A couple of weeks ago, OpenBSD announced that they would be disabling Simultaneous Multi Threading (SMT) a.k.a HyperThreading on Intel CPUs over security fears related to side-channel attacks on the cache (much like those of recent Specter fame). Well, I've just updated my OpenBSD 6.3 partition to a -current snapshot that includes the new protection(s) and the results are blog-worthy, so here we go...

Firstly, my machine has an i3-5157u, 2 cores x 2 threads, so 4 hyperthreads (logical...

NEWS 180707: My build of RaspAnd Oreo 8.1 is ready. It’s the first RaspAnd build with Android Oreo 8.1. All installed apps (including Google Play Services and Google Play Store) have been updated to the latest available version by 180707. Read about all other included apps below. While downloading RaspAnd Oreo 8.1 Build 180707 you will also get RaspAnd Nougat 7.1.2 Build 180529, which works much better than RaspAnd Oreo 8.1.

RaspAnd Oreo 8.1 Build 180707 can be used with the official...

The decline and fall of the Linux forum - Episode V : You can't "educate" people, so just give up...

Foreword

This was broken off from Episode IV and spun off into it's own episode. Episode IV had accumulated lots of addendum sections and become far to sprawling as a result, plus Episode IV had a "theme" and the below content wasn't it. The first piece was written some time late last year and the last parts earlier this year, I have only tidied...

I was setting up smokeping in a docker container on a recently-repurposed machine on my home network, as I recently downsized from a Cisco 3560 core switch to two Ubiquiti US-8s (primary reasoning: the US-8 handles vlans like a champ, and I can run them both on my battery bank with a lighter wattage impact than the 3560). Smokeping was reporting some odd numbers which illustrates a quirk about switches/routers designed for management purposes, so I thought I'd write here about the effect and what...

user@host:~$ sudo reboot
[sudo] password for user:
Failed to start reboot.target: Connection timed out
See system logs and 'systemctl status reboot.target' for details.

Words cannot express how infuriating and depressing that error message is. Just turn the &$(&%^Y(#@ computer off!

Edit: It gets ever more obnoxious:

root@host:~# systemctl status reboot.target
Failed to get properties: Connection timed out
...