* Posts by Trevor_Pott

6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010

One IP address, multiple SSL sites? Beating the great IPv4 squeeze

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Re: chmod 0755 or similar...

Crud? Crud? Why you young whipper snapper, I'll have you know...

...and get off my goddamned lawn!

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Re: Thumbs up, but have to respectfully disagree with some things

A) I'm sorry, NAT has a purpose. That purpose is renumbering. SO I'm not listening to anything else you have to say about IPv6. Your opinions are now invalid.

B) You don't have to have one certificate with all the domains on your server using my method. Only one certificate per server {} block. Each server {} block gets it's own cert and you can have multiple server {} blocks point to a single backend server, if you want.

So um...NEXT!

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Re: TREVORRRRR!!!!!

There shouldn't be a chmod 0777 in any of those files...I removed that after I found out that SELinux was the culprit...

Damn it, did I use the wrong files? <grumble>

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Re: Microsoft TMG

TMG has the best thing Microsoft ever made. R.I.P.

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Re: Simple answer

They supply a media converter. I build my router out of an Atom and CentOS. :)

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Re: Letsbecareful

Certbot is your friend. Certbot is always your friend.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

I use SixxS tunnels. They randomly stop working and cause problems. I'm not a fan.

Even if they did work, however, there's still the renumbering problem, which was never solved. Every other complaint I have aside, renumbering is a massive problem that you simply can't get around without 1:1 NAT, something which causes the purists to ooze out of the wall and start wailing about how the world isn't fair and we're trying to take away their toys.

Which means, of course, that you have to choose between downtime and a :lot: of administrative effort whenever you need to fail over between links (because you don't get BGP access for SMB internet connections) or you have to very carefully pick your software such that it doesn't require some stupid end-to-end configuration because there's some gods-be-damned IPv6 purist working as a dev at the wretched urine factory that made the app you want to use.

So you know what? Not so fond of IPv6. Maybe if it wasn't drafted by, and subsequently lorded over by, a bunch of elitist fuckbaloons that don't give a rat's ass about anyone who can't stump up a few million a year in internet connectivity I might care. Bunch since the poxy whoresons decided to just abandon the majority to the wolves because we "don't matter", I'm not particularly inclined to give them a free ride.

You're Donald Trump's sysadmin. You've got data leaks coming out the *ss. What to do

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Re: seriously Trevor

Addendum re this section: "First off, Caesium 137 isn't all that harmful. It decays via beta emission into Barium 137(m) which pukes out a gamma ray on its way to ground state. The Barium is what's bad for your health."

With science not being your strong suit, I'm assuming humour probably isn't either. So you should read that paragraph with a smiley at the end. Barium itself isn't bad for you (in smallish quantities), but the gamma ray that Barium 137(m) pukes out on its way to Barium 137 is.

More accurately: one gamma ray is statistically unlikely to be bad for you, but a whole bunch of them probably are. To wit: even if one gamma ray it hit some DNA, or knocked free an oxygen somewhere that could mess with DNA your natural DNA repair mechanisms would handle it. Typically, you'd need to get dosed with a lot of high-energy photons in order to do more damage than your body could repair.

We're talking statistics here, however. Theoretically you could get dinged by a gamma ray from decay of any of the many radioactive isotopes naturally present in your body - or randomly hit by a cosmic ray - and have everything align against you such that your DNA repair mechanisms missed the alteration and you get cancer. That's life.

The more high energy photons you're exposed to, the greater the chances you'll develop a cancer. This is less of an issue with alpha and beta radiation, but I'd stay away from things that emit neutrons in their decay chain. Again: quantity is relevant.

If you want to freak out about something, however, why don't you go study the effects of mercury on humans and start learning about how it is being concentrated via the food chain and posing an actual threat to us...

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Re: seriously Trevor

First off, Caesium 137 isn't all that harmful. It decays via beta emission into Barium 137(m) which pukes out a gamma ray on its way to ground state. The Barium is what's bad for your health.

Now, a single atom of Caesium converting into Barium and emitting some electrons and a high energy photon is statistically unlikely to harm you. Think "one in a number large enough to take you until the end of the universe to write out" chances of giving you cancer. I wouldn't want to sleep on several kilgrams of Caesium 137, but you are not going to run into large quantities of Caesium 137 due to the Fukushima event.

If all the Caesium 137 - and Iodine, and Strontium and all the other nasty crap - released by Fukushima were to be gathered up into a ball it would really, - really - suck to be anywhere near that. As in "your skin melting from your face and you die in agony" levels of bad. Fortunately, the way it all went kablooie means the radioactive badness was dispersed pretty far and wide.

Even accounting for concentration of isotopes through the food chain - and remember, most of the really nasty stuff has some pretty short half lives - you're still not getting to "omg zombie mutant cancer fishes that will kill your children" territory here. You're talking about "irrelevantly increased background radiation" for the overwhelming majority of the world and "mild-to-irrelevant increased cancer risk" to a few specific areas in Japan proper. Areas that have been fenced off.

Maybe you should stop pissing your pants in terror whenever the word "radiation" is used and learn how the world works. Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to take my life in my hands and go eat a radioactive banana. OMG potassiums!

P.S. I had pacific tuna for lunch today. It was delicious. I think I'll order my next bottled water from Hawaii. I'd actually be less afraid of that than where most of the bottled water on this continent comes from (Ontario), largely because there's less pollution and horrible metals in most Hawaiian water sources. They'll do a lot more damage to me a lot more quickly than a few high energy photons and some emitted electrons.

P.P.S. Seriously, how do you cope with flying. Do you have any idea how much radiation you're exposed to on a transcontinental flight? Do you avoid medical imaging? Egads, man...

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Re: White House Leaks. Leaky Leaky.

made it about 1/3 the way through and realized I was reading Trevor

*smoochies*, Alastair. :)

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Re: seriously Trevor

Bye. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Also: I really don't care what you say about the queen. She's a big girl and I assume she can handle herself. I'm not nationalist, especially for the remnants of some other country that invaded this continent, committed genocide several times then established colonies without any real representation.

As for pooping on the US of A and it's grand poobah, well...I calls 'em like I sees 'em. If he wasn't a douchecanoe there wouldn't be so many people leaking (or need to cover so much up) and thus no point in writing such an article. Don't blame me for not having an economical relationship with the truth.

As for the Fukushima radiation not really hurting anything...please point to any actual evidence of where it has actually hurt something. And while you're at it, maybe understand something about radiation.

Science! It works, bitches.

Get this: Tech industry thinks journos are too mean. TOO MEAN?!

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Re: As usual...

While I agree, this goes both ways. Yes, there absolutely are journalists, editors and so forth who basically refuse to report anything positive because they view it as their personal mission in life to report only scandals, misery and negativity. Their story is always an attempt to see someone or some organization brought low and they feel mighty in their quest to vanquish that dratted windmill.

On the other side, however, there are always the True Believers who are just as guilty of dragging up ancient, debunked myths, FUD and liberally misapplying a whitepaper for the enterprise to the SMB. They clog up comment sections, flood social media and turn to other media outlets to voice their own negativity and hate.

In our collective race to vilify and dehumanize we've lost that sense of wonder that is, quite frankly, why most of us got into this business in the first place. Curiosity and an endless sense of possibility have been replaced with cynicism and outright paranoia. A desire to serve the greater good gives way to a siege mentality and seeing villains where none exist, and malice where simple human error is more likely.

Anyone who says something positive about something we dislike is a shill. Anyone who says something negative about something we like is a troll. So liberally do we cast our aspersions that all of us on all sides have become pre-emptively defensive. We lash out at others not because of what we are sure they've said, but because so many times in the past we have heard hateful and hurtful narratives begin that way.

We fear being labelled a shill, or a troll, so we don't speak out about what we know to be true. We hold our tongues, we temper our comments, we allow ignorance to be perpetuated and we participate in it through acts of omission, downregulating of speech into political correctness and avoidance of controversy.

We can broach difficult topics and speak uncomfortable truths without lashing out. By the same token, we must not lash out at those who speak that which we do not want spoken...especially if the truths being disbursed are not hateful and cynical, but examples of joy, or at least reasoned moderation.

The first duty of us all is to the truth...but the hardest truth of all to recognize is that the world is not so filled with bleakness, hate, polarization and cynicism as we both allow ourselves to believe and insist that all others also take to heart. The world simply is, and it is filled with people who mostly do the best they can.

And when everything else on the airwaves is unrelentingly negative taking time to talk about what's not horrible can be the revolutionary act each of us actually needs.

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Re: Press' Responsibility

'Enlightened' self-interest almost never is. It's just the term Randians use to mean 'sociopathic selfishness'.

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Re: Press' Responsibility

"The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform"

The first duty of every journalist - indeed, ever decent person, in my view - is to the truth, not to loyalty.

'We need a new Geneva Convention to protect all citizens from snoops'

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I will not believe Microsoft as a corporation collectively gives a rat's ass about privacy until Endpoint Antichrist is fired in disgrace, and blackballed from the industry with the most vehement prejudice possible.

As South Australia blacked out, PM's office was told renewable power was not to blame

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Re: Just the beginning

As a matter of fact, you are misinformed. From your statement I'm betting that you're referring to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). Most thorium proponents who haven't read up much do. The US ran molten salt reactors in the 1960s (a type of reactor that is the most likely candidate for Thorium use today), however, the MSRE didn't actually use thorium during the experiments.

Now, there have been many Thorium reactors built and run over the years. A smallish Thorium reactor actually isn't that hard to build, and they don't technically have to be molten salt reactors. (That's just the sanest way to do it at any scale.) The ticket here is that you can't just shove Thorium into a reactor, wave a magic wand and poof have power.

So here's the deal: the Thorium you can pull out of the ground on Earth is Th232. In order to get Th232 to split you need to modify it, generally into u233 via the absorption of a Neutron. In order to do that you need a neutron donor. This mean feeding the thing materials that barf neutrons.

Back in oldentimes, that was easy. We cranked that stuff out of breeder reactors all the time. Today, we do this a lot less. What's more, while you can technically crank a Thorium reactor with just about anything that will emit neutrons, in reality only a few isotopes are ever going to be okay for civilian use. This is because, for one reason or another, they're considered really, really stupid for people to try to steal for nuclear proliferation purposes.

The big problem we have today is that we just don't make a lot of those isotopes any more. (Consider, for example, that we're almost out of Plutonium for RTGs.) What we do make has everyone under the sun - from existing Thorium burners to researchers - clamoring for it. Also, in case you hadn't noticed, but international politics have become pretty xenophobic and awful of late, which doesn't help.

So, if you really want to go Thorium in a big way, you're going to have to build a Thorium program. That means building non-Thorium reactors to provide your jump-start isotopes, the security apparatus around their use and transport etc. etc.

You are also most likely to try to use Thorium in a molten salt reactor these days (for various practicality reasons), which means additional investment in facilities which clean impurities from the salts. Oh, and you have to figure out what to do with all the Neptunium.

The other alternative is you just wait around and hope to your deity that the proposed experiments to modify a CANDU reactor to burn Thorium work and are considered generally safe. Almost everyone has CANDU reactors, so if we can just stuff Thorium in there maybe we can run a hybrid facility with one reactor that's not Thorium and the rest that are.

It's important to note here that the big drivers behind the CANDU Thorium cycle are the Chinese. This is because they're not batshit crazy about nuclear waste like the Americans (and their empire of lacky nations) are. The Americans think piling up a bunch of highly radioactive nuclear waste (almost all of which could be refined and used to build bombs) without any long term storage facility is a really great idea an everyone should do that.

The Chinese, on the other hand, think that's raw lunacy and said "hey, can we take this pile of highly radioactive slag and burn it?" (Answer: yes, you can do that in a Thorium reactor. They're great for that.)

But the Chinese are rational about such things and basically the entire rest of the world (except India) isn't. The Chinese are perfectly willing to take their 300+ nuclear reactors worth of waste, drive the waste via heavily armed whatever on a shoot-first-and-take-questions-never approach to a giant Thorium facility and burn the whole thing until all that's left is a bunch of Neptunium and some decay products that have half lives so long they're not a threat.

There is no way you get a western nation to make that kind of decision. "Nuclear" is a boogyman and some group somewhere will terrify the populace into screaming their heads off. So meanwhile, we all live with giant piles of insanely radioactive material for the next several thousand years and expensive electricity whilst the Chinese build a way to dispose of nuclear waste, drive down electricity costs and, oh yeah, figure out how to turn a really small amount of naturally neutron-emitting material into something that can power humanity for the next million years.

That's why it takes 50 years to build a proper full-scale Thorium program. (See: India.) Because the US won't give you what you need to start burning Thorium today even though they are literally sitting on metric tonnes of it that they don't have a long term facility for.

Because politics. Because humans are morons. Because we live in the darkest possible timeline and everything is awful forever.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: Just the beginning

*sigh*

Thorium isn't some magic want. You need a lot of U-232. This means breeder reactors to start. Then it takes 30 years to ramp up to being able to even use Thorium in a reactor, which needs a completely different reactor again.

Realistically, going from "we have no Thorium program" to "burning Thorium to make power" is a 50 year project, and it involves breeding isotopes of fissionables that can be used to make badda-big-boom. That is politically difficult for most to accept, and practically difficult to safeguard and protect through the life of the project.

Not saying it can't be done, but it isn't the sort of thing that fits within one PM's term, and doesn't occur at the stroke of one PM's pen. This is the sort of thing that is a national infrastructure program that requires broad multi-stakeholder support and a commitment by the populous to see it through over generations.

Lovely. Now someone's ported IoT-menacing Mirai to Windows boxes

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Re: Bored of hearing crap about IoT

To late. IPv6 idiots baked publicly addressable IPs for every device directly into the standard and cockblock any attempt whatsoever to remedy this idiocy.

Grumpy Trump trumped, now he's got the hump: Muslim ban beaten back by appeals court

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Re: "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!"

"Trump can't be elected for more than two terms."

There is more than one Trump.

Dynasties. They're a thing.

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Re: "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!"

"everything else is alternative facts and fake news"

And? So? What does that mean?

If the people whose votes actually matter only care about alternative facts and fake news then why does the truth, evidence or actual facts matter? Have you even read 1984? It has some lessons about how you can run a post-truth nation that I think you missed.

I promise you: Steve Bannon didn't miss those lessons at all.

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Re: "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!"

Uh...what? "He made the promise, it's up to him to keep it within the bounds of the law and the Constitution of the United States."

Stop right there, buddy. That's not how this works. Trump made promises. Trump drained the swamp. Trump shook up Washington. Everything that didn't happen exactly as he said it would is because of obstruction by disgusting progressive liberals who hate America. The only way to make America great again is to elect Trump a second time. And then a third! And a fourth! Never elect someone who is not Trump!

This thing where you think Trump voters are going to look at Trump's record as though he hast o play by any rules whatsoever is...wrong. That simply isn't how his base performs communes with alternate facts.

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Re: "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!"

"But to what end? Now Trump has blown his load early, he's got nothing to do but twiddle his thumbs for 4 years."

There is plenty he hasn't ruined yet. Give him time.

Senator wants a piece of Pai: FCC boss blasted for ripping up schools, libraries internet report

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Re: you must know the drill by now . . .

I did not disagree that the people - both those in charge and those being led - actively want the Brawndoing of America...I'm just saying that it's ridiculously shortsighted. Once the 1% have sucked every last bent copper out of America, which nation will take them in and let them repeat the process?

Okay, well, the UK and Australia...but really, they'll probably have ruined themselves by the time the US milked dry anyways...

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Re: you must know the drill by now . . .

If you don't educate your electorate where will the skill come from to create an economy that can enrich the 1%?

If you don't allow your economy to enrich the 99%, how will that money ever find its way to the 1%?

The 1% can only buy so much stuff from one another...

More tech companies join anti-Trump battle, but why did some pay for his inauguration?

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And the best way to weaken an enemy from the inside is polonium.

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Re: Seriously, what do you expect them to do?

If the bad guys take over, you do what you are expected to do: fight 'em until you can't.

That is what I expect them - and everyone else - to do. Full stop.

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These companies oppose one particular executive order, and not Trump in general

Which makes them collaborators. Anyone who works with the enemy, for any reason...

IBM's Marissa Mayer moment: Staff ordered to work in one of 6 main offices – or face the axe

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Re: Up the Organization

Senior managers are why marketing is such a clusterfuck.

This many standards is dumb: Decoding 25Gb Ethernet and beyond

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Sorry, not quite correct. You're confusing layers of the OSI model.

Standards with multiple lanes - which includes the 4-lane 10GbE standards - split the signals at the physical layer and then reconstitute them at the physical layer.

Say, for example, that you had 10Gbit of data coming into your XAUI-based 10GbE NIC. The 10GbE silicon would split the data stream (which it sees as a stream of 1s and 0s, not at packets) into 4 lanes of traffic and fire them out to the interface.

The interface would then either dump the signals onto copper as radio waves (each lane being it's own chunk of spectrum) or forward these to an optical transceiver. If sent via copper then the interface and silicon on the receiving end need to be able speak the same number of lanes with the same kind of encoding. So if you are using XAUI you are probably using 10Gbase-CX4 as your copper medium, for example, and you'll need some silicon somewhere in there that can pick up the 4 lanes of traffic emitted and put that back into a single 10Gbit stream that gets dumped onto the PCIe bus.

If, however, there are optical transceivers in play this is different again. The optical transceiver will take the data stream it gets (4 lane, 10 lane or just one lane) and convert that into light according to the standard it is designed for. This may mean that a 10Gbit stream from the application layer is broken into 4 2.5Gbit streams at the NIC silicon then reconstituted into a single 10Gbit optical stream that then goes through the same process in reverse.

It's also equally possible that your single 10Gbit stream goes from application layer all the way to the transceiver as a single 10Gbit stream, but the transceiver then cuts it into 100 different colours before firing down the fiber.

When optical transceivers are involved the general rule of thumb (that doesn't always apply, but let's ignore that for a moment) is that if you have two optical transceivers that speak the same optical standard they can communicate with one another, regardless of the underlying silicon/copper signal architecture. If, however, you are trying to connect using copper (I.E. forgoing the use of expensive transceiver hardware) then you can only connect up nodes if the underlying silicon can understand one another.

Hope that helps.

Supermicro boasts of secret super server Silicon Valley win

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Re: Whose DC is it - Intel's maybe?

Why would Intel buy Supermicro servers? Intel make their own server boards.

Don't worry, America: Elon Musk says he'll have a word with Trump

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Elon Muck is a goddamned collaborator.

Australia to review effectiveness of ISPs' copyright-defending website blocks

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Re: not good enough!

I can think of at least three different ways to do this that don't break physics. Backdooring crypto is a lot harder than some metamaterials tech.

So you want to roll your own cloud

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Re: Branding

Given that vOneCloud is just a "rebranded" OpenNebula with some of the install effort already done for you, I'm willing to bet that's in the manual somewhere. Most likely some thing you change in a .yaml file in /etc/ somewhere.

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: You got it all wrong!

Completely disagree. If you have to tinker with the guts of something to make it work, the thing isn't worth running in the first place. If, however, you can get back up and running by taking workloads/data/config and reinjecting into a clean setup and be up and running in minutes, you're golden.

Desired state configs with software that actually works is infinitely better than boosting one's own ego welding disparate pieces of shite together. I don't want to be indespensible, nor to make some other IT guy indespensible. I want a turnkey solution. And would ya look at that, they actually exist.

If I ever get to the point where I need to start worrying about "scale" enough that I am breaking the solutions on the table, then I'm in the world where I can just turn to VCE or Microsoft and buy my clouds pre-canned at rack scale.

Remember that different approaches make sense at different scales. Just because it's financially viable for Google to lock a bunch of PhDs in a room and have them reinvent the wheel every 18 months doesn't mean that's remotely rational for someone talking about setting up a two site solution in some colos.

Beauty of small deployments? I can test it all at the scale I intend to use for the next few years before I deploy. We'll worry about bigger once there's enough revenue to hire dedicated full time nerds to babysit. And that's an increasingly long way off, as the turnkey stuff gets better and better.

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Re: Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

If I weld it together out of hope and BBQed unicorns, how do my business partners continue the solution after I've been whacked by the tiny handed fuhrer's jackbooted Twitter gestapo?

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I intend to start with Backup as a Service and DR as a Service, but want to offer basic Infrastructure as a Service rather quickly. I also want a platform capable of delivering Platform as a Service as a vet and verify the templates for such.

There is money to be made there in the simple fact that not everyone is going to put their information into the tiny, tiny hands of the USA. Beyond that, there is value in being a local provider. Someone who can take your data, shove it on a hard drive and drive it down to you after an outage event.

I don't want to challenge Azure for every little thing, nor Amazon. It would be nice, but doing so is more expensive than it is remunerative. I just want to milk the most lucrative parts, and the ones where people are more likely to want to "buy local".

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Re: Euro Versions

I cannot see the e-mails on comments, but you can contact me directly through http://www.trevorpott.com

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Re: Backup and restore?

Claiming a final winner will be quite the journey, I think. A lot of learning to do before I get there.

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Re: "print money"

Who needs to go toe to toe? They want to make billions. I'm happy carving out a few hundred thousand a year. An irrelevance to them, but the ability to copy my customers' data onto a hard drive and drive it down the road to them when things go phut is something that actually matters to some folks.

I don't want the whole pie, mate. Just a nice, comfortable niche. :)

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Re: Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

IIRC, ProxMox doesn't do full SDDC-style isolation. That said, it's been a couple of years since I really dug into it, it's probably worth looking at again.

Not having the billing piece might be a bit of a killer though...

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Re: Seems dodgy

Open source. No real money for marketing, what ya going to do? ;)

That said, the VM provided seems fine. I've been poking at it for about a week now, and I can't see anything compromising about it. It just seems like someone packaged up OpenNebula on top of CentOS 7 and did the standard customizations so that when you deploy from OVA it doesn't do silly things like have its networking explode.

Having tried to install OpenNebula from scratch onto CentOS myself, I have to say I appreciate the packaging. OpenNebula isn't the easiest thing to get up and running the way it should be.

That said, I do think I might actually know someone who knows someone who is part of the vOneCloud team. Worth pointing it out to them. ;)

What might HPE do with SimpliVity?

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Re: Inventing Converged Infrastructure - Again

Dude, it was like 5 in the morning and they were servers flying through clouds.

Hush.

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Re: Facts

It will change down the road if one of the big vendors has sufficiently good reason to make it change. Alternately, you can use SimpliVity's technology to provide dedupe without necessarily using it as the underpinning of an HCI-like storage solution. There are plenty of ways to skin that cat, but I am putting my money on "HPE gets Microsoft to change the rules".

Change. It's the only constant in the universe.

Memory loss: Toshiba puts chip biz up for sale

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I hope WD buys them. Makes great SSDs. Lots of SSDs. The most SSDs. For the love of Jibbers someone start making more SSDs!

I'm sick of this supply problem.

HPE buying SimpliVity is like a 'unicorn barbecue' – HCI boss man

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Re: But does it really Scale?

Man, if only I wasn't bound by NDA, I'd kick your ass so hard over this bullshit FUD...

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Re: Scale? Great in theory

Sorry, but you are presenting alternative facts as truths here.

Data loss events with Scale were way back in the old days before Scale was HCI, and IIRC, they involved not doing things as per the manual. Since then, a lot has changed. The entire underlying Scale storage platform has changed - at least twice - as has Scale's business model. (They've gone from external storage to HCI.)

I simply do not believe that there have been spontaneous data loss events with the Scale HCI platform, especially since the conversion to the HEAT storage engine. Indeed, I've had quite the run of bad hard drives (thanks, Dell) myself, and the system has adjusted brilliantly to each event.

Also, you know, I have spent literally hundreds of hours over the past year putting a concerted effort into trying to break Scale, to little avail. (There is geek cred to being able to bug report neat things in front of a Slack channel full of many of one's professional heroes.)

Scale isn't the most feature rich solution out there. This isn't because KVM is in some way limited, but becuase Scale automate or choose not to expose all features to the client. Fair enough. That's a design choice.

But what they do expose is pretty badass. It's easy to use, and above all it is solid. I bet my own business on Scale. Many of my customers now run Scale. My lab's infrastructure runs on Scale. I kick the crap out of their stuff - both GA and beta - all day, every day and have been doing so for over a year now.

There is nothing wrong with Scale Computing's HCI solutions. Oh, I could give a seminar on where I think they are off on business focus in one area, or where I don't think partnerships or development are going fast enough. I've had those conversations with them any number of times. But the tech itself is solid.

As for discussions of market share being too small, well...I'm bound by NDA and can't go into detail, but you are (unsurprisingly) not accurate here either. Scale has enough flowing through to justify an IPO, but they are also patient enough to wait for the right time. This SimpliVity deal has proven that "right now" isn't it.

And why should they? Between existing customers, and some of the deals in late stages they'll be profitable soon enough. Scale's channel partners are enthusiastic to the point of religion, and their customers (myself included) are basically a cult.

Scale only has to play the long game - and believe me, they're aware of all the possible scenarios, as we debate it all in excruciating detail regularly - and they'll win. They can either buy out their backers and stay a privately held company, or IPO at time of their choosing. Their backers seem (so far) cool with the idea of taking time and aren't pushing for some massively leveraged IPO with shockingly punitive run rates gushing red ink.

Scale has problems, don't get me wrong. any company does. What they aren't is a company that peddles broken gear. Debate the features or "inflexibility" or various design choices all you want, but don't spread "alternative facts" about them. They don't deserve it, and neither do El Reg's readers.

H0LiCOW! Hubble's constant update paves way for 'new physics'

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: "Mysterious Dr X says, Universe is NOT Expanding" at CanadaFreePress

Just admit it, you're the TimeCube guy, aren't you?

UK ISPs may be handed cock-blocking powers

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

That's a fantastic thing. removing the ability to completely censor information is always a good thing.

CIA boss: Make America (a) great (big database of surveillance on citizens, foreigners) again!

Trevor_Pott Gold badge

Re: The Phoenix Syndrome (voting libertarian)

@Swarthy: except everything you said was bullshit.

Your choices were "everyone has their throat slit, their families' throat's slit, and everyone they ever knew's throat's slit" (Trump) or "a smallish chunk of people get beheaded but for the most part everything is status quo" (Clinton). Or, you could vote that you, personally, only get slapped in the face, while most of the rest of the country is randomly pushed into vats of acid (third party candidates).

Of course, you also knew full well that voting third party was futile and was never, ever going to amount to anything. But you voted that way anyways, instead of considering anyone other than yourself.

Your system sucks. Fix it. But don't waste your vote when so much is on the line. Join a political party and get them to change how they do things. Had this been Sanders versus Trump we wouldn't be in this situation. That's an example of where the system broke down, and nobody seems to give enough of a fuck in the US to actually fix it.

At least here in Canada we're having massive national debates about virtually all aspects of our electoral process, in large part because you guys showed us what not to do.

P.S. No third party stood a chance. This isn't because third parties can't win - the US has had changes in the bipartisan setup over it's history - but because your third party candidates were fucking lunatics. They didn't have a clue what they were doing and lacked either enough charisma to fake it or the osmium testes to just bullshit straight through. None of your third party candidates had a complete platform that was ready to lead a nation, nor enough money to buy one after the fact.

If you want a viable third party, get a platform together, get some politicians with history and cred to back it, build some consensus, put together enough money to make a real run of it, and you'll probably win. Trump has shown us that the US is ready for a third way. There just don't happen to be any leaders (or financiers) capable of forging that path.