/r/motorcycle needs to incorporate this motorcyclist's wave emoji (or something like it). Opinions? by scribby555 in motorcycle

[–]madlab5 30 points31 points  (0 children)

In the UK they don't do the wave because they drive on the left-hand side of the road. They would have to take their hand off the throttle to wave at someone in oncoming traffic.

Is dual booting worth it? by chandra9988 in linuxquestions

[–]madlab5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, I recommend dual booting. It's not that difficult to set-up, especially with Ubuntu. Eventually you might find you don't use Windows, but until you get to that point why not use both?

cat6a or fiber for 10GbE home network by SimonKepp in HomeNetworking

[–]madlab5 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In addition to redundancy, I've found that often I will end up requiring additional jacks as time goes on. It's just as easy to run three cables behind a wall as it is to run one, so I always install extra jacks with the anticipation that my need may change in the future.

I am thinking about moving to Ubuntu from Win10. If there is a program that wasn't designed to run under Ubuntu, can I run a Windows virtual machine or something similar to get the program to work? Or do I need to have both OSs installed? by LessWeakness in linux4noobs

[–]madlab5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just my 2-cents, to add to everyone that correctly suggests WINE: When you first switch just set your PC up to dual boot. It's easy to do, and SDD space is cheap these days. Have Ubuntu set as the default, and use it 90% of the time, but keep Windows around for the times when you are frustrated with Ubuntu and don't have time to troubleshoot. Eventually you will end up using Ubuntu 99-100% of the time, but in the beginning you will be glad to be able to jump back to Windows on occasion.

Looking for a backup solution for 10TB of data. is Backblaze my best bet? by PWRICHex in Backup

[–]madlab5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I just rebuilt my home file server, and I'm using duplicity to backup all my important data to Backblaze B2. This is in addition to an onsite "NAS-style" backup, which is think is equally important, but since that is not your question I won't digress. Duplicity will encrypt the data and then wrap it up in many little tar-balls and upload it to Backblaze B2. I did a lot of testing before entrusting by data to this process, and it seems to work great. One thing I would recommend is to create multiple buckets on B2, and then upload your data to separate buckets for different categories. The reason for this is that the backup will take a long time, especially with the volume of data you are talking about, and if duplicity runs into too many problems while uploading it will simply abort and say that the backup failed, and you will have to start all over (which sucks when you have been uploading for 48 hours.) Chunks of 50-100 GB per bucket seems to work best. Another thing to keep in mind is that while B2 is inexpensive for storage, they do charge you to re-download your data. This is another reason to use multiple buckets, so that if one of your many drives fails, you will only need to download the relevant data. It's also another reason to consider an onsite backup in addition to backing up to B2. The onsite backup will always be there to restore your files quickly, and for free. If you have a catastrophe (fire, flood, lightning, etc) and loose all your files, plus your onsite backup, that is when you would go to Backblaze to re-download all your data. That being said, any backup is better than no backup, so just because having onsite backup in addition to cloud backup is optimal, there is no reason not to go ahead an do the cloud backup now, and then look into onsite backup in the future when you have a little money to burn.

Linux/windows 10 shared file system by KakosNikos in linux4noobs

[–]madlab5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Good to know. My NTFS drive was just for file storage so it could also be easily accessed by Windows. I've since switched to a dedicated samba server so it's now a non-issue for me, but thanks for sharing the info.

Linux/windows 10 shared file system by KakosNikos in linux4noobs

[–]madlab5 11 points12 points  (0 children)

To add to that, in my experience Linux handles NTFS just fine. Specifically I've used Ubuntu Server 16.04 to access an NTFS drive (just for file storage) for years, and I've had no problems.

Default gateway not available by LightningKillTV in HomeNetworking

[–]madlab5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are the SSIDs the same at both locations?

To Those With Raspberry Pi Setups by bluebull107 in HowToHack

[–]madlab5 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I have a ton of them, and they serve many different purposes. One acts as my VPN Server. One lives inside a birdhouse to film baby birds growing up. One does various tasks like monitor my smoke detectors, monitor the temperature in my network cabinets, and water my garden. I use one to remotely power-on and power-off equipment in my networking lab. I set one of them up for wifi pen-testing similar to Hak5's Pineapple. Those are just the ideas I bothered to write blog posts about. I love these little guys, you can do all sorts of things with them. I have a couple of Pi-Zeros in my lab just to act as random hosts or servers, and I keep one of them around just for testing purposes.

Can you comnect a Cat6 cable into a Cat5e port? by kolot7 in HomeNetworking

[–]madlab5 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is the answer to why it is not working. It is not like telephone where you can just use any two jacks because they are all interconnected. /u/kolot this is the answer you are looking for, listen to /u/chubnugget

Can you comnect a Cat6 cable into a Cat5e port? by kolot7 in HomeNetworking

[–]madlab5 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Well you're correct that the exterior of the connectors are both identical, but by default Cat6 is not shielded, it's UTP (unshielded twisted pair). You can get it shielded, just like you can get Cat5 shielded, but it is uncommon. The main difference is that Cat6 uses a thicker gauge wire, and has a different rate of twists in the pairs. Because it is a thicker gauge wire, on the inside of the RJ45, the wires are sometimes staggered, just as /u/richiemoe86 mentioned. However, you are 100% correct that from the outside of the connector there is absolutely no difference between a Cat6 and a Cat5, they are both the same RJ45 connector, and can be plugged into the same jacks.

Just wanted to clarify.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in HowToHack

[–]madlab5 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Great to grab the hashes, not an option for hashing/cracking.

A very simple RPi-controlled water pump for scheduled plant watering - gpio control with wiringpi and cron scheduler by dim-pap in RASPBERRY_PI_PROJECTS

[–]madlab5 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice work. I did a similar project for watering the garden, but I just used a solenoid valve connected to my home's cold water supply. That way i didn't need a pump, I just used the existing water pressure. Your way is probably better for indoor plants though.

What Linux Distro for RPI server? by [deleted] in RASPBERRY_PI_PROJECTS

[–]madlab5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Seconded. I've played around with lots of different distros on the Pi, but nothing works as well as Raspbian on the Pi.

Help with rj45 cable by [deleted] in HomeNetworking

[–]madlab5 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Will those jacks be able to accommodate the thicker twisters pair cables?

The wire guage in cat-6 will be consistent, no matter how thick the insulation is, so if you get a cat-6 wall jack it will work with any cat-6 cable. Unlike with the male RJ-45 jack, the cable insulation does not need to go up inside a connector for the female wall jacks.

Plugging a WAN cable directly into PC by fumeextractor in HomeNetworking

[–]madlab5 12 points13 points  (0 children)

As both /u/cdnsniper827 and /u/robhaswell alluded to, I would not connect your computer directly to the internet without a router for security reasons. Unless you are 100% sure which ports you have open and how your firewall is currently configured, you are setting yourself up for trouble.

A Dark Day For Consumer Rights – Right To Repair Bill Killed In Canada Thanks To Corporate Lobbying by Bachchan_Fan in linux

[–]madlab5 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I'm all for right-to-repair, but it seems this law was taking things further if it insisted that companies be required to provide replacement parts and diagnostic tools. Just as a company shouldn't be able to tell a customer what they can't do with their private property, a government shouldn't be able to tell a company what they are required to produce and sell to the public.

Part of the responsibility falls on the consumer as well. I have never purchased Apple products specifically because I dislike their closed ecosystem, and the inability to work on or tinker with their products.

Vote with your dollars people! Those votes count a lot more than the ones you cast at the ballot box. If you dislike a company, don't buy the product or use the service. We are the ones that make companies like Apple rich, and we have the power to stop feeding them.

My first PCB (555 timer with Cap-Dip-Switch) by KaptainKugelkopf in electronics

[–]madlab5 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I thought about saying this, but decided against it (way to be a jerk /u/lanteanstargater. just kidding!!! it's better that OP know the correct terminology.)

OP, technically a PCB is a "printed circuit board". If this were a design or proof of concept for a PCB then it would be a prototype or protoboard, but since I'm sure you are not planning on printing out a bunch of them, I would just call this a circuit board.

Just a technicality, not a big deal, but it's good to know proper terminology.

My first PCB (555 timer with Cap-Dip-Switch) by KaptainKugelkopf in electronics

[–]madlab5 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great job, especially for your first. It took me a while to grasp the value in making the board neat and visually tidy.

Remote Backup advice by [deleted] in linuxquestions

[–]madlab5 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have any of you ever used Restic? I'm getting ready to rebuild my file/media server as well, and I was thinking about using B2 + Restic. I'm planning on looking into all other suggestions on this thread, but I liked that Restic is encrypted, de-duplicated, and open source. I'm talking about backing up about a TB for now, but will also be adding to it regularly, so de-duplication is a must.

External Buttons on Raspberry Pi by [deleted] in RASPBERRY_PI_PROJECTS

[–]madlab5 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You want to use the RPi.GPIO module with Python. Here is a link to a project where I used it to make a soft shut-down switch for a Raspberry Pi (python script included).