Posts by Dr Who

Re: Likely causes....

Chill. We all get downvotes for comments we thought were really great but clearly weren't. That's the beauty of the comments, they help put our own views into perspective. Stop digging and move on.

Re: DevOps Man...

Indeed. We should all shy away from mediocrity and instead make sure we check our posts for typographical errors before hitting the submit button.

Re: Very disappointing

If indeed you had no breach (although I find your explanation for the resets somewhat implausible) this is still an object lesson in the art of communicating with your customers whilst you are undertaking a seriously disruptive precautionary action.

Re: "trumpet's Da Vinci expo"

It's still arguably his name. Many, probably most, last names have their roots in something descriptive. Johnson, Thompson, Smith, Taylor, d'Arc all stem from something descriptive. They're still last names though.Not sure about Beeblebrox.

Having been a Galaxy addict, I bought a Swift and am incredibly impressed with it. At £129 quid it's a no brainer.

Well they're quite clear that it's on premise, so under their direct control.

I totally agree with you however, WTF is meant by cloud in this context. Smacks to me of a PR bod using buzz words to garner some free column inches. There's probably a NATS IT bod squirming somewhere.

In fact what is probably happening is that NATS will replace some old onsite infrastructure with some new onsite infrastructure, probably deploying machine virtualisation so that they can scale up capacity super fast in the event of a spike in load. This would make sense given the last failure resulted from overloaded server hardware due to a spike in load caused by an unforeseen use case of the NATS software.

Depends on whether it's IaaS or SaaS. If it's true SaaS such as Salesforce.com then you are completely at the mercy of the service provider.

If on the other hand you only need infrastructure services, say a bunch of VMs, on which to run your own applications, then just use two (or even three if you're really paranoid) different service providers and mirror your servers. Very easy, very cost effective, and extraordinarily reliable.

We use two different UK service providers, mirror the VMs between the two and have a third location for archive backups.

Re: Physical access required

Why would you want to give your car to one of the fathers of the Internet? Or did you mean serf?

I know, sarcasm gets you nowhere, but I couldn't resist.

Re: A-Level results

Hear hear!. The only bit I don't get is this continual comparison of engineers/techies and sales staff. It's not what you do, it's about how well you do it.

If the sales person in question is a cold calling telesales person they get paid peanuts - probably less than an equivalently skilled tech job. If they have the rare ability to make sales of tens or hundreds of millions of pounds a year they of course get paid a shed load.

Equally if I fix PC hardware or hack code I get paid peanuts. If on the other hand I write a brilliant search algorithm and pair that up with an ingenious page rank system in order to enable highly targeted advertising, I get paid a bomb. As I would if I were to invent cold fusion in my garage.

To get paid well, it's not enough to do a good job. You have to be creative, innovative and several cuts above average. It's nothing to do with engineering vs sales.

And to those who argue that the City is hoovering up all the best IT talent for huge salaries, of course they do. Finance is basically an IT industry now and they need the best software architects and network architects in the world to compete. It proves that there is indeed a a very well paid market for the best tech talent.

Re: Three weeks without being able to send mail

Without any hesitation I can recommend CloudFloor DNS (http://www.mtgsy.net) who have provided us and our customers with a top notch, highly reliable service for many years now. They're brilliant. The shocker is, their service actually costs a few pounds a month. Unbelievable isn't it! Who'd have thought that you have to pay a reasonable fee to get a good service. Just doesn't make any sense.

Re: Fiona Johnson

Reminds me of an episode of Red Dwarf where Lister is, in a virtual/drug induced world, snogging a gorgeous bird, whereas the lips he is actually kissing in the real world belong to some slobber mouthed alien beast.

Re: Nirvana.... or not

Thumb up to that. There seems to me to be an opportunity here to set up a business purely for the purpose of "co-ordinating and managing a large number of SMEs" on behalf of government departments. Based on a management fee of one percent of contract value that would be 100 million pounds on the HMRC contract alone. Sounds like a worthwhile venture to me. Who's in?

Re: "recreational terror[-ism, -ist]"

I too was greatly tickled by that particular phrase!

"Darling, just popping out for a spot of terrorism. Should be back in an hour or so. Love you."

Re: "The US has been the first to flyby every planet of the Solar System"

I hope Symon and Voland aren't programmers. Their grasp of syntax is clearly somewhat lacking.

Re: In other news:

Indeed. Which could be messy if their internal software system fails to correctly route the egress traffick, resulting in the shit hitting the fan instead of the correct target destination (the pan).

Which is very good to hear for an open source fan such as myself, but in this context makes the sums look even worse. If the software licence costs are lower, that means that an even more ridiculous and frankly unbelievable sum is being spent on development.

Re: Obligations

The most offensive stuff is not the mandatory company information but the disclaimer and confidentiality notices, which are often enormous. You'll notice from the Out-law article you posted (which is excellent and one I often refer people to) that these notices are to all intents and purposes pointless and carry no legal weight. They should never be included in a routine email footer.

Re: Predictable and not going away

Asking when rather than if your systems were/will be compromised is good security practice.

So your strategy is to make life as hard as possible for miscreants once they are in. One useful tactic might be to avoid (presumably) unencrypted password stashes called things like Extranet Oracle & SQL passwords 4.3.06.txt.

Re: Misuse of Word

The meaning of hacker in popular language has come to be the same as cracker. The two are now pretty much interchangeable. We the congoscenti will either have to find an alternative to replace the original meaning of hacker. How about code artiste or vim jockey or extreme keyboarder or even god forbid programmer? More likely we'll just have to be smug in our superior knowledge.

If I'm talking to a non-technical person I always say hacker when I mean cracker. Life's too short to fight the crowd on something which makes no difference to anyone.

Language does change. The meaning of gorgeous is literally "like a pile of of gore". How it got to mean beautiful over the aeons is anyone's guess.

Re: Makes sense

I agree. It's certainly unlikely and it does sound too simple. But it fits. Each time they switched from their emergency site back to the full site the thing died, presumably because the missing cache caused a database overload. So they then switched to the emergency site for several hours, probably to restore the cache from a backup, meaning it wouldn't have to be rebuilt organically.

Fun as it is shooting in the dark, it would be rather nice for the Beeb's technicians to provide El Reg with a full explanation, so that we can all take away the learnings (you've no idea how much I hate that phrase but I'm sure they use it a lot at the BBC).

Re: Real portrayl?

Could have been worse. They might have gone the whole hog and cast Johnny Depp as Turing. Mind you, code breaking is probably about as close to swashbuckling pirate activity as boffinry gets.

Re: The exact location of Rockall

It's easy to find. It's right in the middle of Fuckall.

You're a braver man than I Mr MacLeod. After 170 downvotes and rising on 3 posts a weaker spirit may have quit while he was behind.

I sort of see where you're coming from and you're right, we haven't found our next door planets teeming with life and we haven't had any radio signals from nearby starts, but that's a very small neighbourhood. The odds are very good indeed that in the whole universe there is other life somewhere. Probably lots of it in fact. This does not preclude the chance that Earth contains the only life in the universe, but that's a vanishingly small chance.

Re: What happened to GAGA

If you ask the guys at Indego, they'll tell you that theirs is a lot less bovver than a hover.

That's just utter bo**ocks. This has nothing to do with the cloud and everything to do with truly dreadful system administration. It could just as well have happened in a private data centre as on a cloud service. Cloud services may have their faults, but this is categorically not an example of one of them.