* Posts by Len

889 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2009

After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for 'policy violations'

Len
Go

The Django Project has moved too

"At approximately 3 am UTC on May 26, 2021, the operators of the Freenode IRC network assumed control of the #django* channels on that network. This means that representatives of the Django community no longer retain the ability to enforce Django's Code of Conduct on the Freenode IRC network. Additionally, we do not have the ability to set a topic on Django-related IRC channels on this network."

[..]

Django IRC Channels migration to Libera.Chat

They're coming in thick and fast. Makes you wonder what will be the point of being in control of a deserted FreeNode. The more they keep digging the more value it loses.

The Home Office will need to overturn a long legacy of failure to achieve ambition of all-digital border by 2025

Len
Holmes

Re: Will it really?

Not quite. It’s airlines that, understandably, require documentation about who’s on their planes for internal flights, not the countries. I’m fairly certain I flew London - Edinburgh without going through passport control.

You can fly within the Schengen area without coming across passport control. Major airports like Amsterdam are even divided into a Schengen and a non-Schengen zone so you could do a connecting flight Toulouse-Amsterdam-Berlin without ever passing passport control.

As for the Irish Republic joining Schengen? Not a chance before Irish Unification. The other Schengen countries would never allow an open border with the UK and all 26 of them have a veto on new applications.

Len

Re: Border hawk

That has very little to do with sovereignty. North Korea is very likely the most sovereign country in the world yet not known for treating its citizens that well.

That Salesforce outage: Global DNS downfall started by one engineer trying a quick fix

Len
Big Brother

Re: "We have taken action with that particular employee"

This is definitely a case of needlessly ambiguous terms.

Gone in 60 electrons: Digital art swaggers down the cul-de-sac of obsolescence

Len
Thumb Up

Agreed, NFTs are not a way to store the artwork, they are a way to store the ownership document.

Remember when we used to be allowed to enter museums? Especially if they are showing a special exhibition of works that are not in their own collection, the little signs next to them often show you who actually owns the artwork and is effectively lending the artwork to the curator for the duration of the exhibition.

Somewhere (in the vault of a notary?) will be a document that shows that Family X or Museum Y is the owner of this work, even though the work is not kept with them at the moment. NFTs actually replace this document, not the artwork.

A benefit of this is that the artist has an opportunity for a continued share of the value. If you're a struggling twenty-something artist you might sell a work for a couple of hundred bucks because you need the money. If, through increased appreciation and smart dealers and traders selling it on, that work becomes worth tens of thousands then it's not the artist that benefits but the new owners. With NFTs you could have the original artist share a tiny percentage of each subsequent sale, long after its value has increased.

I have dabbled a bit in the crypto space (not so much owning it but launching an ICO etc.) and it has made me quite skeptical of the whole thing. This, however, is one of those areas where I could see it really add value.

And those artworks themselves? They are probably stored in a PNG file or summat, but that's irrelevant. Yes, it's easy to copy those PNGs. But then, so is a FLAC file of a particular Beatles track. I may have the FLAC file but I do not own the rights to said Beatles track.

If you have a QNAP NAS, stop what you're doing right now and install latest updates. Do it before Qlocker gets you

Len
Paris Hilton

Re: Presumably...

Isn't the problem with many of the online backup solutions that they are very cheap to upload to but very expensive to download from? Presumably because people want their backups to cost nothing but are willing to pay through the nose when disaster has struck.

How is that with AWS S3 Glacier?

India appoints ‘IP Guru’ to push nation towards IPv6

Len

Re: Time to give up on IPv6?

I am not sure about your LAN point. Running an IPv4 LAN is fairly complex compared to an IPv6 LAN, the latter being a case of just connecting your devices and everything sorts itself out. No messing with DHCP servers, conflicting IP ranges, port forwards etc.

Most of the stuff on my LAN at home (from printer and Apple TV to thermostat and smart lighting) all talks over IPv6 without me ever having to do anything about it, it just works. I wish I could say the same about the IPv4 space in my LAN.

Len
Facepalm

Re: Time to give up on IPv6?

All the networking hardware I know has the IPv6 firewall enabled by default.

I have heard some horror stories in the olden days but 2012 was the turnaround year for IPv6 in CPE and I very much doubt suppliers would not get publicly shamed for still messing this up, nine years later. We would also be bombarded with stories of break in that happened thanks to disabled IPv6 firewalls. I am not aware of any of those.

Len
Thumb Up

About time

This is long overdue. Ever tried to get anything more complex than a website in the hands of the average Indian punter?

I have, a couple of years ago, and it's a nightmare. It's completely normal for internet users in India to be behind multiple layers of CGNAT. Setting up slightly more advanced connections with someone behind NAT is quite a task, trying to connect through three or four layers of NAT is bad enough to simply give up. I wonder if P2P applications are even possible in India.

IPv6? Bring it on!

FreeBSD gives ARM64 green light for production over x86 alternative's 'growth trajectory'

Len
Thumb Up

ARM based OpenZFS NAS

What I only just realised, this opens the door for home built NAS using OpenZFS 2.0 based on ARM.

When the people of XigmaNas release their next version based on FreeBSD 13 (they’re currently using FreeBSD 12.2p5) I hope they release an ARM build too.

Especially for backup situations where you don’t have a NAS constantly pumping out gigabytes it might drastically reduce power consumption.

Len
Devil

Re: Also covers Raspberry Pi 3+ and 4.

Funnily enough, FreeBSD is not an OS that makes me think of gaming but Sony Playstation 4 and 5 run on FreeBSD so it’s not impossible. It just needs a bit of tailoring.

License to thrill: Ahead of v13.0, the FreeBSD team talks about Linux and the completed toolchain project that changes everything

Len
Paris Hilton

Re: Speed and OpenZFS 2.0

I can't say I understand much of that space, CPU architecture is not my thing, but as I understand it they're not talking about the 486 CPU but about the i486, i586 and i686 architecture. Not quite the same.

Len
Happy

Re: Speed and OpenZFS 2.0

This is donating, it may have involved relicensing but that is a separate matter.

Let me give an example. When SUN open sourced their ZFS implementation in 2005 it was at that point the only ZFS implementation around. All other versions, the open source Illumos implementation, the closed source Oracle implementation, the macOS version that Apple briefly shipped on their install DVDs, the Nexenta implementation, the ZFS-on-Linux implementation etc. were all forked from the original code dating back to 2005 and therefore did not include support for TRIM. SSDs were not really a thing in the early 2000’s.

This meant that every implementation had to develop their own TRIM implementation (Illumos, Nexenta, perhaps Oracle too) or simply not support TRIM (ZFS-on-Linux).

Out of the various implementations of TRIM for ZFS, the one from Nexenta was by far the superior as it supported queueing. This means that the Queued TRIM command can be queued to run after all scheduled (arguably more important) read and write operations have been completed. Especially on high concurrent use storage systems that is a big deal.

Nexenta has donated their implementation to the OpenZFS project and queued TRIM is now part of OpenZFS 2.0. The code was probably previously closed source and has been relicensed under the open source CDDL license so it could be included in OpenZFS. It is referred to as a “donation” so I assume that the OpenZFS team did not have to pay Nexenta for their code. What I don’t know is if the copyright still rests with Nexenta or whether that has been transferred to OpenZFS too.

That is queued TRIM, just one example, but the development of Sequential Resilvering, dRAID, Zstd compression, Persistent L2ARC, Dataset Encryption, Fusion Pools and Allocation Classes has largely followed a similar path. Either developed straight under an open source CDDL license (so no relicensing required) or donated by companies and relicensed under the CDDL so it could be included in OpenZFS 2.0.

None of this has anything to do with Oracle, they didn’t own the copyright to the specific Nexenta, Delphix, Intel, Datto, iXsystems or Illumos code or were involved in setting the license for the code. The only copyright they bought eleven years was on the original SUN code. As that was forked fifteen years ago, before Oracle even considered buying SUN, the majority of the current code in OpenZFS is no longer based on the old code produced by SUN as development moves on. None of the features I mentioned above existed in 2005.

Len
Happy

Re: The Network stack

Yes, the BSD network stack used to be the gold standard of TCP/IP network stacks. It probably still is. It was also the first major network stack to become fully dual stack IPv4+IPv6 back in the day (15 years ago?). That means that it made a lot of sense for OS developers to just use the BSD stack instead of reinventing the wheel.

If I recall correctly you could see in the acknowledgements for Windows that they used BSD code.

To the day you can see that networking (thanks to this network stack) and storage (thanks to in-kernel ZFS support) are the strong points of FreeBSD and why you see it being used in areas where one or both is extremely important. Hence Netflix using FreeBSD for their content distribution network or so many storage companies building their products around FreeBSD.

Len
Happy

Re: Speed and OpenZFS 2.0

I think you're confusing ZFS (a file system) with OpenZFS (an implementation of the ZFS file system).

Until last year there were probably five or six different implementations of ZFS. Most notably probably a closed shop developed Oracle implementation, the Illumos implementation (maintained by former SUN engineers), the FreeBSD implementation (largely based on the Illumos implementation but with many tweaks by storage corporates), and the ZFS-on-Linux implementation (maintained by Linux enthusiasts with some corporate support). All with varying degrees of compatibility. You couldn't just take out a ZFS formatted drive from an Ubuntu server and fully use it on macOS for instance.

Rumour has it that Oracle lost interest in ZFS (they probably couldn't make enough money out of it) and has closed the entire department that was working on it. All the other implementations joined forces and donated their code to the OpenZFS project. That resulted in OpenZFS 2.0 which contains code from Illumos, FreeBSD, ZFS on Linux, iXsystems, Nexanta, Delphix and quite a few others, from enthusiasts to scientific institutions and large corporates.

The result is OpenZFS 2.0 which has FreeBSD and Linux as its Tier 1 platforms (with macOS expected to join them in Tier 1 this year, Windows potentially later). So, yes, OpenZFS can be used on Linux and is used on Linux. Most commonly Ubuntu and Debian but OpenZFS 2.0.4 is compatible with 3.10 - 5.11 Linux kernels and with a bit of tinkering should be quite straightforward to use on most Linux distro's. Oh, and you can now read and write to your OpenZFS formatted drive you took out of a FreeBSD13 server on your Debian desktop.

I would argue that that is a level of cooperation we sadly don't see often enough in the open source world.

Len
Headmaster

Re: @Len - Apple's use of Mach

Considering the driver system of FreeBSD is wildly different from that of macOS (you might as well ask Microsoft to work on FreeBSD drivers) I don't think Apple could be of much help there.

They have effectively given the wider *nix community the continued use of the printer system CUPS, though. When Michael Sweet, the maintainer of CUPS, wanted to close the project (as he couldn't find the spare time to work on it anymore) Apple put him on their payroll so he could turn maintaining CUPS into a well paid day-job for the next 12 years.

Apple have also donated to the world the iCal standard everyone now uses to store and share calender data, the MPEG4 container format standard, large chunks of Clang/LLVM and most recently Swift (the language).

Granted, it pales in comparison to what Red Hat or Canonical have given.

Len
Devil

Speed and OpenZFS 2.0

The two things I'm really looking forward to in FreeBSD 13 are:

1) the considerably increased performance, largely due to better support for some of the newer CPU shenanigans, improvements to TCP handling and probably partially because they could drop some legacy stuff now they've made i686 the default CPU type instead of i486.

2) replacing the existing ZFS implementation with the new OpenZFS 2.0. Apart from a technical feat (the most comprehensive ZFS implementation ever) it's also a human feat.

Where open source projects tend to split up and fork like no man's business, OpenZFS 2.0 is a rare example of different Open Source communities actually coming together. Practically every voluntary and commercial group that has ever done anything with ZFS (except Oracle but they are rumoured to have stopped their work on ZFS altogether) has come together to work on one codebase. So many ZFS features that have been donated by commercial storage vendors that are now available for free to Joe Bloggs thanks to this. Soon we'll have dRAID (distributed spare) to play with too. You're basically getting features usually only found in >50K storage devices to use on your 4-bay drive at home.

Len
Happy

Re: FreeBSD has plenty of hardcore fans

Have a look on Freshports, currently 42714 packages ready to install.

Len
Devil

Re: Apple's use of Mach

The amount of shared code between macOS and BSD is often greatly exaggerated. It's mainly chunks of userland, and probably originally the network stack, that have a background in BSD.

As someone who uses exclusively macOS on the desktop and almost exclusively FreeBSD on the server I wish there was more shared codebase. If FreeBSD could easily repurpose drivers for macOS for instance then that would help many of the BSD-on-the-desktop initiatives. Alas, the hardware layer of macOS doesn't look anything like that of BSD. It's also considerably easier to run Linux applications on FreeBSD than macOS applications.

OVH founder says UPS fixed up day before blaze is early suspect as source of data centre destruction

Len
Flame

Re: Is there a lesson here about putting your eggs in one basket?

I understand why you'd put four of these buildings next to each other as you can share some resources such as perimeter fencing, entry control, security etc. I also don't think it should be such a problem as fires of this kind are very rare. What probably makes this the exception is that it looks as if the fire did not start in a cabinet (where most of the fire mitigation tech is geared towards) but in a UPS that will not have been placed on the actual floor among the racks.

Also interesting is that two of these four building were too far away from the fire to be damaged yet went offline too.

I think the most important lessons that should be learned from this are:

a) house your UPSs away from the actual datacentre (minimum 50m?).

b) house the individual UPSs away from each other (minimum 10m?).

c) split the incoming power lines (and network lines?) away from the buildings (minimum 100m?) so even if one of the buildings is on fire and the fire brigade has to shut off power to it (or the fire has taken care of that) the other buildings can keep operating.

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

Len
Flame

Re: DR Plans

I did wonder about that. But considering OVH has nearly 30 DCs all over the world I bet that having your data in Strasbourg and your back-up DC in Strasbourg too sounds intuitively wrong enough for most people to have selected a different city for disaster recovery. Even if you did not know that all four Strasbourg DCs are effectively next to each other.

GPS jamming around Cyprus gives our air traffic controllers a headache, says Eurocontrol

Len

ILS?

Could this be partially solved by Larnaca airport upgrading its Instrument Landing System (ILS) so aircraft can lock into a glide path early enough to be less dependent on GPS? At the moment you can probably find more planes out there that are ILS CAT III capable than ones that are Galileo capable.

Can we exhale yet? EU set to rule UK 'adequate' for data sharing in post-Brexit GDPR move

Len

Re: If UK data rules have not changed ...

As I understood the FT article this only applies to your average punter data, held by private companies etc. Let's say, Vodafone head office in the UK processing data from Italian customers for instance.

The UK has not been granted access to the Schengen Information System or the European Arrest Warrant data so police and other security operations will not enjoy data sharing. No more alerts about that chap that has just shown up at the passport control booth in Heathrow.

I also seriously wonder whether the latter is coming back. The UK has a bad reputation when it comes handling sensitive data or sticking to agreements (UK taking 'steps' after illegal copying of EU Schengen data) and I think Brexit is quite an easy way for the EU to never have to share sensitive data again.

Len
Holmes

Re: If UK data rules have not changed ...

It's not necessarily about whether you have changed your regulations or think you are still compliant. It's all about whether your counter-party agrees.

Thankfully it sounds like they are agreeing because I can't begin to describe the omnishambles for some UK sectors if this adequacy had not been given. Not just tech startups, there are many sectors that rely on cross border data transfers, from billing and research to marketing and human resources. Large chunks of the service sector would have been affected as they could no longer handle data from customers in the EU.

For a while it looked like the recognition was only going to go one way. That means that any serious business model for all of Europe would mean moving data heavy operations to the EU and handling UK data from there. Imagine the exodus...

Europe promises all-out assault on batteries to counter China’s lithium-ion domination

Len
Stop

Re: state aid program to build a full production chain for battery tech

Small nitpick, this is not EU funding. These are a bunch of countries, all EU members, that have joined forces and put their own money in a pot to accelerate these developments. The only role for the European Commission has been to give a seal of approval that the project has been designed to not fall foul of EU state aid rules. Apparently it doesn't have a market-distorting effect, probably because joining the project was open to every company and every member state.

The giveaway should be that it lists which countries are involved, you would not see that for an EU project. The fact that it's such a merry band of countries (and some notable countries missing) also shows that these are all countries that have some businesses in this field already and that they would like to support without falling foul of state aid rules. Countries that don't have a foothold in this sector already have clearly passed on the opportunity.

Len
Thumb Up

Northvolt

I was surprised to see them missing from the press release but fortunately they are involved too.

Northvolt are on my ones-to-watch list as they are doing some very interesting things (Battery gigafactory energises the frozen north and Europe’s Tesla rival is fixing the huge battery recycling mess) and have the investment to back it up (Northvolt: $3 Billion For 2 Battery Gigafactories In Europe).

I would love if it El Reg sent a reporter to see how they are getting on.

Barbs exchanged over Linux for M1 Silicon ... lest Apple's lawyers lie in wait

Len
Headmaster

Re: Good if

The Mac Mini has been popular for build farms for a while now. Thousands of Mac Minis running macOS, Windows or Linux. It means you can natively build your code for that environment but only need to support one hardware type. I don't know if they still do but Mozilla used to have a Mac Mini server farm to produce the three 'Tier 1' flavours of Firefox.

Any build farm worth their salt will probably also be able to change the composition on the fly. Trouble with the Windows build? Just take 10% of the Mac and Linux builders and reboot them into the Windows build process for the day.

Now, obviously I don't expect those users to jump on a Linux distro hacked together by a slightly fly-by-night operation in one week but this is a start. In due course we will probably see mainstream distros running on Apple Silicon and they will have learned from these guys what works and what doesn't.

150,000 lost UK police records looking more like 400,000 as Home Office continues to blame 'human error'

Len
Meh

Re: The fickle finger of blame...

That is not an unreasonable assumption with regards to the timing of the incident. It would, however, suggest that the UK government is serious about not breaching agreements. And they have a poor reputation with regards to sticking to their word when it comes to sticking to data agreements

Len
Holmes

Re: The fickle finger of blame...

I am not sure if backups are really a problem here. This process might have actually require there to be no backups.

The police WILL have records that they are not allowed to keep indefinitely and that will need to be permanently removed when certain criteria are met. Perhaps because by law they are only allowed to keep some record for X years. Or because the longer retention of some data is based on the outcome of court proceedings where a not guilty verdict might have a legal impact on retention of some records.

The police SHOULD have a system that culls any data that meets these criteria and that data SHOULD not be retained in backups.

The police MIGHT have a weekly automated job to delete all the records that have met the deletion criteria in the previous seven days. This process MIGHT have some manual requirements (because of a flawed design or because of a deliberate safeguard). If there is a human error involved this is where that might have happened. It may not be a coincidence that it happened at the start of the year. Perhaps someone accidentally changed something to the wrong year and an additional year of data was deleted. In a process that is meant to be legally irretrievable so no backups.

Just speculating but it would explain a thing or two...

Euro cloud slingers fight for niches on their own doorstep as AWS, Microsoft and Google inhale market share

Len
Unhappy

It's all about money

This is all about money, not tech skills. Tech skills are not lacking on a continent that produced SAP, ARM or Spotify. And if they are missing then you can import them from far away, that's what Silicon Valley has been doing for decades. It's the people queuing up to invest hundreds of millions in your business years before it makes a profit that are sorely lacking in Europe.

Offering cloud services or developing the underlying infrastructure doesn't make much sense when it's on a small scale. To some extent it gets cheaper and easier the bigger you are but to get to that size to make a serious dent requires serious investment. How do you start a cloud giant from your garage? You don't. All the major players were big in something else before they dipped their toe into cloud. That in turn means that there are only a handful usual suspects in Europe that have the scale to move into this space. And even then the lack of many millions of high risk investment of a number of years is hard to find.

Among the European leaders, Deutsche Telekom has built the biggest cloud market share in the region of 2 per cent, followed by OVHcloud, Orange and a string of national telcos, and regional cloud and hosting specialists.

By the way, who are they? Is there a list of all these European cloud providers in this report or do we have to make do with 'other'?

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Len
Thumb Up

Re: The whole point of continuous delivery is to make each release as stable as the one before

I was just going to ask if this could have repercussions on stability but you have already more or less answered that question.

I am not that familiar with CentOS but if the order was CentOS Stream -> RHEL -> CentOS Linux doesn't that mean that CentOS users would be the last with new stuff? I'm not thinking of 'teh shiny' but support for most recent hardware, new protocols, new APIs etc.

In that sense moving to Stream would provide more access to new stuff, or am I mistaken.

Len
Devil

FreeBSD

I have to use the odd Linux instance (and use it quite a bit at home) but I am glad all our core business servers run FreeBSD. I don't think FreeBSD has ever surprised me, which for servers is a good thing. There is just one FreeBSD project, one code base, one set of conventions, one package manager, one repository and one group of developers responsible for both kernel and all base packages *. Sure, there are countless maintainers of external packages ("ports") but these are not a required part of the OS or they wouldn't be external.

Sure, it has downsides too. FreeBSD's business model is more a charity than a corporate and is largely reliant on corporates donating to the FreeBSD foundation as a thank you for providing the OS they have built their business around. That means that they are some times cash starved. Also, practically every VPS provider offers ready-made CentOS instances whereas with some you'll have to install FreeBSD from scratch yourself (I'm looking at you, Hetzner).

* There is also zero systemd but let's not get into that discussion.

Leaked draft EU law reveals tech giants could face huge 6% turnover fines if they don't play by Europe's rules

Len

Re: Design by committee

I beg to differ re:committees. That committees produce inferior solutions is the stuff of ‘Great man’ fantasies. Apart from perhaps some novels, pieces of music or paintings every great achievement or product is the result of teams, groups, combined effort and, yes, committees.

From winning wars to making films, from planning cities to creating the Apple Watch, from developing mightily successful business strategy to drafting laws, none of those things are the work of individuals.

You don’t believe that Steve Jobs personally designed computers or that Elon Musk knows how to build cars and rockets himself, do you?

If you want to do something well, don’t do it alone.

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

Len
Happy

VAX/VMS!

Ah VAX/VMS. I am far too young to have ever dabbled with those but in the late eighties I read a Chaos Computer Club book which was full of their hacking and phreaking antics, usually involving VAX/VMS.

Not their own machines, obviously, they typically ‘borrowed’ access to machines running in big companies.

Expect to work between Christmas and New Year as Brexit uncertainty continues, UK SAP users told

Len
Holmes

Re: Silver Lining

The reverse is obviously also true. People with only UK Citizenship (about 60 million Brits lost their EU Citizenship in January) will no longer be automatically allowed to work in the EU.

A friend of mine is an ex CapGemini director who was giving those eye-watering costly trainings (you know the ones, those that make you think fondly of how cheap a whole year at university was) to people all across Europe. He will now have to apply for a work permit for a day's training in Milan or Berlin and so had to radically change his whole business model.

It's also been causing some issues in sectors where products or services come with maintenance contracts. You can't easily send Dave from the Warrington branch to the client in Ludwigshafen any more for annual maintenance or on-call troubleshooting. You'd either need to apply for a work permit for Dave or need to find someone with an EU passport for that.

I attended quite an interesting presentation on the impact of Brexit on HR policies two years ago. Not only did it state that Irish Citizens have now been promoted to god-status as they have the automatic right to work in the EU and the UK (because of bilateral UK-IE agreements), it also highlighted that in the UK we could see the phenomenon that people who kept their EU Citizenship in January and have Settled Status in the UK will become sought-after in some sectors as they can still work anywhere across the UK and the Continent without requiring a work permit.

OpenZFS v2.0.0 targets Linux and FreeBSD – shame about the Oracle licensing worries

Len
Happy

Re: I can't stand misleading charts

The thing is, even older CPUs run rings around NVME drives when it comes to moving data, as long as it's in small chunks from cache. The speed difference between getting 32k off an NVME drive into a CPU or getting the same amount from Level 1 cache into a CPU is so big that it makes an NVME drive look glacial.

A well-designed compression mechanism optimised for speed (and less for compression ratio) makes use of the insane speeds available inside the CPU package to operate faster than NVME speeds.

Much of this is academic anyway as many people will only connect their NAS using at most 10GbE and that is limited to 1250 MB/s, below ZSTD speeds. Your network is more likely to be the bottleneck than the compression speed.

Len
Thumb Up

Re: I want to use this to do backups

Compatibility has been a bit of an issue in the ZFS space because there were so many different ZFS implementations around that didn't all support the same features. That will change after the release of OpenZFS 2.0, though, as practically everyone working on some variant of ZFS has now come under the OpenZFS umbrella and donated their code to v2.0.

That means that, once everyone has replaced their existing ZFS implementation with the OpenZFS 2+ version, you could take a set of drives from a TrueNAS device and read them on your Ubuntu desktop, or take a drive out of your FreeBSD server and read it on your Mac. You could take a set of drives out of your Joyent system and read them on Windows.

I am just hoping that XigmaNAS doesn't wait until the release of FreeBSD 13 in March before upgrading to OpenZFS 2.0 but go down the kmod route before then.

Len
Headmaster

Re: I can't stand misleading charts

Yes, a simplified explanation is that ZSTD offers Gzip style compression ratios at lz4 style speeds. Also, the lz4 version that was included in ZFS many years ago is quite an old version. However, for compatibility reasons it was never updated to a newer version because all checksums for existing dedup tables would suddenly be incorrect. Quite a pain if you have a 400 terabyte system using ZFS dedup.

Compression in OpenZFS is not just used to fit more data on your storage devices, it's also a very noticeable speed gain. Compression and decompression with lz4 or Zstd is so blazingly fast that it's almost always faster to compress data before sending it to a storage device because it's less data that needs to transferred. Even using fast NVME drives.

Len
Headmaster

Re: "acting within the rights granted"

The thing is, why wait until a fairly small non-profit outfit such as the Linux Foundation has included it in its kernel when giant corporations with very deep pockets are much more interesting targets?

Apple included their own ZFS implementation for a while in their OS as a secondary (and read-only by default) file system. They chose to develop their own filesystem (APFS) in the end but ZFS was included in their binaries and on their install DVDs for a bit. Apple has unfathomably deep pockets so if it’s money they are after Oracle could have sued Apple years ago. The risk for Oracle might have been that Apple would spend an amount smaller than their catering budget and use it to buy all of Oracle outright.

Canonical will have more money than the Linux Foundation, they offer and support ZFS on Linux (and soon OpenZFS) why not go after them?

Netflix runs their infrastructure on FreeBSD, I bet they use FreeBSD’s ZFS implementation for that. Why not go after Netflix?

The Sony Playstation 5 runs on an adapted version of FreeBSD 12 (i.e. with ZFS binaries included in the base installation). I wouldn’t be surprised if they use a simplified installation of FreeBSD’s ZFS implementation to allow for the easy and automated addition of extra storage that the PS5 allows. Why not go after Sony?

Dozens of multimillion dollar storage appliance companies depend on a flavour of ZFS in their products. Why not go after them?

Probably many hundreds of cloud storage and back up service providers use a flavour of ZFS. Why not go after them?

Those are the targets that Oracle could go after. The bigger question is, on what legal grounds?

The original ZFS code was released in 2005 by Sun under the CDDL license, a well known open source license very similar to the Mozilla Public License and recognised by the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation. When Oracle bought Sun five years later, Oracle’s further contributions to their own ZFS implementation were never open sourced but by then various forks of the open sourced code were already way ahead of Oracle and the rumours are that the entire Oracle department that used to work on ZFS has since closed down.

All the work on OpenZFS by third parties, both by commercial companies and non-profit initiatives is released under the CDDL license. OpenZFS 2.0 is a combination of open sourced code from Illumos, FreeBSD, ZFS on Linux, iXsystems, Nexanta, Delphix and a number of other companies and organisations. All these parties (and Sun in 2005) have willingly and knowingly open sourced their code for other people to legally use.

I get that Linus sees the GPLv2 as incompatible with the CDDL license and as far I know he is right. To use a potential legal threat from Oracle is a straw man, though.

Len
Holmes

Re: "acting within the rights granted"

Oracle is known to be very litigious. If RedHat, Apple, Canonical, iXSystems, Nexanta, Delphix etc. etc. have done anything wrong in shipping their own ZFS implementations (or ones based on the Open Source forked under de CDDL) in their products, why hasn't Oracle sued them?

Glastonbury hippy shop Hemp in Avalon rapped for spouting 'plandemic' pseudoscience

Len
Unhappy

Not surpring

I know it sounds attractive to divide the world into easy buckets, from nonsense such as "left" and "right" or "gammon" and "remoaner" to "boomer" and "millennial", things are usually not that simple black and white. The world is not a Disney film.

It is well-documented that people who describe themselves as "spiritual" are more than average likely to follow the QAnon conspiracy too. You probably won't find many spiritual "gammon" or right wingers but that doesn't mean they can't believe in QAnon. The art of QAnon is that it is so broad that it covers things for many different people to latch on to. From child abuse conspiracies to anti-vax, from deep state to gold standard, from 5G to fluoride, from anti-Semitism to misogyny. All one needs is to tick one of those boxes and they may ignore all the other stuff they don't care about.

It is well-documented that anti-vaxxers, for instance, are actually relatively educated people, usually definitely above average. It's just that having read media studies or history at Oxford doesn't prevent someone from denying biological sciences or physics.

If you then have a cohort of people who believe in the healing power of crystals or homeopathy it should not be surprising that the jump to "the scientists don't know what they're talking about" is not that big.

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

Len
Paris Hilton

Re: Cubic metres? cm^3? ?? What is its abbrev.??

CM3 is a cubic centimetre. You mean a M3.

But yes, I had never heard of this other way to abbreviate a cubic metre either.

It may date back to 1994 but there's no end in sight for the UK's Chief customs system as Brexit rules beckon

Len
Thumb Up

Re: Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border?

That is correct, it would be even better if lorries couldn't leave the warehouse without correct paperwork. The practical problem is that you can't enforce it, short of putting inspection posts etc. near every warehouse in the UK that occasionally stores goods for export.

A more manageable solution then is to do it nearer the dozen or so exit points on this island but not near enough so the roads around terminals are clogged up by lorries with faulty or missing declarations. That is what the Farage Garage is for, a holding pen for lorries until their paperwork is in order.

I expect that we'll see ANPR on the major roads entering a zone (such as Kent but there will be around ten more of those) that check a lorry's registration number against a database. If the database suggests not all the correct paperwork is in place these lorries will be instructed (with matrix panels?) to go via a Farage Garage first. A bit like you sometimes see automated systems that divert lorries that are too heavy onto a diversion route.

Len
Facepalm

Re: Still. The Farage Garage will be open for business on time.

Not sure you can blame parliament for this. They have no executive function, that would be the cabinet.

The problem is that the government started far too late. Admittedly Theresa May's decision to leave the EU's Single Market* and Customs Union caught most people, Brexiters, Leavers, Remainers, cabinet ministers and civil servants off guard. Still, I believe it was Spring 2017 and so that should have left ample time to prepare.

From that moment on it was clear that SPS checks would be required at the border so the UK government could have started hiring thousands of vets and building veterinary inspection facilities near ports.

From that moment on it was clear that any goods crossing the border would require export declarations, and that you would want to check lorries for the right paperwork long before they even get to the terminal.

From that moment on it was clear that an estimated 180,000 UK businesses would be faced with customs bureaucracy for the first time and that there was a serious shortage of customs brokers (that figure of 50,000 people you some times hear about) to help them navigate this.

From that moment on it was clear that we needed IT systems to handle the estimated 400 million additional customs declarations that UK businesses would have to make every year.

The government could have started widening the M20 straight away. That was always a bottleneck, because that vital connection to Dover would clog up regularly over strikes, terrorist scares, bad weather or accidents. And that was before Brexit. The Brexit decision made it politically possible to sidestep existing planning and environmental regulations and start the Compulsory Purchase Orders for land and housing that was previously an obstacle to widening the M20.

None of the above is contingent on the deal currently being discussed. The trade deal only removes tariffs, not the other bureaucracy. All of the above could have started in 2017 instead of 2020.

It’s the job of the cabinet to propose these measures and the job of parliament to approve or amend.

* It’s actually called the Internal Market but for some reason in the UK we always have to rename EU concepts that already had English names. Just like the UK is the only country that speaks of the “Common Market” when no such thing ever existed, it was called the European Community from 1957 to 1993, when it was renamed European Union.

EU says Boeing 737 Max won't fly over the Continent just yet: The US can make its own choices over pilot training

Len
Meh

Re: Brexit?

The CAA themselves have already confirmed they don't expect to be able to handle all the work that EASA does. It's both a capacity and a skill set issue. For instance, I can easily imagine the CAA will not conduct its own airworthiness tests for new planes.

They have also argued that the CAA should remain a member of the EASA structure as a third party.

Nokstalgia: HMD Global introduces yet another homage to the past – a 4G rework of the Nokia 6300

Len
Thumb Up

Ever looked into Sailfish OS? I run it on a Sony Xperia XA2 as my second phone and am quite happy with it.

With less than two months left, let's check in on Brexit: All IT systems are up and running and ready to go, says no one

Len
Thumb Up

Re: QR

I was on a Brexit webinar with Dutch customs some time in 2018. We mainly do services, not goods, but I still wanted to know what was happening.

I was very impressed with Rotterdam’s preparations. They obviously have the deep sea port of Rotterdam itself which is already mostly used for trading with non-EU countries so they knew what to do. Some of the RoRo ports like Hook of Holland, however, were only used for internal EU trade, to Harwich for instance. They solved that by just moving the smaller ports into the existing Portbase IT system that was used by the larger ports and suddenly Hook of Holland could handle international trade.

They had also started developing ‘Farage Garages’ away from the ferry terminals where every lorry headed for a terminal had to go through first. If the customs formalities were not in order a lorry could not proceed to terminal and could not clog up traffic flows.

The only thing they had not finished yet was their shortage of veterinary inspection posts in the northern part of the Rotterdam port system. They were nearly all on the south banks and they were in the process of building extra veterinary capacity in the north.

This was almost two years ago! According to Dr Jerzewska they have now stress-tested all this before it needs to go operational. I think that chaos at the UK border in the new year, regardless of a deal, is a given. A deal would only remove tariffs, it would not remove customs declarations, rules of origins certification, SPS checks and additional checks for high risk goods.

Len
Holmes

Re: Apparently still negotiating

That is correct, the Transition Phase should have been used for that. Unfortunately, due to a number of things, including but not limited to the UK government's incompetence and the pandemic, that transition phase has been shorted considerably to just eleven months and partially wasted because of virus related distractions.

Now, the Transition Phase is an all-encompassing framework with many legal underpinnings and a hardcoded end date. Near impossible to change. I can, however, imagine that is concluded as planned but on areas where there are still things unresolved (of which there will be many) I can see some temporary arrangements. Particularly where it is in the interest of the EU to give some leeway in their own interest.

See the 18 month reprieve that the EU has given to clearing houses in the City. That's not because they care so much about the City, that's because they need more time to bolster existing clearing houses in the EU.

If there are a number of areas where it is in both party's interest to prevent immediate disruption I can see some temporary extensions of mutual recognitions for instance. It's not as if the UK is going have drastically changed regulation on the 2nd of Jan 2021. It would buy both parties time in very specific areas without it impacting other areas.

Len
Alert

Re: Apparently still negotiating

The deadline for ratification is 15 November so there is still a tiny bit of time.

An extension to the official Transition Phase is legally impossible. Even if there was some political will, even if you were to get it through the Council where there are 27 vetoes, or Parliament where numerous MEPs have shown to take a hawkish stance, anybody with even the slightest standing could just contest a Transition extension in court.

What I can, with a lot of effort, envision is some small phase of "let's not change everything at once" after the Transition Phase ends.

Len
Happy

Re: Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border

I have no first hand experience of it but that is what I heard as well. A checklist to ask lorry drivers if they had thought of X, Y and Z before entering a border county.

You have to admit, though, renaming it to 'Check an HGV is Ready to Cross the Border' makes a lot of sense then.