Rant

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.)

I first dipped my toes into using Synology though their top-notch NVR system. I had eight cameras at the time around my house and it worked very well for myself and my family, though paying $40-$50 a license per camera can get expensive fast. I didn’t really use it for its other features for years until a fellow sysadmin introduced to me the functionality that it had offered him as he did large project like setup NVR and NASes for the city and school systems. It intrigued me enough to accept his proposal of bringing in a Synology 4U rackmount server into my main datacenter.

Even though this device is not meant to be running Linux, I’m going to be tough during this review.

Setup process

It’s extremely easy. Enter in the script, read what its outputting, click a few keys, voila, you have a running Asahi Linux system that dual-boots with MacOS. Ok, its not as simple as that but one through ten where 10 is installing Gentoo its like a two. The only gotchas that occur are when you don’t read the final output and your system goes into an infinite boot loop which is remedied by simply resetting and holding the power button until it tells you it is booting into config mode.

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.

Maybe its my fault but my latest hardware purchase a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen4 has been nothing but issues for me. Lets start with the hardware. I thought purchasing a badass laptop with a 4K display, RTX 3070 mobile, a 16:10 aspect ratio, and all the other great aspects that a powerful laptop is known for would translate well into a beast of a machine that can handle anything I give it. Apart from this system not being very often used in the Linux world due to the lack of specific pages specifying what works and what doesn’t, the consensus was always the fact that Lenovo drivers were well supported on most or all Linux distros. If I was running Windows as my daily driver that assumption would reign true, the system would just work. Well…, I don’t want to run Windows nor do I like to use it if I can avoid it.

I’ve been a user of Linux since 2011. My brother-in-law was the one who introduced me to Linux and more specifically, Ubuntu. Since then, I have loved every minute of it. Even though I don’t use Ubuntu as my daily driver machine, but I do use it and Debian for servers, I am eternally grateful for him showing me this entire different world of computers.

Sometimes learning new things can be frustrating, and believe me there is a steep climb atop the Linux mountain, but once you reach a certain point you just cannot fathom life without it.