Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

  • 4 Posts
  • 138 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldPort Forwarding/Redirecting
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    7 days ago

    At the firewall level, port forwarding forwards traffic bound for one port to another machine on your network on an arbitrary port, but the UI built on top of it in your router may not include this.

    If it’s not an option in your Fritzbox, your options are:

    • Make the service running on your internal network listen on one of those high-number ports instead.
    • Introduce another machine on the network that also performs NAT between your router and your machine
    • Try to access the underlying firewall in your router to tweak the rules manually. Some routers have an admin console accessible via telnet or SSH that may allow this.
    • Get a new router.

    The first and last options on this list are probably the best.


  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlIs Linux As Good As We Think It Is?
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    7 days ago

    You make an excellent point. I have a lot more patience for something I can understand, control, and most importantly, modify to my needs. Compared to an iThing (when it’s interacting with other iThings anyway) Linux is typically embarrassingly user hostile.

    If course, if you want your iThing to do something Apple hasn’t decided you should want to do, it’s a Total Fucking Nightmare to get working, so you use the OS that supports your priorities.

    Still, I really appreciate the Free software that goes out of its way to make things easy, and it’s something I prioritise in my own Free software offerings.



  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlCompanies that use desktop Linux
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    16 days ago

    In my experience, the larger the company, the more likely they are to force you to use Windows. The smaller companies will be more relaxed about the whole thing.

    The largest company I’ve worked for that allows Linux had a staff count of hundreds of engineers and hundreds more non-nerds. In their case though, the laptops were crippled with Crowdstrike and Kollide and while the tech team was working hard to support us, we were always aware that we made up around 1% of the machines they manage and represented a big chunk of their headaches.

    The response to this you usually hear (from me even) is that “I don’t need support, I know what I’m doing”. Which is probably true, but the vast majority of problems is in dealing with access to proprietary systems, failures from Crowdstrike or complaints about kernel versions etc.

    TL;DR: work at a small company (<100 staff) and they’ll probably leave you alone. Go bigger and you’ll be stuck fighting IT in one way or another.


  • It would be absolutely bizarre if you couldn’t connect with WireGuard port and Wireguard obfuscation set to Automatic. Things to try first:

    1. Connect without your VPN and try to access a single website like the theguardian.com
    2. Once that’s working, enable your VPN and that should do it.
    3. If you still can’t get connected, try switching out different countries. Each country listed corresponds to an IP to which your machine will try to connect over a benign port like 443 – so blocking that sort of traffic would be mad unless the IP is explicitly blocked. Therefore, driving to different country targets offers a different IP every time. They’d have to know Mulvad’s whole list and block them all.

    If the above somehow doesn’t work, Mulvad offers support through which you can get a temporary Server IP override. You can enter that in the bottom portion of your app’s settings.



  • Because Ubuntu is the worst of both worlds. Its packages are both old and unstable, offering zero benefit over always-up-to-date distros like Arch or the standard Debian.

    Especially when you’re running a containerised environment, there’s just no reason to opt for anything other than a stable, boring base OS while your containers can be as bleeding edge, crazy, or even Ubuntu-based as you like.




  • I’ve been using Arch for about 15 years or so, and yes, I build up cruft… in my home directory ;-). The system itself is remarkably good at keeping tidy. The one spot to keep an eye on is /var/cache/pacman, as that’s where it stores every package you download before installation and it won’t delete it without you asking it to.

    Any new config file will be saved with a .pacsave extension, so you’ll want to keep an eye out for those, but that’s basically it





  • Actually, tutorials like that are a big reason that I don’t want to switch. The first steps are things like:

    • Install these fonts that only work in a GUI environment
    • Install these programs straight from GitHub without your package manager

    …and all I hear is: “this stuff isn’t ready yet” and “I’m going to be staring at Unicode glyphs the next time I have to tinker outside of my GUI”.

    If I can’t easily and securely install a shell on every environment I use as I don’t want to be constantly context switching, then I’m going to have to stick to Bash.


  • Honestly, the only btrfs feature that interests me is the snapshotting, as the current state of my backups is rather sub-par. There’s just a lot of inertia involved in adopting it when ext4 Just Works™. Maybe next time I install a new system I’ll give it a shot.

    As for zsh, I rather like the general “intelligence” I see on others’ machines: the way it autocorrects typos, draws a navigable menu for tab completions complete with colour highlighting… it looks lovely. I’ve been a Bash user for 25 years though, and muscle memory like smashing the tab key to get what I want is a hard habit to break.