Of all the replies, this is the first one to actually make a good point instead of random google-bad handwaving.

Thank you

No need to be sorry. English is not my first language. I appreciate the correction.

No VPN ever protects you from ad-tracking. Like literally none. That’s not what they are for. VPNs protect you from someone intercepting your traffic on the way to the websites you want to visit. It protects you from malicious public wifi or a malicious ISP. It does not anonymize you in any meaningful way.

Addition just to explain: Google is tracking you on the website you visit, with the help of said website. So no matter whether you use a VPN or not, if you visit that website with or without a VPN, with all the fingerprinting that happens nowadays, they would probably just get a datapoint like “Oh, user X just moved from home internet to VPN” and that’s it.

Like it literally does nearly nothing if you don’t ALSO do 100 other important things to anonymize yourself. A regular user has nearly no chance to stay anonymous the moment they use a regular browser and a VPN would not help them at all.

THIS IS A PAID SERVICE.

Dude, they don’t only do ads. Google has a whole bunch of payed-for services that are never touched for ad-tracking. This is one of them. You are implying that Google Cloud would also use ad-tracking based on customer data, which is absurd.

Please stop spreading this FUD. Just because the free services are payed for by ads does not mean that everything they do is.

(edit: Paid, not Payed)

So your argument has nothing to do with the product itself and everything to do with “hurr Durr Google bad”.

Which is fine, and a valid opinion, but has nothing to do with the product.

I’m annoyed because 90% of the comments here imply or outright state that google will use this data for ads or other means, which has no basis in reality.

I’m super confused by the FUD spread in nearly every comment here.

Pretty much every argument boils down to “we don’t trust google does what they say”, which is funny because I’d like to challenge anyone to provide evidence that google actually sells any of your data. They sell advertising slots that they promise will find the right people, but your data never leaves google. No advertiser gets to see it.

This VPN service promises and has been independently audited to never log or analyze your traffic and even has built in provisions to anonymize your traffic within Google so they can’t reconstruct it.

So apart from the questionable assumption that google is blatantly lying, what’s the argument here? Apart from maybe missing some popular VPN Features like country selection.

Also this is for people that already pay for Google storage anyways, so I don’t see the problem for the intended target audience, it’s sticky an improvement in privacy for them and they get it for free. It sure as hell beats getting your traffic intercepted and ads injected into random http pages like some ISPs do.

Pretty much every alerting system I know also has a filter option to only apply automated discovery rules to certain filesystem types.

But yes, most don’t first squashfs or mounted read-only snapshots by default and it sucks.

But it does. If the universe was deterministic, choice would be impossible because all outcomes would be predetermined.

Quantum randomness may not directly provide free will but it does exclude determinism, which would make free will impossible.

I’m mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.

Are you using zfs?

That’s why you do regular restore tests on separate systems. That should be standard procedure for any company. A fully encrypted disk should be noticable immediately.

If your backups are online and not in a warehouse, you are doing it wrong. Even my own personal backups are on disconnected disks. What a bunch of amateurs.

You can’t trust any full disk encryption without it because only a TPM can verify that your bootloader and initrd are not compromised.

Sample size, 50 students. Lol nothing to see here. This has no value whatsoever.

Counterexample with sample size >1 million:

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-08-09-no-evidence-linking-facebook-adoption-and-negative-well-being

Replace Debian apt sources with Ubuntu ones, do system upgrade and install the Ubuntu-Desktop package, now you have Ubuntu.

It’s been a while since I have done this, but it’s totally possible.

We did this transition from Ubuntu to Debian at Work with thousands of workstations.

It requires a bit of time and testing but it’s possible.

For a handful of servers, try zabbix. Every distribution has a packaged zabbix agent. It has everything: web ui, a way to Auto discover things with a bit of setup, nice graphs, alerting, LDAP User Management if you need it, a way to define per person/group alerting/notification schedules. And the community is big enough that many common services (fail2ban/postfix/MySQL/etc.) have premade custom monitoring scripts. Adding your own metrics is also very easy.

Because I get a non-toxic personalized YouTube feed that does not suck…

Not really. You can still use dm-verity for a normal raid and get checksumming and normal performance, which is better and faster than using btrfs.

But in any case, I’d recommend just going with zfs because it has all the features and is plenty fast.

From arch wiki:

Disabling CoW in Btrfs also disables checksums. Btrfs will not be able to detect corrupted nodatacow files. When combined with RAID 1, power outages or other sources of corruption can cause the data to become out of sync.

No thanks

If you are planning to have any kind of database with regular random writes, stay away from btrfs. It’s roughly 4-5x slower than zfs and will slowly fragment itself to death.

I’m migrating a server from btrfs to zfs right now for this very reason. I have multiple large MySQL and SQLite tables on it and they have accumulated >100k file fragments each and have become abysmally slow. There are lots of benchmarks out there that show that zfs does not have this issue and even when both filesystems are clean, database performance is significantly higher on zfs.

If you don’t want a COW filesystem, then XFS on LVM raid for databases or ext4 on LVM for everything else is probably fine.