Posts by keithpeter

Re: To the surprise of no one

Ah, yes, sales.

The 2003 'monetisation' of Red Hat Linux that became RHEL was the direct driver for Scientific Linux/Fermilab Linux i recollect from reading on the Internet. Details hazy but Red Hat sales quoted something like $30 per core. When it was spelled out slowly to the sales operatives that the computers used in particle accelerator labs have thousands of cores a discount was (eventually) offered, something like $15 per core.

The HEP community did the sums and expanded the role of some of their IT staff to include an independent recompile. There used to be a PowerPoint presentation from an HEP conference with the sums floating around the Web.

Once again in 2020 we have the sudden imposition of a new release plan part way through what was stated as a 10 year support lifetime for CentOS Linux 8. I get the impression that is what is annoying people. Had the change been brought in for Centos Linux 9 then perhaps there would have been less jumping up and down. The change would also perhaps have generated less noise if the new non-profit/open source licences for RHEL that have been promised for 'early 2021' had actually been firmed up and announced at the same time as this change.

Springdale Linux is still independently built from the source code that RedHat chuck over the wall, which I have to assume will mirror the state of released RHEL in order to comply with the GPL. Springdale Linux was PUIAS Linux and they do tweak things to suit their installations so perhaps test very carefully before swapping the yum config to point to their repositories. The Springdale Linux 8 boot images are not linked to the main page, they are at

http://springdale.princeton.edu/data/Springdale/8/x86_64/os/images/

The project does not bother with a large DVD image. This is a small project for a couple of academic institutions, but they do have their own build process independent of CentOS I think which might save a possible DentOS project some time.

I have no doubt that CentOS Stream will be fine for non-critical use such as endpoint desktops etc. But as one server farmer pointed out on another forum the updates will dribble over rather than coming in well defined point releases which is problematic for non-commercial large scale server use.

Johnny Hughes is doing a sterling job of trying to clarify/defend/sell this change on the centos-dev and centos mailing lists. Very grateful for his and Karanbir Singh's work over the last decade or so.

Of course, there is always Oracle Linux

http://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-isos.html

Ah, my coat.

Re: Toshiba

@Mr Jeltz: have a chat with a gas fitter sometime. Or a plumber. You'd be surprised about people's houses.

Overheard in the gents loo in a pub off the Leith Road some decades ago

"You don't buy the beer, you rent it"

Re: @ovation1357 - What a hypocrite!

"They worked hard to offer you a desktop for free, without imposing you any obligation."

Perhaps they could work less hard?

Think about it.

Re: The open source bullets are flying

"But both LO and OO have shot holes in all the other word processing and other applications, reducing their income and corporate profits making it harder to maintain the commercial products unless you keep forcing users to buy new versions."

I've used oOo and later LO under Linux for decades. Awareness of oOo/LO is basically of measure zero in any setting that I have worked in. Hilariously that includes an employer whose standard desktop image includes oOo, inkscape and GIMP alongside MS Office, MS Publisher and the Adobe-thing-for-education-of-the-year.

I suspect but can't prove that MS Office basically ate the market for anyone on the Windows platform even going back to Star Office which is how we got OpenOffice in the first place.

I also suspect but can't prove that Google docs/apps/business is more of a rival to MS 365 in the current cloudy commercial era.

Re: Cashflow & tax rules

@Jellied Eel

Find a seasoned workshop technician/instructor from your local further education college / general college. One with a decade or so of experience who is up for the challenge of setting up a workshop that runs to their rules.

https://steamhouse.org.uk/

These people (who I have no dealings with at all other than looking at the projects being completed each day as I walk past) add undergraduates to very big and sharp woodworking machines together with basic metal work with apparently no issues. Currently mothballed because of COVID.

Best of luck. Sounds a blast.

Re: Location location location

I once occupied an office in space repurposed from a gents loo, which circumstance many of my colleagues found endlessly amusing.

Tiles pipes and porcelain removed, bog standard magnolia paint applied to walls by estates' staff. However, the sporadic aim of previous incumbents lead to a certain smell as ungents prevously absorbed by the walls outgassed. Was advised to repaint using kitchen and bathroom paint with an exterior sealant as undercoat. We did so one weekend and all was good.

Not IT: most of the routine information I am asked for is not actually used for anything. Now I just wait until someone shouts loud, then provide it. Has cut my paperwork down significantly.

Exceptions: safeguarding, special access arrangements, sudden unexplained changes in student performance. Management by exception basically.

Icon: ranty old man

Re: They could always buy it from...

Interesting. I was sort of thinking of the councils setting up a consortium and sharing costs. Probably cloud cuckoo land.

Re: 'spreadsheet software as "human middleware" in the sector'

Moodle is an open source/free online learning/course management tool written in php. It can get student data in various ways, including the upload of a csv file. One has done this with many more students (one student per row, natch) than currently the issue. Moodle has been around for a decade or a decade and a half.

One assumes that a modern hipsta web app would be able to cope with the direct upload of a csv file...

Re: the difference between an engineer and sn installer.

@Symon: cat showing considerable interest in a new space sometimes means that traces of 'little visitors' have been detected...

Re: An ex employer did that too.

"Have all of them in a single meeting to discuss requriements"

Education rather than IT but when sorting new stuff out with different middle managers tending to sit in their silos a director level person I worked with used this strategy to good effect.

All the players in a classroom, if more players identified they received The Summons. Flipcharts round the walls. My job was to write decisions with names against them on the flipcharts. The result was a plan with a time frame and lists of names of people/departments who needed to do what by when. Noone left till it was all sorted (coffee/sandwiches sent in if needed). Then I had to turn the flipcharts into a project plan/set of notes and circulate it.

Quite often the plan changed as we went along, but it got that initial consensus going. Tended to work quite well.

Re: Who was the priority?

As a naive taxpayer I think that I'm generally in favour of local direct emergency systems that work without sophisticated central servers, network infrastructure and so on. You could have a smartphone additionality to that providing data access on the run, but the basic ability to communicate and coordinate should be, it strikes me, as independent of systems that depend on mains power, cables, and consumer networks.

Is there not a hybrid approach available that would use VHF/UHF plus some kind of scrambling, possibly with a rotated scrambling schema downloaded to each radio while charging? How long does operational voice conversation remain sensitive? Hours? Days?

Re: Backup?

Anon because he is still a customer

Either you are a saint or they paid a lot for setting up a backup process. Either way, cheers.

Re: Not met a demon

Did it reboot OK after power was restored?

Re: First you need users

In addition to the points above, I'd just like to mention that Debian is still the only distribution that I know of that provides a good chunk of its repositories as downloadable isos.

Once you manage to find them, a download of DVD1 and DVD2 of the stable Debian release gives you a shedload of software installable offline. Install from DVD1 then boot your new installation, copy the isos to your hard drive, and mount them both. Register them with Synaptic/Apt and you can take a slow boat to China or disappear up the Limpopo secure in the knowledge that you can install software.

The project also provides update isos periodically as each new point release is defined. There is even a blueray iso with the lot on it.

Re: I hate techies!

File sharing: rsync over ssh to some server space?

Or does that put me in the vi as universal UI bracket?

Testing

End user suggests: not pointing lawyers at anyone. Just running a battery of tests against new Web applications before they are made available to punters. Test battery to be updated with new exploits &c when found.

Test team's job is to find holes - could be fun? Gamify the whole process? Splat guns optional.

Spokesbeing quoted in OA was suggesting that things were tested. Perhaps require formal disclosure of testing process when exploits of this nature found?

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

What I see here is a lot of untested hypotheses and anecdotes, which is fine, that is the *starting* point for research.

Has anyone done any actual *research* on why it is difficult to nominate new maintainers?

Is there a general aging of the 'funnel' at all skills levels?

Or is there a specific issue about the big ball of mud now being so complex it is difficult to gain an overview?

Or is it simply that employers are not freeing senior staff to take on significant responsibility?

Or perhaps it is something else entirely.

If the first, then, yes 'onboarding' needs to be looked at, and part of that might be providing a different *presentation* of the patch process. If the second then the barrier represented by setting up a standard compliant email client may not be the key issue. If the third then some kind of paid sabbatical process will need to be funded.

Icon: generational handover is real and it can be a problem. I've faced the issues in a non-IT related field. At some point, ownership of institutions and processes ('the way we do things here') has to be passed on, and you have to let them get on with it. The rite of passage / ritual of retirement is useful like that. We are after all primates with a bit of a patch in our wetwear.

I've been ignoring meetings for the last 10 years or so of a 30 year career in teaching. Has worked ok so far. I started when we stopped talking about the progress of individual students and started talking about 'indicators' and 'strategic alignment'.

Warning: cultures vary in education. Take local advice.

Re: The elevator did it

The Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol had a retrospective exhibition of digital art from 1970s/80s/90s. There was a personal computer programmed to play tunes through a transistor radio placed near it. The output peripheral was actually the CRT monitor - i think the scan coils because medium/long wave. A video 'demo' was looped that had been written to produce the audio in the radio. Quite a nice piece.

"Sure, a Maths degree or A-level would mean they had a spent time looking at the toolboxes available; but anyone with the patience and ability can go away and look up the tools needed down the line whether they did the degree or not. "

Good luck to you.

How do you detect ability?

(I'm assuming your enterprise is not involved in civil engineering or similar.)

"It'll become just an appliance."

What is the lifetime of the SSD in question under typical use conditions?

Looking around my kitchen, my appliances range in age from 20 years (cooker, ok but might need a new one in the next 5 years) to a couple of years (toaster, going strong). Mind you the whole lot cost less than £2k

I'm not averse to the consumer-end-point-as-applience model, but would want a decent lifetime for £2k's worth. 10 years (£4 a week roughly) perhaps.

Aftermarket: anyone want to take bets on a piggyback SSD holder mod appearing in a few years?

Icon: off out before the thunder storms

Re: You know,

@Hubert C and all

I once paid money for a copy of Netscape Communicator 'Gold'. It came in a cardboard box that was basically empty apart from a CD and a piece of card with information about the contents of the CD. The 'Gold' bit meant it had a Web page editor (spun off as Composer) and a mail/news client that became Thunderbird. That was in the days when you went into the shop and picked the box off the shelf then took it to the counter and paid money to a human.

Why not have a paid for version? All 'extras' off? Long term support? Laptop stickers? ISO with source code and build instructions for enthusiasts? Might make a bob or two.

Traffic analysis has been popular...

...since olden days, c.f. Gordon Welchman's The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes

Coat: off out with my personal locator beacon to get some exercise

Re: A question for 'Sam'

Seemed a bit harsh to remove 'Sam' - unless he decided to stop going himself. Clearly not deliberate sabotage. Could have been a good learning point about machine arch differences &c

Icon: used to work in FE. Have taught day release (not IT). Usually committed students.

Re: We hear these stories all the time

..."That was the point I realized something was wrong..."

Which is I imagine how change happens. Wondering what lead you to the insight? Peer group? Television from outside your immediate family? School?