Posts by DougMac

Invisible space was ALT-255.

Very common hiding spot on the network drives.

My personal opinion on the change to Linux are

a) the devs/users really like running side applications on their NAS boxes. The older jails/bhyve setups cost them considerable development time to maintain the side applications. Replacing that with Linux containers, make their development/maintenance time to be much lower, especially with some opensource apps only being released as containerized apps.

b) Now that OpenZFS exists, and is plugged easily into many Linuxes, they can put more development into OpenZFS rather than trying to deal with various different import dates of ZFS code into FreeBSD releases, and redoing work that FreeBSD "reverted".

No more cloud..

> Did we mention our Cloud?

VMware/Broadcom dropped all vSphere+ offerings as part of their "simplification", so they don't run their own cloud any longer.

Re: Using a browser vs browsing

And many "local admin app" might just be an electron wrapped web page as well.

Which depends on Chromium, which is one affected app..

Re: The End

Proxmox VE has an okay management interface.

There are things you have to do on the CLI.

Probably the biggest thing preventing service providers from looking at it seriously is so many products that work with VMware do not work with Proxmox VE. (especially backup software).

I wouldn't count a tar file of the disk image files to be a proper backup solution (ie. built in Proxmox VE backup).

The networking is pretty simplistic, although I haven't really experimented with the new virtual network features of 8.1 much.

The API is pretty light weight.

One thing I encounter that bugs me to no end is that an NFS passthrough into a container doesn't "register" with the system for the first 5-8 minutes of uptime. Thus the container they are passed through to won't start in any reasonable time after host reboot.. I set a cronjob for 10 minutes post-boot to CLI bring up that container, and that seems to do the trick. Could just be my setup, but this seems to be consistent for me in multiple installs.

The bigger problem with MacOS is that Apple also cut off support for older machines for upgraded MacOS versions, so it may be a hardware (artificial) limitation preventing the upgrade as well.

(I know there are ways to make newer OS versions force upgrade on older hardware. )

I generally treat each generation of machine I get as a time capsule, that if I want to use this set of software, I need to keep that system as is. There are so many programs that would die off if I force upgraded it beyond its' means.

But the hardware still is completely usable for what it has. Ie. 98% of what I do can still be covered by my white MacBook (after I put in the SSL proxy software to allow modern crypto), and it is still as speedy as it was back in the day, still runs all my old software.

OOTH, I do have latest hardware, almost none of those old games can run, and even in emulation, do not run half as well as running on my ancient white MacBook.

I already reconsidered my relationship with Evernote long ago, and they and I parted ways after the first few stumbles.

How can they possibly have any users left to get that kind of coin from any longer?

Re: Analogue audio jack

Anybody doing "real" audio on them already are probably using a DAC HAT anyway.

Plenty of solutions out there for that.

As the article stated, many versions of SQL server will break hard from my testing.

My application doesn't officially support newer versions of SQL server. So, its either run unsupported SQL version and hope it works 100% correctly, keep the old version, and disable Microsoft's force changes, or replace the whole thing at some unknown cost, and unknown amount of migration and dev work.

In my testing, Microsoft's TLS patches for SQL don't work reliably. The only fix is to do major version upgrades.

I've also got old network devices online. They right now have their management links isolated, but now we'll have to keep out-of-date desktops around so that they can still be managed.

Rip and replace is the only option. Otherwise, operationally they work totally fine for our needs. Its not a security application, but just because the UI was written long ago the whole thing needs to be tossed.

Re: bad example

>> PCI (I think PCI existed back then) has pretty strict rules about limiting access

Yes, PCI existed long before then.

I think PCI is applied unfairly overall. Huge corporations seem to get free passes at doing horrible PCI violations, while small and midsized get raked over the coals.

I believe it was shown that Target & TJ Max (another credit-card breach due to wifi based roaming cash registers) were keeping way more data than allowed by PCI, such as the CVV and other data they should not have been.

There are little red caps you are supposed to use on 66 blocks for data lines, especially things like 56k DDS and T1 lines. To prevent this very thing.

Of course most techs (especially any of the crews in the last 25 years) didn't know what the red caps signified, and once the data line is dead, it just sits there taking up room anyway.

I've been in closets that have many many dozens of T1 NIU cabinets without a single lit line in them. Because who gets a T1 any more (for voice or data).

Re: Sounds like the same contract people where working at last weeks on call

> I used to work where we had a 4 hour fix contract ...

Yeah, all of those are now 4 hour response, and best effort to fix.

We'll guarantee you get an initial response from T1 support via email within 4 hours. You may get parts by the end of day. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe nextweek depending where we have them.

Halon doesn’t displace oxygen. It is safe to be around. That is a total myth that never dies. It functions chemically to prevent combustion from occurring.

The biggest dangers are what is described above, a huge inrush or gas will blow everything around violently.

Think floor tiles launching. What ever is on the ceiling. Etc.

Also if there is a fire, the stuff burning will be incredibly toxic. Halon can decompose in the fire to unpleasant chemicals you don’t want to breath either. The respirators are there for the output of a fire. You really don’t want to be around anything burning in a data center.

They make one product, that Microsoft essentially gives away for "free" to the same market audience..

I'd say 7% post COVID growth against something already bundled in by your biggest compitior is fairly decent.

But I'm sure they want to grow by COVID numbers again, and that just ain't going to happen.

Re: Randomly

Zoom used to be king of the hill, but Teams being bundled into O365 subscriptions is eating their lunch.

Just like Zoom beat up Webex. Zoom will soon be in Webex's spot.

Its too bad, because I have way more issues on Teams than on Zoom.

Re: Same old same old

It has been 35 years since the Morris Worm (1988).

I'd say that was one of the first wake up calls that security is important and should be followed.

Re: No visit, just a (lost) long week-end

Possibly Exchange EDB?

Loads of fun dealing with corrupted EDBs..

Sometimes, the miners setup shop by squatting in some building nobody cares about, and steals power.

Re: Steam Deck

Maybe VMs are going away in your world, but are the only thing looked at in my world.

Containers don't offer many of my customers the platforms they need.

Everybody has different requirements, and nothing is ever going to go away, just shift around as requirements change.

Re: Kids these days.....

I read that, and was trying to imagine 7" tall tape running through their editing bay.

The largest I've seen is 2" tape.

Re: Not quite.

Tried doing SD card boot for VMware.

I had to replace the cards about ever 4-6 months.

Gave up and spec'd out systems with local SSD boot after that.

Granted, other brands of server hardware seem to do better than others, but it was of no surprise to me that VMware unspec'd SD card boot off the HCL.

Re: No thank you

This must be the reason for offering such a service.

As somebody that plays in that space, there aren't alot of cloud customers that potentially have their own IPv4 blocks sitting around.

The only reason I could see it is if some cloud customer is really tied to OVH, and they want to get away from the absolute shit reputation that OVH IPv4 address space has that gets blocked quite often elsewhere, enough so they go get some rando IPv4 block off an IP broker.

Re: 64K

They were probably referring to the Apple II+ picture shown. With the II+, you got a language card which held the top 16k of RAM if you wanted to hold your basic or whatnot in it and bank switch in RAM.

Otherwise, you had the lower 48k for program RAM, and the top 16k for ROM and I/O space.

The 6502 could address the full 64k, but the top space was ROM and I/O and gaps.

Because they auto-remap the bad sectors behind your back.

Now the remapped sector has to have an additional lookup command adding latency.

You can run out of the spare sectors that they hide from you as well.

This is one reason that disk wipe software had to develop special methods dealing with SSDs, because wiping all *active* sectors doesn't wipe *all* data off the disk.

Re: Apple could very easily cripple jamf...

Apple's complete history has been to ignore the enterprise space with prejudice.

Re: Exchange

And anything before that was guaranteed downtime rebuilding all the time.

My favorite was the _bug_ that made a reboot a 5 hour affair on an exchange server.

That didn't get fixed for half a decade.

Re: Slush fund for hostile nations Vs ...

Is that about cryptobros or GOP bros?