Posts by Licensed_Radio_Nerd

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

atlnets running amok

I have seen the mess in the South Cambridgeshire village of Gamlingay as an alt-net set about installing new poles, much to the chagrin of the residents - especially for those where all other services are underground! It seems as if the planning departments are powerless to control the madness. Fibre at any cost! The contractors managed to damage the Openreach cabling, and that saw Openreach vans tailing the contractors, fixing all of the faults they caused. The upshot for some, was an improvement in their VDSL signals! That aside, no-one could see the reason for the altnet coming to the village. The VDSL coverage was already pretty good, and the village is scheduled for Openreach to roll-out fibre sooner than larger towns over the border in Bedfordshire. Some areas now have a nice new pole ready for fibre that no-one wants to bother with, as many are waiting for Openreach so they are not locked-in to the alt-net.

My home town of Biggleswade has seen Openreach install new poles near to their existing poles, and I assume they will offer to swap the existing drop-wires; and eventually, remove the old POTS poles. My area has copper underground, but it was buried in the dirt when the estate was built in the 1980s, so someone is going to have to come and dig things up to install new ducting - and I suspect that means cutting across the gardens! We had chaos in the small estate roads in the 90s when CableTel's contractors dug up the roads - and in my street, they managed to damage the 3-phase mains ... which required two more larger holes dug in the pavements to find the blown cable. I am eagerly waiting on fibre to the home, as the VDSL signal on the 40-year-old copper is now terrible; and I've had to have Openreach out 3 times in the past few years to replace the terminator head as it was full of water. However, I am wondering what level of chaos will be created when they start digging up the roads and pavements, and whether we will be left until last in the roll-out as being "too hard"!?

IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media thing

Re: NAT

Yes. The application will call home to Twit-central, and the software there will join the two ends together - a bit like the old plug-in switchboards. Unlike the old switchboards, the call routing will not continue through Twit-central. Once each end knows the public IP addresses, they can talk to each other point-to-point. The Network Address Translation side of the firewall will track the passing packets so it knows where to return the data to internally. I would guess (hope) the app is using HTTPS as pretty much every firewall device on the Net passes that without messing with it.

And thanks to this article, I have already disabled this unwanted feature bloat!

Top five reasons to move from CentOS to RHEL (according to Red Hat)

Moved to Rocky for now...

Both of my HPE ML310e Gen8 v2 servers are now running Rocky Linux 8 after a manual migration process from CentOS 7. The deprecation of tcp_wrappers required changes to VsFTPd configs, and a switch to iptables blocking for Fail2Ban. Other than that, it was pretty painless - mostly just updates to config files to correct paths from older configs I had been too lazy to change. I am being warned on boot, that RH may deprecate the HPSSA drivers for my P222 RAID card in future releases. That is rather vague as to whether that means future kernel updates, or major release versions!? Granted, the servers are old, but that was the point with Linux - keeping older kit going. That said, there is a kmod driver from HPE, but it depends if they keep it up to date!? Their software repos are aimed at you purchasing new kit!

If Rocky eventually falls afoul of IBM's practises, I may have to switch distros, which will be a sad day, as I have been using RH-based stuff since the mid-90s. Two servers, two laptops, and a desktop are all running Rocky Linux at the moment. I suspect Ubuntu will win out as they offer their LTS version. There is little/no server-vendor support for Debian, so you cannot install the in-band management software for RAID cards, SNMP monitoring, or iLO/iDRAC integration; and these are essential and useful tools for server management.

The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers

Box of floppies

I spent numerous weekends in the run up to the end of 1999 walking around the offices I worked in patching the crap out of anything and everything that looked like a computer. Those were the Compaq days, so I walked around with a box of trusty Softpaqs on floppy-disk, running through a set procedure to ensure BIOS, OS, et al, were all ready to go. As I came from an Electronic Engineering background, I said to the IT manager (who had arrived in simlar circumstances to Jen on the IT Crowd) that I would leave the servers and network all running, and deal with any issues on our return in January.

The "clever" people over at the York Street site in Cambridge, decided to power-off their AS/400 - just in case! On our return to the office, I was glad to see everything ticking away as before. We had no issues. The IT Manager receives a phone call from York Street. An announcement will have to be made to all of the AS/400 users on our site stating it will be down for a couple of days. The "clever" people had thrown the breakers, in came a lovely wave of 240 Vac, and the stone-cold power-supplies promptly puked their innards! IBM were, so I heard, run off their feet, as quite a few people around the UK had done the same thing.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

Schematics?

I have repaired various items over the years, from a sub-woofer, to various pieces of Amateur Radio gear. That has only been possible as I can usually find the schematics and the parts list. If the parts are custom silicon and obsolete, it becomes a "boat-anchor". It is very hard, and in a lot of cases, completely impossible for a home electronics engineer to repair domestic kit due to the lack of information. There is also no money in it, when the cost of repair is more than the cost of replacement!

In the past, I have tried to be nice to the local tidy tip, by breaking down old kit so it can be put in the correct recycling skip. That is currently not the case. Central Bedfordshire Council have gone full Stasi and now want local residents to produce "Papers, Citizen!" to prove they live in the area and have a right to use the service. So now the WEEE will be going in the land-fill bin!

Red Hat greases migration to RHEL for CentOS 7 holdouts

"So what are all those CentOS 7 users to do when end of life arrives?"

Spending two/three days over that period where other people shovel tonnes of food in their faces rsyncing ~5 TB of data from the in-house ML310 running CentOS 7 to the shed ML310 already running Rocky 8, then re-configuring UEFI/PXEBOOT to the second server, and re-installing the in-house server with Rocky 8. Prep-work is underway to check on config changes for Apache, Sendmail, Sendmail-milter, greylist-milter, spamassassin, spamass-milter, clamav-milter, procmail, Dovecot, chrony, tftpboot, NFS, OpenLDAP, DHCPd, Named... How many daemons is too many daemons? Asking for a friend...

Desktop and laptops are already on Rocky 8, although there are issues, such as the lack of GUI Bluetooth control, three faulty MATE packages in EPEL, and out-dated HP printer drivers - that I worked around by rebuilding the SRPM from Fedora. A Fedora LTS might be nice on the desktop/laptop systems as RHEL is clearly aimed at servers, although systemd, chronyd, and NetworkManager all appear to have been aimed at laptop users! Go figure!! I have looked into possibly using Ubuntu LTS on the desktop/laptops, but when you dig deep, there is always something missing that you want to use, but lack the software skillz to build yourself.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Re: There's a "Maidenhead Locator System" ???

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

I suspect it could be extended to provide a better resolution. And from a UK point-of-view, it would be easy to teach people "you live in India-Oscar 92" or "Juliet Oscar XX" (for Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Kent), and then teach them the smaller numbers and letters. A suitable phone app could convert their Long/Lat to an accurate Maidenhead Locator, and spell it out in the NATO phonetics for easy transmission. The call-handlers are all trained and would (should) be able to pick-out the word, even with noise in the background.

The Maidenhead Locator can be transferred under some pretty awful radio conditions. I took part in the RAF Air Cadet Exercise Blue Ham (Exercise Hermia) this June 2023, and the cadet stations from the RAFAC, Army Cadets, Sea Cadets, and Combined Cadet Force managed to exchange information through serious QRN (thunderstorms raging across Europe) and major QSB (very broken sky conditions from mutiple X-ray flares thrown at us by the sun). It takes time and many repeats, but when you know you are listening for IO or JO, the rest is fairly easy.

73 from somewhere in IO92ub

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

I miss AmiPro 3.0

Back in the heady 90s, everyone who was anyone, was using AmiPro for their documentation (and we tended to pronounce it Amy-Pro). I absolutely loved the ability to set styles - and they were tied to the function keys. Body text - F2. Title - F7. It made writing technical manuals a breeze - and totally keyboard based once you had your styles configured! Then IBM screwed it up! For what I need these days, I use LibreOffice on Rocky Linux 8 with the MATE desktop. It is mostly creating an address label and the odd letter. I have to use M$ Office for work, and it still annoys me with its helpful oddities of auto-formatting. I have not had the need to use them in sufficient anger since the mid-90s to bother learning their in-depth settings.

Nearly every AMD CPU since 2017 vulnerable to Inception data-leak attacks

Just when I thought about upgrading...

I built a home-brew desktop PC several years ago, and decided that time around, to move from AMD chips to Intel. A new shiny Intel Core i7-6700K, no less. And then someone found it was full of holes. In recent times, I was thinking of replacing the CPU/motherboard/RAM with an AMD combination. A new-ish laptop has an octo-core AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U, and the quad-core desktop CPU seems quant. So I have been browsing motherboards and CPU options that behave with Rocky Linux 8 and play nice with Virtual Box. An 8-core CPU is a reasonable chunk of cash, and I was thinking AMD - based on what happened with Intel. And now they have holes! Are there any processors out there that do not contain serious bugs? Asking for a friend...

Waiting for speedy broadband? UK's Openreach prioritizing existing work over fiber expansion

Costing to fix the copper

Voneus turned up in the village of Gamlingay in South Cambridgeshire (where a friend of mine lives) and started making a mess installing more ugly poles to join the existing Openreach poles, then they started digging up roads and verges to lay their fibre interconnects. A village meeting was called to ask who the hell invited them to make a mess - seeing as Openreach have the village marked for FTTP roll-out, and to highlight that those in other areas with underground services did not want ugly poles suddenly sprouting up. Openreach have had to follow the Voneus contractors around the village fixing their damage. Lots of people have had their POTS line damaged or completely broken. The upshot of that is that my friend's VDSL is now rock solid as the flaky connections damaged by Voneus have been repaired.

Fibre Optic was invented and patented in the UK, so the correct spelling is FIBRE! And yes, the shift to "International English" is exceedingly annoying!!

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Former Electronics Engineer here...

Spent 4 years on day-release from the day-job to study BTEC National, then Higher National Certificate in Electronics Engineering. I can fault-find to component level on a variety of electronic systems. I have designed my own little circuits as part of my Amateur Radio hobby; as well as repair radios/amplifiers/PSUs for other Radio Amateurs who lack the skills/kit/etc. I work in IT. Why? In this throw-away society, no-one wants to spend money on having things repaired, so there is no call for my complex electronics skill-set. As other have suggested, there is also little in the way of financial reward for those skills. I gained a £10k pay-increase by switching to IT back in the 90s.

I would love to get back into electronics as IT, with its constant beta software, and everything in the cloud, is driving me nuts. I cannot get back into electronics as few want to pay decent money, they do not understand the skill-set that can come with Amateur Radio, and I have not worked in commercial electronics for years, so what would I know about modern soldering standards?!

There are people out there that could fill the roles. You need to pay more, respect Engineers and Technicians, and offer catch-up training instead of trying to grab people off the shelf who are ready to "go". The latter point also applies to all roles, especially senior ones! Too much word matching and CVs being filed in the "no" pile as the people recruiting do not know the difference between a red Cat5e patch lead and a blue Cat5e patch lead!

Mozilla browser Firefox hits the big 100

Linux desktop user here!

I am a long-time Firefox and Thunderbird user; and each major update to the Extended Support Release annoys me when my favourite add-ons are borked. Changing the folder colours in Thunderbird used to be a breeze with an add-on. That was borked with the Quantum upgrade and the dev gave up. Now you have to change each folder manually, which is annoying! A lot of the themes were also lost in the upgrade to Quantum - and again, the developers of those have given up.

+1 for wanting the bottom status bar back. I used to dock NoScript, uBlock Origin, and others on the status bar - providing you could override the height and stop it taking up a tonne of space! The pop-up bar gets in the way when websites use the full length of the window for their menu. The latest annoyance is changing "Delete" to "Remove Bookmark" and putting it high up the menu. As others have said, the muscle memory keeps going to the wrong place!

It appears Mozilla are trying to kill-off the userChrome.css function I use to set a blank dark grey background on each new tab. I suspect they want everyone to use their crappy home page to drive revenue to Google! I have news for Moz - all of your Home features are disabled on my browsers!

As other have commented, tracking sites will struggle with my browsing. NoScript, uBlock Origin, and an in-house upstream DNS blocker all do their bit to stealth my browsing.

@Lucy in the Sky (with Diamonds) - HPE have updated iLO 4 and the remote console can now be accessed with HTML5. Linux users are finally free of the hassle of trying to install Java Runtime that works with iLO. I cannot comment on whether they have updated iLO3 or 2...