Where my download accelerator plus gang at

Corporate offices might make good housing, malls could be useful for community services. Medical centres, libraries, hackerspaces, community courses (volunteer led), open up skylights in some of the old stores and build greenhouses for community gardens, temporary accommodation, kitchens for homeless people (and other services), market stall spaces and short term storefronts for small businesses so people can have a fair go at selling their stuff without being locked into years-long contracts. So many good ideas in this thread!

What did they just fucking say

(Jk ofc)

Worked for an MSP, we had a large storage array which was our cloud backup repository for all of our clients. It locked up and was doing this semi-regularly, so we decided to run an "OS reinstall". Basically these things install the OS across all of the disks, on a separate partition to where the data lives. "OS Reinstall" clones the OS from the flash drive plugged into the mainboard back to all the disks and retains all configuration and data. "Factory default", however, does not.

This array was particularly... special... In that you booted it up, held a paperclip into the reset pin, and the LEDs would flash a pattern to let you know you're in the boot menu. You click the pin to move through the boot menu options, each time you click it the lights flash a different pattern to tell you which option is selected. First option was normal boot, second or third was OS reinstall, the very next option was factory default.

I head into the data centre. I had the manual, I watched those lights like a hawk and verified the "OS reinstall" LED flash pattern matched up, then I held the pin in for a few seconds to select the option.

All the disks lit up, away we go. 10 minutes pass. Nothing. Not responding on its interface. 15 minutes. 20 minutes, I start sweating. I plug directly into the NIC and head to the default IP filled with dread. It loads. I enter the default password, it works.

There staring back at me: "0B of 45TB used".

Fuck.

This was in the days where 50M fibre was rare and most clients had 1-20M ADSL. Yes, asymmetric. We had to send guys out as far as 3 hour trips with portable hard disks to re-seed the backups over a painful 30ish days of re-ingesting them into the NAS.

The worst part? Years later I discovered that, completely undocumented, you can plug a VGA cable in and you get a text menu on the screen that shows you which option you have selected.

I (somehow) did not get fired.

Jumping on the OpenSUSE bandwagon. I use it daily, have been running the same install of Tumbleweed for years without issue. I'm using KDE Plasma which it let's you choose as part of the installation which fulfils that requirement for you as well.

If you're familiar with Redhat you'll feel at home on it. Zypper is the package manager instead of yum/dnf and works really well (particularly when coping with dependency issues.

I've worked with heaps of distros over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, old school Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Oracle, even a bit of Alpine and some BSD variants) and OpenSUSE is definitely my favourite for a workstation.

Why did I open this comment thread

Not a distro but maybe Plasma Bigscreen is in the ballpark of what you're after?

I don't know if this helps anyone but here are some crisis resources:

🇺🇸 United States 🇺🇸

Emergency: 911
National Eating Disorders Association: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/help-support/contact-helpline
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1- 800-799-7233
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255); www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
Suicide Prevention, Awareness, and Support: www.suicide.org
Lifeline Crisis Chat: https://www.contact-usa.org/chat.html
Crisis Text Line: Text REASON to 741741 (free, confidential and 24/7)
Self-Harm Hotline: 1-800-DONT CUT (1-800-366-8288)
Family Violence Helpline: 1-800-996-6228
Planned Parenthood Hotline: 1-800-230-PLAN (7526)
American Association of Poison Control Centers: 1-800-222-1222
National Council on Alcoholism & Drug Dependency: 1-800-622-2255
GLBT Hotline: 1-888-843-4564
The Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386 or text “START” to 678678. Standard text messaging rates apply. Available 24/7/365. (Provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning—LGBTQ—young people under 25.)
Veterans Crisis Line: https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/
International Suicide Prevention Directory: http://suicideprevention.wikia.com/wiki/International_Suicide_Prevention_Directory

🇨🇦 Canada 🇨🇦

Emergency: 911
Hotline: 1-888-353-2273
YourLifeCounts.org: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines

🇬🇧 UK & Republic of Ireland 🇮🇪

Emergency: 112 or 999
Hotline: +44 (0) 8457 90 90 90 (UK – local rate)
Hotline: +44 (0) 8457 90 91 92 (UK minicom)
Hotline: 1850 60 90 90 (ROI – local rate)
Hotline: 1850 60 90 91 (ROI minicom)
YourLifeCounts.org: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines

🇦🇺 Australia 🇦🇺

Emergency: 000
Lifeline.org: https://www.lifeline.org.au/Get-Help/Online-Services/crisis-chat
LifeLine Australia: 1-300-13-11-14
YourLifeCounts.org: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines

🇳🇿 New Zealand 🇳🇿

Emergency: 111
Lifeline 24/7 Helpline: 0800 543 354
Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)
YourLifeCounts.org: http://www.yourlifecounts.org/need-help/crisis-lines

Makes me wonder if anyone out there is maintaining a list of (I can’t believe I’m about to say this) privacy-respecting cars

Not that I’m advocating for Apple’s inexcusable behaviour, but as someone who’s worked in IT managing fleets of hundreds of Thinkpads (among others like Apple, Dell, Acer, HP), respectfully, they are far less reliable and durable than a MacBook. The only devices I had with higher failure rates than ThinkPads were Acer laptops.

They are certainly more repairable, but so are others like Dell and HP. Lenovo were one of the earlier manufacturers to pull some anti-repair moves such as soldering memory to the mainboard (on the Yoga models).

I think your statement is far more accurate in the days when IBM owned the ThinkPad brand, but unfortunately Lenovo have run it into the ground as far as quality goes.

All that said, I certainly hope we see more projects like Framework so that these big manufacturers can get some sort of reality check.

Nice try, detective

This for sure. As a general rule of thumb, I use XFS for RPM-based distros like Red Hat and SuSE, EXT4 for Debian-based.

I use ZFS if I need to do software RAID and I avoid BTRFS like the plague. BTRFS requires a lot of hand holding in the form of maintenance which is far from intuitive and I expect better from a modern filesystem (especially when there are others that do the same job hassle free). I have had FS-related issues on BTRFS systems more than any other purely because of issues with how it handles data and metadata.

In saying all that, if your data is valuable then ensure you do back it up and you won’t need to worry about failures so much.