It’s too funny to me that Arch of all distributions attracts the thigh /Unix socks crowd (for lack of better word). Nothing about Arch stands out for me in that regard, there’s no social statement or anything, and when I was more active in the community, it wasn’t known for that.

I was deep enough into Arch to run my own private repository using aurutils, but no thighs :(

It doesn’t really do a lot for most people since you just skip UEFI initialization, which yeah does save a lot of time but you still need to restart all your processes

NixOS’ (which I ended up using) solution requires custom keys.

It was a contender when I switched, but its lack of Secure Boot options unfortunately disqualified it.

I actually considered it once. It failed in a VM but I probably tried too much fancy stuff at once (like replacing OpenSSL…)

To be expected, difficulty of Arch installation was always overblown, and Gentoo doesn’t have an installer either, but you need to handle stage tarballs while in Arch, you just used pacman

People are hating on Powershell way too much. I don’t like its syntax really but it has a messy better approach to handling data in the terminal. We have nu and elvish nowadays but MS was really early with the concept and I think they learned from the shortcomings of POSIX compatible shells.

Client data absolutely is encrypted in TLS. You might be thinking of a few fields sent in the clear, like SNI, but generally, it’s all encrypted.

I never said it isn’t, but it’s done using symmetric crypto, not public key (asymmetric) crypto.

Asymmetric crypto is used to encrypt a symmetric key, which is used for encrypting everything else (for the performance reasons you mentioned).

Not anymore, this was only true for RSA key exchange, which was deprecated in TLS 1.2 (“Clients MUST NOT offer and servers MUST NOT select RSA cipher suites”). All current suites use ephemeral Diffie-Hellman over elliptic curves for key agreement (also called key exchange, but I find the term somewhat misleading).

As long as that key was transferred securely and uses a good mode like CBC, an attacker ain’t messing with what’s in there.

First, CBC isn’t a good mode for multiple reasons, one being performance on the encrypting side, but the other one being the exact reason you’re taking about: it is in fact malleable and as such insecure without authentication (though you can use a CMAC, as long as you use a different key). See https://pdf-insecurity.org/encryption/cbc-malleability.html for one example where this exact property is exploited (“Any document format using CBC for encryption is potentially vulnerable to CBC gadgets if a known plaintext is a given, and no integrity protection is applied to the ciphertext.”)

As I wrote in my comment, I was a bit pedantic, because what was stated was that encryption protects the authenticity, and I explained that, while TLS protects all aspects of data security, it’s encryption doesn’t cover the authenticity.

Anyhow, the point is rather moot because I’m pretty sure they won’t get a certificate for the IP anyways.

Public key crypto, properly implemented, does prevent MITM attacks.

It does, but modern public key crypto doesn’t encrypt any client data (RSA key exchange was the only one to my knowledge). It also only verifies the certificates, and the topic was about payload data (i.e. the site you want to view), which asymmetric crypto doesn’t deal with for performance reasons.

My post was not about “does TLS prevent undetected data manipulation” (it does), but rather if it’s the encryption that is responsible for it (it’s not unless you put AES-GCM into that umbrella term).

Right, and for the challenge, you need to have access to a privileged port (which usually implies ownership), which you won’t get assigned.

Let’s Encrypt are rolling out IP-based certs, you may wanna follow its development. I’m not sure if it could be used for your forwarded VPN port, but it’d be nice anyhow

It shouldn’t be because you’re not actually the owner of the IP address. If any user could get a cert, they could impersonate any other.

I believe encryption helps prevent tampering the data between the server and user too. It should prevent for example, someone MITM the connection and injecting malicious content that tells the user to download malware

No, encryption only protects the confidentiality of data. You need message authentication codes or authenticated encryption to make sure the message hasn’t been transported tampered with. Especially stream ciphers like ChaCha (but also AES in counter mode) are susceptible to malleability attacks, which are super simple yet very dangerous.

Edit: this post is a bit pedantic because any scheme that is relevant for LE certificates covers authenticity protection. But it’s not the encryption part of those schemes that is responsible.

Good luck on the journey! What I meant is that over time, you’ll realize that what you did was probably not the most elegant was to do something, at least that’s my experience with my config. Like, I started with a flake with an explicit config for each machine (basically multiple nixosConfigurations) and then turned it into a lib with functions to turn a set of hosts from json into an attribute set (kind of a simple inventory done). My last efforts that are still ongoing (cough) are splitting my NixOS modules off into a separate flake using flake-parts.

I do understand you meant having the stuff that your need work, I just wanted to hint that the language is very powerful and as such, most configurations have room for improvement, as in learning to do things more efficient or do things that weren’t possible before.

None of this stuff for me. I prefer one tool doing one thing, like busybox

Oregon Trail?

NixOS […] learn everything

I don’t think it’s possible to learn everything for NixOS as a casual user / admin. It’s massive. I was luckily able to sneak a NixOS project into work which gave me some paid time on the topic. But there’s always room to learn more about it. Which is a good thing - by its nature, it’s just more powerful than conventional distributions.

While you might have a point somewhere, I’m not sure it applies in this particular case.

PulseAudio was or still is (I don’t know actually) developed, but you don’t just change a system’s architecture.

creating a new project is easy, and even getting that project into distros can be easier than evolving older projects.

I think this downplays the achievements of PipeWire. Not only is it, contrary to what you write after, backwards-compatible; but if such a project was easy, why aren’t more people / companies doing it?

In my opinion, PipeWire turned Linux systems from being last in multimedia to maybe first place even. Remember capturing the screen or a window before? In fact PipeWire was only extended to audio because the design proved itself so well, so it actually did evolve. Just not from audio to better audio, but from video to video and audio. Saying that starting such a project [edit: is easy] might be technically correct, but then doesn’t make any point.

PipeWire doesn’t need replacement, which can’t be said for its predecessors. PulseAudio, OSS and raw ALSA had their shortcomings. PipeWire blows Windows audio out of the water in my opinion

Lung cancer speed run [no asbestos %]

Privileged ports can be used by processes that are running without root permissions.

I guess you mean unprivileged ports?

So if the sshd process would crash or stop for some other reason, any malicious user process could pretend to be the real ssh server without privilege escalation.

Not really, except on the very first connection because you need access to the root-owned and otherwise inaccessible SSH host key, otherwise you’ll get the message a lot of people have probably seen after they reinstalled a system (something like “SOMEONE MIGHT BE DOING SOMETHING VERY NASTY!”).

Not sure how you can read my comment that way, but you do you.