Posts by l8gravely

Re: Proxmox 8.x VM migrations hang with Ryzen gear

I've been playing (lightly) with ProxMox on an old UCS system with Intel CPUs and gobs of memory and network bandwidth. It seems to be working, but I haven't done any major work on it. I really should setup some big VMs, run 'stress' inside them, and then start doing migrations back and forth. So far I've been impressed, but not quite wild about how it all hangs together. I wish they would split the interface up a bit more to make the VMs be more central to the display of what's going on. But that's more of a what am I used to type thing.

As for AMD VMotion problems, that's news and a bit worrying. I wonder what's causing the problem? So what made you fail proxmox, besides the VMotion problems? How did you think of it overall? And if not ProxMox or VMware, what other options have you looked at?

I've also got another client with a TrueNAS storage cluster and .... it's Active/passive. And failover takes quite a chunk of time. So I'm really hesitant to do upgrades and failovers. My old Netapp boxes (which this replaced) just keep chugging along due to some legacy CIFS volumes which just don't quite work when trying to Robocopy them off the Netapp (old 8.x in 7-mode... sigh) but I do have to say Netapp makes damn nice bulletproof gear. It just runs and runs and runs. And it shows.

I've had it from Eric's mouth himself that he screwed up sendmail's config format by optimizing for computer time instead of human time. The monstrosity that is their m4 based configuration language to *generate* the .cf files is just icing on the cake.

Plan 9

I've got a treasured copy of Plan9 NiB sitting on my shelves, with manuals and everything. I really wish I could find the time to take it out and use it. The big gotcha today is a web browser honestly.

Having using various job scheduling tools, gsh (global shell), shell splitters to push stuff out to clients (tried cfengine, using ansible in a few places...) and all those other tools over the years, I have to say Plan 9 is seductive in alot of ways.

And maybe it's time to bring it back now that we can fire up VMs/containers and such easily now for testing and playing around. The GUI will be a problem, but maybe just abstracting it ontop of wayland where you have a single window that takes the full screen and Plan9 just runs it's magic inside it would be a way to play?

Re: Thank you Liam

The problem is that every library was written to help abstract out annoying to write code, or repetitive code. But every application or user needs just 50% of the library. It's just a completely different 50% for each and every project.

So if you throw away abstraction, sure, you can run really quite leanly and on smaller systems. But once you use abstractions because (like linux) you run across a metric crap ton of different architectures and systems and busses, then you need abstractions and then you get bloat.

How many of you grow your own veg and raise your own meat? I bet you all pop down to the local shop and pickup your food. Or go out and have someone make it for you in a restaurant. You've just abstracted out the light and lean process of doing it yourself! Sheesh!

So yes I'm being annoying, and no I don't have an answer for software bloat beyond pointing out that different people have different needs, likes and wants. And trying to satisfy as many of those at once is what makes software (and even hardware!) such a problematic edifice.

KVM on linux works nicely...

KVM can be clunky at times, but it does work and work well. It's the VMotion that people will miss the most. But Cisco has been screwing that up with their various software packages that freak out for some reason if you VMotion them, which kinda defeats the entire purpose of having them be VMs in the first place....

Re: chromebooks suck

I bought the mother-in-law a chromebook 10 years ago because she kept screwing up her windows 7 (?) laptop no matter how I locked it down. And since she's a technophobe and passive-aggressive about asking for help... I just gave in and got her a chromebook. It's been awesome. Just minor niggles over all that time. I just recently replaced it because alot of sites aren't supporting the older 32bit version of chrome anymore, so I got her a new $400 one. Better screen and keyboard, and it will just *work* for her needs. She's happy, I'm happy. And I expect it to last her another 10 years.

This seems like a win win to me. Less crap in the skip to be recycled (or not). and less support hassles for me.

Re: EMACS or death

I love emacs key bindings for basic editing tasks, and even reading emails using vm (viewmail). But hacking it... in elisp? No way... not going to happen, ever. Unfortunately.

I keep wishing I could use other tools with the emacs editing keystrokes. It's what my fingers are programmed for. Do I use vi/vim for quick edits? Sure! But then I find myself doing :wq! in emacs, or C-xs in vim and it all goes to hell in a handbasket for a second or two of confusion. LOL!

Of course you have to swap capslock and ctrl to make this all work well. I usually do it at the keyboard or BIOS level if I can, just do I don't have to do it inside the OS for each and every one I use.

Now get off my lawn, punk!

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

You guys obviously have more money than you know what to do with. Or a totally an*l boss who has the pull to get the right system setup. Bravo!

why keep pop3 enabled then?

My question is why you even had POP3 enabled if the standard was to only support IMAP? Sure, you might need it for some wierd clients, but you push them off to a different server, or lock them down some other way.

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

I ended up replacing my Brother MFC-8860DN unit not because it wasn't working, but because it was so out of support that drivers were getting harder and harder to support. I wish Brother would just relase the source, it's not that magical pixie dust that it needs to be hidden away, it's just a BRScript (postscript like language) they need to support. So anyone, my old unit only did BRScript v2, and they're utpo v4 and v2 is pretty much only older 32bit compat distros. I didn't want to keep running older Debian relases just for printing.

So of course I replaced it with another Brother Laser Printer. I hope I get another 14 years out of it.

emacs for mail reading is wonderful!

I'm still, 30 years on, using a package called 'vm' or 'viewmail' in emacs to read and write most of my emails. It's quicker and simpler and my fingers know all the shortcuts. And more importantly, I can edit text in emacs much much much quicker and less painfully than in almost any other tool. I know enough to be productive.

But I hate lisp, in all it's forms. elisp (what emacs is written in) is a mystery to me. I've just never wrapped my brain around it even after all these years. I just find all the fingernail clippings in my source code to be obnoxious. But I still love my email tool, even when I have to goto another client for html only or graphical emails (phone mail client handles those if need be) which I can't deal with otherwise. And I miss a ton of spam crap and can whip through hundreds of emails efficiently.

Most email reader tools today are just point and click (or poke and prod on the phone/ipad) and just suck for any serious or largescale work. They're easy to use at first, but then you hit the limits and your productivity just drops into the toilet.

In-law support is awesome!

I have a mother-in-law who is a wonderful lady, but terrible with technology. I got a 32bit Chromebook way back in 2013 and it was awesome. Before that she would regularly bork her windows (8? 7? dunno...) laptop and have to call me for help. And being that I was 30 minutes away, didn't have windows at home and she was horrible at reading what was said on the screen... and terrified of making a mistake. Well let's say that it was simpler to toodle on down and help her out than spend two hours plus on the phone.

The chromebook (which still runs!) was amazing. She could read her email, see web pages, etc. All very simple and very easy for her to get around on. Occasionally problems popped up, but not often.

I ended up replacing it _only_ because chrome was 32bit only and stuck on version 78 and smugmug wouldn't load on there. $250 later, she's got a new, bigger screen chromebook and she's happy. I'm happy. And I expect this to be her last one ever.

And she can happily click on links, hit dodgy web sites, and I don't care. Sweet.

And we're now even closer to that ideal where I can get the father-in-law off his laptop and onto a chromebook as well, once all his apps move to the cloud as well. So it's a win in alot of ways, even though it's a loss in others. But for supporting family members, it's a total win!

Re: It's DNS

As some one who was working on $WORK's external DNS yesterday and had my home internet go down just after the changes.... my heart started beating just a wee bit faster until I figured out I didn't take down all of our global company. Whew.... :-)

Re: Pinball Wizard Master fell asleep

Elf needs food, badly!

Re: Noisy installers suck.

Obviously the developers of Java don't believe in this at all either, since every damn failure is a font of useless error reporting. As is python exception reporting too at times.

But I get that it's hard to find the right medium.

Re: Good thinking that man

You do know that Starship doesn't use Liquified Hydrogen as fuel, don't you? It's using Methane, which is quite different, even if it does have hydrogen in the molecules.

Re: "execute his target script 16384 times"

I bet he assumed that cron was just a fire off once type batch system, and that old jobs would be never run again. He didn't know/realize it was a scheduled job, not a batch job.

Waccc'ing on the Wang

When I got to my UNI in the mid-late 80s, we have a Wang system for people to write papers on, located in the WACCC. So people used to go WACCC on the Wang....

Re: Installed Remedy

We have service now.... ugh. At least our internal admin is responsive to fixing stuff.

tcsh is dead...

I've been a tcsh user (and compiler of it!) for many many many years now, but even so I've finally given up on (t)csh for scripting and just moved on to bash, which finally has the CLI experience that (t)csh had over the bourne shell side of things. I've still got a soft spot for tcsh, but I cant' say I'm using it nearly as much any more. But $WORK has a long long long long history if all the setup scripts in tcsh, so there it stays the default shell for users.

Re: air CON

So how are you going to get to 3% CO2 in an office building? No one has a building that sealed unless you in a bio-hazard lab or something special like that.

Re: Not during Christmas, but not at the best moment either...

Same here, I was in Lautenbrunen area way up on the hills when I got called by work while on Vacation. Luckily the family could take an hour walk while I fixed the issue (being the only storage Netapp guy left) fairly quickly. They still sing my praises after that one. Heck, I also took a call while sitting on a chairlift and solved the issue for my boss. He was *very* happy that day.

Re: Next gen?

I wouldn't trust btrfs with a ten foot pole after all the troubles I went through upgrading a SUSE 12.5 to 15.1 (not as big a jump as implied...) system which I ended up in such a horrible state of failure that I had to trash it and re-install the system.

Filesystems are complicated enough that adding in support for RAID, snapshots, CopyOnWrite, etc is just asking for trouble in my opinion.

I was around when DEC put out advfs as a replacement for UFS on their DEC OSF/1 systems. It was a nice idea, but it hasn't gone anywhere.

The biggest vendor of log based filesystems is probably Netapp with their WAFL filesystems. But it's also a tightly controlled environment which only supports NFS and CIFS and block based protocols, which severely limits the problem space they have to address.

As I alluded to in my previous comment here, writing a filesystem that has all the features people want is *hard*. Most people use probably 25% of the filesystem's abilities. But it's the remaining mix which causes all kinds of problems.

Re: Their "fun"..

I've done the Six Sigma training, and most companies use it in the wrong way. It's for measuring and correcting the process when you repeat it alot. So having ten clients and doing some sort of six sigma methodology on how good/bad you are in solving their problems isn't going to cut it.

It's for when you make 10,000 or 10 million identical widgets and you want to make sure you understand their variance and how they fit the requiremetns. This is why it was invented by 3m (as I recall, could be wrong) for helping them make their product efficiently, and with the proper controls in place to keep it consistent.

One off projects aren't really the focus for this tool. The stats get all dogy when you have small numbers.

Re: IMHO..

At least they're not YAML format....

Re: Here's hoping that it will work out

You'd think they'd actually test this in lunar orbit first... where it's cheaper and easier to send down some landers to test with. Yes, it's a totally different and more severe environment than mars, but it's simpler and less time consuming to test there and make sure the rendevous and transfer parts actually work properly. In any case, it will be a fun and interesting mission to watch!

Makita, not Black'n'Decker

I suspect you're thinking of the original Makita 9.6V drills with the long battery in the handle. Damn near idestructable. I had one for close to 25 years before it finally bit the dust enough it wasn't worth finding a new battery or replacing the trigger switch. The original ones had the simple on/off switch, the slightly newer ones had the squeeze switch for variable speed.

You could practically hammer stuff with the back end, and they would survive a drop from a suprisingly high place too.

Miss that sucker...

But the DeWalt 12V stuff is damn near a perfect replacement. Strong, light (not like the 18V and 20V stuff!) small and easy to use. And so much power.

Re: Bad design

CommVault backup software is like this. A bunch of icons for status fields of tapes. No text when you hover over them either, so you have to remember what the hell they mean, and it's not always obvious. Or consistent. And no I don't want to keep referring to a cheat sheet somewhere to figure it out.

It's like Emojis. We spent all this time coming up with standard symbols (letters) which we can group into things (words) and now we have Emojis where you have to remember what the hell each is, and what they mean and they're all slightly different. Or completely different (eggplant anyone?) depending on context. Sucks.

So how do I say "Get off my lawn!" in Emjoi?

I did the same for George Carlin, it was simply amazing seeing him up close and personal.

Re: taking notes...

It was obviously a micro economics course...

Re: compute time is not the cost driver

Exactly! We ran into this with Oracle. If you run on ESXi you pay a license on all the cores available in that host. So a 4 core host which costs more than a 12 core host saves us money since we don't need more than that. But god forbid you put that ESXi host into VCenter, because now Oracle wants you to pay a license based on *all* the cores in the VCenter cluster. So if you have 4 hosts with 4 cores each, you have to pay for a 12 core license, even if you only ever run your single Oracle instance on four cores.

And since VCenter 7.x can now VMotion between VCenters... you can't just put your ORacle systems into their own cluster because "hey you might move that VM somwhere else you have more cores so you gotta pay more".

Bollocks. This is why I'm trying to push people to Postrgresql as the backend if at all possible.

Re: Remote development

We had labs filled with X-terminals from (digs through trashheap of my memory...) NCD which ran great, were cheaper than the DECstation 3100s they replaced because we just got a big honking AlphaServer 2100 as the base system everyone logged into.

I miss tvtwm window manager still...

Re: Enter candidate for dead simplest text editor

I prefer emacs and Latex for my documentation needs. It's crufty in some ways, but within emacs I've got my fingers trained for the basics of editing. Beginning of line, end of line, delete character, mark a block of text and cut/copy/move.

I've done this for decades. Even micro-emacs with the *very* limited subset of emacs movement commands is perfectly useable to edit latex (or markdown) documents.

There's also the WYSIWYG Latex editor 'Lyx' to do what you want here. And TeX/LaTeX is just as powerful as Markdown, it's just a different syntax, with alot more power under the hood.

But you know, that's the joy of open source and choices, people can use what they want, and offer suggestions on different ways to achieve the same end.

Now I do admit the use of pandoc to export to RTF so you can cut'n'paste it into other places in a formatted state is a *neat* thing. There are places where a GUI is a good tool. But not always. And not when you have to do something over and over and over again. Why else do people use 'Ctrl-S' to save, why have a key combination when there's a perfectly good mouse and menu bar where you can save all you want? Because it's not efficient. And as an author, I'm sure you are *very* efficient when it comes to pounding out words because you get paid by the word, and anything which slows you down isn't good. So the investing of time to learn a key set of shortcuts is well worth it.

And I agree 100%! I use emacs because that's what my fingers know for editing, but I don't use more than 2% of the power of emacs I'm sure. There's so much it does and can do and which people have added to it, but unless you try to learn it all and use it all, it just drifts away.

Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

Sez you! I just brewed my cuppa this morning in an electric kettle like god intended, and while my mum was a brit, she never drank tea, only coffee, since she despised tea for some reason. Me... I drink tea since I dislike coffee!