Once I a very sleepy adult human happened to accidentally stand smack in the middle of my ThinkPad P50, with plastic everything. It’s 7 years old now, and still works fine.

If your local machine is not reachable from the internet, you could set up the cheapest VPS - you can get a free one for 12 months at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/#all-free-services Connect from your destination machine (the firewalled one) to the VPS, and set up a reverse tunnel. For example, drop this into your ~/.ssh/config on the destination machine:

Host rtun
        Hostname something
        RemoteForward 1234 localhost:22

tmux new-ses 'while sleep 1; do ssh rtun; done'

Then configure your local machine to connect to destination via the jumpbox:

Host vps
        Hostname something

Host destination
        Hostname localhost
        Port 1234
        ProxyJump vps

ssh destination should work now.

Make sure to use SSH key auth, not passwords, and never transport secret keys off-machine. It’s easier to wipe and recreate a VPS, if you lose keys, than to explain to Security folks how you were the donkey that enabled the breach.

Lovely. Thanks! Now to figure out how to redirect that YubiKey USB device, so I could use Passkey auth…

Where’d you get the .rdp file? I can’t find a way to get a working version of mine.

Fun fact: mentioning etc ssh sshd_config triggers some CloudFlare security warning that prevents me from posting it under the right name.

1. Log into the Windows machine via the webclient avaliable at https://windows365.microsoft.com/
2. Use PuTTY to set up a reverse tunnel. You’ll need to create a restricted tunnel-only user in your machine. Make sure to use key auth.
3. From your local machine, connect to localhost:portnumber.

As an alternative, you might be able to set up OpenSSH in Windows (yes it’s possible), then use the ProxyJump setting in your local ~/.ssh/config to connect via a tunnel to the final box.

Here’s how you configure the server to not let the user wreak too much havoc:

Match User restricted
        PermitOpen 127.0.0.1:3389 [::1]:3389
        X11Forwarding no
        AllowAgentForwarding no
        ForceCommand /bin/sh -c 'while sleep 999; do true; done'
        ClientAliveInterval 1
        ClientAliveCountMax 2

I dunno, but it sounds like you’d end up back in the original, rather :|

Yes, something like that.

You’ll get other fun features for free, like

• the ability to reattach the session over SSH, after starting it locally
• immunity to Xorg / Wayland compositor / terminal emulator crashing
• ability to comfily use non-tabbed terminal emulators like Alacritty. At least I think it’s not tabbed…

Once I downloaded, installed and used 7zip to extract a .zip archive while Windows Exploder was extracting the same file.

I think tmux should be able to do that.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31980036/how-to-switch-to-the-previous-pane-by-any-shortcut-in-tmux

Jelqing, for example

The obvious sane default is 1 partition covering the whole disk, + EFI system partition. What’s there to offer…

pass, the standard Unix password manager. https://www.passwordstore.org/ Supports auto-typing, GPG encryption (multi-target, ie. each PC or phone has their own keys), Git history of all changes, synchronizing the storage via Syncthing. Probably something else I’m not remembering right now.

Have you tried copying your data into the flatpak’s sandboxed 'environment in ~/var/app?

i3, or Sway if you’re on Wayland, just gets out of your way.

Have a virtual desktop for each use case, memorize where your apps are, and enjoy muscle-memory-based window management. Mod4+1 brings me to terminal, 2 is browser, 3 is work stuff, 4 is personal chat, 5 is email… Every app is fullscreen, for maximum screen real estate. Nothing annoys by blinking when I’m trying to concentrate on something else.

How often does your IP actually change? Mine changes so rarely (during extended power outages, say) that I am able to just update my IP manually when it does.

I even used to run my own authoritative DNS server at home (the one offered by my registrar isn’t configurable enough, think SRV and TXT records) - for that, I have a web UI at my registrar to set the IP addresses of the DNS server.

BtrFS has Stuff.

• Subvolumes, which enable you to share the same /home between Linux distros
• Snapshots that are an great for
  • freezing the FS during off-machine backups: create a snapshot, rsync the snapshot not the main FS, drop the snapshot
  • transient backups. Will executing this thing hose my system? If no, drop the snapshot.
• ability to pool different disks into a single FS
• and so much more.

Fun story: once I needed to do something (resize? can’t recall) a partition that happened to be in use. The solution involved smbmounting a network disk, losetup helping transform that thing into a virtual disk, then migrating the root FS there, recreating partitions, all while running the rootfs on that thing. Thus, pooling can bu useful.

By the way, what does Zsh have over bash that you find useful?

What’s your use case for FS-level encryption? LUKS has worked for me so far, I wonder where I’m missing out.

I migrated from XMonad to Sway, it checks all my requirements. I don’t miss the Turing-complete configurability.

NeoVim is almost a drop-in replacement for Vim (the configuration file is under .config). Plugin installation might be different, tho.

Find a migration guide and be brave.