Posts by Rob Daglish

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

Re: The owner did a

See also Airframe, by Michael Crichton for something very similar

Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online

Did it not? What you seem to be describing is something I have a vague memory of being called "The Microsoft Network", which I was (un)fortunate enough to try on my W95 PC with my 14.4K modem...

See - I'm not the only one to remember it:

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/

Water system cyberattacks spread to Georgia, Michigan amid US-Iran conflict

I always assumed Trump was someone's Public Dump, to be fair.

Re: How to defend critical infrastructure: Don’t Put the PLC on the Internet for Iran to find /s

>Because clearly the best way to manage a water system is to put the industrial equivalent of a steering wheel on the side of the road and hope nobody grabs it.

Errr... I think this is pretty much standard practice in water delivery, to be fair. At least, it is round here.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Point Plank - is that the one that changes depending on how long the piece of wood is?

Yes. The Methodist Homes (MHA) who looked after my Dad's step-mother were one, who were able to make a generous bursary (for want of a better word!) towards her care. So that's around 80 homes. There may be others, but let's just say Care Homes of the UK wouldn't be my specialist subject if I were ever to make an appearance on Mastermind!

Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five

Re: a shed

Jackson? I think that's Boggy Marsh in disguise...

Schleswig-Holstein waves auf Wiedersehen to Microsoft stack

Hmnm. Do you mind me asking if you're a longtime linux user?

I've dabbled with Linux since Slackware on floppies in the mid 90s, but I'm nowhere near proficient. Every year or so, I have a dabble with the idea I'm moving from Windows to Linux (apart from the 4 years I had an M1 Pro MBP). Most years, I get a workable system*, but there's usually some thing or other that just isn't right, and I lose interest. I suspect overworked, underpaid techies in IT departments don't really have the time to take a distro, get it booting into an unprivileged session, and do other stuff when they already know Windows, or Mac... It's a bit like Sir PTerry's "it's largely intuitive, although you have to spend a long time learning it first"!

*My current attempt is MX Linux 25 (Thanks Liam!) running KDE Plasma, which I find visually nice and appealing, and logical. Unfortunately, I've got no sound at all on my laptop, which Googling around tells me is because it's Lunar Lake and something to do with the audio drivers/profile. Lots of things haven't worked to fix it, but I'm hopeful that I will get it going soon. After that - well, I'd really like something that can replace Outlook - I'm not going to persuade work to migrate, and it seems overkill to run a VM just for groupware, but nothing seems to quite fit the bill. Yes, the beauty of OpenSource is I can of course, just write my own, provided I've the skills, time and knowledge to do it. So far, I'm batting 0/3 ;)

Palantir wins £9M contract to run UK firearms licensing: CIA-backed biz to hold gun, bomb, and poison records

Re: Hypocrisy on Steriods

I don't know about anyone else, but every time I've had to use a running machine I've definitely wanted to murder someone...

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

Re: Crash of a different sort

I'm not sure it was a repair, but was certainly used during repairs - my colleague (an ex-Rediffusion engineer) used to thump every monitor that graced his bench. If a fault showed up/disappeared when thumped, the cause was a dry joint. Ted - where ever you are now, thanks - I don't think I ever said it at the time being a cocky little shit of an 18 year old, but an older, wiser Rob would like to buy you a whisky.

Linux kernel maintainers pitch emergency killswitch after CopyFail and Dirty Frag chaos

Re: As a last resort,

Nothing sounds better than Status Quo. The Eagles and the Beatles are fairly good as well, to be fair. Err...

The latest innovation in UK public transport: Schrödinger's trains

Re: Schrödinger's trains II

..desperately trying not to smirk like a naughty schoolboy and make a joke about being in 7 of 9....

Nevermore the new layout, bring back the moderatrix! She wouldn't stand for any of my nonsense

Support tech caught by 'Technician Aura': the bug that only hides when you're watching

Re: Can't monitor something without changing it

I have the opposite problem - when it dries up, the ground dries out and shrinks, causing the junction box to slip and move, shorting the cables so my broadband goes off. Last OpenRetch engineer suggested I take a watering can to the bottom of the pole when we have a dry spell...

Server-room lock was nothing but a crock

Re: The number of machine rooms I have seen …

Haha, reminds me of one of our cabling team...

We had two (very good) cablers, who the LA would only employ on short term contracts of around 3-6 months. The LA provided all the gear though, but not a van to transport it in, so they used their own cars. Occasionally, the contracts wouldn't get renewed until after the previous one ended because LAs can move slowly when having to spend money.

Mysteriously, on those occasions, one of the teams car would be broken into, and various power tools nicked...

We all had a pretty good idea what was happening, but proving it was a different story

Re: Just walk in like you own the place

We had something similar with the trees on the side of a new bypass. Lots of men with hi-vis and pickup trucks spent weeks planting them, and about a week later a similar team of men in similar looking pickups came and removed them. It was only weeks afterwards we found out they'd been nicked in broad daylight. Sometimes just looking like you're supposed to be there doing a task gets tou away with a lot!

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

Re: Video recording needed

I'd suggest a visit to Manchester or Liverpool then. Seems to be a regular occurrence near our office, although the majority of them are Deliveroo/UberEats riders flying round at high speed on totally illegal electric bikes...

DR-DOS rises again – rebuilt from scratch, not open source

I dont really understand why you're letting yourself get so worked up over this.

If it's a hobby, great - let them get on with it and do whatever they want. If you can verify the claim it runs as DRDOS did, does it matter what the source code looks like?

It's much less antisocial than the wallies who go out hiking in the middle of winter armed with a pacamac, flip-flops and a bag of pork scratchings then expect the mountain rescue to get them down from Skiddaw/Ben Nevis/Snowdon when they run out of bravado...

Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'

I studied Psychology, and "ethics" (apart from being next door to Kent) seems to be the stuff that stops you doing things that you need to do to get fair and reliable results...

Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

Re: Basic Rule.

In a previous (IT) life, I used to drive coaches to top up my wages as I was paid so poorly...

I was quite happy driving for stag dos, but hen parties were awful enough that none of us wanted to cover that work.

Re: Cheer up, kids.

Yeah, but a stopped clock is still right twice a day, so how bad can it be?

Re: Hazing = abuse

I believe air is pumped into the abdominal area during keyhole surgery for things like appendectomy, gall bladder removal etc.

I guess there's a difference between a finely calibrated medical device and a bloody great airline, to be fair.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Re: In the old days, we said welcome aboard

I did wonder. I no longer do, sometimes you have to do something to gain knowledge. In this case, the knowledge was of pain and what swearing sounds like when your tongue doesn't work properly. It's good knowledge, but I probably won't do it again...

Emmabuntüs DE 6: A newbie-friendly Linux to help those in need

Re: Newbie

Apparently, right here!

Still not sure how changing the hostname totally tanked a brand new Debian 13 install on my VPS, or why it's network has been configured 3 different ways each time I re-installed it. Although to be fair, I've only been trying to get my head round Linux since 1994, and haven't really settled on a distro yet!

Re: Emmabuntüs

Many years ago, our servers were named in tribute to the Spice Girls - I remember three in particular: "Ginger", so called because for some reason it always had an amber display instead of the traditional blue Dell one, "Baby" (our Novell Fileserver) which was the smallest of our server farm, and "Scary", our GroupWise/BorderManager server, so called because any attempts to update the config were bloody terrifying...

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Re: "Xerox bought the tech from someone else"

I've had chance to think - I believe the "oil reservoir" is referring to the "drum maintenance kit" - service manual for a Xerox example here:

https://laserpros.com/img/manuals/xerox-manuals/phaser-8860-8860mfp-service.pdf

It's basically a roller full of some kind of oil/lubricant which is pressed onto the drum at the bottom of the rotation, and then a small wiper that spreads it thinly. The idea is that the oil stops the wax sticking to the drum. I seem to remember we were told not to transport the printers with the maintenance kit installed as well as ensuring they were cold before moving them. Always good for a coffee when the customer ignored your call to say you were 20 minutes out, please shut it down: "Oh, you didn't shut it down? Well now I'll just have to stop and have a brew while it cools..."

Re: Users and printing devices...

I spent a few years as a warranty certified repair tech for a number of printers, and staples and drawing pins were par for the course. Sellotape round the rollers of a document feeder on an MFP was good, but not as much fun to remove as the blu-tac which one user didn't remove before putting their sheets into the printer.

All, of course, while swearing to the hell-desk that they hadn't put anything other than paper in it.

Users...

Re: Users and printing devices...

Are you sure about that Martin?

I'm fairly certain that at least some of the the Phasers had an oil reservoir of some sort because there was a wiper blade that smeared a thin coating over the drum before the melted wax crayon was put on in so that it slid off onto the paper properly? It's been a while since I've worked on them, but there was a very small oil reservoir replaced as part of the maintenance kit, my service manuals would suggest?

We were always warned not to tip them because of the molten wax rather than the oil - having seen the results when a colleague moved a hot printer, I can see why - ink all over the print surface, effectively wrote the machine off!

ETA: I've just remembered there was another colour laster printer I was once exposed to which did, indeed have an oil reservoir in - I remember it being an evil, evil thing. The school I was working at bought it second-hand in around 2001, and it was a damned nuisance. Minolta, perhaps? It was an absolute sod, and needed something done damned near every day to keep it going, and the quality was - questionable - at best.

ATM maintenance tech broke the bank by forgetting to return a key

Re: My wife was a keyholder at a bank branch

I did once manage to cause a police presence at a bank i was working in. I'd been asked by their help desk to hoover the PCs out as the staff were complaining they were running slowly and very noisy - the thinking from the helldesk was that they were clogged up with fluff and dirt, whereas in reality, they were just not very good PCs...

Anyways, one had a little walkie-talkie style box on top, which i moved to open the lids of the PC. I dutifully started hoovering, and fairly shortly my escort said there were a lot of police sirens going past today. I jokingly replied that it cant have been for me, my bail conditions have been lifted. About 2 minutes later, the biggest hulk of a man I've seen pops his head round the door to see if everything is OK, because it turns out that walkie-talkie was a panic alarm trigger that was faulty and waiting for repair as it's firing whenever its moved.

Ooops.

They were very good about it, and although there were threats to invoice my employer for the wasted time, I dont think we ever got a bill for it, and the staff were incredibly reassured how quickly Plod could get there when needed!

Re: Fired

Sounds awfully like BAe at Barrow, one of the few places where you can sit in Morrisons and watch subs appear and disappear while you drink your coffee... and Barrow is definitely a place you dont want to look at too closely.

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: Opinionated and badly spelt.

Sorry, no.

Regardless of what keyboard I'm using, be it phone/tablet touchscreen, my mechanical marvel, any of my laptops or the bluetooth behemoths that I travel around with, I manage to find time to check that my spelling, punctuation and grammar are as I was taught.

Even if I'm in a hurry, I make time to check my own work - anything else detracts from the quality of the message that I want to impart to other people, and quite frankly poor spelling like that shown in the snippets quoted in the article makes me question the ability of the person writing it. Especially in such a detail-orientated field such as coding.

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Re: Access security 101

I once worked on a very high security site, where leaving your machine unlocked would always lead to a quick email to the first aider to say you'd got a Wotsit stuck in your nostril.

First aider would pop round, laugh, deliver a missive on locking your device, and collect a bag of Haribo for his troubles. I miss that job...

Laptop? Not like you to be so unambitious Jake! One of my colleagues came in to find everything on his desk covered in tinfoil - CRT monitor, desktop, keyboard, mouse, telephone, desk, chair, desk tidy (with every pen done separately and then placed back in), basically an entire corner of the room was shiny silver...

To be fair, he took it in good part knowing full well he'd return the favour later on - and we would have expected nothing less, to be fair!

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

I had a tower like that, i think they were all the same.

For some reason, when I upgraded from a P75 to (I think) a P133, it would overheat if you put the lid on. Sadly it was too sharp to leave the lid off, so it had to go...

It's a Landy. They tend to get quite damp between the leaks and the condensation. Fortunately, the water runs out of all the holes in the bodywork.

Tougher than old boots, but nothing like watertight.

In a similar vain, I once used mine to "gently push" the car of some Novanuts (who were deliberately blocking people in car parking spaces after they'd collected their chinese) out of the car park. They were quite surprised.

Sorry, but your glitchy connection might have cost you that job

Re: Meh, cut the other garbage out

But surely every bed needs to send 200gb a year of data to the mothership?

Re: Shiny not always better

HF Radio? Really?

I'd love more info on that use case - I can't think of many employers that would be happy with their information being broadcast around half the globe!

So I am that employee in the sticks... Whose village has just had BDUK funded fibre installed on one street. The other 10 of you on that other street? You aren't included in the BDUK rollout, so tough.

Which is quite frustrating to have gone through all of that inconvenience of them digging up roads etc to find that I can't then get the connection that's disrupted our travel for the last 12 months.

My DSL connection is getting worse and worse, to the point I had two and did SD-WAN, but it meant I had two crap connections instead of one. Mobile is iffy under the best of circumstances, so I've recently gotten starlink in - which is pretty good, VCs all now work, there's only one drawback - I can't access my employer's main website which is hosted in multiple AWS regions, and used by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, apart from me on starlink...

I despair of this country, I really do sometimes.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

Yeah. We looked after a series of devices in libraries in the early 2000s that had either a 24 or 27 inch touchscreen Iiyama. They were absolutely immense monitors, in both senses of the word...

My personal favourite though was a 32" Philips CRT which was very, very nice. It had been bought for a Novell Netware 4 server. I never officially liberated it for my own PC, I just worked in the server room a lot. (I was 17, I didn't know any better!)

Starlink’s method of dodging solar storms may make it slower, for longer

OK, it's not fibre, but... its been a welcome boost here!

My village has been split in twain by BDUK: we've all had endless roadworks, road closures and chaos caused by Fibrus connecting one half of the village. As for the rest of us? December 2027 "at the earliest".

Meanwhile, I've got a "good" connection at ~70Mbps, except it isn't, because its very lossy and keeps dropping out because the infrastructure is awful, but BT won't change it. Nobody wants to put fibre in for the 10 houses Fibrus missed as it isnt commercially viable, and B4RN? Well, not this far north, and im still and hour feom the scottish border! 4G is OK until you try and do things like VC, so what's a boy to do?

I'm consistently getting 300+ down and 50+ up, so until 2028... looks like I'm stuck with it.

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

Re: Looks like they still didn't catch the cause

I believe Blackboard Monitor Vimes...

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Re: Lotus Notes

I attended a number of the Novell BrainShare events - there were many good speakers amongst the Dev team, and in some of the surrounding uni's, who could make the most dull topics interesting, and were great to have a pint with afterwards!

I miss Novell...

Re: been there, done that ...

This led to one of my favourite Netware messages - Synthetic Time is being issued on Partition...

Always felt like I was playing with the laws of time and space when that one came up!

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Re: There is only one way, has always been only one way, and always will only be one way

I think for cows that may be true, but round here you still see a ram with a chalk bag on his chest so you can tell which ewes have been tupped.

The really posh farms have different colour chalk on different rams so you know who’s been where…

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

Re: Money for nothing...

I'd rather either of those gltham the hopeless, hapless money out that is my W7, thank you very much

It's been absolutely pants since it was three days old. My BMW, on the other hand, has been a superb motor.

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

I joined Demon in 1994, (158.152.202.35 was my IP address; why can I still remember that 30 years later, but I can't tell you what I had for breakfast 10 minutes ago?)

I remember having to have something that accepted mail being pushed to start with, and then later, a rather snazzy piece of software called Tetrix Reader Plug (Demon got you a discount on this!) which was a newsgroup reader as well as being able to pull individual email addresses or everything for the host (each demon user had their own hostname - bobertd.demon.co.uk, in my case - and could have any number of emails at that host.

And it was still more useable that Outlook...

Huawei chair says the future of comms is fiber-to-the-room, which China has and the rest of us don’t

Re: Going beyond 10Gb/s requires fiber for now

I am, but the fricking sharks keep tangling the cables

Remembering when NASA stuck a Space Shuttle on top of a Boeing 747

Re: Dear Santa...

I look at Lego sets and think "gosh, that's expensive", win reality my kids are using the same sets I had nearly 40 years ago, and it's showing every likelihood they'll be perfectly usable by their kids in the fullness of time. I don't think any other thing from my past has lasted so well, so is it really that bad?*

Also, have you seen the price of model trains lately? Wow...

£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan

Re: Where does the money go?

Being arms length public sector, wage caps don't really apply at Sellafield. There are tales of people doing fairly low skilled jobs such as laundry workers earning high wages, incredibly poor performance, jobs being pushed into overtime, poor attendance and high rates of work being contracted out to chains of contractors all adding their own cut for doing nothing but sub-contracting yet again...

It's a money pit, we all know it's a money pit, but nobody wants to do anything about it because why kill the golden goose? When it's finished, West Cumbria has nothing else going for it, and simply wont be a viable area to live in.

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

And yet, for many people it's a go-to reason. For example, SWMBO and the housework....

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

Without turning into the Yorkshireman sketch, I'm not sure my first 486 was that well stocked - it definitely had 4MB of RAM, and I remember upgrading the hard disk to 127MB... It was definitely pre '93, possibly 90/91 as I seem to recall having it before I started secondary school in 1991.

It eventually got 8MB, with the hard disk growing to 500MB, and at some point I believe 16MB (4*4MB SIMMS, which now live in my Korg Triton keyboard!)