iam-TJ (u/iam-TJ) - Readit News

iam-TJ commented on Mobile carriers can get your GPS location an.dywa.ng/carrier-gnss.h... · Posted by u/cbeuw

ItsBob · 9 days ago

I can tell you with almost 100% certainty: no banks in the UK use any 2FA other than SMS-based.

I spent December last year looking for a new bank to move to. One of my criteria (not the most important but it was on the list) was better-than-SMS 2FA.

No one offers it. There may be some niche, loosely-based finance org that does but none of the banks or Building Societies do.

So, unfortunately, you need it in the UK.

iam-TJ · 9 days ago

Barclays, with standard current accounts, provides several methods none of which are SMS. There's a separate pin-code device (called Pinsentry) that does TOTP and challenge-response, or passcodes for both telephone and Internet banking.

iam-TJ commented on JPEG XL Test Page tildeweb.nl/~michiel/jxl/... · Posted by u/roywashere

pkulak · 20 days ago

And Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jxl/

iam-TJ · 19 days ago

Firefox Nightly v149 has added experimental support via Settings > Firefox Labs:

  Webpage Display
  Media: JPEG XL
  With this feature enabled, Nightly supports the JPEG XL (JXL) format. This is an enhanced image file format that supports lossless transition from traditional JPEG files. See bug 1539075 for more details.

iam-TJ commented on I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great theverge.com/tech/858910/... · Posted by u/rorylawless

pjmlp · a month ago

Indeed nothing other than being the only device that dropped connections on some of my routers, no hardware video decoding no matter what tips from Linux forums I tried, OpenGL 3.3 when the card supported OpenGL 4.1....

And when during 2024 I looked for a replacement after it died, I was so lucky that I got one with an UEFI that refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD, while having no issues loading the same, if it was on external box over USB.

iam-TJ · a month ago

"refused to load whatever distro I tried from SSD" sounds very much like a feature in AMI InsydeH2O firmware (and possibly others) where-by one has to manually "trust" the boot-loader file the boot menu entry points to. This doesn't seem to apply to Microsoft Windows boot loaders so I've always assumed the signing certificate is checked directly against the MS UEFI CA root rather than the intermediate 3rd party certificate that is used by Microsoft to sign distro shim files.

I have kept a screenshot of the firmware setup for years to remind me where the option can be found; looking at it now:

menu: Security > "Select UEFI file as trusted"

That would bring up a file-chooser where one can navigate the files in the EFI System Partition and select the distro's initial boot-loader file. For example, for a Debian install it would either or both of:

/EFI/debian/shimx64.efi /EFI/debian/grubx64.efi

iam-TJ commented on Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network blog.tymscar.com/posts/im... · Posted by u/tymscar

slig · 2 months ago

> a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux

Do you remember the name of the product?

iam-TJ · 2 months ago

Two devices I use - both running Debian, and both being open-source hardware to some degree or other:

PC Engines APU2, AMD x86_64, 4-core, 4GiB, 3x Gigabit Ethernet, 3 x mini PCIe, SIM slot, USB 3, Serial, SATA ports. Mine has dual band WiFi in one mPCIe, SSD in another.

Turris Mox, Marvel aarch64. This can expand via plug and go via a range of extension modules. I've got one with 25 Gigabit (3 x 8-port modules) Ethernet, 1 x SFP, 5 x USB3, Wifi, Serial.

iam-TJ commented on Messing with scraper bots herman.bearblog.dev/messi... · Posted by u/HermanMartinus

iam-TJ · 3 months ago

This reminds me of a recent discussion about using a tarpit for A.I. and other scrapers. I've kept a tab alive with a reference to a neat tool and approach called Nepenthes that VERY SLOWLY drip feeds endless generated data into the connection. I've not had an opportunity to experiment with it as yet:

https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

iam-TJ commented on Ask HN: Does anyone have scans of these missing PC Plus issues (1991–1993)? · Posted by u/billpg

iam-TJ · 4 months ago

Have you checked out the The National Museum of Computing (TNMoC) archive. Last time I was there they had a rather good magazine collection going back to the early 1980s. It may be worth a call. I see they have an (incomplete) online catalogue:

https://www.tnmoc.org/library-archive

iam-TJ commented on Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs quantum5.ca/2025/05/11/fa... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

Szpadel · 6 months ago

something that people forget with raid1 is that this only protect from catastrophic disk failure.

this means your your drive need to be dead for raid to do it's protection and this is usually the case.

the problem is when starts corrupting data it reads of writes. in that case raid have no way to know that and can even corrupt data on the healthy drive. (data is read corrupted and then written to both drives)

the issue is that there are 2 copies of the data and raid have no way of telling with one is correct so it's basically flips a coin and select one of them, even if filesystem knows that content makes no sense.

that's basically biggest advantage of filesystems like zfs or btrfs that manage raid themselves, they have checksums and that know with copy is valid and are able to recover and say that one drive appears healthy but it's corrupting data so you probably want to replace it

iam-TJ · 6 months ago

When using LVM one can use the dm-integrity target to detect data corruption.

iam-TJ commented on Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs quantum5.ca/2025/05/11/fa... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

iam-TJ · 6 months ago

When using LVM there is no need to use separate mdadm (MD) based RAID - just use LVM's own RAID support.

I have a workstation with four storage devices; two 512GB SSDs, one 1GB SSD, and one 3TB HDD. I use LUKS/dm_crypt for Full Disk Encryption (FDE) of the OS and most data volumes but two of the SSDs and the volumes they hold are unencrypted. These are for caching or public and ephemeral data that can easily be replaced: source-code of public projects, build products, experimental and temporary OS/VM images, and the like.

  dmsetup ls | wc -l

reports 100 device-mapper Logical Volumes (LV). However only 30 are volumes exposing file-systems or OS images according to:

  ls -1 /dev/mapper/${VG}-* | grep -E "${VG}-[^_]+$" | wc -l

The other 70 are LVM raid1 mirrors, writecache, crypt or other target-type volumes.

This arrangement allows me to choose caching, raid, and any other device-mapper target combinations on a per-LV basis. I divide the file-system hierarchy into multiple mounted LVs and each is tailored to its usage, so I can choose both device-mapper options and file-system type. For example, /var/lib/machines/ is a LV with BTRFS to work with systemd-nspawn/machined so I have a base OS sub-volume and then various per-application snapshots based on it, whereas /home/ is RAID 1 mirror over multiple devices and /etc/ is also a RAID 1 mirror.

The RAID 1 mirrors can be easily backed-up to remote hosts using iSCSI block devices. Simply add the iSCSI volume to the mirror as an additional member, allow it to sync 100%, and then remove it from the mirror (one just needs to be aware of and minimising open files when doing so - syncing on start-up or shutdown when users are logged out is a useful strategy or from the startup or shutdown initrd).

Doing it this way rather than as file backups means in the event of disaster I can recover immediately on another PC simply by creating an LV RAID 1 with the iSCSI volume, adding local member volumes, letting the local volumes sync, then removing the iSCSI volume.

I initially allocate a minimum of space to each volume. If a volume gets close to capacity - or runs out - I simply do a live resize using e.g:

  lvextend --resizefs --size +32G ${VG}/${LV}

or, if I want to direct it to use a specific Physical Volume (PV) for the new space:

    lvextend --resizefs --size +32G ${VG}/${LV} ${PV}

One has to be aware that --resizefs uses 'fsadmn' and only supports a limited set of file-systems (ext*, ReiserFS and XFS) so if using BTRFS or others their own resize operations are required, e.g:

  btrfs filesystem resize max /srv/NAS/${VG}/${LV}

iam-TJ commented on Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move servethehome.com/synology... · Posted by u/motiejus

dur-randir · 10 months ago

Any Linux with LVM. You don't need fancy proprietary OS for that.

iam-TJ · 10 months ago

To expand on this with an example. Adding a new device we'll call sdz to an existing Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Volume Group (VG) called "NAS" such that all the space on sdz is instantly available for adding to any Logical Volume (LV):

  pvcreate /dev/sdz
  vgextend NAS /dev/sdz

Now we want to add additional space to an existing LV "backup":

  lvextend --size +128G --resizefs NAS/backup

*note: --resizefs only works for file-systems supported by 'fsadmn' - its man-page says:

"fsadm utility checks or resizes the filesystem on a device (can be also dm-crypt encrypted device). It tries to use the same API for ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS and XFS filesystem."

If using BTRFS inside the LV, and the LV "backup" is mounted at /srv/backup, tell it to use the additional space using:

  btrfs filesystem resize max /srv/backup