Root Access

On one version of openwrt, the command init --help shows the help text. On a different version the exact same command does init <some random runlevel>

It's like killall on Linux vs. Solaris. killall <name> on Linux kills all processes matching <name>. On Solaris it's basically init 0

Bob

And this is why I try to train myself to do man command rather than command --help

still slip up now and then

Dave

12:16 AM

Always thought runlevel 0 was a shutdown runlevel for all posix systems.

Bob

it's also fun when you type command --version and it tries to run something

java is an offender.

qasdfdsaq

@Bob Yeah but why would it be different between two successive versions of the same OS!! :-@

Also, I learnt recently man is supposedly deprecated, and info was meant to replace it

Bob

good luck guessing if it's --version, -version, -v, -V or -imatroll

@qasdfdsaq nah, that's just GNU

qasdfdsaq

@Bob OpenWRT doesn't have man

Dave

Good night!

Bob

12:18 AM

@qasdfdsaq oh, depends on the OS then

qasdfdsaq

(It doesn't have info either, neither is going to fit on a 4MB default root partition)

Bob

14

A: What is GNU Info for?

As the Wikipedia page says, TeXinfo was designed as the official documentation of the GNU project by Richard Stallman. It is a set of macros on top of TeX, and was designed for writing software manuals. I think Stallman considered man pages inadequate for the task. Two advantages Texinfo has over...

Basically no-one uses info outside of GNU :P

qasdfdsaq

44

A: What is the difference between "man" and "info" documentation?

Man pages are the UNIX traditional way of distributing documentation about programs. The term "man page" itself is short for "manual page", as they correspond to the pages of the printed manual; the man pages "sections" (1 for commands, 2 for system calls, etc.) correspond to sections in the ful...

Bob

10

A: Why didn't GNU Info succeed man?

To answer your question with at least a hint of factual background I propose to start by looking at the timeline of creation of man, info and other documentation systems. The first man page was written in 1971 using troff (nroff was not around yet) in a time when working on a CRT based terminal ...

qasdfdsaq

That's what I got

Bob

12:25 AM

@qasdfdsaq Put it this way: I'd always trust the unix.se answer over the ubuntu.se one.

qasdfdsaq

But more upvotes!

Anyhow I was probably thinking GPL = GNU PL so everything GPL was GNU. Not

Bob

@qasdfdsaq It's not even self-consistent!

> GNU advocates against the use of man pages at all

And it links here: gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Man-Pages

which says:

> In the GNU project, man pages are secondary. It is not necessary or expected for every GNU program to have a man page, but some of them do. It’s your choice whether to include a man page in your program.

Also, even that is only within the GNU project itself.

0

Q: Dell Dell Dell Dell Dell

Okay so my school had blocked Facebook, does anyone know any websites or anything to get on it please? I've tried using that stupid https and the proxy thing (which they've now blocked as well) it's just not working

facebook

o.O

qasdfdsaq

Urgh

Anytime I see a question start with "So my <school/college/parents> have blocked XYZ" I go facepalm

allquixotic

@Bob not even gonna tell them about guac

Part of the privilege of being an adult social deviant and accomplished technologist is that you get to use that kind of cool stuff to get around anal firewall rules

Til then, let 'em suffer, I say.

Bob

@allquixotic Threw them a bone. Suggested use of phone (mobile internet).

allquixotic

12:37 AM

Now get off my lawn, kid.

Bob

@allquixotic Meh, I'm just tunneling through proxytunnel :P

qasdfdsaq

Huh. Wonder if guac supports ssl. And if it's actually a client or just a gateway

Bob

> As an API, Guacamole provides a common and efficient means of streaming text data over a JavaScript-based tunnel using either HTTP or WebSocket, and a client implementation which supports the Guacamole protocol and renders the remote display when combined with a Guacamole protocol stream from the tunnel.

Little from column A, little from column B

allquixotic

@qasdfdsaq Guac itself doesn't "support" SSL because Guac doesn't come with a web server; you host it on top of a web server like nginx.

I use nginx as my TLS layer for guac.

Bob

The only problem with proxytunnel is it only works on apache :\

not nginx

allquixotic

12:43 AM

And it's not just a gateway; it has a rich JS/HTML5 client for the browser that communicates over the Guac protocol over a WebSocket to the backend, which then connects separately to the RDP or SSH server (or VNC, etc.) and translates the incoming RDP/VNC/... whatevers into the guacd protocol layer.

Bob

I've considered moving to stunnel but it's too much work when this already works :P

qasdfdsaq

I'm too old fashioned for nginx anyway

allquixotic

So, literally, if you have a modern web browser that can connect to a website over https, you have a jump box. Can even upload and download files and copy and paste.

Bob

@allquixotic Well, the client is still expected to be in JS

It doesn't expose a general (SOCKS) tunnel, afaict

Anonymous

what the FUCK

Anonymous

12:45 AM

Brazilian police arrest Facebook's Latin America vice-president

Anonymous

way to go @ThatBrazilianGuy

Anonymous

> Dzodan accused of ignoring judicial order in drug crime investigation
Facebook says WhatsApp is separate entity and does not store information

Journeyman Geek

@allquixotic or be like me and not even bother with facebook

allquixotic

@JourneymanGeek yeah, but things like imgur are blocked on many networks I've been on.

sometimes slashdot, sometimes chat.SO

Journeyman Geek

@allquixotic I am pondering dropping /. from my rss feeds

Anonymous

12:54 AM

@qasdfdsaq HALP my school blocked minecraft?!?!!!11111

Journeyman Geek

mein gott.

qasdfdsaq

!!trout @PatoSáinz

ChatBot John Cavil

slaps PatoSainz around a bit with a large trout!

slaps @PatoSáinz around a bit with a large trout!

Anonymous

!!trout @allquixotic

ChatBot John Cavil

slaps @qasdfdsaq around a bit with a large trout!

slaps @JourneymanGeek around a bit with a large trout!

slaps @allquixotic around a bit with a large trout!

Anonymous

12:55 AM

heh

Anonymous

sorry.

Anonymous

@JourneymanGeek I pinged you before because you should read today's transcript. esp. some messages our little friend whose avatar is a mythological animal left today.

Bob

...we have someone with a mythological avatar?

Anonymous

lol c'mon people

allquixotic

the interesting part is that it's basically a cp of earlier transcripts, so you won't learn much

if you ran dedup on it, you'd have at least a 5x or 10x savings

qasdfdsaq

12:59 AM

lol

Anonymous

lol

Journeyman Geek

@PatoSáinz oh?

Bob

@PatoSáinz @allquixotic ahh.

Journeyman Geek

@PatoSáinz he's over dramatic at times.

Bob

Oh yea. @allquixotic did you end up sorting out Cavil running via screen?

Cause I just tried and it seems to work just fine.

Journeyman Geek

1:04 AM

@PatoSáinz this has happened before. Nothing to worry about

Anonymous

@JourneymanGeek well the thing is that ideally it shouldn't happen again, you see

allquixotic

@Bob no...

@Bob on my box? can you killall nodejs phantomjs and try it?

(see my commit log; I made a bunch of changes today)

qasdfdsaq

What did I miss

allquixotic

sean@cavil:~/dev/SO-ChatBot$ cat debug.sh
#!/bin/bash
phantomjs --webdriver=4444 --cookies-file=/home/sean/dev/SO-ChatBot/cookies &
nodejs run-headless-webdriver.js

Journeyman Geek

@PatoSáinz quite honestly? Its a hard thing to deal with someone who demands attention. I can suspend him like he demands, but its somewhat excessive and gives him what he wants. The best way to deal with it is to just ignore him.

allquixotic

1:07 AM

that works fine when running that in mosh

but ~/dev/cron.sh doesn't bring up cavil

Journeyman Geek

sadly I need don't really have the option of ignoring people, being a mod

Bob

@allquixotic Yea, I already did that.

allquixotic

!!info

ChatBot John Cavil

@allquixotic I awoke on Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:07 GMT (that's about 1 hour ago), got invoked 6 times, learned 1 commands

allquixotic

huh, ok

Bob

1:08 AM

That was the auto-restart.

allquixotic

CLOSEDNOREPRO then

Bob

lol

qasdfdsaq

@JourneymanGeek You could use your low-rep/puppet account to see what chat looks like with people like me blocked! :-P

ChatBot John Cavil

I have just been restarted! This happens daily automatically, or when my owner restarts me. Ready for commands.

Bob

$ ~/dev/cron.sh
~/dev/SO-ChatBot ~
node: no process found

That worked just fine

allquixotic

1:09 AM

!! s/process/butt/

ChatBot John Cavil

@allquixotic $ ~/dev/cron.sh
~/dev/SO-ChatBot ~
node: no butt found [$source$](http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/27952479#27952479)

Journeyman Geek

@qasdfdsaq Oh, I could.

allquixotic

and I applied Zirak's Number.isFinite() fix

Bob

Yep, I tested that above. Looks great.

allquixotic

!!> 5*25

ChatBot John Cavil

1:09 AM

@allquixotic 125

Bob

I'm wondering if it's worth recompiling phantomjs with the ghostdriver cookie fix

allquixotic

merging your selenium branch into zirak master was a little confusing since I had to fix various plugins to support browserify

Bob

But the login happens so quickly now that it doesn't really matter

allquixotic

there was a time over a year ago when Zirak canned about a dozen plugins that I decided to keep

and then he made it so we have to do a little different preamble at the start of every plugin with browserify

Bob

// yer a wizard Caprica
var wizard = browserify({
    basedir: 'source',
    paths: ['.', './source', './static']
});

lol

allquixotic

1:11 AM

!! s/Caprica/Cavil/

ChatBot John Cavil

@allquixotic // yer a wizard Cavil
var wizard = browserify({
basedir: 'source',
paths: ['.', './source', './static']
}); [$source$](http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/27952517#27952517)

Bob

I love reading his comments and commit messages

Journeyman Geek

0_0

Bob

> Note to self: Don't be an idiot.

That was 8a5aadee3b13495b974ec389d91dc072d55f1a11

Journeyman Geek

That is always a useful note to self

allquixotic

1:12 AM

what would happen if we did Starcraft Templar -> Archon merging of Zirak and the SU mod, random

Note to self: boiled egg potatoes?

Bob

> Use browserify instead of randomness

@allquixotic Nah, Zirak's actually funny. Random's just... random.

> Fuck this shit, change whitespace to spaces.

allquixotic

careful bob, the ninja flagger might flag you

4

Bob

That was a good change.

I don't like tab indents.

allquixotic

I like editors that will let me press Tab and insert a predefined number of spaces

like Eclipse, Gedit

Bob

@allquixotic Most editors do that

VSCode actually auto-detects the indent method in use and will use that

So if a file is already in tabs I won't accidentally start inserting spaces into it

dunno if other editors do the same

@allquixotic I suppose it's better than the old build script.

Journeyman Geek

1:19 AM

@Bob MS does the best IDEs

Bob

@JourneymanGeek Agreed. Though some people really like JetBrains.

allquixotic

Eclipse is still my favorite

qasdfdsaq

Yay I can star again

HackToHell

IntelliJ ftw

qasdfdsaq

I totally wasn't the one who starred that.

Journeyman Geek

1:30 AM

de nile. She is a river ina frica!

HackToHell

huh

Bob

@allquixotic Eh, it's been plagued with perf problems every time I've tried it.

And at this point NetBeans' default shortcuts are familiar :P (they also seem closer to VS)

HackToHell

Netbeans is also pretty good tbh

Eclipse is just sloow

And I hate the UI

Bob

They just fixed the bug with project loading: netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=258004

Hm. I don't even have Eclipse installed anymore.

qasdfdsaq

And that's all from me for today.

Bob

1:40 AM

@qasdfdsaq How do you find these? :O

That Brazilian Guy

2:01 AM

1 hour ago, by Pato Sáinz

Brazilian police arrest Facebook's Latin America vice-president

@PatoSáinz Well, last year they did try to arrest Bakunin, so...

And arrested a "dangerous protest agitator" for carrying the weapon of mass destruction known as vinegar.

So, at this point I doubt nothing.

Journeyman Geek

@ThatBrazilianGuy they might PICKLE SOMEONE on the streets

Bob

@JourneymanGeek Sounds painful.

Journeyman Geek

Depends on the pickle

That Brazilian Guy

Well, I've never been threatened at gun point (or any physical threats whatsoever) by bandits, only by the police.

Once when I was a stupid teenager and would hack payphones in the late hours of the night to call a girl in a middle-eastern country

Once, many years later when I was at a bust stop after class just waiting for the bus to arrive

And once last year when I was inside public transportantion, absentmindedly staring at the window, a group of policemen made eye contact, embarked into the van, spent a couple minutes searching my backpack and left disappointed because they couldn't find anything encriminating

Journeyman Geek

2:21 AM

lol

I've only been searched by one transport rentacop

6 times

The last time I was all "Hey, no worries, this is the sixth time we've done this. I know the drill"

That Brazilian Guy

By far the most scary time was the one in the bus stop. I was there just waiting the bus, people gradually took their own buses and the bus stop got more and more quiet, then suddenlly...

BAM, three cars full of cops and various rifles aimed at my face

like a damn movie scene

Dave

Really enjoying the new stack exchange chat ui for mobile

That Brazilian Guy

I really dislike compositing text on mobile.

Mobile is designed for consumption rather than composition.

Dave

Likewise, I hate texting period. But the interface is quite clean

@qasdfdsaq they make flagging soo easy on here

Anyhow heading to bed night @ThatBrazilianGuy

That Brazilian Guy

Me too, I should have gone to bed an hour ago =/

bwDraco

2:49 AM

0

A: Battery charge suddenly drops from about 25% to 6%

As a battery ages, its internal resistance increases which affects battery life under heavy load more than it does under light load. Battery fuel gauges often fail to account for this effect resulting in inaccurate indication of the battery's state of charge. In my experience on my laptop, at h...

Why are battery fuel gauges so dumb?

Journeyman Geek

cause its an abstraction of a complex set of variables

bwDraco

Nobody mentioned battery internal resistance. This is an issue of the battery's ability to track state of charge accurately.

Journeyman Geek

There is no such thing as "state of charge"

It keeps an eye on voltage and rate of drop

and historic information on this, and makes an educated guess

which is why you can recaliberate some batteries

Bob

3:19 AM

@JourneymanGeek Yup, voltage and current current draw are the only instantaneous variables that are easily detectable.

And from there and the history it needs to extrapolate a curve.

That's hard. And inaccurate.

Journeyman Geek

pretty much

bwDraco

So, with no particular application in mind, should I get a Raspberry Pi 3?

Journeyman Geek

pugetsystems.com/labs/support-software/… puget does really nice articles. Bit basic for the likes of us.

@bwDraco they've finally built a compelling bit of kit

bwDraco

This isn't exactly like the RPi2 which was still rather special-purpose because of its limited compute power.

Journeyman Geek

but the "no particular application in mind" means it might end up gathering dust

bwDraco

3:32 AM

I could use it as a general-purpose Linux machine and can just cannibalize one of the monitors, etc. as needed. The only thing I need is a microSD card—I don't have many of those, and my line of work only requires full-size SD cards.

Journeyman Geek

Nearly all my systems, except the brix (and my model B pi) have specific roles

unless they're retired

bwDraco

The old laptop has no current application. It's just a crappy (by modern standards) HP laptop.

Journeyman Geek

(I'm bringing along my heavily be-stickered HP stream to india next week)

bwDraco

It has openSUSE Leap 42.1 (Xfce desktop) installed but has no current purpose and is just sitting there.

I'm wondering if openSUSE is going to be an option for the RPi3, and hopefully as ARMv8-A to fully leverage the processor's performance.

USB booting gives a lot more options but 1 GB of memory is going to be problematic and chances are good I'm going to have to dedicate a flash drive (or even an SSD in a USB enclosure) to swap storage.

Things can get expensive very quickly.

bwDraco

3:57 AM

70

Q: I am 21 and I am terrified beyond belief of my father

I am a 21 year old female living in Egypt and I am beyond terrified of my own father...at least i think he is my father. To say it shortly i think i might be adopted at a young age and no one told me about it. In Egypt, daughters must carry the same name as the father my name is different than m...

adult-child fears anxiety adoption abuse

A CM may be able to provide outreach for this poor soul.

Anonymous

holy fucking shit

bwDraco

I'm trying every channel available. I'm calling attention to this on the Tavern.

I'm very tempted to run a bounty and exhaust all reputation on Parenting...

Anonymous

@bwDraco still

Anonymous

the people at Parenting seem to be handling this thing very well

Anonymous

and it may hit HNQ

bwDraco

4:02 AM

It's on HNQ already. I wouldn't be reading this otherwise.

Alex Solon

Does anyone here know how I could enable HTTP-SSL on my Apache 2 l.a.m.p. web-server without having a certificate? Actually, bad question, because I do already know about self-signed SSL certificates. I guess the question is more of a how do I prevent/stop the redirect page the warns the user (like Chrome shows a page saying "Connection Insecure," and you have to click through a menu or two in order to move on to the site). I'm not concerned about the validation of being certified >>> see next

as I'm not performing purchases or transactions

Anonymous

@bwDraco then let nature run its course, I think

Anonymous

All the CMs may be able to do would, blog about it

Anonymous

and I don't think a blogpost would be adequate

Anonymous

or a network-wide banner ad

Anonymous

4:03 AM

that wouldn't be adequate either

bwDraco

SE system message?

Alex Solon

@PatoSáinz are you talking to me or somebody else?

Anonymous

@AlexSolon nono, to @bwDraco

Anonymous

@AlexSolon so you want self-signed certs to not warn the user?

Anonymous

You'd have to add yourself to your user's trust store

allquixotic

4:04 AM

@AlexSolon There is no way to "prevent/stop or bypass" the redirect page that Chrome/Firefox displays when an invalid cert is presented. You can trust a root cert that you self-generated and generate a cert from there, but then each browser that visits the site (each end-user) would need to trust that self-signed root cert.

Anonymous

If you have full control of their PC, you could do it

allquixotic

If you're talking about users whose computers you have no control over, and you don't want them to go through contortions, then there's no workaround short of getting a valid cert.

Anonymous

But if it's just an external web server, nah, you're out of luck

allquixotic

It's a security feature.

Anonymous

You could use Let's Encrypt

Anonymous

4:05 AM

letsencrypt.org

bwDraco

Might be serious enough to warrant a network-wide system message.

Anonymous

They offer free SSL

Anonymous

@bwDraco I don't think so. ~~And I've never heard of network-wide messages.~~ Maybe when there's maintenance.

Alex Solon

@pat

bwDraco

meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/system-message

Alex Solon

4:05 AM

@PatoSáinz I'll look into that. Thanks

Anonymous

@allquixotic heh I love it when we reply at the same time

allquixotic

@bwDraco I don't think it helps to draw undue attention to it. No need for the media circus and hundreds of thousands of eyes. She needs a small number of people with geographical locality, significant bravery and willingness to go against cultural norms, to be willing to step in and help.

Or to find 'net based resources that can hook her up with said people with a relatively low risk of them behaving badly and making her situation worse.

bwDraco

I was thinking about a private chat room...

Anonymous

@allquixotic agree.

Alex Solon

@PatoSáinz The site you sent me to looks promising. I appreciate it. I'll get back to you in a few minutes on whether or not it's really what I'm looking for!

Anonymous

4:09 AM

@AlexSolon if what you're looking for is TLS without warnings, then yes!

Journeyman Geek

@AlexSolon heh. Letsencrypt is probably the future

@bwDraco and? None of us is really qualified to solve her issues

Lets stick to things we know about

and letsencrypt is a free signed cert supported by most of the major browsers

Bob

@JourneymanGeek So is StartSSL technically

Journeyman Geek

at "technically"

Anonymous

@Bob well not until you have to revoke your cert

Anonymous

and there's no auto-renewal iirc

Journeyman Geek

4:19 AM

anyway, not much reason to do SSL and a self signed cert outside testing, no?

Bob

@JourneymanGeek There's opportunistic encryption without authentication

It's part of HTTP/2

Journeyman Geek

@Bob wouldn't that still kick you cert warnings?

Bob

@JourneymanGeek blog.alteroot.org/articles/2015-03-28/…

Paul Vargas

Hello!

Do I Need to upgrade my CPU?

I have a i7-4790k.

... to i7 6700k?

Bob

Opportunistic encryption

Opportunistic encryption (OE) refers to any system that, when connecting to another system, attempts to encrypt the communications channel otherwise falling back to unencrypted communications. This method requires no pre-arrangement between the two systems. Opportunistic encryption can be used to combat passive wiretapping. (An active wiretapper, on the other hand, can disrupt encryption negotiation to either force an unencrypted channel or perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the encrypted link) It does not provide a strong level of security as authentication may be difficult to establish and...

@PaulVargas I don't know. Do you?

It's really a question of needs.

Is there anything you do that needs the newer CPU? Id not, then you don't need to upgrade.

allquixotic

4:27 AM

@PaulVargas The 6700K is actually a downgrade in single-threaded performance.

Bob

Do you want to upgrade? Then that's a question of what you want.

@allquixotic More nuanced than that, though. Things like newer chipsets, DDR4 support, faster iGPU, etc..

End of the day, though, whether someone needs the upgrade or not depends entirely on their circumstances.

There's nothing absolutely groundbreaking here.

allquixotic

heh... and then there's people like me who have the i7-3770K, which is 1.5 gens older than the 4790K, quite a bit lower single-threaded perf, but I'm not planning to upgrade to Skylake because the improvement isn't worth my money.

probably will go for Kaby + Pascal

Bob

@allquixotic Eh, I'm still on the 2600

Honestly, from Nehalem onwards CPUs have largely been 'fast enough' for everyday uses.

Even some of the Core 2 ones.

jiggunjer

I'm still waiting for a smartphone that will last a week without charging, while playing hearthstone :p

Alex Solon

4:50 AM

@Bob Speaking of Core 2 Duos and their capability; my first gaming rig I built (or rather, I upgraded an off the shelf tower to the point where the only thing that was original was the motherboard) has a Core 2 Duo E8400 (3 GHz dual-core) for it's processor, and it's still a pretty formidable beast. That combined with a cheap NVidia GT 640 (Galaxy factory overclocked) would max out most games from 2010 and back (some newer). Skyrim ran just fine at 1440x900 at the highest possible settings. >>

Just goes to show that, even though some hardware is getting older, it's quite capable of doing most modern tasks.

But, alas, now that I have built a much, much better gaming rig with an AMD FX-8350 O/C to 4.9 GHz, Three AMD R9 290's in cross-fire (this was originally a NVidia GTX Titan Black, but I later changed my mind to use three high-end cards like the R9 290, because my setup has three 4K monitors and would work better with such a setup. I may or may not keep the Titan Black for a future project as I don't need the money back at this moment, but if I ever do, I will most likely sell that card.

Journeyman Geek

@Bob I have a 3770 and a 980TI, which works great

@AlexSolon which is the real reason why PC manufacturers are struggling

@AlexSolon I game on one 4k monitor on a 980TI. I do 2x 4k monitors fine tho

Alex Solon

The only downside to having an AMD card is the lack of support for GPU-computational-processing (Things like Cuda Cores make a big difference in software for engineering and video editing), so it tends to be faster and more fluid feeling to use a single, crap GTX card (like even my GT 640 performed better than these three R9 290's). But I do have a $4000 Quadro M6000 8 Gigabyte card that I got from my moms work (she's the project engineer at the firm she works at, and all the computers >> next

Transcript for