How is your day going today? / How did your day go today?

Post Reply New Topic

I started some beans last night in the crockpot with onions and sausage. Every once in a while, I woke up, ate some beans, and then went back to sleep.

It's been a very slow day.

After I brushed my teeth, got dressed, and ate breakfast, I left and boarded a bus to go my school.

When I arrived, the first thing I did was visiting my school's gym where I spent about 30 minutes on the indoor track.

After, I went to my school's Hispanic Resource Center where I ate lunch and finished an essay for my Spanish class.

My Spanish class begins in about 15-20 minutes from now.

Overall, my day has been good so far and I will attend a "midterm stress relief" event that will be after class.

My main workstation picked up some malware this morning.

Many people ignore malware, but it can be very dangerous. The last thing you want is for it to be able to gain access to the passwords of places like banking and credit card sites. I'm not going to take that chance.

The malware in particular redirects urls to its own advertising. The danger is that it might do more or that other malware might have been installed as well.

So now I'm reinstalling everything from scratch and will be changing a large number of passwords.

Aarrgggghhhhhh! This is not a good day.

I'm now setting up three hard drives on the computer, each with its own operating system.

The first drive will contain the latest version of OpenBSD for development work.

The second drive will contain the latest version of SuSE Linux for use as a general workstation. It won't be used for anything related to checking bank or credit card accounts or to order anything. It should never see a credit card number at all. If it gets hit with malware, it might divulge some passwords, but not to anything financial.

The third drive will contain the latest version of Ubuntu and will require entering a password before booting in order to decrypt the drive. With the encryption and a password used only for that one thing, malware on another computer will not be able to access the drive at all. It will only be used for access financial access and for ordering equipment.

Since the drives themselves will all be powered up all the time, even if not mounted or decrypted, I'm going with SSD drives for their minimal power requirements.

can you tell me your opinion of SSD lifespan? i had a bad experience with a 2012 vintage samsung SSD that burnt out after only about 7 years.

Supposed to be something like 1.5 million to 2 million writes, I think.

For what it's worth, I've had problems with IDE drives in much less than 7 years.

My next to the oldest brother lost two hard drives about a month apart that were just a few months old. He was a photographer and lost a lot of shoots when that happened because he didn't believe in doing backups.

So far, I've yet to lose a SSD drive, but only one SSD drive that I have is more than a year old.

one SSD is enough for me, I lost my audio restoration facilities earlier this year when it with very little warning, turned into a brick. the main symptom was the mouse stopped working. before I could figure out what was wrong, it went south. thankfully i'd just backed up a buncha stuff. but still lost much time because the audio restoration facilities had to be configured to work properly, that took me months to get right. that is lost.

Losing a drive can be a big hassle to deal with. Even in the case I'm having where I got some malware on my main workstation, I spent yesterday copying the files to other computers so I wouldn't lose everything.

Most of the files were music mp3s. I had a subscription on emusic.com for years going back to when they didn't limit how much you could download at one time and have a few hundred gigabytes of files from back then. Also, some more recent mp3s.

There are also some audio books and a large number of old time radio shows. And also a few videos of tv shows and movies.

And a lot of disk images of various BSD and Linux operating systems going back for years and software packages installed on them. For example, the full set of packages for OpenBSD has been more than 20 gigabytes per version for quite a few versions.

Anyway, I've got everything backed up and am getting ready to reinstall the operating system.

I generally buy my computers refurbished from Discount Electronics in Austin. The last one I ordered was still sitting in the unopened box yesterday so last night I opened it up and am using that for the new workstation. I'm going to turn the current workstation into a file server and backup machine. That is, in addition to a full set of all my music and other files above, I'm going to use a backup package, probably borgbackup, to back up copies from most of the computers here to the backup machine. That's in addition to using faubackup on the OpenBSD systems to back up critical files on each machine to a separate hard drive on the same machine. Both borbackup and faubackup are similar to the Time Machine program on OSX.

^^^that sounds like a LOT of work

It’s been one of those days when I feel a smidge of sympathy for people who have the need to drink themselves into a stupor.

Just a smidge, though. Just a smidge...

It is.

I installed the latest version of OpenBSD on an SSD drive this morning and installed a second drive to use for storing files and backups. I'm copying the data onto the second drive now.

I'm reconsidering my plans of having three separate bootable SSD drives on the workstation after some thought. I'll keep an SSD on it for banking and ordering just in case there is a further problem.

For general use, I'm thinking about setting up a second account on the computer to be used for banking and ordering. For this, I'll tighten up securing on the OS as much as possible. Linux is generally more secure than Windows -- if the regular account is compromised by malware, it should only affect that one account and not carry over to the more secure account.

As for all the work about moving files around, I intend to start using a smaller SSD drive for the operating system on every computer and keep the data files on a separate drive. If I need to replace the OS, it will be a much simpler task to copy a few files off

On my computer that I set up this morning for a file and backup server, the home directory for user accounts is small. All the normal data is to be stored on a second drive. This should make it far easier to replace the OS whenever necessary.

^^^i hope unlike my own experience, all those SSDs of yours last a good long time, at least 15-20 years.

My day has just begun, it is currently 07:36 a.m. here. Today I am supposed to be studying so not a very fun day for me.

just started, completed the first of my two daily/nightly sleeps.

For some reason, I've spent most of the last 24 hours asleep. I tend to fall asleep when waiting for something like installing a new OS on a computer to finish.

I woke up late and had a slow start.
Went to Bunnings to buy more paint brushes and went cruising around a bit.
Went out again to get groceries and thought I'd have some time before a storm hit but I didn't and I had to race the car back to the shopping centre's undercover parking complex, leaving my frozen/cold groceries to thaw out in the back seat
Anyway to storm turned out to be nothing (I'm always paranoid about hail).
Came home and removed an upstairs door to paint which I did, undercoated white first, then I did the semi-gloss top coat about 2 hours ago.