@derobert granted; I was working with a 166,747-word dictionary, so ~17 bits, which is indeed still quite a bit more. So a word counts for three characters ;-). My basic point is that people tend to think words are vastly more resistant than characters, but that’s not the case — a three-word password is similar to a nine-character password (using only latin alphabetic characters), per the above, a four-word password to a twelve-character password.

dictionary words alone aren't enough. words+numbers+punctuation is. and perhaps some minimal 1337-ing. the objective is to increase pw length whilst remaining memorable for a human.

@cas yes, I’m not arguing in favour of word-based passwords, but against them. I’ve never even seen most of my passwords, they’re generated by my password manager.

I think most dictionnary nowadays tend to use common 1337 syntax

@Kiwy yeah, hashcat has options to enable that

@StephenKitt yeah, i got that. i was arguing that dictionary words aren't all bad - not if you combine them with numbers and punctuation. a 30+ character password made up of random words + random numbers + random punctuation (all of random length) is not going to be any easier to brute force than 30+ random characters....but will be easier for a human to remember.

and almost certainly harder to crack than the other common recommendation "use the initial letters of your favourite book or album or song". i'm sure pre-generated lists of those initialisms already exist. they can easily be generated by downloading lists of the 100 most popular books/records. or dl-ing the entire catalogues of book/record shops.

@cas indeed, and that would make a good master password for a password manager ;-)

a password manager is a good thing. but not much use if the passwords in it are trivially short :)

Personally I use phrases, but then change some of the letters to numbers, or other special characters. Still not that easy to remember.

What does a password manager do, exactly? Does it store passwords on your hard drive in some encrypted form? And what about backup?

@FaheemMitha yes, it stores them in an encrypted file. Backup is the same as anything sensitive.

@StephenKitt I see. So you don't actually save passwords elsewhere, then?

Any opinions about using amazon.in/HP-Slimline-A0020IN-J4005-DDR4/dp/B07TCJD8FX as a backup machine?

I was looking at internet appliances, but they are not any cheaper.

@FaheemMitha they’re backed up in safe places

@StephenKitt I see.

What backup manager do you use?

@FaheemMitha Borg Backup, but I’ve been meaning to check out Relic

@StephenKitt Oh. Me too. But it doesn't work well with my external USB drive. That's why I was thinking of using a proper computer. Keeps getting stuck with stale locks, and then the backup doesn't happen. Is it working well for you?

With a proper computer I could use ssh. Which seems more reliable then using an external drive.

Does anyone know what "NA Graphics" might mean?

Unfortunately it seems that Linux compatibility isn't a given for the HP Slimline.

@FaheemMitha it works very well for me; I back up over SSH though, not to a USB drive

@FaheemMitha it means the system uses the integrated GPU on the CPU

ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/128992/…

For Borg Backup to an external drive, I’d run Borg Backup locally, and then copy the new files to the external drive

in normal operation Borg only creates new files, it doesn’t alter files in its repo (apart from the last one), so copying a regularly-updated backup doesn’t take much time

@StephenKitt Oh, is that possible?

@FaheemMitha yes

I've got lines that look like:

borg create --compression $CLEVEL --stats /media/faheem/My\ Passport/backup-INBOX::`hostname`-`date +%Y-%m-%d:%H.%M`  /var/spool/mail/faheem

I guess that counts as creating the archives directly on the external hard drive?

And copy how? Using rsync?

I still think an actual computer would be better. Sometimes the drive gives errors, or it gets physically disconnected. It just doesn't seem terribly reliable.

Connecting to a remote VPS for backup, in the Netherlands or something, is actually much more reliable.

@FaheemMitha yes

@FaheemMitha that would work, yes

@StephenKitt And you're suggesting doing it on the machine first, and then copying it over. Yes, I can imagine that would work better.

@FaheemMitha yes, because you can deal with connection issues etc. separately

@StephenKitt Yes, very true.

I run Borg every hour, so I have a regular snapshot of stuff I’m working on (and I don’t have to wait long after archiving photos etc. before they’re backed up)

@StephenKitt Yes, I do it every hour for some things, but not all of home, I think.

Yes, home is daily. Maybe I should make it hourly too.

The HP Slimline appears to use something called the NewarkC motherboard, about which next to no information is available - support.hp.com/ie-en/document/c05948962

This Dell comes preinstalled with Ubuntu - amazon.in/Dell-Vostro-3470-2018-SFF-Desktop/dp/B07DKVHG5P

Is installing Debian from an external USB device straightforward these days?

@FaheemMitha very, that’s what I use

@StephenKitt Ok, thanks.

It seems they are selling computers without disk drives these days.

Meaning DVD/CD drives.

@FaheemMitha that's the list of VCSs they consider git clearly superior to. I think they consider Mercurial to be the same order of goodness as git.

@StephenKitt And yet three words is much easier to remember than 9 random characters (or 4 vs. 14, or whatever calculation you get from any reasonable dictionary size). That's the advantage of words. The disadvantage, of course, is obvious: they are so much longer. And I agree with (and use) a password manager too; then of course 16-character random alphanum+symbols is easy, because you never have to remember it.

I do like that about password managers -- the ones with custom-rule generators in them -- I can find out the site's password limits & rules and max them out

@cas and if you have enough randomly chosen words, you're probably not getting much (other than passing broken password complexity requirement meters) by changing a few is to *1*s, etc. Certainly far fewer bits than you'd get by adding one more word.

And of course (if anyone hasn't seen it): pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#appA

... current recommendations are to require 8+ characters, check against already exposed password lists, and that's it. No requirements on composition, and no length limit (within reason).

whoa, does installing GPUs in glowing polygons really work? Don't they just fall out? :-P

(and with that many GPUs, shouldn't you have better graphics?)

Ugh, I really shouldn't have written that perl script

@JeffSchaller We could go back to talking about Brexit instead?

@derobert: Can perl be used to automate exiting the EU?

@Jesse_b kill(q{KILL}, $$); ought to do it, at least if run by the exiting party.

=)

Though I think the UK's current algorithm can only be contemplated in other languages.

Well the only logical next step is to see how we can involve ed(1)

Kind of hard to learn ed when google naturally does s/ed/sed/g

At least ed is easy to exit. Just hit control-D. Maybe they accidentally started /(n|neo)?vim?/ or emacs, and now they really can't get out.

I got stuck in some sort of nano or nano-like editor the other day and had to restart my terminal

Probably emacs. I don't think anyone argues you should always stay in vi-like editors.

it looked like nano but none of the usual methods worked to close it

@Jesse_b Annoying too when they don't respect control-Z so you can't even use kill to close it... and have to switch to another terminal.

To be fair I'm not exactly a power user and I think I've literally never intentionally opened nano so I don't know anything about it other than how annoying it is to me

@derobert Perhaps so. Or perhaps they don't want to remind people about the competition.

Why multiple managers in docker swarm mode? why not one manager?

@Jesse_b Nano is a Pico clone. So it would be fairer to say that Pico is annoying. If you find it annoying.

@overexchange docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/how-swarm-mode-works/nodes

@JeffSchaller So.... more than one manager is for fault-tolerance?

@overexchange that's what I gather! Unless you enjoy creating new clusters to recover, I guess?

yes the documentation says the same

can we say docker swarm cluster design as a prototype design for any distributed system design?

Because I worked on some distributed system design that had multiple distributed servers managed by a cluster-aware domain server

this is somme commercial product doing it busines

I see the same here

mgr nodes are fault tolerant

worker nodes aren't

this means applications running in worker nodes should be stateless applications... which is not easy

isn't it?

manager launching another worker node is a different aspect

You might find a bigger audience at a SO chat room -- perhaps chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/76919/docker ?

There's a Docker chat room? O-la-la.

@FaheemMitha 37 pages of chat rooms on SO!

@JeffSchaller Well, not that many active ones. Like IRC channels.