I Did It

[Kellemora]

I think it Debian it is called TimeShift instead of SnapShot.
However, there is a place called Debian SnapShot that has all the old versions of Debian you can download and install.

I've never used it, well I did once when I was doing a major upgrade, just in case.
But never had to use it to restore the system.

[yogi]

Apple computer started the idea with it's Time Machine. This was basically a system image much the same as those snapshots you can make inside virtual machines. The images I was, and still am, interested in are bit for bit copies. The last one I made copied the EFI boot partition, the system partition, the recovery partition, and the D:\ drive which was on a separate partition on a separate hard drive. I never tried to recover to two separate drives before and don't know if this will actually work. However, since the image was created by the native software in the Windows OS, I'm guessing it will all work out. The bit for bit copies are size sensitive. In other words I can't restore the image to a smaller partitions. Any resizing would have to be done after the image was fully installed.

Images are not the same thing as recovery disks, which is what I suspect you are talking about with those ancient Debien OS's. The recovery disk will allow you to boot a dead system because it is designed to be a live CD, or USB, or whatever. That live system will attempt to reinstall the system on an existing machine if that is what you want. Generally that doesn't go well because something is corrupt which is why you are trying to recover in the first place. You also can do a fresh install from a recovery disk, but that erases everything first and then does the install. Thus you lose all your data that way. Be that all as it may, I think it's a great idea for Debian, or any other popular OS, to offer out of date recovery disks. A lot of people out there never migrated to the latest versions and would benefit greatly from an outdated operating system archive.

[Kellemora]

I've never tried a system restore, so not sure how it works or if it really even does.

I read somewhere less that two weeks ago, that some server farm is still using Debian 8. Not the whole OS, just the Server Version of Debian 8. It works perfectly, so they see no reason to change it. And all the employees know it like the back of their hand. Simple and fast to repair a problem.

Since I keep all of my data redundantly on external drives. I've never been afraid to run an Upgrade to a new version of the Distro I'm using. But in practice, what I normally do, is create a new partition and install the new version on it, so I still have the old version to fall back on if something goes wrong. But the sad thing is, I still have all those old versions, so when Grub goes to write a new file, it has to find all of those old Distro's I no longer use, and that takes some time, hi hi.

[yogi]

You can skip this post if you like, but I'm going to gripe a bit about Debian, and how it represents what I don't like about Linux in general.

For a very long time I was an advocate of not fixing software, operating systems in particular, if it is not broken. The people you read about using Debian 8 must have similar thoughts. As long as there are no problems that are show stoppers, there really isn't a point to upgrading. Unfortunately, nothing stands still. That's the nature of the universe.

Debian is a highly regarded operating system and it's reliability over many years has earned it a reputation good enough to be imitated (or copied) by many other system developers. While that is all well and good, it gives those downstream developers some incentive to be lazy. Why bother to spend the time and money developing a new OS if Debian is already proven good? Just adding to the existing FOSS to create a new front end is typical. The liability in doing that is the absolute trust placed in those Debian developers. If they mess up, their errors are propagated downstream to every wannabe developer of a Linux distribution based on Debian. This doesn't seem to bother the people who clone Debian into their brainchild because the blame for any upstream problems can be shifted to the Debian group. The fact that their own distro is flaky due to Debian's oversight doesn't seem to matter. But it should.

I've posted about problems I was having with Samba reading Windows shares stored on a Linux server I own. Samba, as it happens, currently has three major versions floating about in the wild. About a year or two ago Version 1 of Samba was shown to have a major vulnerability that opened the door to full control on the local computer. This particular vulnerability could not be fixed easily so that Microsoft decided to disable Samba 1 in all its Windows operating systems via an emergency update. This required switching to Samba v2 or Samba v3 if you were a system administrator.

Servers with the shared directories were between a rock and a hard spot when this vulnerability was documented. If they shut off Samba v1, a lot of clients would no longer have access to their shares. Since Windows is the predominant user of Samba for file sharing, those server administrators were not all that concerned, although they should have been. Eventually servers of the world stopped supporting Samba v1 and suddenly a lot of people were shut out of their shared files on that given server. The solution is obvious. If the server switched to Samba v2, then the client should do the same and everything will be peachy again. Well, as you might have guessed by now, Debian did not switch. Not at first anyway. Thus many downstream distributions didn't work either if they did not switch. I've read in a couple places that developers are waiting on Debian to fix the problem because it was upstream and not their job to do so. Besides, only Windows and Macs were the major victims.

As it stands today Debian is aware of the Samba issue and is trying to fix Samba. The repositories, however, will no longer download Samba and thus a lot of upgrades that used to work no longer complete their tasks. This is fine if you don't care about Samba, but not fine if you do. At some point, and nobody really knows when, Debian will fix Samba for their latest release, Debian 10 I believe. If you don't upgrade to Debian 10, the best case scenario is that your Samba software will remain vulnerable. The worst case scenario is that Samba will stop working.

Micorsoft and Apple, by they way, fixed Samba v1 by disabling it. You can re-enable it if you care to. I'm thinking Debian can do likewise, if they cared to. But, after all, it's only Windows users who would be affected the most.

[Kellemora]

root@SilverYogi10:/home/gary# smbstatus

Samba version 4.9.5-Debian

You've posted something like this before, but it is old hat, really.

Did you know Windows no longer runs on DOS, and hasn't for many years, hi hi.

[yogi]

I did warn you about the gripe. Your memory is better than you would have me believe. LOL

Yes I did post this story a while back and at that time was not positive where the problem was rooted. Since I was using a new computer with a beta version of Windows, I only had suspicions to go on. Since that time I've read about similar issues in Linux forums, Open SUSE being one of them. The vulnerability within Samba (i.e. SMBv1) is well known because it is so widely distributed. Microsoft immediately put a fix in place, but apparently that was not the case in the land of Linux. Note, the fix from Microsoft was not a solution. They took the stand simply to not use the vulnerable software. It wasn't until recently that it became clear that Linux developers didn't take the same approach. It seems as if they are trying to fix the vulnerable version of Samba instead of deprecating SMBv1 like Microsoft did. As far as I can tell, they (mostly Debian) are still working on it. The reason Linux developers can be so arrogant is due to what I believe to be an ingrained bias against Microsoft's Windows. This Samba problem affects Windows and Mac users more than Linux systems. Unfortunately, I think Debian underestimated how many people out there are in need of accessing Windows shares in spite of their operating system allegiance.

While I doubt that any of this applies to your particular situation, allow me to clarify a thing or two about my concerns.
There is a network protocol called Server Message Block, or SMB. This is what Microsoft created for use to access it's shares on remote servers. Way back when, it was called CIFS, and is a dialect of the SMB protocol. As of today, there are several SMB dialects:

CIFS – Windows NT 4.0
SMB 1.0 – Windows 2000
SMB 2.0 – Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 (supported in Samba 3.6)
SMB 2.1 – Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (Samba 4.0)
SMB 3.0 – Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 (Samba 4.2)
SMB 3.02 – Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 (not supported in Samba)
SMB 3.1.1 – Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10 (not supported in Samba)
SOURCE: http://woshub.com/smb-1-0-support-in-wi ... r-2012-r2/

Samba is a Linux protocol derived from the original SMB Server package (there is also a client package). Linux uses Samba for handling file and printer shares, which is how Linux communicates with Windows.

The point I probably did not make clear in all this discussion is that Samba and SMB are two different software packages. They shake hands with each other and have common roots, but the pecking order is CIFS, then SMB, then Samba.

The reason why none of this may apply to you is that while your computer has Samba installed, it is not used to handle Windows file shares. Thus, any of the vulnerabilities I mentioned are not a threat to you because you are not using the SMB protocol per se. I did find this little tid bit that summarized what you need to know about the software:

Samba is used to implement the SMB protocol in Linux/Unix . Samba 4.14 and newer uses SMB 2.1 by default.

Since the dreaded vulnerability is in SMBv1, none of this applies to you.

Then again, the reason I posted this did not evolve from my concern for your computer security system.

[Kellemora]

Well, regardless of which protocol is used. If I download an infected file from a Windows computer, it CAN and does infect some of my files, namely the ones it is looking for.

I hear right now, more so than desktop computers, mobile phones are getting a gazillion hacks and viruses since they became so popular. And Linux based phones are no exception, mainly because they did become so popular, that's what the hackers are after. Seems cell phones have a very low security level built into them.

I'm no computer guru, and rarely get down into the workings of the computer, unless it is absolutely necessary for some reason, and even then, I need explicit directions on how to do it.

[yogi]

The "Samba" problem to which I refer in this thread is a huge catastrophic flaw. You may have heard about government and military installations being hacked during the past year or two, which would seem quite surprising considering all the security put into those systems. Well, the hack exploited the Samba vulnerability that I am talking about here.

The thing that irks me is the criticism I read about Windows and how safe and secure Linux is by comparison. The truth is that was never the case. Linux and Unix vulnerabilities came to my attention all the time when I worked with servers at Motorola. We didn't patch most of them because they seemed so trivial and there was a limit to the amount of time we could devote to updating a system and shutting down operations. The corporate folks had a much more secure attitude than us factory folks. LOL

You are absolutely correct that the bad guys go for the low hanging fruit, or that which is plentiful. That's why mobile devices are targets. But don't kid yourself. There are only a few very rare individuals of interest to serious hackers. These are people in high places with sensitive knowledge. By far the majority of hacks are at the network level, where you say Linux is the rule. Like yourself I never get into the guts of the operating system unless there is a compelling reason for doing so. Limited as it is, my experience shows that Linux is not and probably never was more secure than Windows. It's all a matter of who gets the attention at any given moment.

[Kellemora]

I can honestly say, I don't know much about what goes on in big corporations or server farms as far as security is concerned, but would imagine they have an almost impenetrable fire wall. Even so, most hackers got in via some side program like Flash Player, and probably Samba too, although I've never heard of Samba being used on servers. Companies have another way of connecting the Windows computers on the floor to the file server, mainframe or server farm.
That being said, every hack that I've ever heard of came into the system through a Windows computer. Including into my Linux files on Linux computers, because they were available on the LAN to a Windows computer.

You've had good luck with Windows computers, I can't say the same for me.

[yogi]

I read a commentary from a security company a while back wherein they said things are getting critical. The bad actors are getting pretty smart and being financed by governments and military establishments. Those organizations have all the money and resources to do anything, so it seems. But that's not the worry. The kind of break-ins is what has security experts on edge. Passwords, firewalls, zero trust networks, and most other front end protection is being bypassed in a high number of cases. When that percentage reaches 65%, the situation will be beyond control. At the moment it's around 50% and rising. It seems that most networks are being compromised by people with proper credentials. If the bad guy has the right login credentials in his possession he doesn't need anything sophisticated to brute force an entry. And, apparently, a lot of those credentials are obtained via phishing. What is scary is that quite a few are just internal people who may be disgruntled for one reason or another or somebody being bribed and/or extorted. What you and I see as threats on our PC's is just practice. The real dangers are lurking in what seems to be ordinary activity. How to deal with that is the current crisis.

[Kellemora]

I know exactly what you mean. They had a big ordeal out here at Oak Ridge National Laboratory a year or so ago.
A worker who handled some computer things for them, was at home, in bed sleeping, when someone accessed one of the labs computer systems using his credentials and password. But they knew it wasn't him the second they began uploading files to an area of the system this guy would never have any reason to be in.
Needless to say, they sandboxed what the guy was doing to see what the code was supposed to do.
In the interim, the security folks descended on the guys house and found him in bed sleeping. That got him off the hook, sorta.
They still wanted to know how this other person got his log-in info and the list of passwords needed to gain access to certain areas of the system. He had no idea.
Searching the logs for the past month, they found several breaches into employee files.
So everyone had to get new passwords and a new file created for like 200+ employees.
Some of those breaches were traced back to Russia and China Internet providers, but that was as far as they got.
One thing that was changed throughout Oak Ridge was the Inter-Office Memo System, which was supposed to be entirely in-house and not accessible from the outside, but apparently someone found a way to monitor it from the other side of the world.
There solution was to turn off and remove that system entirely.
Plus they had a team spending many manhours going through logs for the past years it was in use.
There only quote on the matter was, there was no disruption of service at the facility, due to the incident.

[yogi]

ORNL would be a prime target for state actors. I'm pretty sure I read about the incident you describe but don't recall any of the details. They generally don't like to reveal the breach in the first place and are even more hesitant to discuss any mitigating procedures put into place. It would not be any surprise to learn that an agent of some foreign country was an employee at ORNL and supplying the bad guys with what they want. The focus on security these days seems to be on behavior of the system and trying to distinguish a valid system process apart from one that should not be happening. This computer, the one I'm writing this message on, currently has 207 processes running for a total of 2724 threads all of which are manipulating what they call handles, numbering over 107,000 at this moment. The job of IT security now and days is to keep track of all that and to be certain none of them are doing anything unexpected. That's just my computer. When you think about what must be going on inside all the computers at ORNL, it's mind boggling. Apparently they can't keep track of it all in real time, and that is what the danger is. The fact of the matter is we are engaged in a cyber war, and not by choice.

[Kellemora]

I believe you are right Yogi!
I do know the Super Computers they have there only run ONE program at a time. Naturally they are big programs, and each one is daisy chained right behind the other, so those machines are cranking out a lot of data in the blink of an eye.
But they have other server computers also that are running thousands of programs at once, and running the whole place too.
I've now toured their facilities at least ten times since moving here. Amazing place for sure.
They do have one computer that is not connected to anything else, not even the Internet. Where visitors can try running their own programs on it. Even so, you have to get an appointment and sometimes wait many months before your turn comes up.
They do have little computers all around the visitors center to use, but they are all programmed to do only a certain thing, which will display on the screen. You can only do what it was designed to do and nothing else.

[yogi]

Perhaps one day I will make it over to Oak Ridge to see what you are talking about. It seems nearly as impressive as Cheyenne Mountain. I'm certain they have all the computer power you can imagine, but by definition servers do not run programs. Servers only serve. Or, at least that is the intention. We did run some programs off our office server and got reprimanded for it by the IT group. LOL I think it's kind of cool that the public has access to a supercomputer merely for the price of a reservation. I'd love to see and use that machine, but to be honest I have no clue what program I'd run on it. I can't even think of a problem I would want to solve regardless of the programming language. Not only does ORNL have a gigantic collection of computer power, they are also solving problems nobody ever thought of before. LOL Just goes to show you what you can do with an unlimited supply of money.

[Kellemora]

I don't think just anybody can use the Super Computers they have.
The one they have set up for anyone to use, is not actually a super computer, but an old mainframe they have there, detached from everything else.

This is the ORNL site that shows everything, except, they have Summit and Titan info turned off temporarily.
It really is an amazing place to visit.
https://www.ornl.gov/directorate/ccsd/s ... uting-ornl

Debi and I went through the old nuclear power plant a couple of times while out that way.
https://tcr.ornl.gov/

I just hope none of our enemies ever blow up that place, or in less than 20 minutes, we will be toast out here.

[yogi]

ORNL is very likely on the list of targets should there be a nuclear war. I don't think it's the first place that would get hit, but that doesn't really matter. Any nuclear war, any place on earth, would be the end of civilization as we know it. Some think tank geniuses feel that we could survive a limited nuclear attack, but you got to wonder who they mean by "we." I am certain the military has it all figured out and probably could survive a nuclear winter. The rest of us, however, will be left out in the cold. As far as I know there are no plans in any of the think tanks for how things will proceed should the war mongers go crazy.

In the mean time ORNL is doing some pretty interesting stuff. The only place I visited that is even close to matching would be the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. My wife's brother inlaw had a brother who worked there as a technician. He took us on an unofficial tour walking through the accelerator tunnel to a place they were experimenting with what is now called a gama knife. This is just a string of protons used to annihilate brain tumors without invasive surgery. The setup at the time was draconian and you had to be very desperate to agree to be treated in this tunnel. Now and days some hospitals do this as a matter of routine. Talk about amazing.

[Kellemora]

Lot's of neat and interesting places all across the U.S. of A. and I'm sure in other countries also.

One of my late sisters operations was done without any cutting through her body to get to the area that needed fixed or undone, whatever the case may have been. She eventually died of brain cancer, but her operation was in the stomach area.
They used cutting lasers, but they only cut where the two beams met each other, which was down inside the body.
I'm pretty sure it was to sever a tumor, and once severed it would decompose on its own.

I hear a lot of eye surgeons are now using lasers to correct some vision problems, including crossed eyes by doing something with the muscles.

[yogi]

Laser surgery for correcting vision problems has been around for many years. I don't think it's appropriate in all cases, but it is very effective for what it does. Essentially it eliminates the need for corrective lenses for some people.

The gamma knife to which I refer in my last post was primarily used for brain surgery. I know nothing about such surgeries but what you describe about cutting a tumor loose sounds right. Usually any kind of radiation therapy involves collateral damage. They can't focus the beam that well to begin with and the beam passes through body tissues entering and leaving. Thus everything in it's path gets annihilated. It's good in the sense that it's not invasive, but it's not so good in that other tissues besides the target get destroyed. I'm not sure how that gamma knife became effective for brain surgery, but I do know you don't want any collateral damage at all when operating inside one's noggin. Apparently the gamma rays kill the offensive tumor and nothing else.

[Kellemora]

I've worn glasses my entire life, and used to them keeping things from hitting my eyes.
So when I do end up getting cataract surgery, I still plan on wearing glasses.
Will probably have to anyhow since I have astigmatism.

Now I'm going to go on a little rant here about the ability to cure cancer, but the law won't allow it.
Here is why I say that!
You can go to the radiology department, and they will use tags in the dye so only the cancerous cells show up on the X-Ray.
Now it seems to me, they could use the same tags on the cancer killing medication, rather than let it affect your whole body.
Why don't they?
The tags are NOT APPROVED for affecting a curative, only approved for exploratory use.

One of the gals where Debi works got Covid, and they worked side by side for a few days.
The gal went and got checked and checked positive for Covid.
Debi went to the doctor today and also got tested while there, no Covid. Which is good.
She called the gal she works with to let her know, because she was worried about Debi at her age.
The gal said her doctor prescribed Ivermectin for her, but she had to have her husband drive all the way out to Alcoa to get it, as only two pharmacies have been able to get it.

[yogi]

Your rant/observation is well taken. The radioactive tagging isn't designed to carry the cure for cancer. It attaches itself to the proper cells, but does not deliver a lethal blow. Your idea is valid, however. Think about how the vaccines for covid work. They use RNA as a carrier, which is something that has proven effective but has raise the shackles of many a critic. That's not what tagging is all about.

It's probably best I don't say too much about Ivermectin. It's controversial, and I'll just leave it at that. Although, I will add that our dog has a prescription for it for some reason or another.

My wife of many years had a cataract removed a couple months ago. That was for one eye only and she still needs corrective lenses for both eyes. However, her vision is much improved after the surgery. She can in fact see better without glasses, but neither of her eyes are perfect, even now.