* Posts by Down not across

1987 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2013

License to thrill: Ahead of v13.0, the FreeBSD team talks about Linux and the completed toolchain project that changes everything

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Re: Says it all

There is of course also nas4free, ahem, sorry XigmaNAS that forked off when iXSystems trademarked FreeNAS. I stuck with nas4free for some reason or other (might have been easier upgrade route from older FreeNAS or something to do with the slightly different feature sets) but both are excellent NAS software.

Talk about a Blue Monday: OVH outlines recovery plan as French data centres smoulder

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Re: cooling

Joking aside as long as things don't leak (into air resulting in fumes) that shouldn't really be an issue. In fact oil has higher boiling point than water.

Nevertheless as far as I know OVH use water cooling at board level and try to avoid A/C by sucking air from outside, through servers into "hole in the middle of the building". So your answer is water and air (unless I've misunderstood their design).

So it appears some of you really don't want us to use the word 'hacker' when we really mean 'criminal'

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Re: Whatever El Reg decides...

No.

That word does not exist.

Mobile World Congress seemingly serious about in-person Barcelona event in June, shares safety plan

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Re: Pandemic outrage fatigue

I know that there is a needs for event businesses and airlines to get going again but this all feels very reckless. The big whammy is that those travelling may not even know they are infected but then when they are back home, we suddenly have a huge problem.

Currently pretty much every destination requires you to have proof of negative SARS-CoV-2 test before being allowed to board the plane. Many destinations require quarantine/test(s) on arrival. For example in UK you likely end up having 3 PCR tests on arrival (the new mandatory day 2 and 8 test plus day 5 test to release if you don't fancy self quarantining for 10 days) in addition to the one to be allowed to board the plane.

I'm not going to comment on whether people should travel or not, but anyone not knowing if they are infected seems very unlikely.

Cisco issues blizzard of end-of-life notices for Nexus 3K and 7K switches

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Re: product lifetime

As long as you don't lose your license or you may lose features, or find number of ports enabled reduced etc.

The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread

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Re: Thanks!

As I've mentioned here before, I did a similar thing with character EPROM on Kaypro 2X. It had scandinavian characters mapped to {}[]/| so any programming was a pain. So I read out the EPROM, edited the characters and burned to a fresh EPROM, soldered EPROMS on top of each other bar CS pin and then wired a toggle switch to CS pins. Worked a charm.

Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows

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Re: New and updated commands

Not to mention on Solaris you had the be aware of the path (/usr/bin vs /usr/ucb) as you had both SysV and BSD variants for some commands.

Microsoft issues emergency fix for Wi-Fi foul-up delivered hot and fresh on Patch Tuesday

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Re: We used to be able to choose when we update

I found a good for it not to update is to ensure there is not enough free space (as I discovered on Atom based 2-in-1 that has tiny eMMC). It complains like hell but refuses to bork the system unless there iss XXGB free.

HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 slips off the shelf – and off the planet: Boxen heading to ISS

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AC/DC

The previous Spaceborne computer operated at 120V AC and used inverters to charge it from the ISS. The approach was not too reliable, hence the use of DC this time around.

Inverters? Seriously?

Why would they do silly thing like that when all the PSU would do is rectify and lower the voltage back down (given all you need is 3.3, 5 and 12V).

Using inverters seems inefficient, and in an environment where I suspect despite sunshine, power draw of each bit of kit makes a real difference.

Well at least they seem to have taken more sensible approach now.

Better buckle up: Volkswagen puts Microsoft in driver's seat to deliver 'automated' platform

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Re: VW. Not.

I suppose the question with all these is what happens if it can't talk to the server.

Depending how it talks to the cloud, rip out SIM or whatever transceiver module it uses. Or will it stop working or only work in limp mode? I guess if it does, someone will either hack it or create fake "server" for it to talk to. Assuming people still care about being snooped on.

All my cars have been, are, and are likely to be few decades old or at most from 00's so I'm very likely to avoid this and just need to stock up on popcorn.

Microsoft's underwhelming, underpowered dual-screen Surface Duo phone arrives in the UK this month for £1,349

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The rather excellent MS-owned Nokia that this post was scribbled on; less than £100

MS bought Nokia mobile phone division, however they only leased the name. Any Nokia running Android has nothing to do with MS, but are manufactured by HMD Global under license from Nokia. Of course it is entirely possible you are referring to an old winphone.

Nothing wrong with that I'm quite happy with the the Nokia 8 and have felt no need to upgrade since it still gets updates (albeit with slight delay) and does what I need it to do.

48-hour strike action: Openreach repayment project engineers confirm it's on

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Smells like manure

In fact we've offered them all a better-paid, higher grade role within Openreach and we've given a cast-iron guarantee that they can stay on their existing terms and conditions – including an extremely competitive salary of around £45,000 a year – if they choose to.

If it is all so wonderful, why are peasants revolting? Clearly all is not quite as it made out to be.

Perhaps overtime (which tends to be required, but unpaid at management grades) , travel etc are conveniently not considered part of the aforementioned T&C.

What the heck is FinOps? It's controlling cloud spend – and new report says it ain't easy

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Re: on-demand pricing is bullshit

Quite. CAPEX vs OPEX.

The laptop you bought in 2020 may stop you buying a car in 2021: Chips are going short

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Re: Stop me from buying a car? Probably not.

Personally I find the following chip-based technology useful in my BMW 435d:

1. Heads up display

2. Sat Nav

3. Traction control

4. Stability control

5. Cruise control

6. Electric memory seats

7. Keyless start

8. Climate control

9. Tyre pressure monitor

10. Intelligent 4WD

Useful? Yes (apart from 7). Necessary, not by a long way. Sure I like my gadgets, but so many modern cars (say anything beyond mid noughties) are increasingly forgetting basic ergonomics especially in an environment where you really shouldn't need to look at the controls.

Not to mention how everything has to be "coded" to the car. I mean changing a battery on newer models requires a trip to dealer or laptop with ISTA or something. Changing bulbs used to be something you could do in 30 seconds at roadside, now you need to pull out headlight assemblies and/or disassemble part of the car to change a consumable.

I prefer "recycling" old(er) cars and am (possibly mistaken as I haven't done the maths) of the opinion that keeping the already manufactured older car going is going to be lesser impact on environment than it is to build a brand new car (especially now that they're likely start to need to be electric or at least hybrid) given i don't do silly amount of miles in a year either.

Rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond: Oracle launches rugged edge-of-network box for hostile environments

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RED

Can't think of RED without thinking of Marvin. He'd make short work of that puny little box.

Openreach engineers vote to strike amid changes to job grading structure

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management grade

OR is claiming same T&C. However in many companies (I have no knowledge of OR, so they may be different) management grade is not eligible for overtime."Management grade" could also come with other unwanted obligations.

This Brit biz's seven-screen laptop is something to behold

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The only image of the machine in question was via a Twitter link, which if blocked renders the reader pretty much blind to what is being discussed. Serving a header image from your own domain would go a long way to fixing this.

Umm...no. There were links to couple of publications that had images of it.

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I've opted for some cheap 1920x1080 USB-powered screens from Bezos Bazaar. Obviously not used while on a train or plane, but is nice portable way to have multi-monitor setup at destination.

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Re: Timber!

At "around" 12kg that exceeds many airlines' carry-on baggage weight limit so you would really need a sturdy flight case anyway as you'd be likely to be forced to put the beast in the hold.

The unanswered question at CentOS community Q&A: How can we trust you now?

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Trust

That question to the CentOS board about changing the EOL of a released project was really about trust, and it was one that board members chose not to answer.

And by not answering, they have answered it.

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

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Re: I got a wierd call one evening

This event taught me two things early on : 1) never trust anyone when someone high up doesn't like you, and 2) always stick to the rules.

FTFY

3) Keep copies of communication and any other relevant evidence should you need to CYA

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Re: Had a call...

The funny part of this one is that I was only employed by them for a total of three months prior (installed and setup an HP3000 Series 37 system over the summer break).

.

I have a soft spot for HP3000. I have Series 39 with 2 x 7914 disks and 7970E tape drive. Everything connected via HP-IB of course. Whopping 2MB of memory. MPE V is fun and I quite like SPL although it helps to have the full manual set for information on all the intrinsics. It is what I learnt COBOL (well, the little bit that I learnt) on.

Cisco reveals critical bug in small biz VPN routers when half the world is stuck working at home

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I'm somewhat surprised RV series stay up long enough to be exploited.

Ok, admittedly I only did some testing quite a while ago on an older RV-200 (or may have been RV-100) and it kept freezing. Cisco (and other) forums were full of posts of how cisco didn't seem to care and offered no updates/fixes. Could have been hardware/cooling issue I suppose

At least cisco is offering some support for the newer models by the looks of it.

Death Becomes It: Who put the Blue in the Blue Screen of Death?

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Re: And with W10

Hmm, I shan't paste the uptime of a SS5 running 4.1.3_U1 then. I'll just get told off...

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

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Re: The compatibility list

You're not a disk maker. Stop pretending you are.

To be fair this is not exactly new. Most large computer vendors released their "own" disks with their own firmware. As an example Sun was shipping its own disks that were all manufactured by others. Same goes for other vendors.

Granted, Sun (again as example) didn't spit on you if you stuck botgt standard Seagate instead of its "own".

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Re: Are they going proprietary though?

.

Seems to me, they'll test the drives as they can and the list will get bigger. I also strongly doubt they would be so dumb as to set this limit on consumer grade RAIDS like yours.

From the article:

The new policy applies as of the release of three new Synology NAS appliances intended for enterprise use and will be applied to other models over time.

..I wouldn't be so sure.

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Re: very unfortunate move,

They are very good bits of kit. You just set them up and they look after themselves.

So does my nas4free. At the time it was cheaper than any Qnap or Synology 4-bay NAS as HP was having one of their offers on Microservers.

It does not restrict what disks I can shove int into the ZFS pool.

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

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Re: Opps

In the days when PC ATs were new, I balanced a brand new $LARGE-GB $EXPENSIVE drive on the edge of the case. It was a full-height drive.

Ah, I was expecting more of a "crash". I was testing some new large capacity at the time FH 5.25" ESDI drives all laying on a desk. May have been CDC Wren or something like that. The voice coil seek operations were violent enough to make the drive travel across the, admittedly fairly slippy, desk. Now if it had been balanced on edge of the case...

Severe bug in Libgcrypt – used by GPG and others – is a whole heap of trouble, prompts patch scramble

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Re: Well......

Good workmen use the best tools they can get, and in particular they use tools which protect them against their own occasional idiocy.

From the article..

Hanno Böck, a German IT journalist and hacker, expressed similar criticism and noted that the maintainers of GnuPGP don't appear to use an AddressSanitizer (or asan) in testing, which could have helped catch the bug.

You were saying? Its bit like your insulation. They could've used tools to help avoid issues, but chose not to.

I'm not denying C doesn't make it easy to make you shoot yourself in the foot. It has, however, been around long enough that there are many tools available to try to prevent that.

Cisco intros desktop switches, one with USB-C to power your laptop

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Do you think its on fire sale or something...

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Re: Pricing

They're likely to also have usual Catalyst pricing so neat as it might be to use those (only in US since they're clearly designed for US socket backboxes to replace existing outlet), its not likely to be cheap. Having said that if you already run Catalyst environment and those integrate fairly seamlessly, that helps as managing infrastructure does have a cost.

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Re: "when Wi-Fi gets more reliable every year"

I have powerline as a trunk between floors. It was meant to be temporary until I get around running fibre (or possibly copper) between SFP ports. Much to my surprise it has been extremely reliable. So much so that I haven't bothered tearing walls and floors open for the cable run. House was partially rewired before which may help with regards to quality of the mains wiring. I did have to replace the kit once as one converter did die (old age or issues with power we had in the area for a while where it fluctuated and at times was on/off like a yoyo.

They can be quite sensitive to what else is connected to the circuit.

Down not across

Besides which, in the EU (and UK if the Tories haven't axed that law) you're going to be required to have a docking station for your laptop because ergonomics, so may as well plug in the network port.

Would you happen to have link to that?

Get off my lawn: UK.Gov looks to reform land access laws for network operators weeks after PAC savages full-fibre gigabit targets for 2025

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Re: This Land is My Land, This land is Your land...

They could've at least put it at edge of lawn (picture suggest it being plonked quite away from the kerb).

So what if you accidentally knock it over...or were planning to do something else with that part of YOUR property that is now blocked by the cabinet. Guess you could always plant some japanese knotweed next to it.

Pretty shitty law I'd say. At he very least the property owner should be entitled to specify where on the property (within reason) they can erect their crap. Not that I am suprised...in land of the free the big telco/cable have pretty free reign.

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

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Re: The neutral doesn't join up with anything on the switch!

Amusingly having those fitted to internal copper piping seems to get you a passing certificate even if the house (70s) has non-metal (yeah those brittle things) water supply pipe. I thought NEC 250.50 specifies it needs to be metal undergound for 10ft or more.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

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It's a familiar refrain, same tune as Gnome3 and NetworkManager.

NetworkMangler. Now there is another idiocy that has no place on a server. I can vaguely see why someone might want to run it on a laptop. Still, at least it can be excorcised.

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I'm still not convinced with that argument. Sure I've seen some boxes take rather long time to boot. However I doubt that parallelism would actually save much time due to dependencies. Also, how often do these lager environments get rebooted? Not that often.

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Re: RE: doing things behind the curtain

I've had to do that on occasion for some old Realtek wireless cards, other than that for me it Just WorksTM

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Re: RE: doing things behind the curtain @buchan

I wonder just mow many people really remember the concept of dedicated print backends set up using lpadmin (or earlier, by editing the lp scripts). It was often difficult, and often required programs to know how to handle particular printers.

I do. Fondly.

Nothing wrong with termcap/printcap.

I must be exception but I only bought PostScript capable printers and simple lp worked very well thank you very much. CUPS (for me) was total overkill and recall (this was long ago mind, and CUPS was in its infancy) it mysteriously suddendly refusing to print and it took ages and lot of google-fu to get it to play nice again.

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Re: GNU's not Unix

Yes, Solaris has SMF. However unlike systemd, SMF actually works pretty well and does just init/respawn and doesn't try to be all encompassing convoluted cancer like systemd.

Had Poettering implemented just a rewrite of SMF for Linux, it might have gotten better reception.

BOFH: Are you a druid? Legally, you have to tell me if you're a druid

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Re: Oh, dear....

Don't forget to (re)read the old episodes for the origins and antics of that bot. The outcome was indeed entirely forseeable, which I'm sure did not escape BOFH when he suggested it.

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

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Re: Censorship by Private Companies

No, it really isn't. Firstly in terms of scale and reach. The vast majority of political discourse between individuals across the planet takes place on a handful of social network platforms.

Seriously? Since when did social networks suddendly become the only way for discourse (or discussion for that matter)? Yeah, I'm grumpy old git obviously, but I've stayed well away from the social networks as I never saw their appeal and their behaviour over years has only reaffirmed that I was right not to bother.

I don't feel that limits my freedom to express myself in any way. I can't understand that people really think the social networks and somehow the only effective way to communicate.

We turn away for a second and Corellium is already showing off Ubuntu on Apple Silicon

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Re: One more second

On what grounds?

Its not like Hackintosh where you are installing software against license.

Is there a seal on the packaging saying "by breaking this seal thou agree not to install non-Apple OS" ? (not that those are necessarily legally enforceable)

You've bought the hardware, you can run whatever you want on it.

Negative Trustpilot review of law firm Summerfield Browne cost aggrieved Briton £28k

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Re: Guess what happened if you ever got a 4?

When I was in the rat race, come appraisal (pay review) time there was always some jackass in the system (it was a 360° review system) who thought it would be clever to use the 3/5 rule because 'no one is perfect'.

Performance reviews are generally a joke. Even if whole team really goes out of their way to do truly outstanding job the reviews are forced to follow the bell curve by the bellends higher up.

UK Prime Minister Johnson knows not when 400k+ deleted records from police DB will be back

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Re: oops...

Not quite so easy in a distributed system. Ensuring integrity and consistency across multiple databases makes recovery fair bit more complex than a single database.

So what can we expect from a Joe Biden White House when it comes to tech? We'll try to answer that right now

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I'm not arguing against questioning sleep/instant-on type modes, but just wondering if the metrics used for arguments have been thoroughly calculated, or based on headline grabbing numbers.

I wonder if anyone has calculated total power consumption of instant-on (up to 1W standby consumption) vs hard off and consumption during bootup (especially on older non-SSD consoles) + starting a game.

Also their suggestion of "We have repeatedly urged Sony and Microsoft to include a dedicated low-power chip for video playback in their consoles, and this request is even more important today given the potential for long hours of 'binge watching' via the console." probably doesn't take into account the carbon cost of additional components.

On his way out, Trump emits exec order suggesting US cloud giants must verify ID of all foreign customers

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As others have pointed out it would also be pretty trivial to fake an ID in Photoshop since the anti-counterfeiting technology on IDs usually only works when you can see the physical card, not a photo of the card.

Obviously not the case in UK, but in EU many countries have biometric ID cards that are easily used for authentication (yes you need a card reader) as is done for many public sector online services.

No, I'm not advocating it, just saying physical access to the card by the provider does not mean it can't be authenticated.

SpaceX powers through bad case of wind to nail Falcon 9's eighth droneship landing

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Re: 8th Time

I'm still impressed. Especially considering the "unfavourable conditions" not being an issue in the end.

Screw you, gadget-menders! No really, you'll need loads of screwdrivers to fix Apple's AirPods Max headphones

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Re: £550 headphones

I'm not entirely sure where my DT 880 Studio are, but I still use my DT550 very frequently and I've yet to come across anything (at least for a reasonable price) that would come anywhere near the sound quality (purely in my humble opinion that is).