#Sysadmin Chronicles #LinuxMint #Debian

Last night I wound up dealing with one of the wildest debian breakages I’ve ever seen. It was quiet the project to work through, but in the end we got everything working again.

While I honestly am not sure exactly what happened, I’m fairly sure it was a combination of (mostly) user error, and automatic-updates being enabled.

My user errors/ Mistakes that I know of: Distro is LinuxMint Debian Edition, and the sources for apt used the “stable” tag (instead of ie bookworm), the mint repos use the codename which was faye for LMDE6. Normally I’m used to setting up pure debian and then adding MINT repos if necessary, but this server was setup as “LMDE” from the start, so it priorities Mint versions of things like cinnamon (this ended up being a major dependency issue for apt) . Mint doesnt have a “stable” tag for their repos, so its only goes by codename, in this case the major mistake seems to be that before confirming the switch from 12 to 13 the mint sources.list should have been changed to the codename “gigi”

With debian 13 recently becoming released as “stable”, so that meant a dist-upgrade was due for the system, but we had not gotten around to it (this server gets very little tinkering unless something breaks, thus why auto updates had been enabled)

At some point since the move from 12 to 13, An individual package or 2 was installed onto the server (and maybe a dependency or 2 if it had them) without doing a full upgrade. Because it was the first time since the move, apt mentions/warns about how the stable version has changed and asks to confirm the transition, This tells debian its now okay to upgrade everything to the new 13 versions.

Later Debian auto update goes to do its thing, runs into some kind of an issue with version/dependency conflicts due to the mix of debian 13 and LMDE “faye” that prevents the installation/upgrade of a number of essential packages. but instead of reverting changes and going back to old versions, it leaves the packages no longer installed. packages like cinnamon-desktop and fish and bash shell… (or packages for libs that these essentials need to be able to start)

So after maybe an hour of trying to figure out how to reinstall everything and undo stuff, we decide to cut our losses, do a full backup/format/reinstall…. this time with just a pure Debian 13 and no Mint.

After that restoring the backups went smoothly and overall this server was overdue for a good refresh anyway.

Bloomberg reports that a Russian diplomat at a private meeting in Moscow with UK, French, & German envoys apparently acknowledged that Russia is deliberately violating NATO airspace, as “a response to Ukrainian attacks on Crimea,” which Moscow says NATO facilitates.

@kevinrothrock Yikes.

Heres a non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/LgJIv

In 2024 and 2025, humans will spend something like 600 billion of LLMs. That’s about as much money as the entire Apollo program plus 2 entire International Space Stations for 40 years plus 5 copies of the longest bridge in the world, and then you’ll have money left to end world hunger for a year.

But instead, we have funny pictures, hallucinations and a semi-ok-ish summary machine that only rarely inserts random phrases. With possibly the worst RoI since Enron

Just thinking about how if during Charlie Kirk’s “Funeral”, everyone who attended had tragically died, we would have a 91 year old President Chuck Grassley right now.

@feoh I think its mainly employers/businesses to blame, In an ideal world end users would know better, but also in an ideal world end users also would be able to trust their employer and vice versa.

If your wife or someone actually had malicious intent to keep that data after being terminated, they could easily prevent a remote wipe by just keeping the thing in a Faraday bag till they’re outside of signal range. Like so many things we accept in society today its little more then security theater at the expense of honest actors who are too trusting of corporations.

The current bitcoin drama vs knots is pretty funny to me, It sounds like they ran out of problems to solve and need a new thing to argue over.

@feoh I'm not sure which is more insane: having to give an employer that kind of access to a device you own, or having to use a device your employer controls for something that allows access to your home.

How did we get to the point where average people don't even question this? Like imagine if you told someone 20 years ago they had to give their employer a key to their home, or that the employer needs access to their voice mail 24/7 just in case a work related message came in. Absolutely bonkers what people will put up with now.

Going to do a bit of an experiment with Jellyfin hosted on the VPS using remote NFS mounts to the media

@n_dimension Oh yikes, thats not my conclusion, I needed to quote that better (fixed now)… I wasn’t drawing any conclusions, i was just sharing the full quote. I know thats the end goal for them. Utah actually already has some kind of laws in place but i believe its only for “pornography” (so far).

“Utah Governor Spencer Cox called the Internet a “cancer” yesterday; today, “cancer probably isn’t a strong enough word,” likening social media to “fentanyl” in destroying young minds and taking lives:

“We have seen an escalation in violence that has been happening across the country. … I don’t think a governor, I don’t think a president, and I don’t think anyone can change the trajectory of this. It truly is about every single one of us.

And I can’t emphasize enough the damage that social media and the Internet is doing to all of us. Those dopamine hits. These companies, trillion dollar market caps and the most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to the outrage which is the same type of dopamine, the same chemical that you get from taking fentanyl and get us addicted to outrage and getting us to hate each other.

I’ve seen it in real time since the death of Charlie Kirk. I’ve seen it in every corner of our society. The conflict entrepreneurs are taking advantage of us and we are losing our agency, and we have to take that back. We have to turn it off, and do you have to give it back to the community and caring about our neighbors and bettering ourselves, exercising, sleeping and all of these things that this thing takes away from us.”

Full Article: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/charlie-kirk-assassination-sparks-6da

I decided to move Pleroma back onto my home server instead of the VPS. It was usable on the VPS but the cpu usage was a bit much

I normally have a pretty averse reaction to real gore but I’m super into fake gore, and watching Charlie Kirk die gives me the same kind of feelings a good horror movie killing would.

@newman Wait so now they want immigrants to feel safe in the USA?

Best Video of the shooting i’ve found circulating so far.

If Charlie Kirk is so pro-life, why did he die?

#GravityWellxYz update: Things are mostly working but for various reasons here and there I’ve been rebooting and doing things that might cause intermittent short down times. Sorry For the inconvenience