Tippon

I've got a Linux server running Xubuntu at the moment (It was a media player first), and it also runs two Minecraft servers for the family. It has two network cards that are both connected to the internet. Is there a way to bind the VPN to one of the cards and use the other one for regular use?

I've got Surfshark as my VPN, and it doesn't allow port forwarding under Linux. I've got some software that I want to keep behind the VPN, but the lack of port forwarding is stopping me from sharing the Minecraft servers, and when the VPN is active, it slows down the connection to some of my services like Plex.

I've tried to look it up, but I just don't know enough to get myself anywhere. I've found results that talk about name spaces and routing tables, but they assume a level of knowledge that I just haven't got yet.

I want to use the Arr suite and qBittorrent as the main programs behind the VPN, and Plex, Mylar (a comic manager), Syncthing, and Minecraft as the main programs without it. If I set up qBittorrent and the Arrs as Docker containers, can I use Gluetun to bind just them to the VPN? The VPN is using OpenVPN connections if that makes a difference.

Thanks in advance :)

Update: I managed to get it working with the answers from @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me and this link:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-permanently-mount-a-drive-in-linux-and-why-you-should/

I've just installed Mint 22 on my laptop, and I've got two storage drives alongside my main drive. I want these drives to be available to all users on boot, and to be readable and writable. At the moment they're treated as removable drives, and are mounted under the individual user. As a result, any permissions that I'm setting as the owner are not sticking when they're mounted by another user.

The first drive is synced with my main PC through Syncthing, and is synced to Onedrive from there. The second drive is my music, podcasts, and audiobooks, which are all synced through Syncthing only. I'm the only person using the laptop and accessing any of these files, so I'm not bothered about the wrong user accidentally opening them.

I've read some posts about editing fstab to mount them at startup, but they don't cover whether the drives will be available to other users or not. Can I just add them to fstab and mount them somewhere that's available to all users, then sort out the permissions? If so, where's the best place to put them?

Thanks in advance :)

This might sound daft, but something similar used to work with live discs.

I've got Windows 10 and Mint 21.1 dual booting on my computer at the moment. Every so often I'll realise that I've missed something from my Windows installation. If it's important, I then have to boot to Windows to get the information, or the settings etc.

Is there a way to virtualise my Mint installation so that I can run both the OSs at once to make sure that I've got everything?

VirtualBox had a tool to do this with a live USB, but that was back in the MBR days, so it probably won't work with modern hardware.

EDIT: Sorry, I should clarify, Mint and Windows are on the same physical disk, and the plan is to remove Windows once I'm done.

Update: I'm giving up. It looks like it is possible if you have separate disks with separate boot partitions, but getting it to work with a shared boot partition is harder work than I'm willing to do right now.

VMware Player can use a partition or disk, but might be in read only mode, I couldn't get far enough to check.

Thanks for all the replies :)

Hi all :)

I'm setting up a small business in the UK, and need some accounting software to keep track of everything, and generate invoices, that sort of thing. I tried Wave a few years ago, and it looks like it does what I need, but is US based and proprietary.

https://www.waveapps.com/

It has the option of linking to your bank account too, and automatically pulling your transactions etc. This is quite important, as I'm trying to get diagnosed with ADHD, and have a terrible memory. I won't remember to manually enter transactions regularly.

Being able to use it on Android and Windows / Linux would be ideal. I can self host it if there are any options that work.

Does anyone have any ideas please?

Hi all :)

I manage a handful of websites and their emails using the PortableApps suite on Windows, so have a separate browser and mail client for each one. This has worked well for years, but now I'm switching to Linux, Mint specifically. I've read that I can set up profiles on Firefox and probably Thunderbird, or maybe run separate instances with things like AppImages, but it sounds like it's a messy solution, and could end up with me using the wrong profile by mistake

What I want to do is set up a virtual machine for each site, and have a completely separate instance of the programs, and hopefully a way to easily transfer the machines to other systems if needs be.

I'd prefer to use a Debian / Ubuntu based distro with Apt and the 'Windows' style desktop, as that's what I'm already used to, but am I better off installing Mint and stripping it down, or is there something more suited to this?

Thanks in advance :)

Went out on a rare clear night to a wetlands near me to take some photos of the stars. As it was so dark, and the stars are so small, I had to rely on the focus peaking function of my camera to tell if the stars were in focus or not.

I've got home and started to process the photos, and I've found out that despite the camera telling me that they were in focus, they clearly weren't.

Hey ho, what's a wasted few hours in the freezing cold between friends...

Hi all :)

Apologies for the long writeup, but I'm not sure if the background is important or not.

I've got a media server currently running Xubuntu (getting ready to be transitioned to a proper server OS before anyone asks), and I've been having a problem with static IP addresses.

About a year ago I was having a problem with the ethernet card switching from a static IP to DHCP, and screwing up the services that depended on the IP address. It appeared to be a problem with my ISP router (BT SmartHub 2). I thought I'd fixed it, and didn't have any trouble for a while.

I added a second ethernet card to split my traffic. My VPN doesn't allow split tunneling on Linux, and I wanted some traffic to go through the VPN while some bypassed it. I hadn't set anything up for that yet, but did give the second ethernet card a static IP address. I changed the DNS servers on both to go through my AdGuard installation on the same machine, and some other ad blocking DNS servers.

When I first installed the second ethernet card I had a few problems, but my network switch died at the same time, and replacing it appeared to cure the issues. The issues were similar to before, in that I couldn't get a static IP to stick.

To now - Last night we were having some power issues in the area, power surges and brownouts. In the time that it took me to get to my PC and log in to the media server to shut it down, it had rebooted at least three times. I shut everything down successfully, and after I turned everything back on this morning, the services like Plex that don't need the IP all seemed to be working properly.

After my kid went to bed, I tried to log onto the server to check it. Nothing that needed the IP address would work. I tried the second IP address and that was the same. I managed to log in with NoMachine and saw that there were two new ethernet connections, both set to DHCP, and they were being used instead of the previous connections. The previous connections apparently haven't been used for the last six days.

I tried deleting one of the new connections to see if it would force Xubuntu to use the old ones, and it seemed to work, but deleting the second one cut off the network connections completely. After connecting a monitor and peripherals to the server, I could see an option for an Auto Connection in the network dropdown menu, and that let me connect again.

My previous connections are still in the network manager with all the static IP settings, but there are two new Auto Ethernet connections too, using DHCP.

Can anyone give me a clue as to what's happened here please? I thought it was a problem caused by the power problems, but it's apparently been going on for almost a week.

Apologies in advance if I'm slow to reply for the next few days, and thank you in advance for any help :)

Are there any good tools for listing your current programs, maybe exporting settings etc. Listing hidden settings and save locations would be great too.

I'm about 90% ready to switch to Linux full time, and I want to make sure that I've got everything. I've got a horrible feeling that I'm missing something, but I can't think what it might be.

EDIT: Ironically, I forgot to mention my ADHD / memory issues. I could do with a tool like this because I forget about anything that I'm not currently using, or actively thinking about using soon >.<

I found the site and tried to check, but it wouldn't show me anything without being logged in, so I created an account. Now that I'm signed in though, I can only find vague rules, like

The User's account is for personal use only. Only the individual who holds the account is allowed to connect on it. Connections to the User's account are recorded so that we can detect account sharing. The User agrees to keep his login secret, We won't offer technical support for account hacking.

How does this work with a phone or laptop, for example? What if I sign in at my parents house when I visit for a few days?

Can anyone help please?

Hi all :)

I've been using MediaMonkey on Windows 10 and Android to organise my music, playlists, audiobooks, and podcasts, including syncing them to my phone. MediaMonkey has let me down again, so I'm looking to switch, and as I'm trying to switch to Linux too, now would be a good time to get a Linux media manager.

One of the main ways that I use MM is by either building a playlist and transferring the whole thing, or adding to a playlist and just syncing the new tracks. I prefer the tracks to be placed in their artist / album directory though, rather than a directory for the playlist.

I also use MM on Windows to organise my tracks with online metadata, usually from Discogs, so that it matches the entry for the album. I store my media under music\sorted\album artist\album name\track no - artist - title, with a similar setup for audiobooks and podcasts, and would prefer to do the same with the new software.

Does anyone know of anything that can do this please?

I've looked at Strawberry and Cinnamon, but development seems to have stopped, and I don't know enough about things like flaws and bugs to know if they're still safe to use.

Thanks in advance for your help :)

I run Mylar on my Xubuntu server to manage my comic collection. I found out recently that there's a tool that can convert the embedded .jpgs to .webp to save space, but it only works on cbz files and not cbr (zipped vs rar for those who don't know). I wanted to convert all of my cbr to cbz so that I could run the tool on all my comics, so I needed to search hundreds of subdirectories for them and move them to the same folder to be processed.

Under Windows, I'd just type *.cbr into the search bar built into Explorer from the root comic directory, hit enter to get a list of files, select them all, and move them to the new folder. On Xubuntu, it's nothing like as simple.

I found the search option in Thunar which opened Catfish, typed in *.cbr, and got a no files found message. After looking through the very limited options, I started searching for a way to do it. About thirty minutes later I'd found dozens of links telling me to use different, Terminal only, tools, but nothing about how to search subdirectories from the Catfish GUI. Purely by accident, I found a post from 2012 that mentioned the fact that Catfish doesn't use wildcards, so just search with .cbr, something that's not mentioned in the official docs.

I tried it, and it searched the subdirectories too, and found my files! Except there was no way to copy or cut and paste, just open, show in file manager, copy location, save as, or delete. No good options for almost 500 files across several dozen locations.

I ended up asking Chat GPT how to do it, and doing it through the Terminal, using this:

'find . -type f -name "*.cbr" -exec mv {} /path/to/destination ;'

This is pretty basic functionality, and I had to resort to getting help to use the Terminal :(