I usually read the Blackblaze Hard Drive Data stats on the blogs on the website, since I find the information useful and informative when it comes to buying  hard drives for my personal NAS (network attached storage box) and I want to make sure the drives stay good and healthy for a long while (value aspect). I also look at https://shucks.top/ – great place to find cheaper per TB external drives that one can “shuck” to remove the drive out. While the aspect of removing drives from the casing can be a bit unnerving, it gets easier as one keeps on doing it. I actually got the idea from another Backblaze blog when the team over there had to resort to such measures when there was a hard drive shortage due to the floods in Thailand that one year, causing a surge in pricing since supplies where constrained.

Anyway, the new blog post I saw was from here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-network-stats/ – pretty good newbie guide for the masses to understand how Backblaze operates and what kind of connectivity they would like for their services.

P.S. – I am looking at probably changing up the simply layout of this website to start to segregate the blog posts. Might have more posts coming down the line and it is probably a good idea to segment the hobby of DJing and the professional side of IT related content on this website.

Looks like PCWorld posted about an article about another data dump of user emails and passwords. Having this in hand, a nefarious actor can use this in a credential stuffing attack, just randomly using the combination of an email and using the password associated with it.

This is why it is best practice to have AT LEAST different passwords for every account you create online. Usually stored in a password manager like 1Password, Apple’s iCloud Keychain, or even Chrome or Firefox. Keep in mind your “eggs in one basket” is just as protected as the main password on the basket.

If an online account offers 2FA (or multi-factor authentication), use it. There is a huge push for passkeys, which use biometrics to confirm your identity. Most Android and Apple devices will allow you to sign up for them using the sensors built into the device.

More information about this latest data dump can be found here:

https://cybernews.com/security/hacker-on-hacker-crime-personal-information-of-24000-illegal-data-buyers-put-for-sale-online/

https://cybernews.com/news/leaker-says-they-are-offering-private-details-of-500-million-facebook-users/

https://cybernews.com/news/stolen-data-of-500-million-linkedin-users-being-sold-online-2-million-leaked-as-proof-2/

In addition to using haveibeenpwnd? website to identify if you have leaked PI (personal information) on the Internet, you can also use this search from CyberNews: https://cybernews.com/personal-data-leak-check/

*Disclaimer* – While I got this all working in the end, it was a bit of trial and error to figure out exactly what to do. Did my research on a few forum posts and reading out the solutions. But some of it didn’t apply to the situation I was in. If you are like me and had r8168-dkms working previously, and pulled in a new update for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, give the builtin driver r8169 a try. This advice would apply to Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller, it might also apply to other Realtek NICs, but I cannot verify if it would work on others or not.

Also this advice ASSUMES you are slightly comfortable with using terminal on Linux, via local machine or remote SSH. [[email protected]]

I believe it all started when I updated the main Ubuntu 22.04 to 22.04.2, I went searching through the internet to see why my Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller was no longer connecting to the wired network. This was a big deal to me because the system I was running this on was a headless server (thankfully still in the house) that I was trying to figure out why I could not remote SSH into it. (I also have AnyDesk installed on the operating system, for when I was lazy and didn’t get too familiar with terminal yet). Thankfully the WiFi NIC was still operable, so I was connecting a very small 5” monitor (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07B8JNKT3?ie=UTF8&th=1) to the system, along with a keyboard and mouse to see what the heck was going on.

From what I was seeing online, it looks like the r8169 NIC driver (that comes default with the Ubuntu install) was not functioning correctly and I needed to run r8168-dkms on it, disabling the default driver. From what I could ascertain in the current situation, r8169 could not enable the Gigabit Ethernet NIC, so following the Debian commands for installing such a thing from the Linux repository “apt”:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install r8168-dkms

After running that command and sending off a “sudo reboot now” command in console to make sure that the configuration stays intact after a reboot, I saw it worked well and the connection was stable after a few hours.

I bring this all up because TODAY I decided to restart the server (again with a remote SSH terminal session) after pulling in new updates for Ubuntu using apt update and apt upgrade. My connection was closed by host, but it wasn’t coming back. Thinking the server froze up or some other issue, I force restarted it at the power button on the unit itself. SSH still wasn’t working. So I pulled up my trusty 5” monitor, keyboard and mouse and locally attached it all to see what was going on. Same issue as before, missing Ethernet connection from the status bar (top right) and from the settings menu. Again WiFi was still working, so I connected that to my guest WiFi in my place and started working on updating the Ethernet NIC driver.

Played the “search the Internet game for an answer”, I had a hunch that the r8168 driver wasn’t working correctly and decided to give the stock (built-in) Realtek r8169 driver a chance. In order for me to re-enable r8169, I had to purge and remove dependent packages and configurations like so:

sudo apt remove r8168-dkms

sudo apt remove — auto-remove r8168-dkms

sudo apt purge r8168-dkms

sudo apt purge — auto-remove r8168-dkms

Interestingly enough after a reboot, it didn’t automatically fix it after removing the r8168-dkms, so after poking around some more I put in two more commands:

rmmod r8169

sudo modprobe r8169

After typing in the last command, the server was able to recognize the Ethernet controller and immediately connected back to the wired network! Once I verified the connection was up and active, I disabled the WiFi once again on the machine to solely connect to the network through the Ethernet port.

P.S. – I did the command lspci in terminal to list out the hardware to verify exactly what make and model the Ethernet Controller was. By doing so I was able to use that info while searching around the Internet to figure out what the issue was in the first place.

This is all running on a HP ProDesk 400 G5 Desktop Mini i5-9500T.

Website sources I used mainly to try to figure out what the heck to do: 

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/after-update-kernel-from-6-2-16-19-to-6-5-11-3-network-not-work-anymore.136831/

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-signed/+bug/1876593

Practicing good internet hygiene is a great thing: different passwords for different websites, using passwords that are not easily guessable and longer (example: using a 3 word password separated by a special character i.e., dog7car-HATCH.

Anyway a newsletter email sent by the admin of haveibeenpwned.com brought  up the fact that there is another huge data breach; while most of this data seems to be around the year 2020, who knows what else lurks out there and however they were able to obtain the data in the first place. Hence the importance of having different passwords for different website, and also making sure to use two factor authentication (if available) and/or passkeys (the fancy new way to authenticate without passwords)

I always recommend to friends and clients to use a password manager (a necessary evil nowadays) to manage all of these things. Heck, using a built in one (like Apple’s implementation) is better than nothing, in my honest opinion. I do have a client that likes to literally write down his passwords and accounts in a little notebook that he tends to leave in a safe most of the time. I’ve told him about my recommendations, but they prefer their style. 

One of the most recent data dumps can be searched through here: https://search.0t.rocks/ – from what I can suss out, most of the passwords have been redacted, but I will admit that I only looked up some emails and other family members information to look at it.

I might be doing these technology posts in another way, but for now I guess it will stay up like this.