Posts by firstnamebunchofnumbers

Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions

Nest... the dumbest smart thing we have

I really regret getting talked into Nest by our plumbing/heating engineer when we had a new boiler install. Unfortunately we had to do this in anger as our boiler packed up about 3 weeks after moving in a couple of years ago and 2 weeks before Christmas so I really didn't have time to do any research. I looked at OpenTherm devices and found a really nice OpenTherm relay/logger to allow me to (pointlessly) scrape metrics and logs from the thermostat messaging but our heating engineer looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and Nest was all that they would support.

Unfortunately we probably still have to keep the boiler for at least another 3-5 years before it is worth replacing but I would have loved to have gone with ASHP if the old boiler had broken down at a more convenient moment.

Anyway, all of our other home stuff is integrated and controlled by Home Assistant... presence detection using wifi devices via integration with the Unifi wireless controller, even the Amazon Blink cameras have a stable and feature-complete integration (even though auth/credential management of Blink is a joke). But our Nest thermostat for heating and water? Nope. It has been a couple of years since I checked but there was a time where you needed to dump some API credential and subscribe to the Google Developer API platform and even then the hot water schedule/boost was still hidden in a private API.

Nest offers family-approved and robust hardware when compared to the proprietary wall thermostats over the last 30 years... but in terms of software and integration with other platforms (the smart part) total garbage.

Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival

E-mail hosting is not just e-mail

Having self-hosted my e-mail for 20+ years:

* Originally various terminal clients such as Mutt and Pine that I would just telnet/SSH to

* Then various combinations of mostly fat-client access with ClawsMail and Thunderbird with Dovecot or whatever on the backend with Roundcube or SquirrelMail for web at various points

* Then ran my own Zimbra instance for several years (very nice web client, heavy VM needed for all the JVM gubbins) and Thunderbird as a client

* Then back to Dovecot, probably under cPanel and mostly Roundcube, with Thunderbird still for mailing list traffic

* Then about 8 years ago moved the whole lot to FastMail... superb web and mobile client experience, awesome filtering and rule management, and integrations

The frustrating thing is that in that time I have ended up with an annoyingly well-used GMail address running in parallel to all of that anyway!

Initially thanks to the Contacts+Calendar sync to clients and gradually becoming more "sticky" with Android login/sync/backup into the whole Google ecosystem. So I have ended up in a world where now Contacts/Cal sync to Google and my actual long-established personal/professional mail to FastMail, with a GMail address as a burner on the side. What a mess. And the reason? Not because of any major deficiencies solely in e-mail client experience but because mobile syncing of Contacts and Calendar was just too good to refuse with Android/Google 15-20 years ago. Of course I tried running my own CardDAV/CalDAV infrastructure at various stages, with Mozilla Sunbird or something on the desktop side, even had an OwnCloud for a year or two, but the whole setup for mobile was still a mess, being rather difficult to funnel it all away from Google's Android syncing platform.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

Altnets

Altnet customer here for the last 3 years (Swish Fibre, now Cuckoo/Jurassic/AllPointsFibre depending on which router's reverse DNS I happen to hit in `mtr`). The connection is XGPON so naturally I chose the 1Gbps symmetrical option (920Mbps in reality) just because I work in tech and wouldn't be able to take myself seriously if I chose only 250Mbps etc. At the time (with early sign-up discounts and an 18 month commitment) it was only 25% more expensive at £40 per month than their basic 150Mbps option. And 1Gbps was only £6 more per month than I had been paying for "unlimited fibre" FTTC (WTF?) with Zen (who I really like) for years.

Back in November an OpenReach flyer came through informing us that "unlimited full fibre" gigabit speeds will be available from December 2026... "up to" 1600Mbps down and 115Mbps up. Even now they are still trying to sell OpenReach's FTTC here for 85% of the cost of my 1Gbps symmetrical connection. I'll be really interested to see the pricing of OpenReach's "unlimited full fibre" service when ISPs are able to offer it in our area.

Happy with the altnets in our area to be honest. The only downside I find with Swish Fibre and their "next generation" network is that they still don't support the current version of the internet protocol (RFC 8200).

OpenZFS 2.3 is here, with RAID expansion and faster dedup

Re: Give ZFS another try

> Of course, you'll need to either take the old filesystem ofline first,

...

> Or unmount the new filesystem, specify the new mountpoint, then unmount the old and mount the new:

My original question was whether I could keep the mountpoint online and data in-use throughout, identical to using pvmove with LVM. The ZFS migration process described here doesn't seem to achieve that.

So just to follow-up, with ZFS is there no way I can move a bunch of data (a dataset) from one set of physical disks (vdev?) to a different set of physical disks, while keeping the data mounted and fully in-use by applications at all times?

Re: Give ZFS another try

Well I am under the impression that online migration of datasets to different vdevs (if that is the term) still isn't possible with ZFS while keeping the data mounted at the same mountpoint. Hence me continually sticking with LVM in almost all scenarios.

pvmove with LVM is brilliant. About 15-20 years ago I was using it to migrate many PBs of SAN storage to new arrays while applications and LUN consumers were none the wiser (taking care to stay well within SAN IO limits of course).

Give ZFS another try

I have used ZFS for home storage briefly over the years and always found it slightly restrictive and ended up going back to mdraid+LVM. For basic filesystem I was very pleased but the physical volume management felt clunky. This zRAID expansion sounds like it is worth me taking ZFS for a spin again though.

My main confusion point with ZFS was that I never figured out a sequence (perhaps I just didn't RTFM enough) to move ZFS datasets between pools of physical disks while keeping the mountpoint available and online. Every process of migration seems to need a manual copy of data (or snapshot) and a pool destroy/re-create, which necessitates a short downtime to flip the replacement dataset to the desired mountpoint. It's even more complicated if you are limited on chassis bays/ports/drives which might require an intermediate copy to a temporary larger-but-lower-redundancy disk pool. With LVM the killer feature is pvmove (I have done SAN migrations using pvmove between LUNs or arrays and keeping everything mounted and running is superb). Is there an equivalent method for online backend disk/volume migration in ZFS that I have perhaps missed?

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

XPS

XPS has been a decent line of laptops for me for over a decade, for both personal and work machines.

In a few years' time they will probably regard getting rid of the XPS brand as a mistake as it does convey a certain level of assurance that the product is, firstly, a laptop and generally one with a non-entry-level spec, build quality and portability. The opposite I guess to Inspiron which I'd say were always the cheapest Chinesium/plastic chassis of the lot.

Good luck trying to stand out in a saturated market when their product keywords for SEO (and tech buyers) are now just "Dell" then a combination of the words "Pro", "Max", "Plus, "Premium".

Huawei handed 2,596,148,429,267,413,
814,265,248,164,610,048 IPv6 addresses

Re: I have one major worry about IPv6

> doesn't that mean they're now directly reachable from the Net?

Yes, that would be the case if you didn't have a firewall in place. Why would you not have a firewall in place? :)

Most firewall/gateways outside of provider-locked home routers will let you specify the source+destination address+port traffic flows are allowed through in the same way for IPv6 as for IPv4.

Seriously though I had the same confusion about 15 years ago then moved my home internet to Zen which offered IPv6 and it forced me to understand it. Once you get your head around it there's not much difference.

My biggest source of annoyance with IPv6 though isn't anything to do with IPv6 addresses, it's the move away from DHCP as being the convention for handing out addresses. SLAAC (automatic) IPv6 addressing with PD (Prefix Delegation, giving devices a v6 address from ranges given to you by your ISP) works well but I never end up using it in isolation. Generally I also need a DHCPv6 daemon to hand out things like DNS, dns-search, boot-file, ntp-server and other options.

Another thing that holds back wider deployment certainly for bigger organisations is the idea having to re-number v6 hosts to new provider-allocated ranges when you change provider. The way around that is to run your own AS and get your own slice of v6 space from the RIR so you are not tied in to a specific provider. Yes, you can use DDNS for hosts to update their IPv6 (forward and reverse) DNS records but that was a scary switchover even for my home network.

In a way this has actually forced more centralisation on the internet, where orgs will outsource their edge to a CDN so the public-facing network and addressing is not their problem. There are internal IPv6 ranges that you can use (search for ULA addressing) but in my experience that's a massive kludge and only works for internal-internal traffic anyway and is best avoided (apart from something like a storage or other strictly internal VLAN etc).

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

Re: It seems to be the American way...

An interesting/harrowing documentary on iPlayer at the moment showing the complete lack of care for any of the effects of the UK's atomic testing programme https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m00257rk/britains-nuclear-bomb-scandal-our-story

'Patch yesterday': Zimbra mail servers under siege through RCE vuln

Still going?

Great to know zimbra is still going to be honest. I used to quite like running/using it, was a decent option for self-hosted e-mail in the days before hosted providers offering 50GB+ mailboxes.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: Recurrence

I look at the rubbish strewn across the roadsides here in semi-rural Buckinghamshire and your definition leads me to consider that the UK is perhaps not a 1st world country :/

I contrast that to our travels in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland this summer where the roadsides were absolutely spotless by comparison. We spent the best part of a week at an Austrian lake and I didn't see a single item of rubbish in the water, at all, and I really was trying to spot anything by the end.

Need to move 1.2 exabytes across the world every day? Just Effingo

Re: Brain balance

I will repeatedly agree with this.

The only good UI to ever come out of Google is a plain page with a text box and a search button and even that was essentially a cut-down evolution of AltaVista at the time. Everything else is an absolute pie and often, bafflingly, goes deliberately against long-established UI intuition.

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

Re: "The issue being addressed is what to do with that cord that has one failed light"

> Needless to say after 15+ years of service those old lights will probably be replaced next year. Fortunately our recycling centre is a short drive away and has a bin for generic electrical stuff but the cost of trawling through that and getting anything usable out of most of the stuff chucked in there must be enormous.

Thought about this a bit more. The environmental cost of the old lights (and human cost, as I expect most of this electronic waste is exported to poor countries to be picked over for less than $1 per day) is probably much more than the financial cost to me of a string of new lights (£10). Since I am fortunate enough to not have to worry necessarily about the financial cost of the 35W of power these old lights draw for the ~12 hours per day over the ~30 day festive period, it probably makes more environmental sense for me to continue to subsidise these old lights, keeping them out of waste at least until they are genuinely kaput.

Re: "The issue being addressed is what to do with that cord that has one failed light"

Being a complete tragic person this year I hooked up our Christmas lights (living room and kitchen-diner) to some power monitoring (Shelly Plus Plugs, for control of the lighting via Home Assistant). The 15+ year-old string of incandescent lights uses about 35W and the 4 year-old string of LEDs 3W.

Needless to say after 15+ years of service those old lights will probably be replaced next year. Fortunately our recycling centre is a short drive away and has a bin for generic electrical stuff but the cost of trawling through that and getting anything usable out of most of the stuff chucked in there must be enormous.

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

Shame

The Red Hat bugzilla has been a valuable resource for all Linux admins and devs for 15-20 years.

It's hard to ever imagine a public JIRA instance reaching such levels of SEO and accessibility... although we all know the plan for this will be for it to be a very private resource instead.

/me goes to "Edit Comment" in JIRA and laughs heartily at the incompetence that allows me to be presented with a 200x100px text box.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Expensive

That would also leave more Pi stock available for people who actually need them.

The most appealing Pi form-factor for me in recent years is probably the Pi Zero 2W actually, ideal for small home automation applications.

> Will it velcro to the back of your TV to provide silent streaming from the interwebs?

My cheap £35 refurb Lenovo ThinkCenter Tiny thing is attached via a VESA bracket. Works well enough.

Expensive

The shortage of stock over the last few years made me re-consider using rPis in a couple of home situations. If you need a headless/fanless board for a very specific function, then the price-per-watt might still be worth it. It's not even that small in footprint when you factor in the cables sprouting out of every direction

However on my home "management server" I tried attaching an SSD via USB-SATA enclosure to my 4GB Pi 4 to make updates/installations slightly less IO-bound vs MicroSD or USB-3 stick. Despite recommended/compatible USB 3 chipset, I had no end of problems with the power envelope of the Pi. With a powered USB hub as well the thing ended up taking out 2 plug sockets and wires everywhere... not a family-approved application.

I eventually just bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93 Tiny with Intel i3 "T" CPU (office refurb on ebay, £35). When comparing the power usage, the full x86 box with more RAM and expandability idled at 9-12W and my Pi 4 idled at 4W. For some applications such as ARM development, GPIO/electronics tinkering, or a truly fanless requirement then it might be worth paying the Pi premium. But IMO if you need cheap but still vaguely efficient home compute for some headless home server/NAS tinkering, then for most people a cheap refurb x86 thin client is probably more flexible and cost-effective.

Downloading the Webb Scope's data starts with a 6-month scheduling scramble

DSN Now

Thanks for sharing this amazing link https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html I'm basically addicted to it already!

OpenZFS 2.2 is nearly here, and ZFSBootMenu 2.2 already is

ZFS... pls explain

I have been using ZFS on-and-off for a number of years, mostly off in the last 2-3 to be fair.

The thing I never quite got my head around is the concept of dropping a drive for a graceful replacement. With LVM I add a new PV to the VG then do a `pvmove` command to move the extents from the drive I'd like to replace to the new (possibly larger) drive. Then I can safely remove the old PV from the VG. Repeat that with all PVs then resize2fs.

Could anyone describe a similar workflow with ZFS? I remember getting confused and concerned when adding the new drive to the zpool and the zpool size instantly grew to include it, rather than preparing to then remove an older drive. IIRC I ended up copying all the data off to another physical device then rebuilding the zvol/zpool or whatever and copying back to ZFS. I was probably just "holding it wrong" and need to RTFM but if anyone can point me to the way of doing this with ZFS?

HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch

Shareware

Have always considered HashiCorp's stuff as shareware, in that its existence as true FOSS was completely dependent on HashiCorp's share price or financial priorities.

Decent software (albeit dreadful QA) that solves unique problems. There's a path to monetisation but post-IPO that was always going to involve gradual retraction of licensing and community engagement.

Since when did my SSD need water cooling?

Progress

My favourite feature of M2 drives is how much surface area they take up on a motherboard. Especially, on a recent Asus board, that to replace an M2 drive I had to remove three expansion cards and associated cabling, undo 4 screws to remove some plastic decorative cover to then get access to the disk.

Why sit them flat on the motherboard and not vertically like RAM? Or just use the fact that they take out PCI lanes and have them on expansion cards by default.

Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available. Repeat, Azure Linux

Azure

The thing is there is no way MS are creating their hosted/PaaS offerings such as O365, Exchange online, Azure Domain Controllers with their fundamental in-house core technologies.

Exchange online and Azure AD managed by a global topology of JetDB instances and Domain Controllers? Nah, probably just postfix, Exim, postgres, OpenLDAP, BIND (etc and/or whatever) *heavily* optimised and bent into shape. Which is no mean feat and no slight on MS engineering meant by that at all, just let's be real here, Microsoft's primary revenue streams in the present day would not exist if it weren't for Linux and the open-source platform.

Perseverance rover shows up Curiosity with discovery of Martian water park

powerful stream in the area

> proof of water that flowed faster and at greater depths than previous evidence indicated

...

> little doubt there was a powerful stream in the area,

I see lots of this sort of wording that once upon a time there was *water* on moon/planet whatever, based on effectively "look, a flowing substance carved shapes in rock over billions of years".

As a space numpty but achieving minor adequacy in science A levels and some sort of BSc, I never seem to see anyone questioning whether it was anything other than *liquid* H₂O. IMO over a billion-year geological solar-system time-scales, in space(!) etc, all bets are off! Planetary topology caused exclusively by liquid H₂O actually seems to be the most unlikely thing out of anything to me.

As recession looms, Workday warns that legacy HR systems need updating

Workday warning people to not use Workday?

I was at a place that had outsourced their people processing to workday and using it felt like the very definition of legacy! You could practically hear the JBoss apps clunking away as each HTML 4 table loaded in various iframes... felt like using a web app from 1998.

Zorin OS 16.2: Shapeshifting desktop to help the Linux-wary feel more at home

XFCE

XFCE... Been doing the job and staying out of my way for years!

Tend to use Fedora in the last few years (after many years of Mint or Xubuntu). Fedora rolls at a nice cadence but with any gnarly bits having been tested by many others before it reaches me.