Thank you!

Ok, so if my main router is on 192.168.1.1 and my new OpenWrt router I plan on connecting to VPN is 192.168.1.2, I should set the OpenWrt router’s gateway to 192.168.1.1, set any devices I want on the VPN to use gateway 192.168.1.2, and any devices I don’t want on the VPN should stay on 192.168.1.1, right?

Would devices on the VPN still be able to access the local network and devices that have 192.168.1.1 as their gateway? I assume it would only route internet bound traffic and the OpenWRT router would be able to just pass through local network traffic the same way as the main router?

Also, would the OpenWrt router be able to deal with the main router handling DHCP if I configure it to give it a static IP? Will it just know what devices it’s talking to when the main router assigns them their dynamic IPs?

Sorry for all the noob questions, networking is not one of my strengths.

just get a cheap Pi-type device, install OpenWRT, setup your VPN connections, then create a route on your network to point at this new device for whatever you need it for.

Can I just set its IP address as the default gateway on my devices instead of the main router and expect it to forward everything to the main router through the VPN? Or is there a more complicated setup procedure to get the two routers talking properly?

I briefly tried to make my server a default gateway in the past but couldn’t get it to work, and I’m generally not super experienced with networking. But that was on a general non-router OS. Does OpenWrt do the gateway and routing/forwarding configuration by itself more than a general Linux OS?

Hmm, basically make a container with the VPN client and proxy server, and expose the proxy port through it? Not sure how to route the host server’s traffic through that but I suppose I can just point all the important stuff to the local container’s proxy port. I’ll see if that’s more reliable than modifying the host network configurations. Thanks!

I’ve also been thinking of switching to Nix so I can just configure it once and rebuild the entire system with all the condigurations at any time without going through manually setting everything back up with individual commands/file edits. Though I’m not sure if that’d be more reliable given it’s broken randomly on Fedora when I didn’t even change any network configurations.

I don’t have custom firmware on my router and frankly don’t trust the stock one to handle VPN connections securely without sending “analytics” back to the manufacturer.

I’m thinking about seeing if I can get OpenWrt on it though, but I’m worried it won’t be reliable enough and I really don’t want to be in a situation where I have no internet period after my experiences with just the proxy server breaking. The only reason I’ve been able to troubleshoot it is because the internet itself still works.

TIL companies have Mac fleets

My biggest issue with Windows is the lack of control I have of the actual hardware I own. I don’t own my work computer to begin with nor am I entitled to have full control over it so it doesn’t matter.

I do use WSL, but mainly because I’m more familiar with Bash than Powershell and don’t have to constantly figure out how Powershell does things I already know how to do.

It’s the same reason I have no problem using my company’s OneDrive for work files when I go out of my way to avoid putting any of my personal data on the cloud. It’s their data and they don’t care so I don’t care either.

It’s also nice because I can set up a Linux-only file server at home with things like SSHFS and the Windows computer can’t even see it since it has no SSH access doesn’t even support the network share protocol. If I had an SMB share it would show up on my work computer because it autodetects it.

parallel, easy multithreading right in the command line. This is what I wish was included in every programming language’s standard library, a dead simple parallelization function that takes a collection, an operation to be performed on the members of that collection, and optionally the max number of threads (should be the number of hardware threads available on the system by default), and just does it without needing to manually set up threads and handlers.

inotifywait, for seeing what files are being accessed/modified.

tail -F, for a live feed of a log file.

script, for recording a terminal session complete with control and formatting characters and your inputs. You can then cat the generated file to get the exact output back in your terminal.

screen, starts a terminal session that keeps running after you close the window/SSH and can be re-accessed with screen -x.

Finally, a more complex command I often find myself repeatedly hitting the up arrow to get:

find . -type f -name '*' -print0 | parallel --null 'echo {}'

Recursively lists every file in the current directory and uses parallel to perform some operation on them. The {} in the parallel string will be replaced with the path to a given file. The '*' part can be replaced with a more specific filter for the file name, like '*.txt'.

Open source devs working on literally the most important infrastructure that powers all other software development: Y’all are getting paid?

Is it possible to use LUKS with a password with a Windows NTFS partition and just have GRUB decrypt it to let Windows boot? Don’t intend to dual boot Windows ever but just curious.

Frankly I trust a password stored in my brain way more than whatever keys the TPM is storing. No way something being pushed this hard by Westoid tech corporations doesn’t have a backdoor that just unlocks everything for “approved” parties.

Pff you know how many layers of abstraction HolyC still has? Real computing enthusiasts write their OS in machine code. Not assembly, that’s an abstraction too, literally tapping out high and low electrical pulses like you’re in the Marconi room on the Titanic.

Yeah ambiguity is for C code /s

KDE is second-class to GNOME on Fedora.

It is? I ask because I’ve always used Fedora KDE and honesty it’s been the best KDE experience I’ve had. Now I’m curious how much better the Fedora GNOME experience might be if it’s prioritized so much more, but I’ve never seriously used GNOME so I don’t think I can make a fair assessment. In what ways is KDE deprioritized?

What’s the appeal of Bazzite over regular Fedora immutable version? I’ve personally never had an issue running Steam on Fedora, then again I wouldn’t consider myself a “gamer,” certainly not my biggest requirement as far as computing is concerned.

Thank you for elaborating!

“No longer needed” is probably never going to happen, but IMO needed by fewer companies is inevitable. I see “vibe coding” as an extension to those website builders like Squarespace, definitely not suitable for a large website or a company whose entire business model is software and/or web based services, but good enough that the owner of a small, non-tech company who just happens to need a website or simple app can do it themselves instead of paying someone on Fiverr or something to do it. Unfortunately that means the options for new developers looking for easy experience building jobs that could eventually help them land a better paying position will be even more limited than it is now.

Can you elaborate? I’d like to learn what I’m thinking or doing wrong.

This raises an interesting issue: Should house guests expect to be given Wi-Fi access? I’ve personally never even asked for Wi-Fi when I go over to someone else’s house because frankly I don’t trust their network. I don’t know what “smart devices” are port scanning every other device or collecting MAC addresses, I don’t know if they’ve ever updated their router firmware and if it’s been infected by the numerous malware automatically scanning the internet for unpatched routers. Not worth it, I’d rather use mobile data or not access the internet until I go home. Also I don’t want Google or Cloudflare to know who my friends are and where they live by having my browser fingerprint show up on their IP.

Thank you for the in depth explanation of hard drive noises! I have everything I care about backed up and will keep listening for changes. Hopefully it’s just an OS thing.

I tried using smartctl but it doesn’t seem to like the fact that it’s in a USB enclosure and says “unknown USB bridge”. Trying smartctl -d sat does give some SMART information and says that the “overall-health self-assessment test result” is passed for both based on “Attribute checks”, but I’m not sure if it’s actually passed or it just can’t see the actual failing information. It also says “SMART status not supported: Incomplete response, ATA output registers are missing” above the passed result which seems to indicate that it’s missing the information it needs for a full assessment.

I run Pi-Hole and Ollama in containers, but neither have mount points or volumes on the hard drives, only the system SSD.

One drive is a fairly new Seagate IronWolf Pro, but the other is a refurbished server hard drive so if one is dying it’s probably that one, though the stuff I actually care about is copied on both drives and a third one that’s offline and unplugged.

The weird thing is that this only started happening when I reinstalled the OS, but like I said I reinstalled with newer version so that might be the cause? Maybe some disk/fs implementation changed and now does things automatically when the drives are idle that 42 didn’t do? But I feel like that would still trigger the indicators.

My next step is probably to use inotify to look at file accesses, experiment with only mounting one drive at a time to see which one clicks or if they all do, maybe even connect the drives to another computer over SATA to do a full SMART check.

Thank you!