Holy fuck, muscle memory just saved my ass.

At a train station wanting to do some work on my mini laptop which has disk encryption (LUKS I think). Realised that I forgot the password partly 😬

Few tries.... incorrect. FUCK.

*hey, let's try to let my hands do the work based on muscle memory!*

*starts typing the password (its insanely long) and presses enter*

*succesfully unlocked, booting...*

😅

Every.Single.Time!

Fixed a $2000 broken laserprinter with a paperclip and some ducttape. Eat my dust, MacGyver!

Crap.. got myself into a fight with someone in a bar.

Hospitalized, turns out that my knee is bruised and my nose is broken. For some reason the knee hurts much more than the nose though.. very weird.

Just noticed that some fucker there stole my keychain USB stick too. Couldn't care less about the USB stick itself, got tons of those at home and hard drive storage even more so (10TB) but the data on it was invaluable. It held on a LUKS-encrypted partition, my GPG keys, revocation certificates, server backups and everything. My entire digital identity pretty much.

I'm afraid that the thief might try to crack it. On the flip side, if it's just a common Windows user, plugging it in will prompt him to format it.. hopefully he'll do that.

What do you think.. take a leap with fate and see how strong LUKS really is or revoke all my keys and assume my servers' filesystems to be in the hands of some random person that I don't know?

Seriously though.. stealing a fucking flash drive, of what size.. 32GB? What the fuck is wrong with people?

Funniest O'Reilly meme so far :)

Looking at the amount of Samsung Note 7 rants, I have to restore the balance with some classic Iphone bashing ;)

One:

Had a stack of harddrives with my important data, two USB drives and a 4.7gb disc, two or three cloud storage accounts.

Needed a restore:
Knocked the stack of hard drives onto the floor (all broken), stood on one of the flash drives, found the other one in a pocket of a pair of trousers which just came out of the washing machine, dvd too scratched to read and couldn't verify my cloud storage account because I lost the password to the connected email account and the backup email account to verify that one didn't exist anymore. Fucking hell.

Two:

Production database with not that much yet but at least some production data which wasn't backupped.
Friend: can I reboot the db machine?
Me: yup!
Friend: what's the luks crypt password?
Me: 😯😐😓😫😲😧😭

End of story 😅

For the record, the first one actually happened (I literally cried afterwards) and that taught me to update my recovery email addresses more often!

Meanwhile ... in Japan

Best Rubik's Cube I ever had...this kept me busy for a while :) ...

Work: a word to describes the time that elapses between 2 devRant sessions...

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

Switch colleagues wireless mouses. The more colleagues, the funnier it gets :)

Just now I was compiling a new kernel for my laptop because the last ones were from before my rootfs became LUKS-encrypted. Then I found that option about SELinux again.. NSA SELinux. A MAC system that linuxxx praised earlier. Should I tell him? 😜

The designer of this keyboard should be shot on sight! A set of keys left of ctrl, shift, tab...except esc of course. Pure evil! I'm changing the volume, every time that I have to use shift... :/

If you ever feel down at your job: remember that someone, somewhere has to read Windows10 user feedback all day long ;)

"Leap, and grow wings on the way down"

So apparently this guy has the infrastructure for the Linux kernel mailinglist archive sitting under his desk.

And then there was a power outage.
While he's on vacation.
Now, someone has to physically go there to enter a LUKS passphrase to let the system boot again... 🤔😂😂😂

Sometimes I don't understand people.

I love it when a fellow "dev" asks about some interesting security topic (full disk encryption) and I'm like "yeah I use LUKS pretty much everywhere".. and then takes an entire arm when given a hand.

Performance in LUKS? Yeah sure you can benchmark it within cryptsetup. Here's how to do it and choose a good cipher for your CPU.

D: Oh also how do I check my battery life?
M (thinking): you lazy fucking piece of shit.
M: FUCKING GOOGLE IT
D: Obviously that means that you don't know it.
M (thinking): so not only lazy but also disgustingly ungrateful, fucking twat.
M: acpi. Next time fucking Google it.
D: You know what? Never mind.

As if I'm the one that's fucking wrong now!! But you know what, never mind indeed. Because you've successfully wasted my fucking time instead of fucking googling "check battery life Linux" like a sensible dev would.

Fellow "dev", if you're on devRant I hope you read this. You can seriously go fuck yourself.

I just got insulted by a Facebook add :/

This week's most redundant comment award goes to...

There is no hope for this one. Actual user remark: "I had to uninstall AVG: it kept bugging  me with these irritating warnings whenever I try to install new cracked (with microtorrent downloaded) software" :/

FUCK THSI SHIT 😤😤😤😤

I've just destroyed my home partition, then in an attempt to repair it destroyed everything else... And now my systems (dualboot) won't even start anymore 😤😤😤😤😤

Don't try to resize luks partitions like you would do with normal partitions kids.

Tl;dr; even password as simple as 123! Could be too dificult to use for unauth access. Even if you write it down for someone! Some minor HID config changes could be unbeatable for some people.

I always leave my lappy at the office and I leave it turned on and connected so I could connect to it from home if I really need to. The holiday is not an exception. I left it connected too.

Forba few weeks I was trying to connect to it from home to doublecheck xpra command I was using. Without any luck. The lappy was unreachable all this time :/

today some people came in the office. I reached out to one of them I trust the most to check on my lappy. And he says it's charger is unplugged. Fucking janitors...

I ask to plug it back in and turn it on. LUKS password prompt pops up. I send him the pw via sms along with a note that I'm using non-EN kbd layout. He confirms he'll manage.

20 minutes later he pings me "are you sure the pw is correct?". Yes it is! 5 more minutes later he pings me "... Is this how you type numbers and symbols with your layout?" nope, it's the other way around!

10 more minutes later he plugs in his own kbd, still fails. Sets up my layout in his lappy, spends a few minutes using it, plugs it back to my lappy and FINALLY enters the pw correctly.

Come on dude.. 😁

I think this is enough...said no cuber ever :)

Finally finished my first mathematical proposition of devRant:

Cool, so it looks like updating my nVidia drivers somehow killed LUKS on my machine? or whatever happens immediately after decrypting the volume group; honestly can’t tell.

To the uninitiated, this means my machine no longer boots. Like, at all.

Looks like I’m spending tomorrow reverting. 😕

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

SAP: tool of the devil! Got this error message today :)

"Knock knock.
Race Condition!
Who's there?" :D

Hi everybody! I came across this chicken breed, actually called "java bantam". How could I not buy 2 of them? :) Any name suggestions?

Did you install Google?

Fuck graphical installers and their bullshit, installed a perfectly working luks encrypted arch install on my usb stick and got most things setup too already.

Next I need to makepkgchroot yay into it - for now I've had to use yaourt, also can't boot off of it, because I didn't yet figure out how to do the grub uefi shit inside of it - which isn't really necesssary as I plan to use it just as a chroot slave anyway, but useful for when I would have to rescue my laptop or something.

Customer:"Adjust my application so it stops automtically when it encounters a file that has already been processed".
I do the adjustments. Two days later I get a mail from that customer. I'm not lying: "Hey, my application stops when I try to reuse my files"... the people you sometimes have to put up with...

Yet another school group project where no one is taking responsibility. Great!

Professionaly travelling the world sucks ass. It's loosing day and days on airports, railway stations, driving.... Then, completely exhausted, you must do your high-end job on command for a customer who already hates you from the moment you came in, because he knows your hourly rate.They do not realize it's the companies rate, not my wage. And when it's finished and running, it's considered normal...no need for a "thank you". Getting really tired of this shit :/

From last night:

Decrypting a LUKS volume group from a different install is a major pain in the drinking time. I can’t get this crap working no matter what I try. Ugh.

Great, just in the week when I’m on holiday, they  decided to do a coffee mug contest on devRant, so I wasn’t able to show mine. Well, I think this one deserves it’s place amongst the other beauties. It’s completely impractical to drink from, but it can count as a statement ;)

Today started off great!

New 5TiB HDD... Check!

Formatted with zfs under LUKS, with a high level.of compression and dedup... Check!

Copying over roughly 4TiB of data, about 2 of which was scattered in small files... Coworker unplugged it from AC thinking it was his (they are sort of similar), when the process was almost complete.

Goddamit. zpool scrub.... 6 hours left. It's 9 pm over here, and I'm not a fan of leaving my stuff at work. Goddammit.

...I guess tomorrow is another day.

Hi devRant, meet the unresettable computer. When you try to reset it, it asks you for a keyboard layout...BUT YOU HAVE NO INPUT DEVICE TO ANSWER! Fucking great...

OK so encrypted my system drive during install. So far so cool. It also prompts me to enter the password before loading the OS. However if I misstype it it kicks me in grub rescue mode instead of asking me to reenter it. Wtf D: Can I change this?

sudo bar --in-file alcohol :)
(Bar on Sicily, Italy)

I know a doctor's practice which gives you your first name as a default password for your account. Watertight security for all these medical records :)

Fuck Joomla and all of its stupid iframe blocking settings

I want to de-Google. I simply do not trust them anymore. They own pratically every single step of your online life. Does anyone here have tip for a good, alternative free e-mail provider? One with respect for my privacy, and not a company that makes billions of our society, but avoids paying taxes.

For fucks sake!
Why does every god damn distro have their own tool to generate initramfs?!
I just spend over an hour to find out that Void-Linux uses dracut and to find documentation, on how to use luks with a dracut-generated initramfs.
Seriously,Arch has mkinitcpio,
Fedora has dracut,
Gentoo has genkernel and I suppose the other big distros also have their own tools.
Why can't we standardize that shit on one of them?

SAP made it easy

When I was at my previous sales job, explaining the same sales pitch for the 987345284th time, listening to my customers' every irrational need, I suddenly realised I wanted to work with something rational and logical. Best insight of my life!

I'm an ABAP developer...I'm slowly getting the impression I'm the only one on this planet :)

Calling a routine from an instance method (don't even ask, in ABAP, you can do that)

Oh SAP, you nail in my coffin...3 days to set up a simple mailing functionality :s I hate you...

In nearby county to mine, coder was arrested for 3 months for nickname matching leaked terrorist nickname "grower" by coincidence. His coding education was enough reason for arrest.

All hdd/ssd/usb/mobile devices were confiscated for thorough analysis right from the morning by police.

Feeding my security paranoia. Encrypting fully filesystem(LUKS) and my internet traffic (self raised open vpn), wiping fully usbs. I ll be protected from my ISP recording my traffic, and from unauthorised access to my data.

From a meme somewhere, but pretty accurate.
When everything works. Boss:"Why are these guys even here?"
When problems occur. Boss:"Why are these guys even here?"

XAMARIN

Why with clojure every new thing have many hidden traps full of crap!? Did you try to connect to Neo4j with the two principal libraries?

So it's been almost a whole day and I've still not managed to Install Arch with LUKS/LVM and grub2. Time to give up? Yes.

Every day my company reminds us that we must be a team. My coworker is near to degree in software eng, but have some difficults. This person made many mistakes in the past, but it's still with us. He need an help, but everyone is too busy!!!
Fuck you motherfuckers!!! I help him and after graduation, "I'll slap on the face"! But now, I cannot leave him alone. When is so close to graduation...

BASTARDS MOTHERFUCKERS!