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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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What is the largest file transfer you have ever done? (startrek.website)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm writing a program that wraps around dd to try and warn you if you are doing anything stupid. I have thus been giving the man page a good read. While doing this, I noticed that dd supported all the way up to Quettabytes, a unit orders of magnitude larger than all the data on the entire internet.

This has caused me to wonder what the largest storage operation you guys have done. I've taken a couple images of hard drives that were a single terabyte large, but I was wondering if the sysadmins among you have had to do something with e.g a giant RAID 10 array.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I'm currently backing up my /dev folder to my unlimited cloud storage. The backup of the file /dev/random is running since two weeks.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

That's silly. You should compress it before uploading.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

No wonder. That file is super slow to transfer for some reason. but wait till you get to /dev/urandom. That file hat TBs to transfer at whatever pipe you can throw at it...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Cool, so I learned something new today. Don't run cat /dev/random

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why not try /dev/urandom?

😹

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Ya know, if not for the other person's comment, I might have been gullible enough to try this...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I’m guessing this is a joke, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

/dev/random and other "files" in /dev are not really files, they are interfaces which van be used to interact with virtual or hardware devices. /dev/random spits out cryptographically secure random data. Another example is /dev/zero, which spits out only zero bytes.

Both are infinite.

Not all "files" in /dev are infinite, for example hard drives can (depending on which technology they use) be accessed under /dev/sda /dev/sdb and so on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I’m aware of that. I was quite sure the author was joking, with the slightest bit of concern of them actually making the mistake.