tal

Israel's the one party that wasn't a variable on this. Iran decided to hit a cargo ship, and the US decided to hit Iran back.

Well...okay, maybe the cargo ship was Israeli, but I would assume not.

searches

It's the Ever Lovely, Singapore-flagged and -owned.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-attacks-cargo-ship-testing-trumps-deal-to-reopen-strait-d3cf454c

Iran's Revolutionary Guard attacked a Singapore-flagged cargo ship, the Ever Lovely, in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday,

https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/containers/and-may-she-be-ever-lovely

The Ever Lovely is owned by Evergreen Marine (Singapore) and will be deployed on the Far East – South America trade.

I was kind of surprised to find that Russia actually doesn't have a whole lot by way of surveillance satellites (or at least didn't earlier in the war, when I was looking things up). I'd kind of assumed that they did

the Soviet Union was a front-runner with satellites

but I'd guess that it was an area that didn't get a lot of funding in recent years.

searches

So, this is from 2022:

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-satellites-ukraine-war-gps/31797618.html

In Russia's War On Ukraine, Effective Satellites Are Few And Far Between

Another big item on the list of problems: satellites -- there are too few of them, and too few with high-quality capabilities.

According to experts and open-source information compiled by RFE/RL, Russia has long been saddled with a small and inadequate fleet of communications and surveillance satellites that in many cases rely on either outdated technology or imported parts that are now harder to come by due to Western sanctions.

“In principle, Russia is already practically blind in orbit, " said Bart Hendrix, a Brussels-based analyst and expert on Soviet and Russian space programs.

According to a database maintained by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a respected U.S. nongovernmental organization, Russia currently has around 100 military or dual-purpose satellites. Nineteen of them are classified as remote sensing satellites, with technology allowing either optical photography or radio signal surveillance. The others serve other purposes.

Resolution Matters

Russia has two optical reconnaissance satellites in orbit now, called Persona, Hendrix said, but they were launched between seven and nine years ago, meaning they may be near the end of their working life.

Adding further to the problem: The maximum resolution of the Persona satellites is believed to be 50 centimeters per pixel, Hendrix said.

By comparison, the best American spy satellites, called Keyhole, are estimated to have a resolution of around 5 centimeters per pixel. At that resolution, the letter “V” which is being painted on the roofs of Russian military vehicles operating in Ukraine would be easily and clearly visible from the typical altitude where a spy satellite was orbiting.

Commercial satellite companies like Maxar and Planet typically have a maximum resolution of around 15 centimeters.

“The Americans have at least five Keyhole-12 satellites, the Italians, the French and the Spaniards have their own satellites, there are an order of magnitude more,” Hendrix told RFE/RL.

Russia has also lagged behind in building and deploying remote-sensing satellites whose radars can see through cloud cover, unlike optical satellites.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists’ database, Russia has only one confirmed radar satellite in operation, called Kondor. It was launched in 2014, and with an expected lifespan of five years, it may have already ceased to be operational.

In February, Russia’s space forces launched another satellite, dubbed Kosmos-2553 or Neutron. Little is known about its purpose or capabilities, though it was built by Mashinostroyeniye, a Moscow military research institute which specializes specifically in radar-sensing satellites.

“If Neutron is a radar satellite, then this is the first such launch in almost 10 years,” Hendrix said.

My guess is that Russia can probably get access to satellite data from commercial providers in other countries, though

I would not expect, that China, say, is going to cut Russia off.

searches

https://www.kharon.com/brief/china-space-military-intelligence-iran-russia-rocket-satellite

Chang Guang had already been sanctioned by the U.S. in 2023 for the use of its satellite imagery by Russian forces in Ukraine, making the U.S. Treasury Department’s designation of the firm earlier this month under Iran-related authorities the second round against the company. Earth Eye was also sanctioned — for the first time — in the same action, as Treasury targeted both companies for aiding Iran’s military operations amid the war.

does a quick search

It sounds like the high-pressure transmission lines, in the US, need to be about three feet (1 meter) down. Dunno if Russia builds to the same standard.

I don't know how large of a warhead you need

a shaped charge might differ

and how accurate you'd need to be to penetrate one. Russia may not even have its transmission pipeline network buried, for all I know.

But because they span huge areas and can be struck at any point, I'd expect them to be pretty difficult to defend. Even if you ran defenses all along them, you necessarily are thinning your defenses. Do that, and said defenses can't handle a concentrated attack at any one point.

The problem of being the defender is that the attacker has the initiative and gets to decide where to concentrate for an attack.

For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If you don't have air defense, you can't defend your fuel or electricity or whatever else is driving your mass transit system either.

I was commenting earlier on how all or essentially all the power generation in the Moscow region is natural gas, and wondering how viable it'd be for Ukraine to target transmission pipelines.

I remember the one with the European woman who needed to sleep with the Russian guy to get electricity, and the one with the family with the little European girl who had to use her pet hamster to generate electricity using a hamster wheel and then had to eat the hamster to stay alive.

I hadn't seen this one until now.

They were definitely putting a lot of stuff out.

Political construction project: Russia deliberately lowered the official seismic hazard rating for the area to justify building the bridge on highly unstable soil with its own fault system.

That's not necessarily a bad move, if you're Russia and seeking to annex Crimea. That is, even if the bridge will ultimately go down, having the transport capacity may be critical in the short term. Right now, Ukraine has knocked out the ferries. If Russia didn't have the Kerch Strait rail and road bridge

even a flawed, decaying bridge

it'd have a lot less access to Crimea.

Before the Trans-Siberian Railroad was complete in its present form, for a period of time, Imperial Russia built temporary tracks in winter over waterways. Impermanent, but if it was critical enough to get the transport that it provided now, being disposable was acceptable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circum%E2%80%93Baikal_railway

The Circum–Baikal railway (Russian: Кругобайка́льская желе́зная доро́га or Кругобайка́лка, abbreviated "КБЖД") is a historical railway in the Irkutsk region of Russia. It runs along the Northern shore of the Southern extremity of Lake Baikal from the town of Slyudyanka to the Baikal settlement. Until the middle of the 20th century the Circum–Baikal railway was part of the main line of Trans–Siberian Railway; later on, however, a duplicate section of the railway was built.

With the purpose of establishing a through railway connection, before the Circum-Baikal was finished, it was decided to link the shores of the lake with a train ferry. Trains were carried on the special ice breaker-ferry SS Baikal which had three parallel tracks on its train deck. Another, smaller icebreaker-ferry, the "Angara", was also built which carried passengers and goods, but not trains. In the cold winter of 1903/04 when the icebreakers were not strong enough to break the ice, a railway line was laid on the ice, and railway wagons were pulled by draft animals.

One thing I like about bind mounts is that there is always a backup directory in the location, so if the USB isn’t plugged in, accidentally saved files don’t just fall into the void. But I don’t remember if that was the reason.

So, if you have a symlink, what will happen is that trying to save to a path that passes through the symlink will fail, because the program trying to save will fail to access the original path (assuming your above directory structure; /mount/external will exist, but /mount/external/realfolder will not, as realfolder is on your USB drive and won't exist when the media isn't mounted). With most programs, they'll warn you that they couldn't write the file (and in fact, that the directory isn't there). From their standpoint, the path is invalid. You won't typically just save a file and have it vanish.

I guess you could theoretically have something like a script that writes a file data and fails silently if the path doesn't exist. I do think that it might get confusing, to have some files written to the bind mount point in the user directory

I mean, the OS isn't going to merge them when you do the bind mount or anything. You're going to have one directory structure on your removable media that contains some files, and when it's inserted and the bind mount is in place, that's what you'll see, and a second directory structure inside the bind mount that will have different data. Like, if whatever is writing this is something that you control, I think I might set it up to explicitly write somewhere else. Or just create a /mount/external/realfolder directory on the /mount filesystem and give the user write permission to /mount/external/realfolder which will have the same effect, with some data going to a the removable media and some to the directory structure where the mountpoint lives if the media isn't present (just that the files will be written to wherever /mount lives, which may not be the same filesystem as /home/user/; I don't know if that matters for your use case).

But if you do feel that you want to set up a bind mount, then yeah, I'd look at the other comment I have in response to your comment here, the one talking about systemd-udev.

Followup: OP, based on your post update, you do indeed mean bind mounts. Okay.

As I said above, what I would probably do myself for most cases is to just use a symlink, not a bind mount. That's easy, doesn't require futzing around with the system, and in most cases probably does what you want, whereas a bind mount may not (e.g. if you have a filesystem indexer or backup system, they're not going to back the stuff up or index it twice).

That'd be something like:

$ ln -s /mount/external/realfolder /home/user/folder

That does mean that /home/user/folder will still be visible when you don't have the media inserted, though it'll just be a dangling symlink.

If you definitely do want to do it with bind mounts...hmm. It looks like there are some additional hurdles.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/799166/linux-auto-mounting-usb-with-udev

According to a comment there, it looks like systemd-udev shouldn't run a mount command directly, as it runs commands in a private namespace; it should use systemd-mount --no-block, which will ask systemd to set this up. You could probably write a bash script that runs a series of commands, including the systemd-mount command. It may be a bit involved for a linux4noobs solution, and I can't give an off-the-cuff answer from personal experience, but I'd guess that it may very well be technically possible, and that's probably what I'd be looking into if I were determined to specifically to use bind mounts.

Yeah, and you may very well be giving him the right answer; he very well may be just be accidentally using the term, and actually thinking of a regular mount. I gave a response specific to bind mounts as a top level comment.

EDIT: Yeah, he put a portion of his fstab up there

he's after honest-to-God bind mounts (or at least, that's what he's presently using).

mount/unmount everything individually when I plug/unplug the drive.

Setting aside bind mounts, there is no reliable, safe way to just unplug a USB drive. You always need to, in software, on any OS, manually signal to the OS in some way that you're not using it to ensure that any data is flushed to the drive and the OS isn't using it. Zip drives had a locking mechanism and a button that requested an unmount and eject of the media, but USB drives where you expect to just unplug the thing don't. You might get away with it, and newer filesystems won't have the whole filesystem become corrupt if you just yank it, but you still should unmount it. There are systems to automatically mount. There are systems to automatically unmount filesystems that will go unused for a while, and at that point it is safe to unplug. But USB just doesn't physically support blocking someone unplugging something until all the data is written out; if you just yank the thing out, you always run the risk of losing data, even if it mostly works. True for Windows, Linux, any OS. That's why, for example, Windows has that "eject flash drive" thing in its system tray. And note that most flash drives come formatted with some version of FAT, an older DOS/Windows filesystem, which does have the risk of becoming corrupt (i.e. you could lose everything on the filesystem) if it isn't cleanly unmounted. The risk may be small, but it's there. If you reformat the drive with something like ext3, ext4, btrfs (Linux-native filesystems) or NTFS (a Windows-native filesystem), then that corruption risk goes away, and your risk is just "some data that you recently saved might not have made it to the drive".

Okay, that being said, normally a bind mount is a mount that is a "virtual copy" of what exists elsewhere on the filesystem. That is, if you have a bind mount of something, it appears to userspace software to be mounted at two different locations. I'm not sure if that's actually what you mean, or if you just want a single mount that is automatically done by software when you plug the drive in. If you do mean "bind mount", I don't know of a way to do that off the top of my head, though there might be a way to achieve it with udev. I'd guess that there's probably a way to set it up to run arbitrary commands when a device is connected, so there's probably a way to run a bind mount command as well as a regular mount command.

If I were doing this myself and wanted the mount to be at a second location merely for convenience (like, I wanted "shortcuts" that pointed at some drive, when it was plugged in, elsewhere), I would most likely not use a bind mount, but rather just make a symlink aimed at the regular mount point, and access the symlink. Bind mounts are a fairly-exotic thing that one normally uses if one wants to give access to a process to a mount without letting it have access to the directory structure leading up to it, like a containerized system.

If what you want is not a bind mount, but just a regular mount (you don't want the mount to "exist" at two different places in your filesystem tree), then there are various systems that will automatically mount something when you plug it in. @onlinepersona@programming.dev is, I believe, correct that most desktop environments on Linux have some system for this; I'm not familiar with them, as I don't use a desktop environment, so I'm probably not the best person to advise there. I have used autofs, which is an older, more-general and somewhat-more-complicated-to-set-up system that will try to automatically mount a mount when you try accessing a mountpoint, then unmounts it if it is unused for a while. This tends to be more useful for things like network mounts.

Assuming that OP is using the term correctly, a bind mount is where you have a second "copy" of a mount somewhere else on the filesystem (like, you use mount --bind). So he might specifically want two mountpoints for the mount. I don't use KDE, but I don't know if they do that with whatever system they have going on.

The problem is that he doesn't have a background singer to provide harmony. Man's having to carry the whole thing on his own. He really needs some support, get a duet going.

$ yt-dlp 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIaFtAKnqBU'
$ ffmpeg -ss 2.25 -t 2.9 -stream_loop -1 -i The\ Screaming\ Sheep\ \(Original\ Upload\)\ \[SIaFtAKnqBU\].mp4  solovyov-backup-sheep.webm

starts playing both concurrently

Yeah, as partners, those two together are much richer and more complex.