well, before that and for generations, banks printing money was an acceptable way of governments to make rich people richer and all others poorer, so i can fully accept that stealing was learned from govs and the richies there. change how “the successfull” accomplish their successes and you can teach the kids how to live without stealing, keep abuse by gov and richies as is and all the theft is done exactly as ordered by govs and richies, no matter the age.

one example of a program that did multiple things is sfdisk, it used to make the kernel reload the new partition table but that was not its main job, only changing them. the extra functionality moved to blockdev which is nearer to doing such as it also triggers flushing buffers and i think setting read/write status. i am fully ok with that change as it removes code from a program that doesn’t need it to another that already does similar things so that other partitioning programs like gdisk fdisk or parted could go the same way so that maintainers of the reread-partition-table things can concentrate on one solution at one place (in userspace) instead of opening issues at an unknown number of projects that also alter partitioning. the “do one thing” paradigma is good for developers who maintain the code and i pretty much appreciate their work. if you are up to only want one-day-flies that either die or take huge amounts of resources only for keeping them alive (image of a mayfly in an emergency room and a heart-lung machine attached while chirurgs rushing around trying to enlenghten its life a few seconds more) then you are good with monolithic tools that could hardly be maintained and suck allday as no one wants to fix any bugs or cannot without creating new ones due to the tightened dependency hell it has internally.

the point is not a lack of examples doing wrong but where one wants to be heading towards.

Lol what???

wouldn’t that be the definition of stable?

the computer on voyager 2 is running for 47 years now, they might have rebooted some parts meanwhile but overall its a long time now, and if the program is free of bugs the time that program can run only depends on the durability of the hardware, protection from cosmic rays (which were afaik the problems the voyager probes faced mostly, not bugs) which could be quite long if protected from hazardous environments and maybe using optoelectronics but the point is that a bug free software can run forever only depending on hardware durability and energy supply, in any other way no humans are needed for a veery long time ;-)

However, systemd makes the system much more secure and reliable as it is

less secure and less reliable day-by-day you meant? systemd introduces needless dependencies ever since as if that was it sole intention ever from its very beginning, which already were used for wide attacks, and exactly those attacks that the people working hard to remove unneeded dependencies for security reasons meant to prevent by things like “do one thing only” (but security was not the number 1 reason for this one i think), systemd instead: ‘lets add another level of that exponential dependency tree from the insecurity hell’ felt like they did this stupid thing intentionally every month for a decade or more.

and stability… if you don’t monitor what systemd does, you’ll never know how bad it actually is. i’ve made custom scripts to monitor systemd’s failures (failing in doing a very primitive of its job) and there are hundreds (actually varying around 200 to 300 sometimes more) of such per day on all our systems for one particular(!) measurement only that was breaking service stability and i wrote a measure-and-fix+monitor workaround. other fixes were not monitored however, only silently fixed by workarounds, thus just unnumbered systemd bugs/instabilities in the dark that stole a lot of work capacity…

if you run distros with systemd, unreliability is your daily experience unless you don’t really care or have never experienced stability before - like running a service (a single process) for 8 years without any interruption then it suddenly stops and you go like “was it maybe an attack? the process died, how could that be? were there any connects from outside at that moment?” not talking about not updating something that long, but “stability” itself CAN be like if you dont stop it, it’ll still run in 10000+ years maybe millions, more likely that humans extincted themselves way earlier than of a process “just dying” by a bug… while systemd even randomly stops things that were running well for no reason (varying) once a month more or less (also varying in what it actually randomly stops, sometimes (2 times) it even stopped ssh on my servers, me asking myself if i should create yet another workaround for systemds buggyness to not locking me out again from network or ratjer go for the real solution for most* of all systemd problems - *see below) on the few standard installs i personally have as i didn’t have the way to automatically replace provider installed distro on VMs in the DC. i want this replacing automatically for the same reason why i don’t like systemd, it causes manual work for a thing that should go automated. however due to systemd’s perpetuated instability i now managed to have this way, and every second working on getting rid of systemd is worth it 100k times. this however does not solve all systemd-introduced problems as the xz attack showed (a systemd-dependency on xz made the infected xz library beeing useful-for-the-atracker during compiletime of sshd binary with which then the attacker could infect the newly built sshd binary),one could still be attacked through systemd’s dependency hell even if one does not use systemd by oneself, but the build machines used for your distro could be affected/infected by systemd’s needless dependencies when “also” compiling for systemd-affected distributions thus there is the risk of becoming a victim of needless-systemd-dependencies while not using systemd at all. however the attack through systemd dependency (and that the public solution was not the removal of needless dependencies only included as source for superflous third party “needs”) made clear that systemd is an overall problem for security that will not be solved quickly but stay just like all windows insecurities will stay as long as they whish to push them to their “users”.

systemd reducing overall security and its unreliability combined with some builtin impediments (i.e. when debugging its defects) is what drove me away from systemd. there are solutions way more stable and way more secure (and way better documented btw) that do not call in for needless dependencies, reducing risks, attack vectors and increases overall debuggability i.e. by deterministic behaviour as an easy example. and none of its important (to me) promises have been fulfilled yet by systemd, drop-in-replacement? have heared that lie thousands of times, but in the last decade i have not experienced it a single time in a distro and it does not seem to be included/finished any more.

for windows users or windows admins a linux with systemd on it IS an improvement in stability, security and of course for updating, yes. but all of that does not come from systemd, rather the opposite is the case, systemd reduces it month by month, thats my experience and thats the most important experience for me, idc what lies whitdepapers tell or what broken promises are believed by anyone or the masses, i want secure and stable servers and services and systemd does not fit in for any of these goals and the time it was still “young” and early problems could be accepted in the hope they get fixed soon are gone, but without those fixes having ever appeared.

maybe try to find a linux user group near where you live. if there is one, usually you get help there, but its usually kinda different sort of help, you don’t get “the solution” to get your personal whishes come true ready prepared in bite-sized piezes for easy consumption but just the help by advices or suggestions that those there can give you or directly would try out.

open source is about sharing knowledge and todays mainstream OS distributions are way more complicated than long ago so the learning curve to adjust things in ways the distribution didn’t prepare (which is often a lot) might be high but always worth a try at least for the learning.

for a lightweight desktop environment that is somehow similar to the old windows98, i’ld say give XFCE a try. i think on debian/ubuntu trying out could be as easy as installing the xfce (or xfce4?) package (or maybe an xfce4-desktop-environment paclage) i don’t remember the exact package name but there is one meta package that depends on all needed stuff, i did it like 4 years ago… when installed you could try it by logging in and (your distro should have a login manager that allows this, or you’ld have to change that too) choosing xfce as desktop environment at login time, thus if you don’t like it, logout again and login with the other again.

i am using xfce because it is clean, lightweight, it does its job, does not invent new unneeded features every few month (like it felt when i used kde long ago) and is adjustable enough for me. i removed the lower task bar and put the open windows components into the bar above adjustedbthat a bit, thats basically what i changed and i think it is quite similar to what win98 was (but thats not the reason for me to have it that way)

also, it is possible to change the window manager (that handles how windows are placed), the desktop manager (like task bar, application menu, maybe widges, logout buttons) and of course also one could change x.org to wayland and back without changing the other components. the login window could come from gnome project but after login one could use a complete different projects toolset.

“can” does not mean that every distro makes that an easy task. also mixing things will likely end in a fuller disk for lots of “needed” components that are maybe mostly unused. (i think i once used gnome but installed kde only for their printing dialog *lol)

when using the big distributions it is likely that no 3rd party downloads are needed to try other window managers or desktop environments, maybe search for such keywords in aptitude , apt search, or such. but new fancy stuff also often first comes from unknown 3rd party websites (or git*.com which is the same security risk as 3rd party websites) before it gets into main repositories after years (or maybe even never)

Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. […] and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!

maybe “TwisterOS” tries to invent air movement by software? it might be a random unrelated incident and the fan is simply broken, it might also be that it enabled some fan control and the fan would start if you only heat up the system enough which might not happen with a lightweight distro and the maybe not cpu consuming programs you use (?). “stress” is a program that could artificially create such cpu consumption for testing (but with a broken fan it might be not a good idea to actively and unnecesarily heat up the cpu, but also cpus usually have failsafe shutdown mechanisms so they dont overheat but that might be like a sudden power down so maybe expect unsaved work to just vanish) another test could be to just give the fan another power source and see what happens, and put abother fan that works in place to see if that changes something

You can use

also there is:

./configure && make && make install

just to mention ;-)

yeah! you beat me to it 👍

guess this instance is lost, lets restart the matrix!

https://youtu.be/rNdpvNH1yi8?si=GPLbzrNxnwKNCfHm

with a microscope

if it was at least a scanning tunneling one, then yes, good job 👍 🤪

well there is plenty of what is possible to try. but unless one had looked at the real cause i’ld suspect one of apples hardware backdoors to cause the crashes like if the backdoor doesn’t work, crash the kernel, so we never loose control over the sheeapple thing. or more realistic if you want:

First maybe just crappy hardware:

There is a reason why i suspect apple’s hardware, cause my shitty macbook at work should(!) go to something like hibernate, sleep, or its spyveillance-only mode when closing the lid, and it should also lock the screen when doing so, the actual results seem pure randomly choosen, sometimes the sleep mode survives the weekend with lots of accu left, sometimes its completely depleted and i even have to charge it for a while before it has enough power to show the charging logo. for security reasons i have to manually lock my screen, verify it and then close the lid, which is pure annoy. this could just be buggy hardware, a sensor so broken that reading its inputs directly could crash any OS that assumes i.e. no division by zero, pointers to nonexisting ram or whatever, and maybe apple just knows what faulty measurements mean what (but cannot make that stable too, only no crash occurs)

secondly with a hardware backdoor:

https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2023_kaspersky-discloses-iphone-hardware-feature-vital-in-operation-triangulation-case

“The discovered vulnerability is a hardware feature, possibly based on the principle of “security through obscurity,” and may have been intended for testing or debugging. Following the initial 0-click iMessage attack and subsequent privilege escalation, the attackers leveraged this hardware feature to bypass hardware-based security protections and manipulate the contents of protected memory regions.”

which is that (some/all?) iphones have at least one memory page where one only has to accidently or intentionally write something into it, that could trigger the backdoor feature to let you choose which memory address to overwrite with what bytes, bypassing every(!) security mechanism in hardware AND of course those made of software too. that is how i understood documentation and presentations about it. now apple said they “fixed” it in software, from what i remember that fix was just a “os preventing apps from writing to that memory backdoor page” thus not a fix but only a mitigation, while “fix” is more a lie than only misleading words to just pretend it wasn’t permanent and unfixable. let us assume that linux does not include hardware backdoor mitigations for apple devices AND that apple placed the very same backdoor memory page into macbooks as well but maybe at (an)other physical address(es). now the code that runs on closing the lid “might” just reside at or write to the very same memory page on every boot for a given exact same kernel, which might be a memory page that acts the same or similar like that iphone hardware backdoor, overwriting some other memory page depending on what is actually written to the backdoor page which immediately crashes the kernel. if that’s whats happening there, t2linux is not broken, but macbooks are just insecure costly (loss of money, time, security, trust, work performance, patents, stability, a.s.o. …) waste.

how to find out? (maybe)

• get the kernel code.
• deactivate every driver not needed to boot and run the lidclose stuff like i.e. the sensor, compile the kernel anew and try booting from it.

changin the kernel a lot by removing everything(!) not needed should in theory/hopefully also change the pages that would be affected when closing the lid. same effect: likely no backdoor. no effect: maybe something you deactivated, maybe yet another backdoor discovery.

it might also be solveable by sth like acpi settings or such, probably switchable from kernel boot cmdline , maybe change settings for hibernate / suspend to ram (does apple hardware even support such? i mean without the buggy behaviour i experience?)l

but you did notice that compilers can be manipulated to include backdoors into resulting binaries AND put the same manipulation into newly compiled compilers as well, right? then where did you get that compiler from? did you have a look at the binary output? then if so, did you look at it using the hexeditor of that same compiler? 😎 plz have a look … 💥 bzzzt … really you are lucky to be alive after a blast like that, especially you, have yourself checked out with ems before you leave!

you should definitely know what type of authentication you use (my opinion) !! the agent can hold the key forever, so if you are just not asked again when connecting once more, thats what the agent is for. however its only in ram, so stopping the process or rebooting ends that of course. if you didn’t reboot meanwhile maybe try unload all keys from it (ssh-add -D, ssh-add -L) and see what the next login is like.

btw: i use ControlMaster /ControlPath (with timeouts) to even reduce the number of passwordless logins and speed things up when running scripts or things like ansible, monitoring via ssh etc. then everything goes through the already open channel and no authentication is needed for the second thing any more, it gets really fast then.

no bad politics

😭

you already have an internet connected back door in your CPU.

unless you’re running your own gsm station and let your cpu’s safely connect to it, and use that connection for additional snmp monitoring data?

i would not trust hardware from a vendor that puts hardwired backdoors into physical memory… you’ld undermine any security the OS could give you.

The whole point of ssh-agent is to remember your passphrase.

replace passphrase with private key and you’re very correct.

passphrases used to login to servers using PasswordAuthentication are not stored in the agent. i might be wrong with technical details on how the private key is actually stored in RAM by the agent, but in the context of ssh passphrases that could be directly used for login to servers, saying the agent stores passphrases is at least a bit misleading.

what you want is:

• use Key authentication, not passwords
• disable passwordauthentication on the server when you have setup and secured (some sort of backup) ssh access with keys instead of passwords.
• if you always want to provide a short password for login, then don’t use an agent, i.e. unset that environment variable and check ssh_config
• give your private key a password that fits your needs (average time it shoulf take attackers to guess that password vs your time you need overall to exchange the pubkey on all your servers)
• change the privatekey every time immediately after someone might have had access to the password protected privkey file
• do not give others access to your account on your pc to not have to change your private key too often.

also an idea:

• use a token that stores the private key AND is PIN protected as in it would lock itself upon a few tries with a wrong pin. this way the “password” needed to enter for logins can be minimal while at the same time protecting the private key from beeing copied. but even then one should not let others have access to the same machine (of course not as root) or account (as user, but better not at all) as an unlocked token could also possibly be used to place a second attacker provided key on the server you wanted to protect.

all depends on the level of security you want to achieve. additional TOTP could improve security too (but beware that some authenticator providers might have “sharing” features which could compromise the TOTP token even before its first use.

My theory is that you already have something providing ssh agent service

in the past some xserver environments started an ssh-agent for you just in case of, and for some reason i don’t remember that was annoying and i disabled it to start my agent in my shell environment as i wanted it.

also a possibility is tharlt there are other agents like the gpg-agent that afaik also handles ssh keys.

but i would also look into $HOME/.ssh/config if there was something configured that matches the hostname, ip, or with wildcards* parts of it, that could interfere with key selection as the .ssh/id_rsa key should IMHO always be tried if key auth is possible and no (matching) key is known to the ssh process, that is unless there already is something configured…

not sure if a system-wide /etc/ssh/ssh_config would interfere there too, maybe have a look there too. as this behaviour seems a bit unexpected if not configured specially to do so.

antarctica:

• no bad politics
• no wars so far
• people there are mainly interested in science
• no economic abuse or exploitation
• pinguins!
• no air conditioning needed to survive the summer.
• winter is offline time, visitors won’t arrive or leave then.
• last place to stay cool during boomers heritage “heat death of our planet”

well sure, it has downsides too. Next Rollercoaster park is -tbh- unreachable, internet connection is sloo.oo…oow (or did they already finish the submarine fibre cable?) and sunbathing basically only brings you frost bites (if you’re lucky).

However i am not planning to migrate there.

i experimented with this some time ago, see my post here: https://lemmy.ml/post/18706002/12772832

i had experimented with kexec and takeover.sh to install a distro that was not available by my provider.

it resulted in some scripts i now (triggered by this thread) have published (in a nonready state):

http://github.com/tobinq/goaround

the scripts may be in bad shape but i successfully changed one preinstalled ubuntu to a devuan with what is in these scripts. however i didn’t work on them for month now and am not sure about that last state… so its experimental only.

accepted