agent_flounder

This is all I've run across on reverse engineering, so far but it is quite interesting.

https://bsky.app/profile/filippo.abyssdomain.expert/post/3kowjkx2njy2b

Well maybe they aren't experienced info security professionals :)

I get where you're coming from but is he managing his risk or not?

Does he understand the risk? If yes, good. No? Bad.

Is he ignoring the risk? If yes, bad. No? Good.

Is he weighing the risks against the benefits he receives of using these apps and taking appropriate steps to mitigate those risks? If yes, then good. No? Bad.

Cyber security isn't "lock everything down at all costs". Otherwise I would insist you throw your phone in an incinerator along with all your computers, live in a bunker reinforced against nuclear attack with a small army to guard you, never leave it, never talk to anyone... Etc.

It is enabling one to achieve their goals with a tolerable amount of risk. That level of tolerable risk is different for everyone.

Totally agree. Have been there and done that quite a few times too.

Hopefully people with more of a clue than me will chime in... Meanwhile, my best swag is the filesystem had issues and had to do an fsck? If that's the case it would boot quickly next time assuming a clean shutdown.

Were there any errors during boot?

Fastboot enabled in BIOS or no? (Not sure if this has anything to do with anything I'm just trying to look useful)

PS: the weird active time could maybe somehow be related to the filesystem being borked needing fsck? I'm not sure.

Load average of 400???

You could install systat (or similar) and use output from sar to watch for thresholds and reboot if exceeded.

The upside of doing this is you may also be able to narrow down what is going on, exactly, when this happens, since sar records stats for CPU, memory, disk etc. So you can go back after the fact and you might be able to see if it is just a CPU thing or more than that. (Unless the problem happens instantly rather than gradually increasing).

PS: rather than using cron, you could run a script as a daemon that runs sar at 1 sec intervals.

Another thought is some kind of external watchdog. Curl webpage on server, if delay too long power cycle with smart home outlet? Idk. Just throwing crazy ideas out there.

Not op. I installed windows 10 on my custom built desktop and my kids custom built desktop, on VM, etc. Have not had a problem and it was pretty simple overall. I'm sure some folks do have issues, though. Shit happens. Is windows 11 shittier for install? I've never had the desire to try :)

I've also installed various Linux distros on the above and a few other computers (Mint, Nobara, Fedora). Aside from Mint not working with my AMD RX 6600, no problems there either, really. And these distros installed easily.

Again, ymmv. I knew Mint would probably fail because the 5.19 kernel does not seem to like my GPU. That's why I switched to Nobara in the first place (iirc the 6.x kernel wasn't available at the time)

Good to know. Well I have 16G now that should give me plenty to spare.

I will have to try that once my ram upgrade gets here.

I'm just finding out about this now lol. Imagine Kickstarter but with a 24h window...

Well, you're not wrong. I was away from my desktop when I commented and forgot btop looked so fancy.

For now I still prefer htop because I can see at a glance the stuff I'm most interested in (mem & cpu and process sort).

I'll have to play with some of the other suggestions in the post...

I also am starting to play around with cockpit a little more for remote monitoring.

If I was that memory- and cpu-constrained I would be using other tools such as memstat, iostat, and cpustat.