She was a friend, I used to go to her house a few times a month.

She will be missed.

It's been since 2010 or so, at least -- if not longer.

I'm writing this down because it was driving me crazy, but I just figured it out.

I have a small system running Armbian, that I use as a DNS-Over-TLS proxy for my home network, using Stubby. This works by acting as a DNS stub resolver that then loops the DNS requests to encrypted DNS servers. This hides my DNS queries from my ISP -- the evil that is Comcast.

My problem has been that the service, managed by Systemd, fails to load on boot but will load if I log in and start it by hand. The error was the service couldn't bind to my chosen IP address, as it was starting up before DHCP finished setting things up.

The standard instructions for getting a service to wait is to use the network-online.target instead of the network.target.

What everything I researched failed to mention was this only works if systemd is handling the network interface and DHCP. If something else -- Network Manager, /etc/network/interfaces, etc. -- is handling your network interface, it just won't work.

Yes, in hindsight, that seems sort of obvious. But, it wasn't explicitly mentioned anywhere and Debian insists on providing half-a-dozen ways to manage your network interfaces, which is why I'm writing this down.

Now for the next two phases.

Yes, wire fraud indictments mean we get to use Interpol and bounties. It's going to be fun.

I've written here before about how I rip and store every bit of physical media that I purchase. Movies, television shows (on disc), music, and pictures, are all copied and stored on a little server I have in my home. Everything is available on my home network, via Samba shares, with televisions being connected to CuBox devices running LibreELEC for an interface.

All in all I have about 2.5 Tb of data, with over 600 movies and TV show episodes -- all legally purchased -- in SD or HD resolution. It was stored on a single drive in a small server I had in a utility closet. Backups were made to a USB drive, stored elsewhere. The ultimate backups are the original media.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, it all imploded. I was sloppy and lazy and got burned. The server was not on a UPS and a nasty power surge took out both the motherboard and the hard drive. I was unable to get the drive to spin up at all. Any machine it was attached to wouldn't even enter BIOS/UEFI until after the drive timed out, so even SpinRite was useless.

My USB backup drive, of course, failed. I don't know why, and I hadn't used it in several months, but it had a ton of errors. I was able to recover about 5% of my data from that. The rest, I've been recovering from original media. I expect to finish some time in late January, because that is a slow, tedious process, and because I'm obsessive about getting the encoding right and the tags correct.

As before, I'm using MakeMKV for DVD and Blu-Ray rips, with HandBrake for encoding. Under Linux, these do an excellent job, but I can't get the tags to auto-populate like it is possible in Windows, so it can be slow.

To ensure this doesn't happen again, I'm doing the following:

1. Adding a UPS to the main server. And, instead of a normal Linux box, I'm expecting one of these to be delivered early in January. I'm planning on configuring it as RAID-5 with some 4 TB WD Red NAS drives, for a total of 12 TB of usable space.

The Internet is full of stories on how RAID-5 is dead and a bad choice for modern, large (multi-TB) NAS, but my use case is different. In my case, it is much closer to WORM than traditional NAS. I'll be writing to the system maybe once a month, as I add new content, and reading frequently by not continuously. It should serve my purpose without having to dedicate 2 drives to redundancy.

2. I'm also adding a second layer of backup in the way of BDXL 100 Gb M-Disc archives.

Surprisingly, Ubuntu doesn't properly support recording Blu-Ray discs out-of-the-box. It seems that some time ago there was a major pissing contest around the license between the original author of cdrtools and some distro maintainers. The end result was forking some tools under the CDRKit package.

TLDR -- My first attempt resulted in a $17 coaster, as 100 GB BDXL M-Discs aren't cheap.

For Ubuntu, follow the instructions here to add a PPA and then install both K3B (main repository) and the needed PPA tools, cdrecord and mkisofs.

After doing that, I can now successfully record 100 GB backup discs using K3B. It takes about an hour-and-a-half for them to burn, using an LG WH14NS40 drive. And while a 25-pack of these beauties will set me back about $375, it beats the pants off of 3 months worth of re-ripping and encoding.

For anything else, I'm comfortable just encrypting and uploading to Google Drive. But 2.5 TB of media is just too much, and the actual upload and download times are too damn long.

The original M-DISC company went bankrupt, and assets were acquired by the debtors, as documented in the Wikipedia link above. While the *idea* of long term, stable, archival storage in a DVD/BR media is fantastic, I think they bumped into a the reality of there's only so much data that I need to store long term. Once I bought a set of 10 DVD blanks, back when it came out, I only really used 1. Once you get rid of things like videos, music, and pictures, the rest of the data I generate and care about is significantly smaller than 4.7 Gb. I still have 7 of the original discs I purchased back in 2011, when I got my first M-DISC capable DVD-R. (Two were experimental coasters.)

Look, if you're not a very wealthy person (and I mean raking in millions through trusts and LLCs each year), you need to know they are about to steal your money.

PAY YOUR PROPERTY AND SALES TAXES before Year End. Next year you have a total cap on Property Taxes, Mortgage Interest, Sales Tax or State Income Tax, and other fees of $10,000 TOTAL.

DO IT NOW!

See Have Bruce Perens Keynote Your Confference at perens.com

So, the Neo-Nazis are getting bolder in the U Dist. Was going to lunch with a friend and ran into one who yelled various threats and racist aspersions at me. Apparently he had been doing this for quite a while, and others had called 911 too. He was obviously trying to provoke a physical reaction (my friend is Filipino) from me but I was pretty calm, since I know what to do. This is why you have to have leaders who don't promote garbage like this, it encourages the loons.

Just after me, he did a similar thing to a young couple and the guy started brawling with the male of the couple.

I blame the President and his VP Trump.

Seriously, didn't even make it to 3 pm.

RUFKM?

Resign now. Take completely compromised Pence with you and tell President Bannon he's going back into cold storage in Argentina again.

So, for those of you don't realize it, I'm a catalyst. I've fought against my basic nature for years, but it's what I do.

and right now, my job is saving America.

No pay, hard work, it's connecting stuff, using some ancient protocol builds that are in everything to bypass security that never did work, and providing little pushes that get things done.

Expect more. Just starting.

It's immaterial if you know I used to have a four digit slashdot account and spaced my old password from my old account at one of the first ISPs, or that I used to hack things before the USE*NET wars, or was there at the start of the events that created EFF and all that.

I just do things. Never for personal gain.

This is one of those times.

While the Brother P-Touch QL-500 is recognized out of the box by Ubuntu, it doesn't really work. Do the following to fix:

1. Go to the Brother driver site and download both the LPR and CUPSWRAPPER driver. http://support.brother.com/g/s/id/linux/en/download_esp.html#QL-500
2. Install both with "sudo apt install ./ql500cupswrapper-1.0.1-0.i386.deb ./ql500lpr-1.0.1-0.i386.deb"

That works.

Ideally, download and use the font "OCR-B", which is freely available from here: http://www.fontpalace.com/font-download/OcrB+Regular/

Note to future self.

I was fiddling around with my laptop and broke something. My WiFi kept disconnecting every couple of minutes. A quick look in dmesg showed the iwlwifi kernel module was segfaulting every couple of minutes.

This was new. WTF had I changed? Reminder to self -- don't fiddle with things that matter when really tired.

As it turns out, I had enabled up the amd64-microcode in my system, which is under Additional Drivers in Ubuntu. This played absolute havoc with the Intel WiFi and provided no discernible benefits.

Uncheck box, reboot machine, problem resolved.

This is how dictatorships start.

And how they behave.

Don't be sheep.

Let me be clear. I was a Canadian Army Sergeant with a high security classification during the Cold War. During Reagan. I saw what Russia did and what we did, some of which is still classified.

The Russia today may be different, but if you're backing Russia taking over our elections in the US (yes, I was born here, my dad and grandpa are USAF vets) you're insane.

And very very very deluded.

This is NOT ok.

When attempting to change your password on the genealogy website Ancestry.com, you get this not-so-helpful message:

New Password -- Your new password should be between 5 to 24 characters long and can be any combination of letters, numbers, and some symbols.

Really. Some symbols. Not that they're going to tell you which ones. Oh no, that would be too easy. You have to guess!

The best I can figure out is some dev is just fucking with people for fun. Either that, or they had to spend way too much time writing escape code for special characters and this is payback.

For the record, so far I've determined that a period, hyphen, and underscore are all acceptable and a space is not. . - _

Ugh!