Psa

Article: PSA be aware of the difference between localhost and 127.0.0.1

I was bit in the butt by a bug that sprung up at me over the weekend. It really wasn’t a bug but I think it should be. I explain more down below. Over the weekend I setup a new VPS with Linode where its only job was to be my central always-running syncthing server in the cloud. Upon first setting it up was able to reverse SSH tunnel to it using my standard SSH config and keys using this command. (hic sunt localhost is a play on words from the old Hunt-Lenox-Globe which coined the phrase “Here be dragons” or “hic sunt dracones” in Latin.)

Editor’s Note GrapheneOS has placed the Pixel 4 line in legacy extended support which is great news as I believe many people complained and or threw money at the GrapheneOS creators.

Unfortunately, my Pixel 4 XL that I have been using with GrapheneOS for around two years now is End-of-Life. All the Pixel 4 range except the Pixel 4a(5G) will no longer be getting any extended support nor security updates as of Oct 1, 2023. This sucks as the Pixel 4 XL has been the best phone I have ever used and I do not want to give it up. I will be looking for alternative ROMs to be installing but finding one that offered all the great things GrapheneOS does is going to be hard.

If you ever have an issue with Arch Linux it could be due to a kernel issue. Due to its rolling release nature. Most updates usually comes with a new kernel version. Due to the mismatch between what you are running and what Arch Linux is now looking for, various things can stop working.

For me this specifically was the OS would not detect any new USB stick I had just plugged into my computer. After identifying that it was a kernel issue, performing a simple reboot resolves the issue.

PSA!!!

As a homelabber I have used several filesystems across many machines. When I first began the simplest was EXT3 and its predecessor EXT4 is still the simplest journaling file system around. After a while I started to look for redundancy via mdadm’s RAID on Linux. From then on I had RAID arrays usually consisting of RAID1 or mirror on most of my systems whether it be on HDDs or SSDs. But only after 10 plus years have I had a reason to take an old unused RAID1 HDD and try to get a file out of the drive, I have found it to be virtually impossible.