DigitalDilemma

  • 3 Posts
  • 586 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I’m guessing you’ve already turned it off and on again. If not, seriously, do that. It works more time than it doesn’t for random weirdness.

    Run ‘htop’ and sort by CPU (it’s a friendlier and better version of ‘top’. That’ll show you what processes are using the most CPU

    Whilst you’re in there, check the free memory. If that’s low, or swap usage is high, then use htop to sort by memory usage to find what’s using the most.

    If you see processes you don’t recognise, hit google and find out why. It’s very unlikely they’re malicious, but it’s far less common on linux than Windows to have random processes doing unknown stuff. If it’s using a lot of cpu or memory, there’ll be a reason. It might be a dumb reason, but you will be able to find it out.

    And then when you know what the guilty process is, if it is that, and it’s not critical - you can stop it with systemctl and narrow down what’s afoot.








  • Before this year, the thought of an entirely arbitrary block to things like American cloud services by America to its European allies would have seemed extremely unlikely. It would make no sense, the damage to America and it’s GDP would far outweigh any any political benefit.

    All of those reasons still hold true, but I absolutely assure you, European governments and companies all over have that possibility firmly in their risk portfolio now. America tells microsoft to immediately not only stop selling products in Europe, but disable those already in use? Ditto Google. Ditto Apple. Ditto all the hundreds of IT hardware producers that are American. Want to cripple a foreign government that uses MS Office? Remotely disable it. job done. Sure, it would be illegal, but America’s government has no respect for law.

    (Even before this, several European governments were using open source (Germany, France, Austria, Portugal - there’s a list but this is less about idealism and more about protecting themselves from the unpredictable as well as not trusting America with their data any more. Every thing like this can only be seen as non Americans distancing themselves from America every way they can, and with good reason.)





  • Other have answered the runtime and load question very well already.

    I have three other points.

    1. Batteries degrade over time. Over-speccing your UPS means more likelyhood that things will hold up in three years time as the capacity given is for new ones. Plus, not running your UPS at 100% capacity reduces its stress. Again, more reliable.

    2. You can get a much better quality UPS by buying a second hand one without batteries off ebay and replacing them yourself, typically for a fraction of the cost of buying new. Plus you know you have new batteries. UPS is something where quality genuinely matters. I’ve had to carry a cheap and badly made UPS out of an office whilst it was on fire, so now I spec more carefully. (And ensure they’re metal bodied!)

    3. Consider what you NEED to power. What sort of power cuts are you expecting? Does it matter if something goes down?

    I UPS my servers and my main desktop, but not my routers, nor my wifi or IOT things. My internet provider also goes out when there’s a cut (I’m on a mesh system so rely on neighbours, who will typically also be down) and I can’t do much without power anyway, but it keeps the disks spinning. We typically get very short automated outages here of less than 10s (yesterday was a bad day, we had 9 within 2 hours)