Lazarus535's questions

I have four HDDs in my NAS.

Three (Western Digital, all the same model) are put in standby mode (spin down) by hd-idle and they stay in standby until I use them. The reason I use hd-idle and not the internal power saving mechanism via hdparm (-S XX /dev/smth) is that those drives do not support it.

Here comes the problem: The forth (Toshiba) can be spun down by hd-idle and also manually by hdparm (-y /dev/drive4) but wakes up after around 30 minutes (sometimes sooner, sometimes later)...every time. I tried various things:

Shut down hd-idle all together. (Maybe it causes the wake-ups somehow). Did not work.

Try different settings for hdparm -S XX /dev/drive4 (internal standby time) and hdparm -B XX /dev/drive4 (internal power management settings). Nope, still wakes up after a while.

Check iostat if the drive was used by somethings. No usage what so ever. Everything is unmounted. Also the drive is part of an LVM volume group and FS with the other drives in the system and I am fairly positive that if some process would wake up the drive, it would also wake up all the other drives.

I have no clue what's going on here. Has anyone experienced this? How can I enhance my debugging?

On a side note: I know that spinning HDDs up and down constantly is bad, but I sometimes do not need the drives for long periods of time and would rather have them be in standby for this duration.

I want to set the TERM environment variable to a different value for each of my remote machines, so i used SetEnv TERM=myTermForRemoteVar in ~/.ssh/config. The remote machine still sees TERM=myLocalTermVar.

I added AcceptEnv TERM in /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the remote machine. No luck still.

I tried just for testing purposes SetEnv FOO=smth locally and AcceptEnv FOO. This works perfectly and the remote machine sees FOO=smth.

Is TERM treated specially by ssh? SetEnv works in general but not for TERM. Anyone else seeing this behavior? It is not documented at least. Is this a bug?

Whenever the Windows UAC pop-up shows up to grant a program administrator rights there is just a Yes/No answer.

Is there any way to limit what a program can do when run as administrator. Most programs do not need all priviledges, but just a little bit, that a standard user cannot do.

In Linux there a multiple ways, i can think of right now:

Root capabilities: partition the root priviledge into smaller capabilities

fakeroot: when the program checks for root but does not really need it

SELinux and similar tools: Everything must be explicitly granted

Another way of asking: Can i limit the amount of damage a program can cause while giving access to administrator rights.

Example: Give a program the right to see one specific programs adress space, but not all of them.