Just don’t try plugging it into a Raspberry Pi 5.

No data loss, but won’t work without changing your kernel. The other way around is much worse though — you can use an RPi5 to make a BTRFS drive which essentially only works on RPi5s.

I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_console

Right, that’s what the & exit is supposed to prevent, since it’s already logged out.

I did all of grad school with i3wm. And I spent a very, very long time in grad school…

I always ran startx & exit to prevent someone from VT switching to a logged in console if my screen was locked :)

Been a while but isn’t that very insecure? Gotta run startx & exit ;)

Any chance you have a DMZ set up on your router?

On your router, are there any settings specific to any host (other than the server maybe)? For example, a static IP or a port forwarded rule.

Do you have a VPN on the phones? Can you traceroute from your phone to the server and post that? (I like PingTools for Android.) You should have 1 hop (you -> server, nothing in between).

Can you verify that you are on the same wifi including same wifi channel? Phone on 5GHz but Linux box on 2.4GHz, for example.

Some mobile clients make it easy to accidentally downvote. I sometimes see that I accidentally downvoted a comment from time to time.

PingTools has been useful for me (though I mostly just use it for iperf).

Right, I just meant that you can’t sudo cat file > /dev/sda but you can sudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)

Compiling a kernel yourself isn’t a big deal these days, especially with DKMS. Generally the type of people I’ve encountered who care about which kernel version they’re usiyare the type of people who are capable of compiling it themselves…

One caveat is that you will need write access to the drive, which probably means you need to run as root — can’t run that with sudo as-is, unlike dd.

Also a super useful tool for measuring real world bandwidth, both on physical media and over the network ( dd status=progress ... | nc ...).

Oh I love Debian on the desktop! More a comment on the feeling of the OS being very concerned about downtime and stability, with minimal “surprises.” Not a bad thing at all!

When I used Arch I updated once and it removed the running kernel and its modules. So when I plugged in a webcam it didn’t work, since the module was gone.

Not a catastrophe, but it was an off-putting user experience coming from Debian. Arch felt more like a desktop OS, Debian feels more like a server OS to me (updates generally warn/confirm when you need to restart services or the machine).

To each their own! Having more up to date stuff was a nice perk of running Arch, certainly.

Nice, thanks!

Thanks! That sounds like a good option. Mostly would want to avoid something that’s flooding the network with DNS requests — a few attempts at phoning home now and then are, like you say, probably inevitable.

Any recommendations on cameras that work well local-only/don’t seem to make peculiar DNS requests?

If I ever get around to installing cameras I’ll have them on their own, no-internet VLAN, but would prefer having well-behaved devices.

I picked up an old HP LaserJet (with the Ethernet option) for free during grad school. It was a great printer — good CUPS/Linux support, reliable, cheap 3rd party toner.

It’s sad how the mighty have fallen. Would never recommend one for someone today.