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Blocklist-Update.sh

Blocklist-Update.sh is a script that I wrote to manage blocklists from bluetack etc to be used in conjunction with Transmission torrent downloader in Linux/MacOS. The script can be taylored to work with Qbittorrent as well, but the placement of the blocklists means you'd have to redirect the blocklist to go somewhere locally manageable as Transmission uses its own blocklist directory in .config. I believe there are about 10 lists there now. It works well for my needs. It can be ran weekly using crontab in standard user profile.  To download:  blocklist-update.sh To download the others:  Github
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SSD PARTITION ALIGNMENT

I was searching for more information regarding SSDs last night as that is what I now use, I found an interesting little tip that most users will never have to worry about, but people using Arch Linux, Manjaro or Windows that was cloned from another drive may want to consider checking this. The Partition manager within Linux normally takes good care to ensure that you have some free space to be used by the SSD in the event that a cell becomes worn out or corrupted. Also, Linux generally ensures that a proper amount of unallocated drive space is set aside preceeding the partition. However, on my own image of Manjaro, I discovered that this was not the case. The partition was “out of alignment”. To fix this situation, I found an article on Lifehacker that went into instructional detail about how to solve this from a live environment or an image of Gparted. Gparted is a separate live environment of Linux that is based on Debian and uses Gparted as the main tool to manage partitions and help fix boot drives.

To check the drive’s partition alignment, you simply have to type a couple of commands. The first command puts you in Parted or Gparted’s Command Line Interface. The command is this, sudo parted /dev /sd(x) . The x is the drive letter, ie sda. The command opens Parted in the terminal, the next command, align-check opt (n), is the second command which shows you either a 1 or a 0 to let you know if you are aligned or not. 0 equals misaligned and 1 equals aligned. The n in parenthesis is a variable to stand for whatever the drive partition number is, ie sda1 or sda2. If you let Manjaro or Ubuntu set up the partitions for you, your default partition might /dev /sda1. If your partitions are out of alignment, you might want to refer to the article to fix that, but this will cause two writes instead of one when modifying data on the drive and this is bad for performance and lifespan.

Another issue, Manjaro also sets discard as an option in fstab by default. While we want our drives to trim once a week, it’s not recommended to leave the option enabled all the time, this degrades drive performance over time and can cause RAM and CPU usage to spike needlessly. To stop this from happening, type in a terminal: sudo cp /etc /fstab /etc /fstab.old && sudo nano /etc /fstab. This will make a backup of your fstab file, this is important as fstab is the file that Linux looks at before mounting your drives at bootup. This will then proceed to open the file in the nano text editor. To get rid of discard, simply remove the word discard and the comma before it from the file on all drives and then press CTRL + O and CTRL + X to save and exit. After you are satisfied, if you need trim you can run it as follows; sudo fstrim -v –all then reboot. To set up fstrim on a weekly basis, run sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer && sudo systemctl enable fstrim.service && sudo systemctl start fstrim.timer && sudo systemctl start fstrim.service. These commands will ensure that fstrim service runs once a week in Manjaro. Ubuntu does this by default so you won’t even have to worry. My scripts do this per user requests already.


Link to the guy who got me working on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcLnk-o7JIo

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