Got a used business laptop and found a recessed dongle in it. The original owner says they have no clue, that it’s been in there since they got it. There’s no way a dongle is keeping this thing running, is there? I’ve already swapped the OS, if that matters at all
Update: yubikey! Thank you all for the information, I’m definitely still learning
Just swapped to mint (mate) so it’ll take me a minute to find out how to do that. Will update when I find out. Posted this as I headed out the door, not expecting answers to pop up anywhere near this quickly on a community with a post per month. I am endlessly surprised and delighted by lemmy
The command you’re looking for is
lsusb. There’s going to be a lot in there, but for a security token like that, you’re probably looking for something that says “yibikey”, “Fido”, or “u2f”.Thank you! I do have a question though. What does the “ls” in lsusb stand for? I’ve found several query commands that begin with ls and it might help me remember them a bit better if I understand what they mean
I don’t know it’s proper name but “list” is an easy way to remember it. Want to see a list of what’s in a folder? ls. Want to see a list of USB devices? lsusb.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ls
Alright, that’s not hard to remember. Thank you!
List of PCI devices? lspci.
lsorlis also often used as an option/switch that is passed to another program to list something. Want to list all active Screen sessions?screen -ls. Want to list all mounted filesystems?mount -lOh yeah, you should find lots of tutorials on identifying unknown devices in mint. It probably is a yubikey like others have said; but it would be a good way to teach yourself a useful linux skill if you want to learn it.
Found it! It was listed incredibly verbosely, fully spelling out yubikey and then their website. Thank you!