arrive at the comfortable conclusion you’d expect. She never does.

In Season 5, a Cardassian civilian confronts Kira about a Resistance bombing that killed twelve Cardassians, including the family of the military officer who lived there. He asks whether she feels guilty, and Kira’s answer is astonishing from a modern perspective:

“None of you belonged on Bajor. It wasn’t your world. For fifty years you raped our planet, and you killed our people. I don’t care whether you held a phaser in your hand or you ironed shirts for a living. You were all guilty, and you were all legitimate targets!”

Kira isn’t some villain whose radicalism exists so Captain Sisko can spend the next five minutes explaining the enlightened Federation position. She’s not an extremist who eventually realizes that both sides went too far. She’s not even a former terrorist who has matured enough to be embarrassed by her younger self.

She is the first officer of Deep Space Nine. She may be a complicated hero, but she is objectively a hero. Over the course of the series, Kira changes her understanding of people without ever fundamentally changing her understanding of power. She accepts that an innocent Cardassian doesn’t deserve to die solely because he’s Cardassian. But the Cardassian occupation of Bajor was maintained by an entire colonial society, not merely the soldiers holding rifles – and Kira still believes the Bajorans had the right to make that occupation unbearable.

That’s an incredibly uncomfortable distinction, and DS9 lets it remain uncomfortable. Which is probably why Kira feels like a character from another political universe now.

After 9/11, American television certainly didn’t stop making complicated or even sympathetic terrorist characters. But the terrorist became a problem to explain: How was this person radicalized? Can they be redeemed? Have they renounced violence? Are they secretly still dangerous?

What they don’t do is show terrorist characters saying “yes I did it, and I’d do it again” while remaining the hero.

Nana Visitor herself noticed the difference years later. Talking about whether Kira could exist after 9/11, she said she couldn’t imagine playing her quite the same way. Other shows could have complicated terrorist characters, she observed, but the audience was always being asked to question them. “Kira, never.”

And that’s the genuinely subversive thing about her. DS9 doesn’t ask us to discover that Kira was secretly right about everything she did. It shows us innocent people harmed by the Resistance. It lets victims call her a murderer. It lets Kira herself recognize moral boundaries she didn’t always recognize before. But it never requires the colonized person to condemn her own resistance before we’re allowed to consider her a hero.

By the end of the series, Star Trek does something even stranger: when Cardassia itself falls under Dominion occupation, the former Bajoran terrorist is sent to teach the Cardassians how to become terrorists. The imperial power that once hunted Kira’s resistance suddenly needs exactly the knowledge her resistance produced.

Eventually the people who called her a terrorist needed her to teach them how to resist an occupation. Turns out terrorism looks a lot different when you’re the one being occupied.

orignal source: Facebook

Back in the days when WordPress started out, 1GB of RAM was a lot! You’d be surprised what you can do when you’re just running a server.

Just get one of these and set everything up in a few browser tabs. Either that or use an OS with workspace support and put the different apps you want on separate workspaces.

In our livingroom, our old laptop runs Arch Linux with GNOME. Jellyfin is on desktop 1, and Firefox is on desktop 2. Firefox runs Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube in separate tabs and switching between all of these is a keyboard shortcut on the above remote. Frankly, it’s simpler than most “smart” TVs I’ve had to work with.

Or just a cheap laptop.

They really are determined to undermine Star Trek.

Given that sort of description I’d bet that it is DNS actually. If you run a DNS lookup from your LAN for your domain, do you get the external IP or the internal one? You can try this with dig in Linux or host in Windows (I think).

If I’m right and you’re getting the external IP even when querying from your LAN, then what you need is either a separate DNS for your LAN or what they call a “split DNS” whe are a your domain server returns a different value depending on the originating IP.

You can check for this by editing your hosts file. If you add your domain and local IP there and then try to ping that domain on that machine, it should work. If you’ve got a small network, you might even just copy the hosts lines between machines (this is what I do for example).

At my first-ever tech job back in 2000, I was given a little Celeron desktop computer to do my work: mostly writing some ColdFusion and cutting up images in Photoshop. For the most part, the machine worked fine, except whenever I scrolled down on a webpage in Netscape, the box’s PC speaker would start screaming. I tried to ignore it, but I was in a small room with two other nerds and it was getting really annoying.

One day, my frustrated colleague decided it was time to investigate. As part of the process, he noticed that there was very little air coming out of the power supply fan port. “Must be a busted fan and that’s causing an overheating alarm” he declared. We unplugged the box, popped it onto my desk, and opened it up. The internals were pristine. No dust, nothing. The computer was practically brand new after all.

We were just about to crack open the power supply (not recommended, but we were getting desperate) when my colleague noticed that something was wedged inside the fan… it was the biggest (dead, thankfully) cockroach I have ever seen, at least 10cm long. For context, this was in Vancouver, Canada. Those just don’t exist there.

My colleague jammed his screwdriver in there to grind up the cockroach carcass, then plugged the box back in. After a shittone of dessicated cockroach guts spewed out the back, my little computer was operating normally.

As best we could guess, the monster crawled into the fan in Malaysia when as was assembled and somehow got pinned in there, died of starvation, and then stowed away to Canada.

There’s a nifty project on Mastodon where someone is running an instance entirely on solar (and I think a battery?). They’ve been tinkering with some of the code to do things like optimise images for reduced weight of CPU cost.

The project is called @solaradmin@solarcene.community and the account for the person running it is on a separate instance, presumably so petiole can message them about problems: @smallsolar@techhub.social.

The right time to look elsewhere was when Microsoft bought it.

The next best time was when viable alternatives like GitLab and later, Codeberg appeared.

The next best time was when it became clear that they were stealing your code to feed into their sparkly autocomplete and were going to sell it back to you.

The next best time was when they dumped a bunch of vibecoded garbage into the codebase and killed the uptime.

The next best time is now.

You don’t even have to migrate all your stuff. Just start all your new projects on Codeberg, or GitLab, or something self-hosted. Once you get used to the new place, you can migrate your old stuff when you’re ready.

What do you use for voice synthesis?

OMG I love this. Thank you for sharing!

#Solarpunk!

Each Pi 4 has 8GB of RAM. With six devices, that’s 48GB to play with. More than enough for my needs.

Actually, as a web guy, I find the ARM architecture to be more than sufficient. Most of the stuff I build is memory heavy and CPU light, so the Pi is great for this stuff.

They’re fanless and low-power, which was the primary draw to going this route. I run a Kubernetes cluster on them, including a few personal websites (Nginx+Python+Django), PostgreSQL, Sonarr, Calibre, SSH (occasionally) and every once in a while, an OpenArena server :-)

Seven Raspberry Pi 4’s and one Pi Zero, mounted on some tile “shelves” inside some IKEA furniture.

Image

Ho ho ho