* Posts by Pirate Dave

1872 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2008

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Cement Pond

Mountain Oysters. Really, some parts of the pig can be left on the ground after butchering, we don't get a gold star for eating every single scrap like we're still in the midst of the Great Depression.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Cement Pond

As a Southerner, "cement pond" is still in somewhat common use, although generally used for hokey effect when a given redneck is trying to prove how "country" he/she is, often followed by tales of red and white corn-cobs, and further tales about the ingestion of various disgusting bits from a pig. Whether the phrase came from the show and was adopted by us rednecks, or was in use before the show, I can't say.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Didn't the robot have an axe?...

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Windows stopped being good....

I, too, prefer Win2k for the desktop, but 2012 was good for Server, IMHO, since the Powershell integration was better/deeper.

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Got the notification!

I finally got my "[Action Required] Upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription" notification email today. There wasn't any wavering to Google's resolve in the email, so I guess the Countdown To Zoho has begun.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Just great.

Yeah, that does look like Google is squirming a little. Good.

15 GB in 4 hours isn't too bad. That's a "start it before going to bed" kind of thing. Did you use the IMAP option or the "login to Google" option?

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Zoho email

That is good news. Thanks Ben.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Just great.

"I'm quite lucky in that I don't have many G services (android phones / Play store purchases) tied to my login, well, I have a few but i'll just have to bite the bullet on them and call it quits."

Yeah, if I move my main domain to Zoho (highly likely, unless Google recants), I'm wondering how that's going to affect my Samsung phone once Google pulls the plug on my account this summer. I've only got 2 or 3 paid-for apps on it, so I'm not terribly worried about that. But I am wondering if Android itself is going to get massive heartburn once the account is no longer valid. Or worse, the phone will basically wipe itself and I'll have to start pretty much from scratch again - contacts, text messages, pics, etc.

I'm not planning to move the main stuff to Zoho until the last possible minute, in hopes that Google will reverse their decision and save us a great deal of grief. The Zoho setup for my secondary domain only took about an hour, and most of that was waiting for the new SPF to propagate. I didn't use their "login to Godaddy's admin panel" wizard, I did things manually, but they tell you exactly what to put in the TXT and MX records (even DKIM, which I'd never setup before), so it's almost insultingly easy. I've not migrated email out of Gmail before, so I have no idea if Google lets that go quickly, or if they hit you with bandwidth throttling after a certain amount of data. But I've only got 1.5 Gigs of old email stuff, so hopefully they don't consider that "a lot" of data.

I paid Zoho the $15 for a year's service for the secondary domain, even though I'll probably never actually use it for email. IMHO, it was worth the small $ since this was the "test" for the main domain, and allowed me to skirt having to do anything drastic to the main domain. I admit, I started out thinking I was going to move the main domain yesterday, but got cold feet early in the process, and was worried that if I screwed something up, my email would be crapped-out for a day or two. That's when I came up with the idea of using the other domain to test with and leaving the main domain untouched. (sometimes I DO get good ideas right before things go very badly...). I needn't have worried, though, as the signup process was non-destructive, but you never know until you've gone through it once.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Feedback to Google

I've seen recommendations in Google's forums to use the "Send Feedback" link to let Google know how we feel about this. I've done so, and told them in quite plain language that if they continue down this path, I will leave their service completely and go to ZoHo. Maybe if enough of us complain, they'll reconsider, or at least come out with an email-only plan for much, much less than $72/year. Yeah, I still believe in the Tooth Fairy, too.

The Send Feedback link is in the Help menu (the "?" with the circle around it, which I've never used until today)

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Mixed Luck

Nah, my domain has been with them since 2006 - back when their commercials were full of bikini-clad babes washing cars or whatever it was. Scandal!

I've never had an issue with them, but I only use them for registration and DNS, not web hosting or email.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: And this is what happens when

Man, I fought the on-prem email demons for years. Blacklists, open proxies, directory digging/walking, constant door-knocking on the mail server and firewall. Nah, IMHO it's worth it to let all that stuff be Someone Else's problem (hopefully somebody better trained at it than me...).

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Zoho looks good so far. Setup was quick and easy. I'm liking it.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pint

Zoho email

My apologies for being all over this forum today. It's hard to "lose" your main email address after 16 years without feeling like you have to DO SOMETHING NOW!

I've setup one of my domains in Zoho, and it seems pretty sweet. Setup was simple, even though I did everything (SPF, dkim, mx, etc) manually instead of letting them login to my GoDaddy account and pull it directly. Their web email interface is decent, a little cluttered compared to Gmail, but definitely modern looking (well, maybe late-noughties modern).

Setting up a catch-all was as brain-dead simple as it is in Gmail, not complicated like the how-to's I read about doing it in O365. I didn't previously have email setup in the domain I used, so I can't vouch for whether their email-migration tool works or not, nor have I tried setting up any filters, which I use extensively in the gmail account for my main domain. Their account settings page looks to have plenty of knobs and buttons to tweak for various mail processing things.

So $15 for a year's use is very palatable, imho. Plus, they take Paypal, so I didn't even have to expose a credit card number.

I think I can live happily at Zoho for a while. Thanks to those of you who suggested it earlier today. Have one on me ->

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Plus addresses

Microsoft has been making a big faff recently about their coming support for plus addressing in O365. I think it starts in March. I wasn't sure what it was at first, until the boss filled me in.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Give us an easy migration Google

"If anyone from Google is reading, I just want to flick a switch and turn my me@domain.com account to a standard gmail one with the same login and keep everything except the Workplace features."

Exactly this. I'd gladly pay Google $25/year for this (provided they let us keep the catch-all processing).

Pirate Dave Silver badge

I'm seeing mail-only (mail lite) at Zoho is only $1.25/month ($15/year) for 10 GB. I don't need apps or storage, just email, so that's enough for me. Gmail shows I'm using 1.35 GB of 15, so I've got plenty of space.

I've signed up to Zoho with one of my secondary domains and am in the process of getting everything setup. Overall, it looks pretty decent so far, and does support catch-all processing. I'll try to remember to report back here once I get it going.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

I'm in luck (?), my domain is already hosted by GoDaddy.

Thanks for that link.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Interesting. Does Cloudflare actually host/store the email like Gmail does, or is it just a forwarding/filtering service that expects to send the email on your external server somewhere else?

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: This is why I've moved away from gmail

Might I ask - what is the paid service you moved to, and does it support vanity domains?

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Just great.

"Or perhaps this is something El Reg can knock up for a future article?"

I second the motion.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Bait

I don't know if it's bait and switch, but it does seem like the thing we always accused Microsoft of doing - get users addicted to the service, then start turning the screws to extract the $$$. I'll give Google some credit for letting us have it free for 15+ years, though.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Dang! It's half price for the first year though..

I haven't ventured that far into the sign-up process yet. So it goes up to $12/month in July next year? That's a bummer.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Actually, Microsoft365 is $99/year or $9/month for the family plan. So Google does have a slight edge on price. MS also has an individual M365 account for $6.99/month, which is closer in price, but more restrictive in number of users.

Also, from first glance, the personal and family accounts don't appear to support vanity domains. I could be wrong about that, but MS doesn't mention it in any of the pre-sales "Sign up now" info that I've seen so far.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Ah, hell, I hadn't thought about the Android/apps angle. That puts a different twist on things.

I've never much used Drive, I've got all the cloudy-storage goodness I could want through my O365 account at work.

The biggest reason I've stuck with Google AfD (well, aside from it being free) was their support for wildcard/catch-all email handling, and I've used that fairly extensively over the years. I don't think O365 supports that. And after all these years, I sort of prefer Gmail's web interface to the hulking monster of OWA or whatever it's called now.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

So, eh, when did Google notify the affected users? And how do we tell if we're going to lose service? I mean, assuming we haven't gotten an email from the Chocolate Factory yet. I haven't received any notice from Google that they are going to cut me off if I don't pay, nor are there any announcements about it in the Admin console, but at the same time, I'm not 100% sure what service I do have now. I've had my account since 2006, back when it was called Google Apps for Domains.

$72/year is a bit much, IMHO, considering I primarily only use it for email formy vanity domain. I guess if it's not free anymore, then it's not useful anymore, and I'll move on - maybe get another VM from Vultr for $5/month and run my own email server. Hmm, I wonder if I can still find my old Groupwise 6.5 install CD. lol.

Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Soooo close

You almost had it El Reg. The clue was right in front of you...

"decide on a "universal sound" for the silent but deadly transport mode."

Hmm, where have I heard that phrase before...? Ah, yes. Let'er rip, but make it less silent, though, for the benefit of humanity.

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Windows 95 + a few service packs

"Windows NT4 was the Novell Netware killer."

Nope, sorry, that was Win9x, at least around here. NT may have killed Netware in the large enterprise shops, but there were lots and lots of small business clients (< 10 users) that had been using Novell, Banyan, etc, previously. Then 95 came out with something that looked like file and printer sharing but with no license fees - it came "free" with a new computer. I still sold a few Novell licenses after that (well, installed them anyway), but most of the Mom-n-Pop shops were quite happy with a Win95/98 "server" in the breakroom closet, and if it crapped its pants every other week, well, they'd gotten a good deal on it, so they were OK with just rebooting it and getting back to work. That was my experience, anyway. YMMV.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pint

Best one I've read in a while.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

I agree, 95 had issues, but was better than 3.1 in several ways. The UI was a great improvement. So were long file names. Explorer was nicer than File Manager (at least until IE 4 arrived). In fact, I can safely say that Win95 was the last time I ever thought a new version of Windows had a superior UI compared to the previous version, and that lasted until Win2k (imho), after which the UI started sliding off the hill.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: "because the fool thing didn't have very good memory protection at all"

" back then PCs were still quite expensive for the average consumer"

Then eMachines came along, and put all the small computer shops out of the business of selling "custom" computers for $1000-1200. It had been hard enough competing with Gateway2000, PackardBell, and to a lesser extent, Dell. Hell, I couldn't even buy parts for the $500 that eMachines was charging for their boxes. It very quickly became "Time To Look For A Real Job"...

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

I remember the soft-modems. A couple of smallish square chips, a few small caps and resistors, and lots of green or blue fiberglass. Hard to believe it could replace the old Hayes or USR modems with all their components, but it did. ISTR this was when "driver issues" really started coming to the fore, with the arrival of the soft-modems and soft-soundcards. Suddenly crappy driver programming became hugely problematic (not to say that it's gone away today, despite what WHQL says...).

Hive View security camera customers left in the dark as some gear gives up the ghost

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Makes one wonder ...

" how long the entire "cloud" charade will continue."

Until the cow is dried up and dead. Which may take a while yet, as there's still an entire flight of eager middle-managers with eyes agleam at the prospect of using "cloud" to leverage themselves into the E-suite. Once that group flames-out spectacularly, "cloud" will become background noise again. Shoot, we may even go back to calling it "hosted" instead of "cloud".

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: Please bundle Process Explorer directly...

Life as a college PC tech got much easier when we discovered DeepFreeze. Set all of the lab and Library PCs to reboot at 3:00 AM, then Deepfreeze them. Life is good (or, at least, better).

Meta trains data2vec neural network to grok speech, images, text so it can 'understand the world'

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: So it can 'understand the world'

Yeah, our top researchers still haven't perfected the human-to-space-alien translation software yet.

Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return

Pirate Dave Silver badge

After a couple of hundred spams, the account gets restricted and the admin has to remove it from the restricted list. This is a commonplace problem with less-sophisticated users who fall for phishing scams. And some folks fall for them time after time after time.

Google leads legacy Voice phone service out behind the barn, two shots ring out

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Gmail will never die. There's too much data to be mined in those emails for Google to ever (willingly) give it up.

North Korea says it's launched a third hypersonic missile, this time reaching Mach 10

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Sure...

Mach 10? Well, maybe next time they'll turn it up to 11.

Mobile networks really hate Apple's Private Relay: Some folks find iOS privacy feature blocked on their iPhones

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Verizon

I got the notice from Verizon about their over-eager sniffing last month and opted-out immediately. Fucking spooky shit. Whoever thought that up at Verizon needs to fuck themselves vigorously with a broken light-bulb until they realize what a horrible idea it was.

It is seriously sad that the IT/Telecoms industry sees its customers as nothing more than milk cows full of juicy data to make the rich richer (and the Zucks Zuckier). I mean, I can sort of maybe understand the justification for "free" sites like Facebook, Google, etc. But not fucking Verizon, who I pay $800+/year for cell phone service. Fuckers!

<and now, back to our regularly scheduled program>

No defence for outdated defenders as consumer AV nears RIP

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Failure of capitalism

I didn't remember it either, until AC posted that it was MSAV. Then I remembered. Easy to forget about it, though. Back then, most all you had to worry about was "where has this floppy been" and ejecting the floppy before you reboot the computer. Oh, and make sure your shareware came from a reputable source. So for the most part, there wasn't much need for AV software unless you thought you had an infected floppy or file, and certainly no need for always-running AV that chews-up 1 GB+ of RAM.

Much simpler times back then.

AT&T, Verizon delay 5G C-band rollout over FAA fears of passenger plane radars jammed by signals

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: re: Why is everything suddenly a threat to our (US) democracy?

Don't forget Madonna. Or Kathy Griffin. Or most of Hollywood in 2017. All disagreeing with the results of the 2016 election. All the masturbatory marches, the rallies, and the constant denigration of everyone who voted for the Orange Guy. Don't forget Dave Chappell almost getting ostracized for daring to say that we needed to give Orange Guy a chance. I think THAT'S the "hard left" he's talking about.

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: re: Why is everything suddenly a threat to our (US) democracy?

"removing civil service protections and making employees 'at will'"

Having dealt with some of the sterling examples of Federal civil servants, I can't say that's necessarily a Bad Thing (tm). Lazy or incompetent, I don't know. I just know that some of them seem to think that "working" isn't actually part of "going to work". But hey, they're untouchable once they get in, no matter how poor they are at customer service, so they have no reason to tone-down the disdain. Just my experience though.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: re: Why is everything suddenly a threat to our (US) democracy?

Well, I'll admit, my semi-automatic firearms rarely disappoint me; politicians, not so much.

It's not so much whether it is or isn't under threat, it's why is that suddenly the catch-phrase? Sure, democracy in the US has been under threat pretty much since the country was founded, that's nothing new. But it perseveres and marches on in one form or another, wearing whatever the latest fashion is in politics, but still democracy underneath.

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Come on, El Reg, you left off the end of the quote...

"Agreeing to your proposal would not only be an unprecedented and unwarranted circumvention of the due process and checks and balances carefully crafted in the structure of our democracy, but an irresponsible abdication of the operating control required to deploy world-class and globally competitive communications networks that are every bit as essential to our country's economic vitality, public safety and national interests as the airline industry, As well, your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries."

Why is everything suddenly a threat to our (US) democracy? Or is that just the new, hip way of saying "think of the children"?

The Ghost of Windows Past haunts a street corner in Bermondsey

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: What I want to know is

We have a Linux-based signage system at work from MVix. It works fairly well, but still does soil the bed from time to time.

The thing is, it mostly displays PowerPoint files. That's the thing to keep in mind - the component that displays the image on the screen is only half of the solution, the other half is the backend software that lets the semi-sentient droids in HR determine what is going to be shown on the screen. And, for the most part, they build their slideshows in PowerPoint and import them, in spite of the fact that the MVix software can display text, graphics, and video, and do timed screen wipes, fades, etc possibly even better than PowerPoint does. But it's the familiarity that they want, so they stick to what they know. And it's the powerpoint files that cause the little display computer to crap its pants once in a while. Even in a non-Microsoft ecosystem, PowerPoint is still the root of all evil.

Windows takes a breather in London's Spitalfields

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Why did Microsoft call their sleep command "timeout"? I guess they were avoiding collision with Powershell's "sleep" command maybe?

OTOH, I didn't even know there was a "timeout" command, so I've learned something today. That's much easier than my usual hack of using "choice /t 3". (If I can remember it's called "timeout" and not sleep or wait or something else).

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

Pirate Dave Silver badge

Re: What do we do? More or less what today's lords demand from us

Ook!

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Re: What do we do? More or less what today's lords demand from us

You used the word "guild". You may be more of a nerd than a geek.

UK National Crime Agency finds 225 million previously unexposed passwords

Pirate Dave Silver badge
Pirate

Fun times

Checking the unusual but relatively permanent admin passwords from my former employer shows about half of them have been compromised. Funny enough, the compromised ones were the ones from the Windows servers we put in in 2013. None of the Novell or Linux passwords are in that list..

Also fun to check former boss and CEO accounts, all of which show as compromised.