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
What operating system did you put on it? Should be able to find it in your devices list. Or at least a device id to work backwards from.
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!