The Post Ninja

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  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Ah, yes, Linux around the turn of the century. Let’s see…

    GPU acceleration? In your dreams. Only some cards had drivers, and there were more than 2 GPU manufacturers back then, too… We had ATi, nVidia, 3dfx, Cirrus, Matrox, Via, Intel… and almost everyone held their driver source cards close to their chest.

    Modems? Not if they were “winmodems”, which had no hardware controller, the CPU and the Windows driver (which was always super proprietary) did all the hard work.

    Sound? AC’97 software audio was out of the question. See above. You had to find a sound blaster card if you wanted to get audio to work right.

    So, you know how modern linux has software packages? Well, back then, we had Slackware, and it compiled everything gentoo style back then. In addition, everyone had a hardon for " compiling from source is better"… so your single core Pentium II had to take its time compiling on a UDMA66-connected hard drive, constrained with 32 or 64 MB RAM. Updating was an overnight procedure.

    RedHat and Debian were godsends for people who didn’t want to waste their time compiling… which unfortinately was more common even so, because a lot of software was source only.

    Oh, and then MP3 support was ripped out of RedHat in Version 9 iirc, the last version before they split it into RHEL and Fedora. RIP music.

    As for Linux on a Mac, there was Yellowdog, which supported the PPC iMacs and such. It was decently good, but I had to write my own x11 monitor settings file (which I still have on a server somewhere, shockingly, I should throw it on github or somewhere) to get the screen to line up and work right.

    Basically, be glad Linux has gone from the “spend a considerable amount of time and have programming / underhood linux knowledge to get it working” to “insert stick, install os, start using it” we have now.




  • flatpaks are designed for gui apps, and due to packaging dependencies, they are extra heavy in disk space. flatpaks are also most often installed on the user, not systemwide, so no root permissions needed to install.

    apt installs systemwide exclusively, but can have a much smaller download size if the dependencies are already installed. Apps sharing dependencies means much less disk space. cli is supported.




  • It’s an “immutable” Fedora, that is, the system comes as a read only image, kind of like how android works. Anything you do is “layered” on top of that image. This means you have to actually try to break it, because you can undo anything you did to break it by simply not booting with the extra layer(s).

    You’re encouraged to install in userspace flatpaks instead of system-wide rpms where possible, as system-wide rpms means adding a layer on top if the image as it is.



  • And that’s why I abandoned cheap consumer routers many years ago… closest devices to implement ipv6 port management firewalling even half good was/is the ASUS devices. I got fed up and went pfsense and/or unifi one day and never looked back.

    UDM handles ipv6 real good, and pfsense can even get /64 subs from an ATT router for all its lan interfaces.




  • It’s amazing how many internet providers still won’t enable IPv6, even though it is hugely beneficial to their own networks (more efficient routing = less router overhead = more bandwidth and less power usage = SAVE MONEY).

    IPv6 was pernanently turned on for the Internet in 2011. That’s THIRTEEN YEARS AGO.

    All consumer and enterprise equipment made in the last 10+ years natively support IPv6. There is no excuse anymore. You can enable dual stack and setup / get your v6 block and go for it. The v6 routing tables are much simpler than the v4 routing tables, as it only has to point to the prefix network for any address, and prefixes are handed out so the ISP gets a contigious prefix block. The routers sort the rest out.

    IPv6 has the 2000::/3 range for internet traffic. That’s 2^125 ip addresses possible. We’re not running out of those even if we have an internet on every planet in the solar system.

    IPv6 Prefix Delegation works like DHCP but for IPv6. It’s not indecipherable magic runes.

    Router asks for a v6 range -> ISP router gives the range -> Router then either further subdivides into subnets, or uses DHCPv6 to give out v6 addresses. Simple.

    But of course, nobody wants to do it the simple way… AT&T and your strange subnetting spec-breaking routers.

    Odd that Comcast/Xfinity, the company that somehow manages to have even worse service than AT&T, implements IPv6 near perfectly. They give prefixes when your router asks. Their own gateways give prefixes to routers behind when requested. It works. If the arguably worst internet company can deploy IPv6 this well, any company can.

    In addition, every device also has its own link-local ipv6 (fe80::/16) that is not routed, but can be called directly and it normally doesn’t change, as it is based partly on the network card’s MAC address. Need to connect your printer by ip address? Use the link local v6 and stop having to play the DHCP or static IP charade.