Root Access

12:27 AM

@JourneymanGeek Old question I had: if you were going to do a forensic copy of a server is it better to pull the power plug, safe shut down, or it doesn't matter? The thought I had was a safe shutdown may overwrite more files in the process

Journeyman Geek

@ekaj: depends.

Why are you doing a copy of the server?

If you're doing it cause it was infiltrated, pull the plug.

More importantly always pull the plug, unless you shouldn't

ekaj

infiltrated, either actively or from a prior exploit you jist gain knowledge of

Journeyman Geek

ahh

Pull the plug

ekaj

i dont think i had ever seen someone specify, atleast

Journeyman Geek

A smart infiltrator may have scripts that run on a clean shutdown

ekaj

12:29 AM

on the bitsive read

Journeyman Geek

dude. Wrong books then.

ekaj

not books, jist se posts and stuff

also sorry for bad typing, tablet

Journeyman Geek

ahh

ekaj

12:45 AM

Not a big fan of Windows 8 on a desktop, but it is obviously very intuitive and works well on a tablet

I think Windows 10 will be the best of both worlds

Journeyman Geek

lol

Yeah

barlop

3:11 AM

are some ISOs designed to boot from CD/DVD but won't work from USB if written with something plain like dd?

Bob

3:32 AM

@barlop An ISO is an image file without any particular filesystem.

There is ISO 9660, which is standard for CDs.

DVDs usually use UDF.

There's specific bootable variants, IIRC.

The real question is if the device firmware lets you boot with that filesystem off a USB mass storage device.

Some might only allow an MBR on UBS mass storage. Others will allow a plain filesystem without partitions/MBR. Others will accept CD/DVD-style filesystems.

End of the day, whether it'll work or not depends on the device firmware.

If the device firmware is UEFI and you have an EFI system partition and the disk is formatted with either a GPT or MBR partition structure, then it's guaranteed to work as per the UEFI standard.

Everything else, especially related to the legacy BIOS, is implementation-specific and not specified in any standard, and will therefore vary depending on your specific machine.

barlop

3:50 AM

@Bob Wow, thanks.. I have read that Debian ISOs are Hybrid so DVD or USB.. any idea what that's about?

would the ISO be no more hybrid than any other ISO?

i.e. just a question of the device's firmware.. nothing to do with the ISO.. so there isn't really such a thing as a hybrid ISO as any ISO is as much a hybrid as that one

Bob

@barlop I'm not sure.

Possibly that means it has a mix of MBR with a UDF filesystem.

There are ways ot mix two partition structures (e.g. MBR + GPT).

barlop

btw, I tried a VPN in Win 7.. great technology! and easier to set up than SSH.. SSH required some learning.

Bob

I think standard DVDs are just raw UDF without another partition structure (MBR/GPT) layer underneath, but I might have remembered incorrectly.

Hybrid disc

A Hybrid disc is a disc, such as CD-ROM or more recently a Blu-ray Disc, which contains multiple types of data which can be used differently on different devices. These include CD-ROM music albums containing video files viewable on a PC, or feature film Blu-ray Discs containing interactive content when used with a PlayStation 3 games console. == Multiple file systems == A Hybrid disc is a CD-ROM that has multiple file systems, so that it can be used on various system software, for example both Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows based operating systems. A hybrid disc has multiple file systems...

> The ISO 9660 primary volume descriptor begins 32768 bytes (32KB) into the disc.

> The MBR is not located in a partition; it is located at a first sector of the device (physical offset 0), preceding the first partition.

barlop

do you know if rufus and unetbootin produce the same result?

Bob

An MBR is 512 bytes, I think

So there's plenty of space to have both an MBR and ISO 9660.

Dunno about UDF, but probably similar.

@barlop I'm not familiar with those, sorry.

barlop

3:57 AM

are you familiar with pendrivelinux?

Bob

Looks like ISOs not designed specifically for USB booting probably won't work with most systems, as they lack the MBR expected by BIOSes, or the GPT expected by UEFI.

@barlop Nope.

I've used YUMI in the past, though.

What it does is it installs an MBR-based bootloader to load syslinux/isolinux, which then loads either a full ISO or an extracted ISO.

I'll be out for a bit.

barlop

rufus is like the hp bootable usb tool

but maybe better

Journeyman Geek

Unetbootin only works with Casper based installers

Iirc

HackToHell

Unetbootin doesn't work with UEFI

And i finally managed to get it to update to 8.1

Font looks weird

Journeyman Geek

Fedora won't work on either rufus or unetbootin

You need to use their own tool

HackToHell

4:24 AM

Windows 8.1 is definitely more snappy

imgx64

5:05 AM

Is it possible to mount an external ext4 drive such that a non-root user can read/write to it, and all writes are written as root on the disk?

Journeyman Geek

all writes are written as root" nope

Also, this feels like an XY question

what are you actually trying to do?

imgx64

5:21 AM

I'm trying to use a USB disk formatted as ext4, like I would use a FAT32 or NTFS disk.

Actually, yeah, the "write as root" is not required, but it's nice to have.

Journeyman Geek

ahh

imgx64

Multiple computers have different UIDs.

Journeyman Geek

I'm under the impression you need something running as root to mount a disk

imgx64

Yeah, that's fine.

Googling around, I don't think it's possible to have any user with any UID to write on the same disk unless i chmod 777 it.

ekaj

7:52 AM

When I press windows key + R, the run window appears and when I type shell:searches, for example, and press enter, windows should direct me to the searches folder. This method works for every user folder except music, documents, pictures and videos. — Yingmei Ishere 33 mins ago

HackToHell

8:05 AM

And my FPS in tf2 just doubled in 8.1

._>

I guess drivers aren't tested on Windows 8 anymore :/

Journeyman Geek

8:27 AM

0_0

0

Q: Does hooking up two PATA devices on a single cable reduce performance?

Presently, I have two PATA (Parallel ATA) devices installed in my computer. One is an optical drive, the other is a hard drive. Since my motherboard only has a single PATA connector, they are both connected to it with one cable. I had never really thought there were any technical problems this...

Bob

9:21 AM

A new study finds that if you give rats a cell phone and a lever they can push to improve the signal, the rats will chew on the cell phone until it breaks and your research supervisors will start to ask some questions about your grant money.

Modern HDDs have a significant amount of on-board cache (64+ MB is common). This cache runs far faster than PATA can. Even without that, modern HDDs can reach or even exceed PATA max transfer rates with sequential R/W, especially considering protocol overhead. There are also other issues with using PATA, including lack of support for AHCI power management. It's not a good idea to use PATA on a new system - your reliability issues are almost certainly due to issues other than PATA vs SATA. Even if something seems to work, it doesn't mean it's the correct solution. — Bob 3 mins ago

Michael Frank

9:53 AM

@allquixotic you played much Heroes of the Storm?

ekaj

►

HackToHell

10:15 AM

Wait for me to use Onedrive and other stuff I have to use a microsoft account sign in ?

I can't use one with a local account ?

Bob

15

Q: How can I sync SkyDrive/OneDrive on Windows 8.1 when signing in to PC with local account?

I have previously asked how I can install, or upgrade to, Windows 8.1, without using a Microsoft account, because "I like to keep things separate, and just logon with a tradional local account. Any apps that require me to sign-in with my Live account, will have to prompt me to sign-in". Until no...

windows-8.1 onedrive microsoft-account

HackToHell

I added PIN as a security option

Metro UI apps are actually nice o0

Bob

@allquixotic english.stackexchange.com/questions/217012/… :P

Bob

12:13 PM

@JourneymanGeek o.O

Journeyman Geek

12:23 PM

(He gifted me that game. I got a booster pack today and managed to craft a badge ;p)

Bob

@JourneymanGeek I thought you were pointing out the background :P

Oh, how's YNAB working out for you?

Journeyman Geek

@Bob: Yes. Amongst other things ;p

Not much cashflow at the moment XD

Bob

@JourneymanGeek o.O

I didn't even know Steam had backgrounds.

@JourneymanGeek Protip: hide your Steam login name :P

Journeyman Geek

true ;p

Journeyman Geek

12:46 PM

i.imgur.com/0g7jGd2.jpg is sanitsed of that. Deleted the earlier one.

Bob

@JourneymanGeek You forgot to ping @allquixotic! :P

Journeyman Geek

;p

Well you did it for me ;p

Journeyman Geek

2:53 PM

meta.stackexchange.com/a/246216/135565 complete repwhorage ahoy!

Bob

@JourneymanGeek Why are you right-clicking :(

Journeyman Geek

It works with either button ;p

Was intentional

Bob

@JourneymanGeek Not much point demonstrating that though :P

Journeyman Geek

SCIENCE!

(also, lazy to redo it ;p)

Bob

+1 for the animation, but -0.5 for the lack of freehand circles. I'll round up this time. — Bob 9 secs ago

Journeyman Geek

2:58 PM

lol

DragonLord

4:28 PM

How I/O intensive is loading game data in a modern game (2012 or later, e.g. Assassin's Creed III)?

I know there's data streaming (and I see this even in AC2), but I'm not sure as to the role of storage performance in gaming use cases.

DragonLord

6:23 PM

0

A: 8 GB SD card shows up as only 6.47 GB after creating ext2 partition; how do I recover the lost space?

On removable media, Windows does not recognize partitions other than the first one. To fix this problem, you need to erase the partition table on the SD card so that it can be reinitialized. The correct size of the SD card as displayed by Windows should be about 7.45 GiB. It appears you created...

It's stupid that Windows doesn't recognize anything other than the first partition on removable media

Psycogeek

@DragonLord Seems to be the program itself and the loading of the data through the program and to the memory and the gpu texture memory and all is the slowdowns. the background loading stuff can actually balk some on faster storage vrses slower, because it is so reactionary , slamming the cpu and bus. (something like that) So really huge storage speed helps some (like 50%) on the loads , but is not all of the bottlenecks of loading. especially wwhen the game parts and pieces are many and small

Which brings up how much of this stuff comes from compressed database like files, and how that is effected by CPU speed itself again.

Psycogeek

6:36 PM

I hate long game loads, and restarting loads from game saves , and game deaths. most of the games seem to be happy to re-load large percentages of it back in, instead of using what is already there. a sort of rebooting :-) to insure it all re-starts up correctly. Storage speed , even caching the entirety of it in ram caches does not "fix" that on most games.

It just improves it some.

DragonLord

@Psycogeek As I understand it, most engines reset the entire game world on a load

Psycogeek

That would explain it

barlop

@JourneymanGeek did you say you prefer hamachi over vnc?

DragonLord

I'm about to repcap for the fifth time in a row

(Didn't quite make it to 200 on the second day because of a bounty, though)