Posts by Steve Kerr

Being that I've dealt with SWIFT for about 33 years, payments within SWIFT don't take days to compete, they generally go through in about a second.

What does take time are banks and financial institutions connecting to SWIFT dealing with the payments if they have clunky bankoffice batch run systems. Also, if they do things like switch off their SWIFT connection from say 5pm on a Friday until 8am on a Monday (or overnight) then anything pending being sent to/from will get held up on SWIFT and will be delivered when the institution next connects. Where things are delayed, the sender of the SWIFT message can get a delayed delivery report that will give a list of anything that is delayed by a recipient institiution.

So yeah, it's not so much SWIFT that is the problem but the clunky financial institutions connecting to it with ancient backoffice systems and ancient banking processes!

More answers on request!

Joys of developers and testing

I do like to test to destruction of applications.

Create a test plan with a bunch of scenarios including things like loss of server, loss of database server, loss of database, loss of table, application falls over, bad data, stress testing,

Developers are fond of saying "but that will never happen" to which the response is "what if it does?" "But it won't", "well lets see....."

One app had to have about 14 months of work done because there were so many issues that it wasn't ready to see the light of day and certainly not customer facing! could write a 10,000 essay on that!

Also, got kicked off of a college prime server after the "email wars" between 2 sets of colleges IT students back in the 80s! Fun times!

FPGA's

Looked around and they do seem to have their uses where creating bespoke hardware solutions would be expensive and if they being used to prototype ASICs before final manufactering, that sort of thing.

Personally, I've only come across FPGA's in the MiSTer emulation arena where cores for FPGAs have been designed by people to fully emulate original computer hardware with all the original timings. I got hold of one of the boards after a long time trying and they're pretty funky and cool and most certainly people have put a lot of work in to get them as exact as possible.

Sometimes for a solution, you don't need multicore fast generic x86 CPU when something lower powered will do when all the requirements can be met in an FPGA core without the expense of tooling up to produce some custom boards.

Bye bye ESXi

I was using ESXi on an intel NUC (slightly entertaining with multiple core types), was originally going to use Nutanix but requires 3 physical disks/ssds to install.

When I heard about broadcom, I was thinking about changing it as I wasn't using it for too much as after much looking decided to go with Proxmox which I'm still learning about.

Was a fairly straightforward install though I only thought about exporting the VMs and trying to import them after I had already blatted it!

Still, for the moment, Proxmox suits my purposes apart from it moaning about the lack of a license every time you login even though there's a free version (for non-prod use).

Shame really as after using VMWare for years actually quite liked it!

Onto learning new stuff!

I've had people email me late in the evenings, beyond 10pm and at weekends and then message/call me 5 minutes later to ask why I haven't responded.

My general response is, it's outside of working hours and therefore will not be responding until the next working day and tell them if it's an emergency, they can raise an out of hours call and then there's an audit trail and a followup overtime claim for at least an hour - they can then justify the cost of the overtime that I'll be getting!

Big user of Nutanix has all our stuff is hosted on it, we've got VMWare on Nutanix as well.

We've migrated a lot of stuff from VMWare to AHV and been pretty straightforward so there's an easy(ish) migration path.

Was going to run the community version of AHV at home but unfortunately, the NUC I'm using to play virtualisation does not support the min 3 SSDs I would need unfortunately. I could do it under Proxmox but rather defeats the point! Though possibly will try again on a small lower power form factor machine at some point.

Sad times!

When I went to a visit to TNMOC, it was rather a shock to find a lot of the machines I've used from early home computers to large mainframes are now museum pieces!!!!

I done work experience on an ICL 2966 running VME & George 3 and a financial institution I worked for had a couple of ICL 2966's, amongst other things like an IBM 4381, Wang, VAX's, HP 3000's, Tandem nonstop, Stratus! A bygone era.

Used Prime computers whilst in college

Sounds like a really am a figment of my own imagination!

Amiga hard disk partitioning

Made mistakes with Amiga hard disk partitioning

Whatever tool I was using to do it (may have been inbuilt one) didn't compare the size of the disk against the size of the partitions.

From memory, you had to specify the start/end block for each partition.

Somewhere along the line, I got confused and managed to create a partition or extend it beyond the end of the disk, what this ended up doing (unknown to me at the time), was wraparound the partiton back past the beginning of the disk (as that's what this partioning app done) - this particular tool didn't check for validity it seems!

Only noticed some days later when weird things strted happening and files got corrupted - took ages to sort out that mass, I think I actually had some backups that I managed to restore (done to VHS tapes no less) - no idea what I lost but I don't think it was much as I was only about 19-20 at the time so didn't have much of importance!

Fun times!

Annoyances

Got windows 11 on a work PC now

Seems to be spending time fighting againt it - so many things are a pain, the most annoying the forced location of the task bar - I know there are probably hacks etc.. around being able to change it, though this is a work PC so there's a limit to what I can do to it (and also corporate policy restrictions). I prefer to have the start bar on the side but no, microsoft says I'm not allowed to do that with the default install of windows 11.

So my own PC, I'm waiting for something better to come along (new framework laptop when it arrives will have linux), gaming PC will be sticking to windows - maybe windows 12 will be better.

No more office

Mentioned in a previous comment on a previous article.

Company I work for used this as the opportune time to downsize their offices round the world where possible, 90% drop in space in european head office and moved to a managed office space elsewhere with some available hotdesking where needed.

So they've seen a way in saving a lot of costs - certainly in the UK but I would think elsewhere as well.

Suits me fine! (though I know for others home working does not suit them for a variety of reasons)

Automating internal attacks

Only a passing comment.

You would think if you have software that is written to be public internet facing that they would an internal set of automation tools that continually attempts to exploit their own software

So you would have a segregated network where you would use the same sort of tools that miscreants would use and then coninually attempt attacks at a variety of supported versions of your software.

I know if I was running a software vendor, I would do something like this.

For some internal software in the past, I have done things to try to break it though people moaned about why i was doing this - I said, we need to understand what will happen to all the interconnected components if something goes wrong, e.g. someone accidently deletes the contents of a table in a DB or services fail or servers fail.

Basically, test it into destuction - it's also a fun thing to do and it means that when it goes live to customers you've tried to minimise the chances of failure, though people can be quite good at breaking things by accident!

That media deletion virus

When I worked for an bank, we had lots of AV and mail AV to protect our stuff.

We also had lots of issues with file server storage always being low - back when 100-200 GB of fileserver space was a huge amount

Whilst on holiday, we had that virus pass thru that zero lengthed all media files, that came from our owner back as we didn't (until then), have mail AV on those links as we thought they were trusted.

Anyway, we recovered about 70% of our file server disk space pretty much immediately (only reason I knew was someone called me whilst I was in France).

When I got back we got so many requests for restores where when checked responses were "please provide a business justification to restore madonnas greated hits" or some such.

only area that got media restored was marketing.

We were much more aggressive in identifying and removing music/films without notification after that.

Weight limit flight to Albania

Once flew to Albania for work and was on an airbus of some description.

Only about 40-50 passengers, the plane was at its weight limit.

The front few rows were filled and so were the rear few rows and only single window seats on the left hand side of the plane, someone wanted to move form the crowded front/back but was told this was not allowed because the plane was at its max carrying weight due to cargo and the seating arrangement was due to balance.

From gatwick it took most of the runway to get off the ground, landing in albania where the runway was short came in so low was skimming the fields for a minute then literally smacked into the tarmac just after the dirt and braked so hard I headbutted the seat in front and had to use my hands to push myself off the faceplant. Plane done a 180 at the other end with the wing actually over the dirt at the other end of the runway, was like doing a 180 at 20mph in a very large reliant robin!

As for passenger weight, I've seen a lot of videos from er....larger so called influencers bemoaning plane seat & aisle widths and saying that they should be given extra seats for free, to me, to be fair, should state your weight+baggage weight approx when booking tickets and pay the difference or refunded the difference at weigh ins at the airport - could be done discretely - only fair to charge per KG for travel, a bit like sending stuff via a parcel company!

Corporate use

I can see a use for this in a business setting - for instance, with a lot of WFH nowadays (myself included), rather than supplying laptops/PCs to employees they could do one of a couple of things.

Allow an employee to use their own PC to connect to a virtual PC on a hosted environment or provide a cheap thin client, like a RPi to connect, this means that companies can reduce phsyical hardware supplied to employees which would make it a lot cheaper.

Saying that, they don't need to run in some cloud providers environment as companies could just host it all themselves in their own environments using things like VMWare Horizon or one of the mass of other products out ther.

it wouldn't surprise me if companies go down that route, I fully expect that the company I work for would do that as literally only use the laptop for teams and outlook and my actual work is done thru hopping onto other secured hosts and from their jumping onwards.

I'm sure i read something a few years back about suggestions that the voting machines go to be checked & tested by the Nevada gambling commission where they would also hold the software in escrow. As they're good at making sure the software in gambling machines does not skew the payouts etc..

From memory, the voting machine vendors point blank refused.

i saw a video as well where they got members of the public to watch whilst a sealed voting machine that was used in local elections was made to produce the "correct vote", they were sat in the room watching this happen, they were shocked at how easy it was to manipulate.

there needs to be more oversight of these machines and their software.

There was a push to use open source voting software where the source code was open to everyone to view, don't know what happened to that initiative though.

Also, I'm not American or in the US so the above is based on being an outside observer on stuff I've read.

When I get round to it, going to set up a VM that talks out to a squid proxy that will redirect to a local webserver hosting my "bank".

The PC will be in its own subnet so can only see the local gateway which will route stuff specifically.

Going to group policy it to the eyeballs and then go thru the entertainment of wasting their time.

My current go to name to give them is Benjamin Chow or Ben Chow for short - say it together and then look up Hindi swear words :-)

We have a few names - for people

We have some names rather than acryonyms for people - some of which is part of peoples names but won't say here.

We have named (internally in the team) certain colleagues as

Mr Shouty

Sargent Major Shouty (SMS) - ex army who believes he can treat civvies the way he treated people in the army, doesn't work!

Captain Chaos - he actually knew about this one and accpted it was was quite funny.

There are more but not saying those ones and many I've forgotten!

This is an issue with these "social" media companies

It's not a phone company problem, it's a social media company issue.

They're binding their service to a phone number and not an account, if it was bound to an account then this wouldn't happen.

huge copout from fakebook/whatsapp blaming someone else for their decision to bind accounts to a mobile number.

OK, there are other issues where companies send SMS messages for 2FA too so there are more complexities to it.

There's also a responsibility for the account owner to delete their phone numbers off of their social media.

So it's a mix of social media companies and the people with accounts with those services.

I would think there would be some kind of "migrating to a new number" thing in those apps, not that this wouldn't be used by identify thieves - it's a complex subject thinking more on it.

Giving up and going for a lunch break!

No more office

The company I work for is just in the process of dumping its London office, they don't want to pay for the space, but if people are WFH, they don't have to pay for it, so that's a win/win for them.

They are going to rent a small managed office as a "collaboration space" for the things where occasionally you do have to do some face to face stuff.

As most of my communication is with people in different offices in the UK, europe, asia & the US, it doesn't really matter where I am to work, the added benefit is that I'm on call so waiting for 90 minutes for me to get to the office or get home to look at things becomes a few minutes so the company wins on quicker support.

Virtual users

Is that 32 million actual users or 32 million bots?

Had a quick look on how to acess

Saw some fancy websites.

Saw some quotes about how it's going to change everything

Saw it's fragmented already with many different metaverse sites.

Saw nothing of interest

Lost interest.

Looks like it's stillborn.

Wasted 7 minutes looking at this stuff.

Going to look at something more interesting which to be honest, is anything else.

Love when the Indian scammers call

Have some great calls with the scammers until they start swearing at me - much entertainment.

Although it's crap that people got scammed out of money, is a bit funny that the what seems to be the majority of scammers are themselves being scammed.

The icing on the cake is if those scum that scammed people out of money were then scammed out those illgotten gains.

Queen Elizabeth - demon driver

I think she has done so much for country, even amongst her own problems in her own family, just like every other family.

I do mourn her passing.

I was at Windsor Horse Show last year when we were asked to just wait for a minute.

These 3 black rangers pulled up next to us, they were going pretty fast, surprised the first one didn't do a handbrake sliding stop.

The drivers door opened and out got the queen, was totally aghast as she was just in front of us, I've got photos of her that close too.

She was watching one of the native showing classes, not in the main ring either, just the side ring and they had a chair there for her to sit on and watch.

We went and saw some other things and when we can back past she was just leaving, getting in the drivers seat leading the way, we saw her driving on the road up to the castle and she was accelerating away from the others, she must have been doing at least 70mph! Total demon driver, it was brilliant.

After the loss of Prince Philip it was so nice to see her so happy at Windsor watching all the horse.

A great loss to the country.

Turning up at work to a bunch of police

In a previous job turned up for a shift with a bunch of police that wanted to talk to me - scared the crap out of me.

Turns out, they wanted to listen to a voice recording of a particular line (lots of dealer lines & also some switchboard lines were recorded) and management told that to come to the building and I'd do it but didn't tell me that they were arriving.

These were analogue tapes that had something like 48 lines recorded and the tapes ran for 24 hours at a time.

Anyway, I ran thru a tape over a time period for one particular external line whilst they listened (and obviously I did too).

What transpired was there were some bomb threats being phoned in to reception, in listening to a scratchy recording, could hear a woman in the background and a child, it was one of the managers in the midsts of a mental breakdown phoning in bomb threats. Don't know what actually happened to him in the end. I was asked by the police about what I thought I heard.

Have had to listen in to a bunch of other dealer conversations which included hearing the sex lives of several of the dealers - oops!

Nothing of appeal

I've looked at it (on a VM) and currently, I see nothing on it which is giving me a "wow, must migrate to this immediately" as opposed to "kicking and screaming and throwing my toys out of my pram"

For some people out there it may be OK as it seems they are trying to go for the MacOS type look but in a Microsoft way.

Maybe windows 12 will be better, to me, this is like the Windows Vista/8 version, they've tried something different, it's going to fail so they go back to something similar to XP/Win7/Win10

IPod Touch

Still use my IPod Touch with stored music from ripped CD's and with Tidal in offline mode.

Was hoping they were going to release an updated one as it's useful for being small, good battery life and not having to worry about storage for everything else on a phone as well.

So when this dies or becomes incompatible with the latest Tidal App update will have to look for something else.

It's a shame as it was a really good simple product.

Locked in at night

I was doing some work late one evening for a bank in Newcastle, we finished about 10pm.

In the huge foyer the length of the building, the customer said as I was a visitor, I had to go out via the main entrance and they would go out via the staff only revolving doors that had to be used with a staff pass.

They duly left and I walked down to the main doors to find there was no-one there, main doors locked and the customer had legged it and I didn't have their mobile numbers to contact them to let me out.

Waited there for 20 minutes thinking I was going to be there all night locked in at bank.

Then I thought I heard music, thought I was hearing things it was so quiet, took me a few minutes to identify where it was coming from, had to go upstairs and pinpoint where it was coming from, found it finally when I found 2 guys replacing floor tiles at the other end. Told them what happened and asked if they had a pass that would get me out of the door.

Finally made it out after being stuck for 30 minutes and still no security showed up - even waved my arms in the air a bit in case there was security monitoring cameras!

The customer did laugh the following day and said that should have probably made sure I could get out before they left!

Fun times

A lot of the list is for illegal items

China is bad for a lot of things and certainly not condoning their actions, so ignoring the holes in the app, the probable monitoring and tracking etc....

Someone has posted the list at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/citizenlab/chat-censorship/master/olympics/illegalwords.txt

Digging thru it, the far majority is for things that are illegal and are pretty much terms for "guns for sale, drugs for sale, prostitutes for sale" though some really odd ones like "national tourism board".

Have only had a 5 minute dig as currently in the midst of my work day.

The joys of generator tests and failover

One financial institution I worked at many years ago decided to do a generator test late in the evening midweek - I was on shift that evening.

The failvoer goes Mains -> Battery -> Generator

On this test it went something like Mains -> Battery -> Generator (fails to start, everything goes black) -> Back to battery (everything comes on) -> back to generator (everything goes black) -> back to battery everything comes on -> batteries give out -> everything goes black and stays black.

No emergency lighting in the DC where the bridge was it turns out and no outside lighting to shine in thru the windows as there were none.

The hilarity, the mainframe batch runs that were in the progress at the time, the chaos - fun times.

So issues with the generators and lots of issues with failed batteries, lots of root cause analysis, lots of beefing up batteries, failover procedures etc...

There was fun at one bank where the generator fuel tanks spung a leak and flooded the basement canteen to a depth of 3 feet, they never did manage to paint over the diesel tide mark enough and their was a odour of diesel for the rest of the time I was there which never quite left.