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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Unfortunately, social media is highly influencial of public opinion, so it is a civic responsibility that those with life experience and expertise with things need to engage in. Failure to do so effectively is rolling over for MAGA Nazis 2.0.

    We need to be better at rhetoric and debate. Cicero wrote over 2 millenia ago about the power of eloquence.

    "Wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good of communities, but eloquence without wisdom is, in most instances, extremely harmful and never beneficial. If, then, anyone exerts all of his energies in the practice of oratory to the neglect of the highest and most honorable pursuits of reason and moral conduct, he is reared as a citizen useless to himself and harmful to his country; but the person who arms himself with eloquence in such a way that enables him not to assault the interest of his country, but rather assist them, this man, in my opinion, will be a citizen most helpful and most devoted both to his own interests and those of the public.”

    In recent years, the unwise have weaponized eloquence. The wise among us have failed spectacularly at understanding the importance and power of persuasion.


  • Oh, you mentioned you don’t want to keep a backup of the entire drive. That is fine, but absolutely back it up before starting the install.

    I would just boot a live Linux image and dd the entire device file onto some sort of storage. That way you can get a bit for bit copy of the drive that you can make it how it was before you touched it. When all is well, then you can ditch the backup. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep if the stuff is important. Storage devices do fail.




  • A swap partition is akin to the page file on Windows. The kernel will use it to move memory pages it doesn’t anticipate using in the near future to it so it can use that RAM for other things. It will also use it in a pinch when there isn’t enough RAM on the system. It isn’t strictly necessary, but it can prevent programs from crashing at a huge performance penalty. It is necessary if you want to use sleep or hibernate or whatever it’s called when it is powered off physically but resumes what you were doing instead of booting when you power it back on. That takes as much swap as you have RAM at minimum. If you want that, a good rule of thumb is 1.5 times physical RAM.

    I have servers I administer for my job that have over 100GB of RAM with very little swap, like 4GB. The applications and machine are tuned and sized so the physical RAM is at ~85% and swap is barely used. The swap is mainly for non application stuff like IDS agent, backup agent, monitoring agent, etc.

    If swap becomes a problem, you can adjust the kernel vm.swappiness parameter as needed. It might take some trial and error to get it right.

    Source: I’ve been working with Linux professionally for almost 20 years now.