#tsdr; short don’t read

My Pop_OS desktop hung yesterday. It’s the second time this month. It’s impossible to know why at this point so I have to speculate and then move on. But what I need is a more reliable desktop.

Back in my PDP-11 days I/we used vt100 terminals, or terminal emulators. If you were one of the preferred staff members you might get an X-11 terminal on a 27in CRT. I was never one of those. However, back then there were a few universal truths.

• the host would be rebooted when it was going to hurt the most
• your terminal sessions would be reset or timeout

And so whenever we bellied up to the terminal it was usualy a fresh session. (tmux and screen were not in play yet)

a nod is as good as a wink to a blind man

The default ChromeOS settings are such that it will sleep after some 5 or 15 minutes of inactivity and if you’re connected with a VPN it will be disconnected and thus all the terminal sessions will terminate. While there are some configuration flags they invite many of the same results.

multi-tasking meet crash

Right now I have an array of hardware. I’ve converted all my coops to OpenBSD and I have one Barn left to reconfigure into a coop. Once that’s complete I’ll start working on my desktop again. I’m pointing my way back to OpenBSD as my desktop too.

• All I need is OpenVPN, IPsec/L2TP, split DNS, a browser, and a terminal
• ChromeOS does not support split DNS and OpenVPN has one or two options

Looking around my LAB I see I have all different types of machines. ChromeOS, OSX, Linux, OpenBSD. And at the moment I’m meditate.