Tai’shar Malkier!

Good luck with that. .local is reserved for mDNS calls, and not every OS treats it the same way. Ask me how I know.

Hey, it’s not perfect, but a fix that gets you 10% of the way there is still 10% you don’t have to do by hand. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, my man.

Fuck yeah. Even better than reimage. That’s creative as fuck and I love it.

From a home user? Probably ain’t shit-all you can do with PXE booting. But if you have a field office or somewhere a user can go with a hardware vpn appliance? Well now you’re in business.

Completely fair, man.

FOG ran on Linux. It wouldn’t have been down. But that’s beside the point.

I never said it was a good answer to CrowdStrike. It was just a story about how I did things 10 years ago, and an option for remotely fixing nonbooting machines. That’s it.

I get you’ve been overworked and stressed as fuck this last few days. I’ve been out of corporate IT for 10 years and I do not envy the shit you guys are going through right now. I wish I could buy you a cup of coffee or a beer or something.

That’s still 15% less work though. If I had to manually fix 1000 computers, clicking a few buttons to automatically fix 150 of them sounds like a sweet-ass deal to me even if it’s not universal.

You could also always commandeer a conference room or three and throw a switch on the table. “Bring in your laptop and go to conference room 3. Plug in using any available cable on the table and reboot your computer. Should be ready in an hour or so. There’s donuts and coffee in conference room 4.” Could knock out another few dozen.

Won’t help for people across the country, but if they’re nearish, it’s not too bad.

Absolutely. 100%

But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. A fix that gets you 40% of the way there is still 40% less work you have to do by hand. Not everything has to be a fix for all situations. There’s no such thing as a panacea.

How would it not have? You got an office or field offices?

“Bring your computer by and plug it in over there.” And flag it for reimage. Yeah. It’s gonna be slow, since you have 200 of the damn things running at once, but you really want to go and manually touch every computer in your org?

The damn thing’s even boot looping, so you don’t even have to reboot it.

I’m sure the user saved all their data in one drive like they were supposed to, right?

I get it, it’s not a 100% fix rate. And it’s a bit of a callous answer to their data. And I don’t even know if the project is still being maintained.

But the post I replied to was lamenting the lack of an option to remotely fix unbootable machines. This was an option to remotely fix nonbootable machines. No need to be a jerk about it.

But to actually answer your question and be transparent, I’ve been doing Linux devops for 10 years now. I haven’t touched a windows server since the days of the gymbros. I DID say it’s been a decade.

Bro. PXE boot image servers. You can remotely image machines from hundreds of miles away with a few clicks and all it takes on the other end is a reboot.

A decade ago I worked for a regional chain of gyms with locations in 4 states.

I was in TN. When a system would go down in SC or NC, we originally had three options:

1. (The most common) have them put it in a box and ship it to me.
2. I go there and fix it (rare)
3. I walk them through fixing it over the phone (fuck my life)

I got sick of this. So I researched options and found an open source software solution called FOG. I ran a server in our office and had little optiplex 160s running a software client that I shipped to each club. Then each machine at each club was configured to PXE boot from the fog client.

The server contained images of every machine we commonly used. I could tell FOG which locations used which models, and it would keep the images cached on the client machines.

If everything was okay, it would chain the boot to the os on the machine. But I could flag a machine for reimage and at next boot, the machine would check in with the local FOG client via PXE and get a complete reimage from premade images on the fog server.

The corporate office was physically connected to one of the clubs, so I trialed the software at our adjacent club, and when it worked great, I rolled it out company wide. It was a massive success.

So yes, I could completely reimage a computer from hundreds of miles away by clicking a few checkboxes on my computer. Since it ran in PXE, the condition of the os didn’t matter at all. It never loaded the os when it was flagged for reimage. It would even join the computer to the domain and set up that locations printers and everything. All I had to tell the low-tech gymbro sales guy on the phone to do was reboot it.

This was free software. It saved us thousands in shipping fees alone. And brought our time to fix down from days to minutes.

There ARE options out there.

Fuck yeah, public transit - Right in my veins, lets go.

But for right now, there is ZERO public transit infrastructure where I live, which is only about 20-30 minutes to a medium-sized city’s downtown. And when I say ZERO, I mean ZERO. We don’t even have busses here. No trains. NOTHING. We don’t even have sidewalks on most roads - if you want to walk, you’re literally walking in the road. I used to ride a bike to work a long time ago - I can’t even count the number of times I’ve had shit thrown at me by shitbag rednecks as they zoomed past in their lifted pickup trucks.

The local governments’ answer to all this is “If you don’t have a car, fuck you.” Cars are literally the only option. If you don’t have a car or a driver’s license, you better find somebody who does and give them gas money, or consign yourself to paying for Uber/Lyft anytime you want to go anywhere. It’s straight-up dangerous to travel any other way around here.

I bought a cheap used Dell R710 on Facebook marketplace for like $100 or so, as well as an ups, rack, 10g switch, etc, from various other sellers. All told, I’ve got about $500 in my server setup.

Installed proxmox on it. It’s “free” if you don’t buy a license. You just have to put up with a little nag screen when you open the control panel but it still works 100%, much like winrar.

Works great.

Edit: just realized this is in c/selfhosted AND I misunderstood the post. I’m gonna leave it here just on the off chance it’s useful to somebody, but I acknowledge it’s not what you’re looking for.

And in rural areas, it’ll be called “skeet shooting with prizes”. I know exactly what my redneck neighbors are like…

FWIW, I’ve used privacy.com a few times. Works pretty well.

It’s coming. Slowly. But it’s coming.

https://dragon863.github.io/blog/echoroot.html

You are a fucking hero. I couldn’t figure out why my Roku TVs were still able to get ads after blocking everything.

I simplified a bit. But it’s easy to bork the cable in the process, and it’s also possible the cable didn’t follow standard wire coloring.

Here’s the step by step process for anybody who wants to do this but doesn’t know for sure what to do.

You will need a razor blade or wire stripper and a wire cutter, as well as a roll of electrical tape.

Also it should go without saying, but unplug both ends of the damn cable before you start. And if you’re using a blade, please be careful not to cut your finger open. Paying $800 for stitches in your finger hurts, defeats the purpose of being a cheapass and modding a cable to save a few bucks, and gets blood everywhere.

1. Verify that the usb cable is a CHARGE AND SYNC cable. A charge only cable will not work.

2. With your razor blade, make an incision into the usb cable about 6 inches from either end. Don’t cut too deep. Only go deep enough to cut the outer jacket. The cut should be slightly longer than your tape is wide. If you have a wire stripper, strip about a 3/4 inch section of the cable about 6 inches from either end.

3. If using a blade, cut around the jacket at both ends of your incision and peel off the jacket between your cuts. You should have about 3/4 inch of unwrapped cable.

4. If there’s a wire mesh wrapping the inside of the cable, cut SOME of the mesh, being careful to ensure that the mesh is still connected on both ends. If there’s a foil wrapper, find the seam and peel it back to expose the inner wires. You can cut the foil if necessary, but do not remove it entirely. Ensure that SOME of the foil and/or mesh is still attached at BOTH sides of the exposed section.

5. The inner wires should now be exposed. There should be 4 wires - red black white and green. There might also be a 5th wire with no insulation at all, but this won’t be in all cables. It’s okay if it’s missing. However, if you don’t see ALL of those 4 colors or see different colors STOP. Tape the cable back up and get a different one. If you only see TWO wires, you have a charge only cable and it won’t work. Tape it back up.

6. Clip the red wire TWICE, about an 1/8th inch apart. There should be a gap in the wire now if you line the ends up. DO NOT cut anything else inside the cable. The black white and green wires MUST remain intact for the cable to function.

7. Bend the red wires up and out of the jacket. Close up the foil and/or mesh and wrap ONLY the exposed portion of the cable with ONE layer of electrical tape, leaving the red wires sticking up on either side of the tape. It’s okay if some metal is exposed on either side of the tape, but the red wires should be able to lay down on it without the ends touching anything metal.

8. Lay the ends of the red wires down so that the ends are laying on the tape. The metal inside the red wire should NOT contact anything else that’s metal in the cable.

9. Wrap the whole opened section of the cable with electrical tape to an inch or two on both sides of the open section.

Plug it in and give it a try. You should have data-only usb cable that doesn’t deliver power now. Mark or label the cable in some way so that you don’t lose your mind trying to figure out why this damn usb cable doesn’t charge your phone when you pull it out of a box of random shit 5 years from now.

I bought a X1C and have never leveled it once. Everything is completely automatic, and I’ve never had a failed print.

If I can see that the print quality is starting to go down (and by that I mean I can see a little ringing or something), I just hit the calibrate button and it does everything on its own with zero intervention besides the initial button.