TRS-80

Thanks for input. Title updated.

A few months later, and I have a little more time, so decided to volunteer to help tidy up the forums. I never directly received a reply to this question, but someone must have heard me because I was just looking today at the Donate page, and now I see (in addition to monthly PayPal option from before): Bitcoin address Amazon wish list (for purchasing hardware) Contact form (for setting up bank transfer, invoice option for companies, etc.) I for one was happy to see additional options and just thought I would share what I discovered. You like Having Nice Things(tm)? Consider supporting Armbian today!

This will be the Moderator counterpart to the Announcement thread I made about the same issue where I asked for help from regular forum Members. In this thread, I will discuss methodology I developed to deal with these sort of spammers, once someone has Flagged such post(s). Humor But first, some humor. Does anyone remember this guy? Anyway, that old infomercial kept playing over and over in my head today while I was working on this. I think we stumbled across some of his students! OK, carrying on... What Not To Do First thing to probably point out, let's not simply edit out these links one by one as we come across them. That doesn't really solve the problem. In fact it makes it worse by eliminating the "trail of bread crumbs" so to speak, the easiest way we have to "get them all" (which is by recursive searching). Allow me to explain... These links seem to be posted in groups, by a small number of spammers. Once you catch on to one part of a cluster of them, it is actually pretty easy to methodically work your way through and find quite a few more, and "get them all" (within a given cluster). Modus Operandi But let me back up even more, for those who are totally unaware of this issue. What these people (we think they are human) are doing, is to register, and then post some at least seemingly relevant information in some topic, at least enough to get their post(s) approved. Then they come back some days or even weeks (!) later, and edit their post(s) to insert spam links. To see some actual examples, have a look at the Announcement post linked in the beginning. 1. Check Profile So, once I found one such post / Member, the first thing I would do is look at their profile. Typically they will have from 1-5 posts or so. I would right click, and open each new post in another tab. Sometimes you will have to search then in the thread (using your browser search function, Ctrl-F in Firefox) to find the post. You will quickly be able to determine whether they are a spammer or not (you will see all the spam links in all their few handful of posts). 2. Flag as Spammer Once you are certain they are a spammer, there are a couple ways you can "Flag as Spammer." Since you already have their profile open, you can click that button in there. Other way is to mouse over their avatar, and then the gear at bottom right opens another little menu that gives you the same option. This should be the first real action you take, because it does a couple things all at once (which will save you some time): it Hides (not Deletes) all their posts, and Bans them from the site (permanently) Note that the above are subject to Admin settings, and these are the current settings as of this writing. 3. Being Thorough Now, if you like to be thorough (I do) I will also kind of go through the threads that contain their spam posts (especially after their post(s)) and look for the following: did any other user (usually unintentionally, or on accident) quote the spam links? if so, edit out those spam links by hand and leave a note what you did make sure no actually useful content was hidden (I have yet to find this in even one case) 4. What Must Be Done (at Minimum) However at a very minimum, you should be taking down a list of all these spam links you come across. This is key to the whole process. Methodically complete all of the above for each spammer and each of his posts. When you are done you should have a list of spam links, and one or more Banned spammers, with all their posts Hidden. 5. Working our URL List of Spam Links Next step, we do a regular search on the forums for each of the spam links in turn. I like to leave this search window up, and again right click and open each result in a new tab, do whatever I need to do, and then come back to the main search result list, and keep going. Some pointers for this phase: Some results will be ones you already discovered Other results will lead you to additional spam posts and/or users. Take care of each of them in turn (as above) and continue to add to your URL list. Scratch each spam URL off your list once you have worked your way through all the results for that particular spam URL. Some times you may have to "massage" the URL a bit if it is too close to common search terms shorten to base URL add quotes around it prepend "https://www." etc... 6. The End Get yourself a cold, tasty, delicious adult beverage of your choosing. You earned it. You have made the world a slightly better place than it was this morning. You have Maintained Civilization. Etc. I think that just about covers it. Any questions, comments are welcomed. One thing I would like to re-iterate, if you don't have the time / patience for this, just Flag the post(s) and leave it for someone else who does. I think it's better to handle these properly and thoroughly than to half-arse it, deleting few links and then handicapping our ability to "get them all" later on. Thanks! EDIT: As an example, I will include my working list, below. This is what I came up with in a couple of hours this afternoon, all starting from one link that @Igor sent me in IRC (this is a bulleted checklist and table from org-mode; names of non spammers vindicated in my search have been removed):

This Q&A thread has been deprecated, so I am Locking it. Now instead we do this which has been working much better. Thanks.

Recently we been finding some very clever spammers who register, make some post(s) that sound at least somewhat on topic, and then come back days or even weeks (!) later and edit them in order to insert spam links. Some examples: Some times they put them alongside otherwise legitimate links: Other times, they sneak them into quotes or lists, etc.: Now, above examples have red background from being deleted (which is not how they will look to you normally) but you get the point. There is no way for us currently to detect this kind of spamming, without enacting draconian measures of moderation, which we are certainly not going to do. So instead we ask for your help. The only way to really find these is to happen upon them while browsing the forum. If you see one, please click on the little flag at the bottom and a Moderator will take care of it. It only takes 2 seconds, and you can help out in keeping the forums a nice and useful place. I also want to mention that something does not have to be Spam, or otherwise "bad" for you to Flag it. Anything that you feel deserves Moderator attention, such as off topic, or a diverging thread that needs to be split up into 2 or more separate topics, etc. can be Flagged. Any forum Member can do this, it requires no special permissions whatsoever. Thanks for your help! Note: This post is geared toward every Member / user of the forums. The corresponding post geared more toward Moderators about how to deal with these kind of posts (once Flagged) can now be found here.

IIRC, by default you are asked to create password for root upon first boot (via console). Are you using newly created password on second login? Or failed to create password on first login? EDIT: the guy going on about MSconfig was actually a spammer, I banned him and hid all his posts once I realized what was going on (editing posts after the fact to insert tiny links).

I edited [solved] into the topic. Don't feel bad, this power issue bit even someone as experienced as @lanefu as we witnessed first hand in IRC recently. There is a reason it is harped upon constantly... Back to the issue. I don't want to speak for @Cornelius, but that seems to me like just a diagnostic step (and/or, temporary work-around). Now that you know what the problem is, try and find a better way of powering. Scanning quickly over the issue (so I may have missed it) it seems you were referring to "USB device" earlier and only "drive" later on. Mentioning "drive" earlier on may have helped better grasp the issue at hand (x y problem), as yes they require more power at startup. I'm not picking at you, just saying (and maybe I even missed it). Anyway, quick look at NanoPi M4 (I don't own one) seems to reveal USB type-C power connector, which is better than Micro SD (potentially) but even that can have potential issues as I read some of them are not specced correctly. I have no idea if that is the case here or not. Anyway I think you know where to look now. I would be very surprised if a forum search for "NanoPi M4 power" or similar did not turn up some solutions. But actually I would do (in order): use some USB to SATA adapter that injects power (especially if 3.5" HDD!) [1] make sure throughput of USB Type C connector is sufficient make sure power supply itself, is sufficient if none of above are sufficient, look into powering through GPIO Note 1: This could be the whole problem, especially if you are dealing with 3.5" HDD, which require much more power. I have several of this one because I found them highly recommended by @tkaiser in this thread.

After a careful re-reading of this entire thread, the following clues jumped out at me: This leads me to think the problem may still be that old reliable rule #1 of power and/or SD card issues (in this case, I think SD card)... This even bit someone as experienced as @lanefu as we all realized in IRC last night (in his case, power)! Even though you state: I cannot help but wonder if all the SD cards were of the same batch perhaps? At this point I would do a thorough testing of the SD card(s) as outlined here, i.e., use f3 if you are on GNU/Linux or the other one mentioned if on Windows. And let us know the results of that.

I see that reading comprehension is not your strong suit. At no point did I ask for help with this. I (pretty clearly) stated that it was my own self-imposed roadblock / delay in implementing torrent seeding. And so I don't see how your post adds to the discussion, at all. In fact, it could be seen as a roundabout personal attack. Furthermore, I already knew that using VPN is not "security by obscurity" which refers more to architectural decisions, coding, etc. things like that. It's more like a camouflage. Anyway, quoting your own source: Anyway, I am really not interested in continuing to argue with someone who uses the term "bazinga" un-ironically.

I may or may have not realized that at the time. In either case, my thoughts on Armbian were the logical continuation of my thought process... Also, some people do not even realize that the alternatives to Armbian are usually much worse... But now I see that is clearly not the case here. Cheers!

All credit goes to @jshc1, I only found this info in this post and split it off here so it could more easily be found later. I am not sure if this applies only to ODROID-XU4 or other Odroids as well.

Yes, follow option B. in OP. ---- @Igor/ all: I been wanting to do this also, but I am getting up to speed with qemu and insuring the box (or virtual box) will only connect to internet via VPN (I do not connect to Internet otherwise, and this is much easier to manage "in person" / on desktop than it is headless / on a server or VM running all the time -- otherwise I would already be doing so). I have been curious for a while however, if we publish any information on the health of the torrent swarm. I guess I could just fire up a VM, connect to VPN, and have a look... However I think that others may follow similar thought process as myself "well I wonder how badly they need seeders" and seeing more of a need might motivate us to make setting it up more of a priority. Just my $0.02. I fully realize my tin foil hat ways (which only cause delay / hurdle for me, personally) are outside the norm.

Ha! Me too (As much as possible). I like you, so I will give some unsolicited advice: I like to cut out the middle man and order directly on AliExpress (or your preferred Chinese site, I heard others mention BangGood, etc.) for most things. Down side of that is you will be waiting weeks of course. So I do few things to mitigate that: I always have numerous projects going I order multiples of things, assortments, etc. if I realize I will need some tool (ex. from preliminary research) I order it far ahead of when I plan to start So, all in all, I am not affected by the weeks of shipping time. But clearly as you can see I have optimized for cost (I am frugal, aka euphemism for "cheap"). Over time you will also build up nice inventory of hacking tools and supplies. If you need something sooner, you need to branch out and make friends in your local hacker communities: ham radio guys, Linux User Group, hacker spaces, etc...

Is this behavior documented somewhere? Whilst perusing the forums, I am trying to collect such little useful nuggets of information... And perhaps add them to Documentation, wikis, etc... where they can be more easily found later.

I am not sure about that specific hardware, but check the pinned topics in this very sub-forum. Probably one of @balbes150 images, he is the main one making these images for TV Boxes. I am not expert in this area but this one seems to have the most activity recently. If you do get it running, there is another thread where you can report back your results and what you had to do to get it working, etc., so make sure you do that if and when you do (get it working). Welcome to the forums and good luck.

If you want to jump on the bandwaggon of dumb hardware decisions (sharing USB and ethernet, etc.) and firmware level RTOS / bootloader / GPU blobs that really run the show (instead of your installed OS) then go right ahead. Look I get the frustration. But there are lots of (much!) better boards than RPi to function as a NAS. If you really do want to join the masses and go buy an RPi then you can stop reading now. Otherwise, your options are: Do more research before purchasing, and make sure you get something that is stable and all the bugs are worked out. OR Buy whatever unknown hardware and then perhaps consider contributing in one way or another, in order to bring it up to full speed / support. Personally, I am only low to mid level (at best) wizard, so I chose to do the former. I started with Cubietruck a few years ago, and it has run absolutely flawless as a NAS and running numerous services. The situation with these SBC is a crap shoot. There are lots of holes you can step in (as you found out). But there are also hidden gems. Thus is the nature of the thing. I for one am very happy that we have Armbian, otherwise we would have no (good) options whatsoever on all of this other hardware that are not RPi. So much in fact that I started supporting (financially (only a little)) and even helping out around here (Moderation most recently). But I am lucky to have the resources (time, money) to be able to do so (in other words I am not judging anyone who cannot, in today's difficult economy). Just my $0.02. Anyway, rant over. I'm sorry but something about your comment I found dismissive to the efforts of all these people and Devs who have already put so much time, effort (and their own money) since years, just so regular people like us can Have Nice Things.

I slightly modified the title as I think the lights flashing were a symptom, not the main point of the thread. I also marked it [solved]. Thanks for reporting back the solution. This may help someone else in the future. EDIT: This sounds like it may be general enough to move to Common Issues. But I am not certain so I leave it here in RK3399 sub-forum for now. If someone else later finds this method to work on other hardware / chipset, please add your feedback and I will move it to Common Issues sub-forum. Thanks.

This is not a support forum for Manjaro. But I moved your topic to P2P anyway. For context, I moved this from RK3399 sub-forum. And so I added that to the title. However you still haven't mentioned what board (which I don't know enough to say is relevant to the question or not).

@dgm78, I updated your post topic to something I though was more relevant, but please let me know if I missed the mark. I also moved it to P2P, as this is clearly afield of what is supported in Armbian.

No, read more carefully (or maybe you are new to ssh?). You need to do (as @martinayotte said above): ssh root@odroid_IP And then enter default password ("1234").

In "normal" world (x86, etc.) I would tend to agree. And personally, I never overclocked any of my hardware since ever. However in Armbian, I know that a lot of testing has been done on lots of boards. If you read back all the posts of @tkaiser (and others) it has been pretty clear to me since years that lots of scientific (testing / fact) based research has been put into optimizations on various boards and chipsets. And the results of all that then baked into Armbian. Which were some of the reasons that attracted me initially. Now, I am only a low to middle level wizard at best, but OTOH I have been reading here for a number of years already. I like to read and study. And since becoming Moderator, I have only been reading even more (into other areas I did not necessarily go into before). Point I am trying to make is, unless you have done some actual experiments (and I would suggest publishing results for peer review, as has been done with all past optimizations) I would hesitate strongly to make out of hand comments on generalities which may not apply at all to Armbian and/or the hardware in question. At a minimum, I would search the forums for the reasons why certain things are already the way they are. There is a wealth of technical information here going back years. But my default assumption would be that, as @piter75 alluded to, there is in fact "some reason" for those decisions, even if that goes against your (and my) normal gut feeling.

I like you. Typical "our tax dollars at work!" Looking forward to updates on this adventure.

After using and thinking about this for a while, I propose to flip the order / meaning of what I wrote above to the following: New Report (Flag icon) - Just as it says, new reports. Moderators talking amongst themselves. The default when a regular Member or Mod makes a report. Under Review (Triangle ! icon) - This would mean bumping it up to Admin level for whatever reason: Functionality not available to Mods (word filter) Need policy decision etc. This means that someone has to take positive action to bump something up to Admin / higher level. Which I think is a better idea. And still preserves notion of getting higher (Admin) level people attention those few times we (Mods) need it, without having them have to read all posts or even all Mod level discussions. I am going to switch to this new method effective immediately. EDIT: I updated the 3 current pending Reports to the new scheme, and will stick with this going forward.

@dkxls, Thanks for your digging into using ZFS on 32-bit on ARM (I also found your recent thread on the ZoL mailing list). This revelation about changes in ZoL 0.7 appears to blow my previous assumptions about 64-bit being required (in general) for ZFS right out of the water. Which opens up a lot more hardware possibilities (in particular, ironically enough, outside of ARM). Within ARM, the Helios4 is the only hardware I am aware of that has ECC memory (that is not something designed for server farms). And as far as I am concerned, there is no point really doing ZFS without ECC. At this point I am really looking forward to Helios64 going forward. But this is still great news for lots of older 32-bit pre-IME x86 hardware. Cheers!