Another day another not much, what about you?

Could you imagine if as this post's title suggests, you were asked a question and could be given a text box to write it in HOWEVER I'd be pinged for that over XMPP protocol, and I come by and be like, "Interesting. So it's true, salt does have a major factor in baking cookies. Well today I learned ^^", and the unsuspecting reader who was curious and jolly enough get's a response from none other than The Woodcutter himself LIVE!

And here I wonder how many of you folks wondered how easy it would be to use some LLM (as people incorrectly call it "ai", no credit for any actual intelligence however) to make generally acceptable parlay in the form of dialogue. Under guise of, well, even impersonation of myself, or whatever supposed human interaction it ought to imply. I can't say I am a fan of this "ai" shite, as it had me get too upset to remain on my previous LinkedIn account, and sometimes on Reddit (which I do like this platform, it'd be my favorite "normie" social media) I end up ripping on some bot quite pointedly, it's just another misfortune rampant and unstoppable now on the very thing I've loved so much for my entire life: computers/internet.

I came here anyways to log some of my recent efforts on Debian. This past couple of days I've been diving somewhat deeper into hardening Debian and looking around, checking various of the usual Linux functions and factors. I recently about a week ago reinstalled COMPLETELY NEW Debian, which no lies happens often and wouldn't normally be such a big deal except that I had to move 100's of GB of my data, and I literally just plain nuked a couple of big partitions and disks, for a total lack of will to deal with piece by piece organizing it all. And I discovered something cool about cockpit when I was using Rocky 9.6 recently for a while, during the first half of the winter, is that it can automount and save your partition keys with dm-crypt. I was able to copy cp -rp /var/* /var/.* /mnt/ which was on /dev/mapper/ as decrypted, then use cockpit while the system was running to remount this /var/ under the new encrypted partition and also automatically decrypt and mount it at boot. So I immeditely rebooted after this HOWEVER in some series of happenings where I'm sure my eyes were not properly focused on the alphas and numerals that were upon my terminals, I accidentally deleted the entire /etc/fstab SHIIT!

SO, the purpose of this web log now is to tell you about 3 of my recent favorite Debian packages, in which the one that SAVED me here when I only WISHED I had genfstab -U / > /etc/fstab, from Arch Linux, is arch-install-scripts. Yep! You guessed it! On Debian, same package name as on Arch Linux, the arch-install-scripts that also includes arch-chroot on Arch Linux. I did not verify this was a thing for Debian, but if it is?!?! Give me a sec, I'll see...



HELL YES! !!! Do we know what this means? WE KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS::> 😸 :: For a lazy ass like myself, at least :: 😹 <::Oh what fun there is to be had!



MMmmmmmmMMmmkkKKk ....
Hardcore cool. It works as I would've hoped, wow nice. Ezpz Debian chroot into filesystems. So damn cool!



That was a lot of fun. Sorry I ran off my topic, why this is such a stoke is because for a while that night after I erased my /etc/fstab and was delighted to find arch-install-scripts in Debian packages, I had to do some cool old stuff, and bring forward some of my long time Linux knowledge, as in order to do a number of various recoveries booted in lower runlevels I had to telinit 5, and various other lower level Linux stuff in my process of fixing this. So despite that I had done a major hurt to my brand new Debian that day, I managed to eventually recover the system, including apply 3 more encrypted partitions as filesystem mounts via cockpit-ws, and reminisce live about when I learned how this all worked. Felt good reminding myself I know some shit, not just a smoker and a joker hahaha!
It was a good time, absolutely.

.. pyblog WHEN ALREADY! Perhaps the python powers to be won't let me endure as much stoke as I predict, when I can worthy work through the scripted actions of this blog. All the more reason not to forget THE WOODCUTTER.

Tags: fstab, linux, arch-install-scripts, debootstrap, hardening-runtime, debian12, debian13, apt-full-upgrade, trixie, bookworm, arch-chroot, linux-skills, good-times, give-your-intelligence-to-the-bot, the-bot-will-oppress-mankind, bewarethechunk, ezpz-debian-chroot, thanks-the-arch-way, archlinux

Recent Good Times 🪕

Ever get a hunch, or a predication, or a scent of the future? I would be filled with praise and joy.

So I recently rented a dedicated hardware server for not bad money, compared to the market. I very much enjoy the systems these folks have. I honestly wouldn't have had any plans what to do with it except solely to tinker with it, and test out more advanced software in a case where I "theoretically could" migrater my VPS services and sites to it. So I wandered into some nice software actually!

I've used cockpit before but never at any length. This time I've made that work, and been seeing much of what it can do. It's system admin server management software that's hosted on the dedicated server for use of managing virtual machines, monitoring resources, managing performance and also VERY CONVENIENTLY it has a log viewer! I do think, but don't quote me on it, it monitors journald. However this cockpit, as far as I can tell, was created by RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) devs it utilizes qemu/kvm and libvirt for it's virtualization panel. Mind you, that I think is an extra extension to install. Since I installed all the available extensions on debian 12 repositories I had to deal with a thing called PCP (Performance Co-Pilot, which combined with installing tuned, granted me quite a few performance profile options, and an intense amount of indepth logging available for the debian 12 base bare metal OS.

One thing I had to deal with was however, that with PCP there's a number of related processes, it's modular in nature, and they almost all of them open a lot of ports on your public interface AND VOID MY WHITELIST FIREWALL!!! That was not cool, and it's not like you know, entire public IP ranges aren't known, and bombed with fuzzers, and some worse than others. And, it's not like you know, that any sofware is "just good", "nah, she's good n secure, don worry bout it", BULLSHIT, smh, it superceded my firewall even. I fixed that though, I was just suprised.

Another thing I'm working on rather heavily is packets flask app project. My twtxt apparatus, for microblogging, and I plan to tie it to XMPP using a SliXMPP library XMPP bot that can accept commands from MUC group chat or PM privately, and post automatically. I have a number of other cool ideas, but I don't wanna really tell anybody cuz I've found not many if anybody really gives a shit. Oh well. However I think the web application, once really polished up and beyond a proper v1.0, should probably actually be enticing for folks, and DEFO one of a kind for sure!

Yea, and as much as I'd like to work on this blog, and have converted it to pythons, and fixed things like the templating being a pain, and the fact I can't use block CSS elements inside of posts (grrrrrr), pyblog project is still basically in competition for dead last on my priorities for programming. However have you noticed the cool new styles updates? LoL I went down the rabbit hole again ⛳🐇

Tags: good-times, news, the8woodcutter, system-administration, sysops, linux, debian12, flask, packets

New Post 5 Minutes in the Future

In the spirit of a new post I thought I would state that it's like a new time, honestly, for me. I've gotten past a longsuffering and under God's heavenly clouds I see happiness! Praise the Lord! I have gotten a public (i think it's called an SVN?) cgit website/server up now! I've been having helluva lot of fun with that since yesterday. The address is cgit.packets.cc which is a subdomain of my XMPP server packets.cc (click to join muc chat in your xmpp client!). I hope you like it, if you are going to follow along with the development of THE ARMADA, a (currently) lone enterprise. That's all I wanted to share, have a good one out there! Don't go to sketchy websites, pay close attention to everything! The white van isn't what you think it is! HaHaHa!!! (not funny I know) ....

Tags: news, freedom, fresh-start, good-times, no-more-haste, programming, lua, cgit, python, golang, php, nginx, system-administration, hosting, xmpp