Posts by AtomicWombat

Linus Torvalds tries vibe coding, world still intact somehow

Re: "as long as it isn't for something important"

Proof of this is left as an exercise for the grader

Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause

Re: Bob's Laptop

Particularly when the only reason that the build works at all on Bob's laptop is that it has a hardcoded dependency on a custom nightly build of the entire FreeBSD userland (on a Linux box!), which Bob has not bothered to write down or tell anyone about.

Not that I've ever had that happen. Nope.

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Let's be honest, the only reason that H-PUX isn't considered the Worst Big Vendor UNIX Ever™ is that AIX was (and apparently continues to be) a thing. I'm surprised that whatever is left of Hewlett-Drunkard kept it on life support this long.

How high-end supercomputer filesystem DAOS can break out of its niche

Widespread?

"But DAOS is widespread, with 15 to 20+ production systems in active use."

~15-20 deployments is not what I'd call widespread for a file system, even in HPC. Furthermore, the main issue with I/O in the era of AI is dealing with the squadzillions of small I/O requests generated by naive users of PyTorch and so on, and that class of user is rarely allowed anywhere near a Top 5 system like ALCF's Aurora.

Eleven years after Lenovo acquired IBM’s x86 server biz, profits are still elusive

Re: There's a reason

AFAICT IBM has started quietly selling x86 servers again, though just as part of larger solutions. Where I work, we've been through 3 generations of their ESS/SSS GPFS-in-a-box product. The first generation was all Power based servers, the second was a roughly equal mix of Power and AMD, and the latest generation is all AMD.

A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees

Re: bed is stuck

"Just steer clear of Gopher"

Don't worry, pretty much everyone not being paid by the University of Wisconsin to work on it already did

AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content

Re: “ All I know is I see regular waves of multiple companies' AI bots raiding my site. ‘

Publish the IP address ranges that these attacks come from and encourage whoever is upstream from you to block traffic from them at the edge router/firewall. Brute force, sure, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

And now for our annual ‘Tape is still not dead’ update

Re: The whole point of backups...

"I think personally the threat of ransomware is what is keeping tape back ups going, for now."

Maybe in the enterprise computing world, but in HPC/research computing, it's a LOT cheaper to keep petabytes of infrequently accessed archival data on tape (even with multiple copies to protect against tape corruption) than on spinning rust or SSDs. (Especially if you have a file system that supports tiering/HSM like GPFS/Storage Scale/whatever IBM calls it this week.)

"Drives built to work with the current ninth-gen spec, which offers 18 terabytes of uncompressed capacity on each tape, can therefore write the 12TB eighth-gen tapes and read seventh-gen tapes to access the measly 6TB each can contain."

Two-generation read compatibility has historically been true for LTO, but sadly it isn't for LTO9. I am in this middle of an LTO7->9 migration that has been significantly complicated by the fact that LTO9 drives won't read LTO7 tapes. (To the point of having to replace and repack a tape library frame at our DR site because otherwise we don't have enough drive slots to accommodate both sets of drives at the same time...)

Trump tariffs ruled illegal within minutes of Musk announcing end of government role

If I believed in reincarnation, I'd be inclined to wonder if Stephen Miller is the reincarnation of Joseph Goebbels. There is definitely a resemblance.

Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running

Re: Similar thing, but zombie user not laptop

At the time we picked them (4-5 years ago now), they were best in show for their niche, and from what I've seen that's not changed.

...HOWEVER...

The company was swallowed by a bigger fish in the interim, and their corporate overlords recently decreed (like 5 minutes after we paid our last annual support bill) that the service is going to be sunset in a couple years in favor of a component of their big-ticket ITSM framework. Which would be fine, except we're just about to complete a multi-year, 6-digit-budget project to overhaul how we do our customer support using a *different* big-ticket ITSM framework, and nobody is exactly chomping at the bit to chuck all that work at the last minute just for this, especially if our ITSM framework can do this (which it of course can, just not as nicely as what we use now).

Re: Similar thing, but zombie user not laptop

We have at least one service provider where I work that is actively hostile toward customers who don't/can't pay with a credit card. Every year when our maintenance renewal comes due, I have to go through an arduous multi-week process of requesting a quote and then repeatedly explaining (AGAIN) that my purchasing department is that of an Enormous State University™ that pays their bills with purchase orders rather than a credit card, and no, I don't have a lot of choice or influence about that.

VMware users gripe over 3-year commitment to renew licenses

In addition to the obvious search for more money, this is all about maximizing the pain for anyone thinking of moving off VMware. Most organizations thinking of migrating off VMware (my employer included) were looking at getting a 1-year support extension to give some overlap time for whatever they're moving to. If that's hard to do, it's yet another disincentive from migrating.