486

@486@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4 source code on GitHub — 45 year old code now open-source⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This explains it, although it is not really Git's fault as that article suggests, but rather the charset conversions to UTF-8 that broke things. With all that fixed it builds fine. I've been using DOSBOX and since all the required build tools are included in the repo, it is easy to build.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft releases MS-DOS 4 source code on GitHub — 45 year old code now open-source⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Did anyone manage to build this? It seems something is missing, or I am doing something wrong. The build fails due to missing symbols for me. Also, interestingly the assembler complained about one line in a certain file being too long. Fortunately that lines was just a comment, so it was easy to fix that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some great use cases for a Raspberry Pi 4, if I buy the 5 to replace it?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Compared to other SBCs, Raspberry Pis have been pretty inefficient for a while. A Pi 5 idles at about 3 W, which is pretty terrible for such a board, compared to other similar devices. You can get X86 PCs that idle at 3 W which are way more powerful. Other ARM SBCs use less than half that at idle and similarly less under load.

  There are probably multiple reasons for that. The Pi's SoCs have always used rather old process nodes, which are more power hungry than more modern ones used by other single board computers and PCs - 16 nm for the Pi 5 SoC and 28 nm for the Pi 4. Also, with the Pi 5 there is this additional "south bridge" chip which is attached via PCIe. This consumes additional power and for some reason the PCIe link is configured such that it never enters power saving states. I don't know why.

  Also, the power supply circuitry on the Pi 5 is far from ideal with its 5 V / 5 A power supply. Such a low voltage at such a high current can easily cause additional losses on the wire. That's mostly relevant under high load though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some great use cases for a Raspberry Pi 4, if I buy the 5 to replace it?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Since none of these require a Raspberry Pi to run, I would suggest using a mini PC (with an Intel N100 or similar) instead of a Pi 5. With all the accessories needed for the Pi, a mini PC can actually be cheaper and of course a lot more powerful. Since the Pi 5 is very power-inefficient, a mini PC can even be better in that regard too if that matters to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open hardware single board computer server recommendations?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, the Odroid H series SBC probably come closest to OP's requirements. Schematics are available on their website. They are also really low power with even the older H2 idling below 4 W.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any feedback from port knockers ?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Highly susceptible to replay and man in the middle attacks.

  fwknop isn't susceptible to either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Another good reason not to open port 22⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is quite a significant difference. An ssh server - even when running on a non-default port - is easily detectable by scanning for it. With a properly configured Wireguard setup this is not the case. As someone scanning from the outside, it is impossible to tell if there is Wireguard listening or not, since it simply won't send any reply to you if you don't have the correct key. Since it uses UDP it isn't even possible to tell if there is any service running on a given UDP port.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best secure router for home use?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I always found the software updates of AVM - the manufacturer of those "Fritz!Box"es - to be of questionable quality. If you take a look at the source code that they have to release upon request of the GPL'ed source code they use, you'll notice that they use ancient versions of the Linux kernel, Busybox and other tools. By ancient, I mean many years old, unsupported by upstream for years. Also, they only publish those sources manually when someone asks for them, which doesn't bode well for their internal development processes. If they used CI/CD pipelines, they could easily push out updates of those sources with every new release…