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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • My mother uses some software that runs in the browser for her shop. It can print out receipts and scan items. To do these things it has a small “sattelite” application that runs on the system and interacts with the printer and scanner. This software only runs on Windows and Linux doesn’t have drivers for the scanner.

    When I switched her over to Linux and found this out in the process I wanted to stop, give up and install windows.

    But then I had a stupid idea. I could run the sattelite program in a Windows VM and pass through the USB devices for receipt printer and scanner. The webapp uses requests to localhost:9998 to communicate with the sattelite so I set up a apache server that proxies these requests into the VM. I also prevented the VM from acessing the Interner so Windows doesn’t update and screw everything up.

    And it works. It has been in use for a week now and I’ve heard no complaints. I’m just praying to god it doesn’t break




  • Yeah it’s alright. I’ve been using Tumbleweed on my Desktop PC for the last few months and I gotta say it’s mid. They do hard drive unlocking in Grub instead of in the initfs which means that only LUKS 1 and with that only the not-so-secure PDKDF is supported, instead of argon2id which is the modern KDF you want to use. This is a small and annoying oversight in the distros security which is why I will not be using it in the future