Doing some troubleshooting on the local network to figure out why VPN routing is borked. Expect services to be intermittent for the next 12 hours or so.

#GravityWellxYz

#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.

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.

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.

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

“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.

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

Don’t y’all see? WEAPONIZE THIS. The entire system relies upon your participation and they cannot force you to comply, only threaten you with deprivation if you don’t. And you’re already suffering deprivation, aren’t you? You’re not paid enough to live comfortable anyway. You can’t afford the stuff they want you to buy anyway. So why keep running on the same fucking treadmill?

Remember how the pandemic just scared the shit out of everyone? How having less consumers and less employees killed off entire industries? And that was by accident. Do you get that if you simply stopped buying anything but survival stuff you could tank these companies?

They don’t think the way you do. They’re beholden to shareholders who demand not only a return on investment but perpetual growth, and who are skittish as newborn colts. If you can reduce sales for a given company in a given year by 10%, you’ve fucked them. Doesn’t matter how many billions they make, you’re still spooking their investors and the market, which is based on absolutely nothing but vibes. Literally nothing else. You can cause chaos by causing doubt. The best part is, you can just straight up say that’s what you’re doing and it won’t make any difference.

General labor and consumer strikes will absolutely wreak havoc. They’ll go on CNN and rant like lunatics: BUY STUFF! JUST BUY ANYTHING! AND COME TO WORK! Because they can arrest you for protesting and they can arrest you for sabotaging pipelines, but they cannot arrest you for not buying shit and not going to work.

You would have to face the possible consequences, but would you rather be scared and stressed because some rich asshole decided to wring another dollar profit out of you or because you were standing up against fascism and trying to turn humans into machines fit only to work and die?

General strikes in 2025. Decide to do it and do it.

Ugh, something about the latest firmware update from GliNet for my router really broked the VPN stuff. Normally I have my setup to relay all traffic over mullvad as a client and the router itself acts as a vpn relay to anything connected to it… guess its time to move that stuff over to Zion too.