Computers & Tech posts page 5

Easily typed passwords

I came across an interesting Stackexchange question about easy to type passwords. It seems a useful consideration for passwords we have to type frequently. Reading through the answers got me to thinking about a solution that fits the criteria of easy / fast to type along with the general password criteria of easy to remember and some reasonable level of secure.

My solution considers typing style for determining ease and uses words and rules for making them memorable. It keeps to the rules from the question of at least one upper case letter, one number, and one symbol.

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Ideas: compute furnace

Furnace with a powerful computer system providing the heat. Will use compute cycles for scientific research or other social or personal purposes, running things like BOINC, Folding at Home, crypto mining, or rented “cloud” usage. Fans or liquid cooling systems will carry heat to a traditional forced air or water boiler system to distribute the heat throughout the home / building. System will increase or decrease CPU usage based on thermostatic control.

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Custom logic for unattended upgrades reboot

The Ubuntu / Debian unattended-upgrades package has an option to automatically reboot as needed when it upgrades packages. It will do this without user input, at a chosen time. However, it doesn’t allow for any conditions beyond need and time. I found a need for more nuance recently, so I had to disable the built-in functionality and set up my own script on a cron job.

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Automatically deal with conf changes using unattended-upgrades

For Ubuntu servers, I use the unattended-upgrades package to automate keeping the system and packages up to date. I recently noticed some of Cogneato’s servers showing packages needing to be updated for multiple days. When I looked in unattended-upgrades.log (in folder /var/log/unattended-upgrades/), I found the message “WARNING Package something has conffile prompt and needs to be upgraded manually”. Basically, there was a change to a configuration file and it didn’t know how to handle it.

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