If you want to run Geekbench 4 on a linux server, this is how to install and run it.
Note that you need to have a working internet connection on the server.
You can run it as root or as any other user.

Let's start from the home directory and put the files there.
cd

Download the files from geekbench.com:
(change version number if needed for latest version)
wget http://cdn.geekbench.com/Geekbench-4.3.3-Linux.tar.gz

Extract the downloaded files:
tar -zxvf Geekbench-4.3.3-Linux.tar.gz

Go to the extracted folder:
cd Geekbench-4.3.3-Linux

Run the test in tryout mode, results are uploaded automatically:
./geekbench_x86_64

After a few minutes the test is completed and you'll see a link to a webpage which is unique for each test.

Upload succeeded. Visit the following link and view your results online:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/1234567

Just enter the link in any browser and you'll see the results of the test.

@dbeato said in NVMe and RAID?:

One of the first Dell Servers with Hotswap NVME was the R7415 so yeah
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/povw/poweredge-r7415

Not sure what others have seen.

The newer ones have a 5 in the model number, so R7515, R6515 etc.
That's the ones you want to buy. AMD Epyc 2 Rome CPUs.

Dual sockets models are R7525, R6525 etc.

And to make this complete: 6 is 1U and 7 is 2U. R7515, R6515 etc.

@jasgot said in Macbook Air for College:

Daughter wants a Mac laptop for college. Any suggestions?

Yes, take her to the store and buy the one she wants.

Buying an Apple product is not a technical issue that needs to be figured out. It's an emotional issue. Like a Gucci bag.

If you have a RAID controller with 8 ports, you can connect up to 8 SAS/SATA drives directly to the RAID controller. That's fine but if you for instance have a server with say 36 drive bays you would need a 36 port RAID controller. Those are hard or maybe even impossible to find.

Well, here is where the SAS expander comes into play. It will work somewhat like a network switch but for SAS/SATA ports.

The SAS expander IC can be integrated directly on the backplane of the drive bays or it can be a standalone card or PCIe card. These are often used when you have more than 8 drive bays and even more so when you have 16 or more drive bays.

It allows you to expand the number of drives the RAID controller is able to connect to. It's transparent to the user because the RAID cards have integrated support for SAS expanders. This is also true of HBAs (Host Bus Adapters).

The only drawback is that the maximum transfer rate is, as always, limited by the PCIe link to the RAID controller card but also by the SAS connections from the RAID controller to the SAS expander. In real life though these bottlenecks are seldom bottlenecks as it's uncommon to read from all drives at the same time and drives are also often slower, especially when using HDDs.

SAS expanders are also used heavily in external JBOD chassis which are expander chassis for drive bays that you connect to a server so you can attach more drives than fits in the standard enclosure, aka Direct Attached Storage DAS. In that case the SAS expander sits inside the JBOD chassis.

@hobbit666 said in How to Secure a Website at Home:

Why not GitHub or GitLab for free?

That was part of the etc
Also I thought GitHub was more for storing scripts and opensource stuff.

It's not generic hosting of websites as you don't have control like you would on a normal webserver.

It's simplified hosting and the github/gitlab pages was initially intended to complement the projects on there. So it would be easy to make a html website from the git repositories, for instance for documentation.

Since you can store any files on gitlab/github you could of course also use the pages for any type of static website.

Here is how to get started in the simplest way possible:
https://guides.github.com/features/pages/

Good to know about WoeUSB.

If you have windows available, rufus is an easy tool to make bootable USB drives.
Doesn't need to be installed and it's fast.
https://rufus.akeo.ie/

But in all honesty it's very easy to make a bootable windows installer USB drive manually. Just make a primary bootable FAT32 partition on the USB drive and copy the files from the ISO onto it. Done.

You can copy more files onto the drive, for instance drivers or other software. If you do that, it makes sense to make a dd image of the entire thing when you're done. That way you can easily write a new USB drive with your custom files on it.

First, ransomware is big business run by organized crime. I think about 19 billion dollar per year industry.

Everything can be compromised in different ways. There is just no way to protect your data 100% and to think otherwise is just naive.

We have chosen to go with tape as our last line of defense. Once you take it offline there is no way it can be remotely compromised. We believe that is enough to be able to recover from most attacks and the cost is reasonable.

Integrity of files

If you want to check the integrity of a bunch of files you can do it with md5deep, which can be thought of as a recursive version of md5sum. It was initially designed for forensic work.

If a file has the same hash as another file they are identical. If you save the md5 hash of a file and later recheck it, you can be sure the file hasn't been changed, corrupted or tampered with.

Installation on Debian

You'll find it in the package md5deep.

apt install md5deep

Inside the package you'll also find sha256deep and some other good stuff. Use sha256deep instead if you want to use sha256 hash. It's better and actually more secure than md5 but might be slower. You use it in the exact the same way though.

Besides linux it's also available on other OSs such as Windows, MacOS. You can build it from source too. https://github.com/jessek/hashdeep

Create MD5 signatures

md5deep -rl /check_this_dir/* > files.md5

This will create a text file (files.md5) with the md5 hash of all files (*) in the "/check_this_dir" directory.

Check MD5 signatures

md5deep -rlX files.md5 /check_this_dir/*

It will return the files that don't match. So if any file has been changed, it will show up.

Common Options

-r is to go into subdirectories as well
-l is to use local paths instead of absolute paths
-X is to do check the signatures

-e is if you want to see the progress while it's working.

Find more info on basic usage with examples here:
http://md5deep.sourceforge.net/start-md5deep.html#basic

Example

Let's check that our files in /boot and it's sub-directories stays intact.

First let's create an md5 file that we will compare with.

md5deep -r /boot/ > boot.md5

Let's verify the files have not been tampered with.

md5deep -rX boot.md5 /boot/ 

If a file or several files has been changed it will return the file and the new hash (exit code 1).
If all is good it will not return anything (exit code 0).

Maybe stop using USB drives for things they aren't designed for?

It looks like we've been down this road before.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/20070/so-xen-server-gave-me-an-error-what-do-i-do

A small SSD would do better. Something with write endurance and something that is designed to attached 24/7 in a hot environment.

If you don't have drive bays or don't want to waste them, use satadom.

Maybe I'm alone but on the top of my list:

1. Only use Microsoft as a last resort when all other options have been explored.
2. If you get paid by the hour disregard #1.

@Fredtx said in Who's making the move to vSphere 8:

I also read that vmware no longer recommends booting from sd cards.

It's here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/85685

It's probably good to move off SD cards but the thing is that SD cards are actually fine because flash is flash - no matter what enclosure you put it in.

The real problem is that the flash memory need to have enough write endurance for the application. And people doesn't know and don't buy the right type of SD cards.

According to vmware you need 128 TBW (over 5 years). Industrial SD cards for example can have that. SD cards that goes into phones and cameras don't.

Same problem with usb sticks as boot devices and "clever" people using SATADOMs for high endurance cache. Oh well.

@gjacobse said in Data Erasure Software?:

@Pete-S said in Data Erasure Software?:

@Yonah-S said in Data Erasure Software?:

so DBAN is the low end solution by Blancco. I am looking for something in the middle range for mid size enterprise.

Mid size enterprise? Then don't deal with that crap.

Decommissioned equipment is sold to recyclers that will securily erase all drives with certificates and then resell your equipment or the parts in it.

Or,.. recycle and shred you HDD or SSD with cert

Or that. Either way, only DIYers and tinkerers not driven by business decisions can afford to mess around with stuff like that.

Enterprise companies should off load this kind of work to other companies that can do it much better and much cheaper than they can.

@Yonah-S said in Data Erasure Software?:

so DBAN is the low end solution by Blancco. I am looking for something in the middle range for mid size enterprise.

Mid size enterprise? Then don't deal with that crap.

Decommissioned equipment is sold to recyclers that will securily erase all drives with certificates and then resell your equipment or the parts in it.

@Yonah-S said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

@Pete-S have you thought of selling it? there is a big market right now for getting rid of old/unused hardware. Especially if you have any SSD's in there.

Thanks, but we're keeping it. Just want to extract the maximum value out of it while it's occupying rack space

@scottalanmiller said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

We typically are backing up databases, so full normally.

Just a side note but one way to make partial backups from databases is to have a "modified date/time" column for large tables.

Then you can do partial backups by looking at the "modified" timestamp and including all rows that has been modified since the last backup.

select * from tableX where modified_datetime>last_backup;

This can be done fully application independent if the database have triggers. The trigger will automatically update the "modified date/time" when changes are made and the application has no clue.

This is an example how to create a trigger that saves when a row is updated:

create trigger update_modified
before update on table tableX
for each row
   set new.modified_datetime=now();

This obviously only makes sense when backups are getting big enough to warrant the extra work.

@dafyre said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

@Pete-S SSH will pretty much only be limited by the bandwidth available for you to suck in the backups.

I actually just finished a script for doing almost exactly what you said just a few days ago. I sanitized it and dropped in in Gitlab if you want to take a look.

https://gitlab.com/dafyre/linux-utils/-/blob/master/autobackup/autobackup.sh

I think I made everything a variable, but since it's sanitized, it's quite possible I missed something.

This one is for pushing backups from the server with data out to the backup server. Once you get it working, just set it up in Cron and go.

Great, thanks! Looks good! I'll use that as a base going forward.

@EddieJennings said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

Conceptually one of the easiest things you can do is have this server pull backups from your various Linux servers using something like rsync or just ssh / scp.

Maybe that's the easiest thing.

I was thinking perhaps pushing the backup from each server would be better, instead of backups being pulled by the backup server.

Perhaps taking everything that needs to be backed up, compress it and send it.

Does ssh support having many concurrent sessions going at the same time, say a hundred?

@EddieJennings said in Turn server into backup storage for remote servers?:

There are many things you can do, but we'd need more detail about what data is to be backed up. Also, we'd want to know where these remote servers are compared to this to-be backup server.

Thanks Eddie.

Well, the servers are basically web servers (VMs) with not much data, say 5-10GB, in each for a full backup. Backups will run a couple of times per day but they can be incremental.

The purpose of this is to backup the customer's data and not the server instance.

Remote servers are a mixture of on-prem VMs, hosted webservers, cloud instances and such.

@gjacobse said in Inconsistent output from PS script:

@Pete-S said in Inconsistent output from PS script:

@gjacobse said in Inconsistent output from PS script:

@Pete-S said in Inconsistent output from PS script:

@Pete-S said in Inconsistent output from PS script:

@gjacobse said in Inconsistent output from PS script:

Get-Service -ComputerName pc1, pc2 SERVICE | Select name, MachineName, Status

Where did you get the -ComputerName syntax from?

I can't find anything like that from the manual: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/get-service?view=powershell-7.2

OK, it's been deprecated. It's available in older versions of powershell, up to 5.1.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.management/get-service?view=powershell-5.1

I read somewhere it doesn't use powershell remoting but dcom instead. And that's why it became obsolete.

Maybe you haven't got the right dcom privileges to run it remotely.

Say what now? I'm reading this:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/samples/managing-services?view=powershell-7.2

I'd put one script on each remote computer and have it send an email whenever the service stops. Or check whatever it is you really want to know with the service.

Sadly, we already monitor the service. I can be 'running' but fail and need to be stop/started. We've also already done the scheduled task route where it checked it ever 15 min and stop/started it. But there are still times it needs to be manually stop/started. And this is 10x better then what they were doing when I started last year....

OK, so the script is part of something you actually use to restart it when you decide to?

I have a server with lots of storage that sits in a datacenter doing nothing.

What is the easiest/best way to turn this server into a backup storage that I can use to backup remote linux servers?