Dangerous Thinking

In response to the most common concerns. 1. It will be annoying to reboot all the time. This would not be suitable for a daily driver system, I agree. This is for a hardened terminal that will be running SSH, VPN, Tor and basically nothing else on an old chromebook. Ideally I would like to forbid root access altogether and reinstall the OS when a significant update is required, if I can automate the install process down to a single button push I can do this once a week with minimal effort, I just have to wait for the install script to complete, then scp my Keepass database and other important files. 2. It will be less secure as it encourages running as root. See above, this is not a daily driver system. It is intended to be a minimal install optimised for secure web browsing, it will be more locked down and barren than Tails or Whonix. 3. Immutable file systems. I have read about these and so far they seem like the best option for my use case, I need to try Silverblue on my ESXI host sometime, see if I can get along with it. 4. is it worth it? I do not know how much extra security removing sudo and su would provide, probably not a great deal if you have a decent password. It seems Fedora silverblue or hardened Gentoo would be much better options, let's face it either of those will be practically invulnerable if updated regularly and used ONLY for SSH, FTP and web-console administration, it's hard to get a virus when connected via SSL to your own infrastructure, particularly on a LAN. Any suggestions?

Given how fast Linux can boot on a laptop with an SSD, I see a potential to further harden Linux via restricting root login to boot time. Most malware relies on privilege escalation, if you can remove both sudo and su this should logically reduce the attack surface? When I hit the power button I'm presented with an option, boot as user, or boot as root. If I want to install programs or modify directories other than /home/DangerousThinking I have to reboot, select "Boot as root" enter the root password, make my changes, reboot and select "Boot as user" Are there any distros that restrict root access to boot time in this way? If not why do you think that is?

Budget (including currency): Already Over Country: UK Hi, I'm picking out PC parts for the first time, here is my selection so far. MSI X470 GAMING PLUS MAX AM4 DDR4 ATX Motherboard AMD RYZEN 5 1600X DESKTOP CPU PROCESSOR 4GHZ TURBO 16MB/95W Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 2666MHz PC4-21300 DIMM RAM Memory Kolink Classic Tower PC Case Black Midi ATX Computer Chassis USB 3.0 80mm Fan UK Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO CPU Cooler 92mm Fan for Intel/AMD and AM4 Cooler Master MWE 700W 230V V2 120mm HDB Fan 80 PLUS White PSU Powersupply Samsung 980 250GB SSD M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive Cooler Master MasterGel Pro V2 Thermal Paste, 1.5ml, 9W/m-k, 2.6g/cm³ Am I making any rookie errors or will all these parts work together properly? I intend to use my Radeon 7950 3GB or an old GTX 570 as the processor has no integrated graphics, will these cards be compatible with my setup running windows 10? I'm going to get a proper GPU after christmas. Down the line I want to install a Ryzen 7 G3 on the same motherboard, apparently I can get a firmware update? If these cards don't work what is the cheapest GPU guaranteed to work with this setup? I'm able to get the above for £450 which seems like a decent deal. How does one go about installing drivers for the GPU with no display? Presumably all modern GPUs have a fallback driver to allow basic use? Thanks.

Sorted now, damn I need a redundant backup.

Hi, I accidentally renamed two directories the same thing. I was backing up files using secure copy and I forgot to give the file a name, this meant the backup file had the same name as my main storage directory on my NAS. Now when I go to my storage directory it only contains the backup files, I have renamed the backup but my storage directory has not returned. The files have not been deleted as the hard drive is still full but no path exists to them, how do I recreate that path? Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm struggling to find the information myself. Thanks

I only really intend to play Minecraft so the R7 250 looks pretty promising, £35 from a proper reseller compared to £80-110 for the other cards mentioned. Does Nvidia have any cards in the 250's range? I've heard my distro works well with Nvidia products so if they have anything similar I'll give it a look. If it plugs in, works and triples the FPS from the Intel® HD Graphics 4400, I'll be happy. I get the feeling the 250 will also be fine for games in the ps3/360 era, maybe even a few from the generation after. I would like to know if Nvidia has a good middle ground between the 250 and the 5500, If one exists I reckon I can get it for around £50 looking at local prices. Thanks for the reply, it's been very helpful

Yeah, the 750 looks promising, nice and small. I can solder pretty well so external power isn't a real problem, just inconvenient. Any other small form-factor, low power, inexpensive cards, with 1.5-2GB of memory? My budget is pretty broad £50-100, I know you can't tell me exactly what it will cost, just wanted to give you an idea of my price range. I've not bought a GPU before so I want some decent starting points, then I'll look at competing cards and make my decision based on price/performance. Thanks for the suggestion the 750 is a bit pricey but should be good for ps3 era games and a few in the ps4 era. Before I buy one, I'd like to look at a few more cards if you can think of any, preferably AMD as troubleshooting Nvidia's Linux drivers is reported to bee a miserable experience.

My own experience is that a slower 3.3GHZ CPU can run the game fine when paired with my hd 7950. I believe the CPU is adequate, I just need a good enough GPU to run the game at max settings. It already runs ok on integrated graphics so I shouldn't need much. I'm looking at around £50 second hand, can stretch a little. Can I get a GPU that takes all it's power from the PCIe slot? There are no power connectors visible on the board so I will need to improvise.

Hi I recently bought a used HP prodesk 400 G2, It works fine as a basic video streaming machine, it even plays Minecraft acceptably well. I would like to improve the graphics performance enough that I can max out the view distance and other settings. The case is rather small and the power supply is 300w, so I need a GPU that fits these requirements. Here is some more information on the computer and supported GPUs: https://support.hp.com/gb-en/document/c04443846 Thanks. P.S. I'm running Linux so AMD is preferable, will go Nvidia if there is a serious benefit.

I tried to get RDP set up on my DL380e G8 with two 2.4ghz 6 cores, I wanted to run all desktops remotely, for my mother, father, and myself. The idea was to have a system with 48GB RAM, 24 threads, and a RAID 6 array of SAS drives. For three users it would be almost impossible to bog it down, plus I could run plenty of VMs on a single thread each. I wanted to use this as a power saving measure, if my old server replaces 3 computers then it has paid for itself power wise, thin clients use barely any power. Ideally I would have upgraded to the 10 core 2.4ghz Xeons and had 10 cores for Windows + RDP and 10 cores for HyperV to run Linux VMs Alas my grand plan was foiled by RDPs crappy video performance, apparently RemoteFX can fix this with either a virtual or dedicated GPU, I couldn't figure it out or even find much information so I gave up on that. It would be so nice if RDP passed full-screen video to the guest GPU, I wouldn't mind videos being in poor quality when playing in a window.

Hi, according to Wikipedia server 2016 can run RemoteFX (not vGPU) as part of the remote desktop infrastructure role, however all guides I can find refer to using it with HyperV which is not ideal for me. Ideally I would like to get a GPU and use it with RemoteFX for better remote desktop performance but for now the "software GPU" is fine as I have CPU resources to burn. My RDP sessions suffer from poor performance when viewing YouTube videos, will RemoteFX help? I only need "decent" 1080p playback without stuttering and artifacts, the odd drop in quality is fine but it has to be a pleasant experience. How do I enable it for my RDP sessions? Do I just download the encoder server side and the select RemoteFX on the Remmina client? I want to get myself and my parents running on thin clients connected to my DL380e as a power saving measure and because their computers are very slow with little RAM. My server has 2X E5-2430L v2 and will have 48GB of 1333MHZ RAM when I get round to filling it up, the performance isn't as snappy as a modern system but it's very consistent with a lot of stuff running, much faster than my parent's PCs when they get bogged down, you can barely tell it's a remote machine when browsing the web. Down the line I want to get us running on shielded windows 10 VMs and set up my own "Emergency Desktop" system on Azure. I would Image the VM daily and upload it to Azure replacing the previous image, ideally I would set up a one-click solution to bring the VM online. (Note, The VM image would only include important files + Windows and programs) Depending on the price I could set up file backup on Azure too, some system where users can write and read but not modify or delete the files. Only my admin account could do that after providing 2FA. This should be mostly immune to conventional ransomware and other viruses that destroy files, I can't see any way for it to affect files stored prior to infection. This is all serious overkill considering most of their stuff is online anyway, but it would be very handy if I need to take the server down for maintenance, Azure VDI is pretty cheap if you only need it for a couple hours. What do you guys think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1WJDq4sHvI so basically WTF is this thing? Is it some sort of DNS that doesn't list malicious websites? Some sort of firewall? A proxy with filtering, that you route all your traffic through? Network sniffer? What would be so hard about making this as PC software? It's just a server that connects via WiFi, right? Surely if it's that great, there would be some equivalent in the enterprise market. If I wanted those features for a business, what would I buy? Can I do similar with open-source software? I have a 12C 2.4GHZ home server that can run Linux VMs so I'm not lacking for hardware. I have heard of Pf-sense, but don't want to use it as I can't have regular downtime on the network (Windows Update) Any other software you would recommend to beef up my network security? Preferably stuff that won't take the network down when it reboots.

I'm thinking of starting again, following a different guide, most of them use MariaDB. Do you think it will cause any conflicts with mySQL, Should I uninstall it?

Nah, same problem. ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'IDENTIFIED BY 'root'' at line 4 The good news is Apache is working, I can get to the default page.

I'm at this step currently https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-and-configure-wordpress#4-configure-database Yeah, I put the -> in, oops. I'll try the command without it. The guide didn't tell me to create a user or set a password. Tried the edited command. GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,CREATE,DROP,ALTER ON wordpress.* TO wordpress@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '<your-password>'; now I get. ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'IDENTIFIED BY '<your-password>'' at line 4 What password does it want, what should I put if I haven't set one?