I am running Poweredge R620 servers. With Debian 10 I had no trouble, I could reliably set my network names using udev and they came up consistently even when moving from older hardware years ago. Knowing full well that upgrading to Debian 11 would break everything, I have resisted for years, but I finally gave up and started moving forward.

After fighting for the past day with a machine, I think the answer here is going to be that beginning with Debian 11 there is simply no way to reliably name the network interfaces now.

Starting with bullseye, udev is officially dead. There are still some remaining files buried on the system but /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules no longer has any effect on the network interfaces.

/etc/default/grub -- "net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0" have been removed and update-grub run

/etc/systemd/network/ -- I created the link files such as 10-eth0.link with the appropriate MAC addresses, but because the ethX names already exist, renaming is not possible:

[Match]
MACAddress=74:86:7a:ed:f6:a3

[Link]
NamePolicy=
Name=eth0

systemctl status systemd-networkd.service -- confirmed that this service is indeed active and running

Very early in dmesg I continue to see this:

[    2.193760] tg3 0000:01:00.0 eth0: attached PHY is 5720C (10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet) (WireSpeed[1], EEE[1])
[    2.227087] tg3 0000:01:00.1 eth1: attached PHY is 5720C (10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet) (WireSpeed[1], EEE[1])
[    2.247850] tg3 0000:02:00.0 eth2: attached PHY is 5720C (10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet) (WireSpeed[1], EEE[1])
[    2.263753] tg3 0000:02:00.1 eth3: attached PHY is 5720C (10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet) (WireSpeed[1], EEE[1])

The problem here is that the ethX names are being assigned backwards. The physical plugs have other brackets in the way so what I previously used as eth0 and eth1 is now being assigned to eth3 and eth2. And despite all of the above, debian and systemd refuse to ever assign "predictable" names to any of the interfaces (nothing shows up in dmesg). I ran across some info about a "BIOSdevname" setting in the actual BIOS, but can find no such setting in the last available BIOS rev for these servers. Because the system is assigning the ethX names, I am unable to reassign the correct names using the systemd link files.

The only solution I've found to work is to use the link files and assign the interface with names like dmz0, dmz1, etc. What's the deal here and what ever happened to the concept that I should be able to set up my computer the way I want to? The udev utility was 100% reliable for all the machines I've run since it was first introduced, and now we're stuck with a system that simply can't be given alternate information? Yeah I'm frustrated and annoyed.

I don't know if anyone else has run across other possible solutions, I fought with the last box for two weeks trying to name eight interfaces in the proper order and never could find anything that would work.

I built a new firewall under Debian 12. The machine has eight network ports, and during configuration I accidentally used the same name for a couple of the ports in the files under /etc/systemd/network/*.link. I ended up with two link files referencing two different MAC addresses but naming each of them as WAN0, and once systemd got that configuration it wouldn't let it go.

From what I could find online, normally I would just issue systemctl daemon-reload followed by a update-initramfs -u and after a reboot systemd should have had the updated information... but no dice this time. The way I finally discovered the problem was when I noticed under ifconfig that my wan0 port was pointing to the wrong MAC address (even though the link files had been corrected).

After several hours of fighting with it, I finally managed to get it to work by renumbering all of my link files, and now the information for each port matches up correctly. But my real question here is WHY did systemd refuse to read updated link files? Is there another step I should have taken which was mysteriously never mentioned in any of the dozens of web pages I looked at trying to fix this? I really need to understand the proper process for getting it to correctly use these files so I can maintain the machine in the future.

(God I miss the reliability of udev already)

I'm building a new rack server (Poweredge R620) and am using the option "consoleblank=600" in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX setting. During the setup I used the wrong memory stick and installed Bullseye, and screen blanking was working correctly there. Since I had already finished nearly all the configuration this week, I thought it would be easier to just do a regular dist upgrade than reloading the whole system.

After upgrading to Bookworm and rebooting, I notice that now when the screen blanking is supposed to kick in (which normally just turns off the display), I am instead getting what looks like rolling static on the screen. I have several other R620 racks running Buster so I know the screen blanking should work with this hardware, but this appears to be an issue specific to Bookworm.

Note that even when I try something like setterm -blank 1 or setterm -powerdown 1 I get the same resulting static after 1 minute. To be clear, this is specifically for the command line, I do not run desktops on my servers.

A google search for the problem has been unsuccessful so I'm hoping someone can point me to a solution or help with the proper search terms.

I'm wondering if anyone has found (free) sources of data to use for live elections results, specifically the Presidential race? I've been building a map of poll results but would also like to put something together to watch the race tomorrow night.

A 1930s-era breakthrough is helping physicists understand how quantum threads could weave together into a holographic space-time fabric.

I would love to have them light up like a scoreboard as each representative takes the floor, showing all of the commandments they have broken. If people want so badly to bring religion into politics then lets just show them exactly who they've been voting for. Maybe we can get the news networks in on this too, displaying it on the side of the screen similar to a sporting event.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the bastion of factual information, has once again shown the nature of her character by claiming that peaceful protestors at the Capitol are in fact an "insurrection of terrorists". Don't you see all the violence and mayhem being caused in this video clip? No, me either...

If you want to make such bold comparisons, lets start out by checking how many people are running for their lives or the number of deaths involved between these two events. Or maybe we should be asking why MTG thought it was an "honor" to meet with the people responsible for murder and the attempt to destroy our democracy?

I've seen the occasional blip here, but this is the first time I've seen a complete outage of this instance. Hoping @Salamander wanders through and gives us the scoop?

I have an annoying problem on my server and google has been of no help. I have two drives mirrored for the OS through mdadm, and I recently replaced them with larger versions through the normal process of replacing one at a time and letting the new drive re-sync, then growing the raids in place. Everything is working as expected, with the exception of systemd... It is filling my logs with messages of timing out while trying to locate both of the old drives that no longer exist. Mdadm itself is perfectly happy with the new storage space and has reported no issues, and since this is a server I can't just blindly reboot it to get systemd to shut the hell up.

So what's the solution here? What can I do to make this error message go away? Thanks.

[Update] Thanks to everyone who made suggestions below, it looks like I finally found the solution in systemctl daemon-reload however there is a lot of other great info provided to help with troubleshooting. I'm still trying to learn the systemd stuff so this has all been greatly appreciated!

Just in case there are others like myself who rarely check reddit any more, I thought it would be helpful to cross-post this. It won't look like much unless you have the solar eclipse glasses, but I plan to break out my tracker and camera (with solar filters!) to try and get some pics.

I've spent the past day working on my newest Poweredge R620 acquisition, and trying to nail down what things I can do without checking. Google has shown me that everyone seems to be having similar issues regardless of brand or model. Gone are the days when a rack server could be fully booted in 90 seconds. A big part of my frustration has been when the USB memory sticks are inserted to get firmware updated before I put this machine in production, easily driving times up to 15-20 minutes just to get to the point where I find out if I have the right combination of BIOS/EUFI boot parameters for each individual drive image.

I currently have this machine down to 6:15 before it starts booting the OS, and a good deal of that time is spent sitting here watching it at the beginning, where it says it's testing memory but in fact hasn't actually started that process yet. It's a mystery what exactly it's even doing.

At this point I've turned off the lifecycle controller scanning for new hardware, no boot processes on the internal SATA or PCI ports, or from the NICs, memory testing disabled... and I've run out of leads. I don't really see anything else available to turn off sensors and such. I mean it's going to be a fixed server running a bunch of VMs so there's no need for additional cards although some day I may increase the RAM, so I don't really need it to scan for future changes at every boot.

Anyway, this all got me thinking... it might be fun to compare notes and see what others have done to improve their boot times, especially if you're also balancing your power usage (since I've read that allowing full CPU power during POST can have a small effect on the time). I'm sure different brands will have different specific techniques, but maybe there's some common areas we can all take advantage of? And sure, ideally our machines would never need to reboot, but many people run machines at home only while being used and deal with this issue daily, or want to get back online as quickly as possible after a power outage, so anything helps...

I have been struggling with this for over a month and still keep running into a brick wall. I am building a new firewall which has six network interfaces, and want to rename them to a known order (wan[0-1], and eth[0-3]). Since Bullseye has stopped honoring udev rules, I have created link files under /etc/systemd/network/ for each interface based on their MAC address. The two WAN interfaces seem to be working reliably but they're not actually plugged into anything yet (this may be an important but untested distinction).

What I've found is that I might get the interfaces renamed correctly when logging in from the keyboard, and this continues to work for multiple reboots. However if I SSH into the machine (which of course is my standard method of working on my servers) it seems to destroy systemd's ability to rename the interface on the next boot. I have played around with the order of the link file numbers to ensure the renumbering doesn't have the devices trying to step on each other, but to no avail. Fixing this problem seems to come down to three different solutions...

• I can simply touch the eth*.link files and I'm back up afte a reboot.
• Sometimes I have to get more drastic, actually opening and saving each of the files (without making any changes). WHY these two methods give me different results, I cannot say.
• When nothing else works, I simply rename one or more of the eth*.link files, giving them a different numerical order. So far it doesn't seem to matter which of the files I rename, but systemd sees that something has changed and re-reads them.

Another piece of information I ran across is that systemd does the interface renaming very early in the boot process, even before the filesystems are mounted, and that you need to run update-initramfs -u to create a new initrd.img file for grub. OK, sounds reasonable... however I would expect the boot behavior to be identical every time I reboot the machine, and not randomly stop working after I sign in remotely. I've also found that generating a new initrd.img does no good unless I also touch or change the link files first, so perhaps this is a false lead.

This behavior just completely baffles me. Renaming interfaces based on MAC addresses should be an extremely simple task, and yet systemd is completely failing unless I change the link files every time I remote connect? Surely someone must have found a reliable way to change multiple interface names in the years since Bullseye was released?

Sorry, I know this is a rant against systemd and this whole "predictable" naming scheme, but all of this stuff worked just fine for the last 24 years that I've been running linux servers, it's not something that should require any effort at all to set up. What do I need to change so that systemd does what it is configured to do, and why is something as simple as a remote connection enough to completely break it when I do get it to work? Please help save my sanity!

(I realize essential details are missing, but this post is already way too long -- ask what you need and I shall provide!)

tl;dr -- Systemd fails to rename network interfaces on the next cycle if I SSH in and type 'reboot'

Your dreams and imagination evolved as a view into another universe. As with the current beliefs, you cannot decipher technical information -- no words in books, no details of how devices work, so even if you can describe things you see from another place, you could not reproduce a working version.

Now how do you convince others that the things your are seeing are really happening without being labeled insane? And how could you use this information to benefit yourself or others? Take a peek into the multiverse to see how other versions of yourself have solved these problems...

I have a self-hosted matrix-synapse server up and running on a Debian linux server, but before I open it up I want to at least get a captcha service in place to reduce spamming. The only module I've seen to handle this function appears to require setting up a Google recaptcha though, however I would prefer to keep all of this entirely self-contained for the privacy of my users. Can anyone recommend a module that allows for a local captcha option? For that matter, can anyone also recommend a captcha system that is pretty straightforward to set up (which is compatible with matrix-synapse) and uses basic preinstalled code bases like perl or python?

And while I'm here, I would also like to provide the option of registering with an email address, but I'm having trouble finding any clear how-to pages on this. Seems like that function might be built directly in to matrix-synapse but I'm just not finding anything helpful. Any suggestions?

I'm fairly new to matrix in general, but I have an initial setup running with the homeserver, Element web page, and an IRC bridge, so if I can just nail down the validation part of registrations I'll have what I think is a good starting point to launch from.

Turns out both grow in my area, and look identical to this when young. Yikes! So based on a post yesterday, I took this outside and sliced it in half. So far it looks promising (I think?) and I'm not dead yet.

This was found growing in a Colorado yard near the base of an elm tree, in an area where there are also rotting cottonwood roots. Altitude is right at 5000 feet. It wasn't my yard so I'm not sure how many days it may have been growing before I picked it today. I have put both halves in the fridge for now, is there any other information I can provide to help identify it?

A full size copy of the inside can be viewed here: http://sourpuss.net/projects/mycology/2023-08-13/IMG_7239.JPG

I've been running systems up to Buster and have always had the 'quiet' option in the grub settings to show the regular service startup messages (the colored ones showing [ok] and such but not all the dmesg stuff). I just upgraded a server to bullseye and there are zero messages being displayed now except an immediate message about not being able to use IRQ 0. Worse, google can't seem to find any information on this. If I remove the quiet option from grub then I see those service messages again, along with all the other stuff I don't need.

What is broken and how do I fix this issue? I assumed it would be safe to upgrade by now but this seems like a pretty big problem if I ever need to troubleshoot a system.

[Edit] In case anyone else finds this post searching for the same issue… Apparently the trick is that now you MUST install plymouth, even on systems that do not have a desktop environment. For whatever reason plymouth has taken over the job of displaying the text startup messages now. Keep your same grub boot parameters (quiet by itself, without the splash option) and you will get the old format of startup messages showing once again. It’s been working fine the old way for 20+ years but hey let’s change something just for the sake of confusing everyone.

[Edit 2] Thanks to marvin below, I now have a final solution that no longer requires plymouth to be installed. Edit /etc/default/grub and add systemd.show_status=true to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. In my case to full line is:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet systemd.show_status=true"

Don't forget to run update-grub after you save your changes.

I run my own email server, and a friend received a compromised laptop from work which resulted in a spam attack from Russia yesterday. Turtle settings saved the days with thousands of emails still in the queue when I saw the problem, however it made me realize that everyone with accounts on my server are local, do not travel, and have no requirement to send emails from outside the country.

I found how to use the smtpd_discard_ehlo_keyword_address_maps setting in postfix to block a CIDR list of IPs, then found a maintained list of IPs by country codes on github. Cool so far, and a script to keep my local list updated was easy enough.

Now the question is, what countries should I be blocking? There are plenty of lists of the top hacking sources, but it's hard to block #2 (the US) when that's where I am located. But otherwise, does anyone have a list of countries they outright block from logging on to their servers? From the above google searches I have 17 countries blocked so far, and in the first 30 minutes already stopped login attempts from three of those countries, so it appears to be working.

Of course I could write a script to parse my logs to see who has already made attempts, but that's what services like fail2ban are for, and I'm just wondering if there are any countries in particular I should directly block? My list so far includes the following: ae bg br cn de hk id in ir iq il kp ng ru sa th vn

The question itself may not be that interesting, but I thought at the very least some folks might be interested in my experience and think about doing something similar themselves. I can post more details of what I did if there is any interest.