* Posts by knightperson

4 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2022

Sophos fixes critical firewall hole exploited by miscreants

knightperson

Re: Ditched them months ago

The free version of pre-XG Sophos UTM uses more than one core. I think it requires two and will support at least four if you want to give it that much resource. (Mine runs in a VM)

I ran it until recently. I never got XG configured the way I wanted, so I eventually gave up and replaced it with PfSense.

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

knightperson

Re: The real mystery is how Paula discovered the clock work around ...

Or the option I tried back in the day: find a local shop that can do surface-mount soldering to replace the buggy Buster chip with a better one. Sadly, what I actually found was a local shop who only CLAIMED they knew how to surface-mount. Brought the machine (Amiga 4000 desktop) back home, and it almost booted once, but never got any farther than that. A friend of mine, far better with a soldering iron than I am, looked at it for all of a second and said "that solder job looks like crap. I could have done better, and I don't even know what I'm doing!" A few unsuccessful negotiations with the store about defending their work later, and I stopped payment on the check. Immediately after that, of course, they were actually able to get ahold of the people who were unavailable when I walked into the shop, accused me of civil and criminal fraud, sent the job to a collection agency, sent several letters threatening small claims or even criminal court (but only threatening rather than acting, as I made it clear I was perfectly willing to defend my conduct before a judge and they never filed anything), and that "resolution pending" stayed on my credit report for the next seven years. I shipped the machine out to another business out-of-state that I had been avoiding because of a few bad reviews, but it came back from them fully functional for less cost than what I had briefly paid the local shop.

I learned many years later that the technician, who I never actually met, was of the opinion that this was beyond his skill and tools and he wasn't comfortable even attempting a surface-mount job with a soldering iron (done properly, it's done with a hot air gun) but the boss, who was the source of most of the threats and arguments against me, ordered him to do it anyway.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

knightperson

Re: Bank of England going to trade show

I remember that story as well. Once somebody with a brain finally showed up and confirmed that yes there IS such a thing as a $2 bill, instead of apologizing to the poor sap they had just left handcuffed to a light pole for the last couple of hours, they tried to justify it with some nonsense about "well, you just have to be careful in this Post-9/11 World."

An old high school teacher who was a bit of a prankster (or had a friend who was, depending on the accuracy of my memory from this long ago) claimed to have taken an old check register, withdrawn $50 in nice, fresh, consecutive-serial-number singles from the bank; and rubber-cemented them into the empty check pad to make a pad of $1's. He would pay for things by ripping off the appropriate number of 1's from his pad and watch people go nuts try to figure out whether they were legitimate currency. They were, of course, but money doesn't come that way so they couldn't be.

Back-to-office mandates won't work, says Salesforce's Benioff

knightperson

Location no longer matters... unless we say it does

A few years ago, I was working support for a company that had recently done a "move to the Cloud" and touted the benefits of how location no longer mattered. I applied for a higher position that was currently in California, but was told that location actually DID matter because the manager of that team wanted his people all in the same place, despite the fact that he wasn't there himself, and I would have to move to take the job. I chose to keep my existing position as an office tech.

Some time later, it was announced that the company-wide support would be moved from Michigan, where it had been done well and economically for about as long as the company had existed, to greater Los Angeles where the cost of living is much higher, and somehow they would save money by doing this. The contradiction that much of that office's business was essentially customer support out-sourced TO Michigan because it was cheaper than most other places apparently didn't bother anybody involved in the decision-making.

Shortly after that announcement, I left, even though my position wasn't one of the ones being relocated.