Posts by Tascam Holiday 54 posts • joined 24 Feb 2009
Our CentOS 7 to 8 migration work has just come to a screeching halt. On this occasion our corporate love of grinding policies has actually helped and we hadn't gone too far down that road yet. Separately our new HPC system would have been CentOS 8 with a couple of RHEL licences just in case we need support - that plan scrapped while we consider an alternative. It will probably be Debian or Ubuntu, and the same for the rest of the estate come 2024.
I think the idea is bonkers too, but the SSH key issue is already solved. We use LDAP to hold public keys at my org, as the home directory is created on initial login only, so doesn't initially exist. We get the user's key as part of registration. A combination of SSSD and SSHD config sorts this out.
...actually scrub that. You'd still need to use a password to decrypt the home dir container, so this wouldn't help much. Oh well!
I jumped ship to Zonomi a few months ago when I realised I was paying $60 a year to Oracle for very little with Dyn (although I've otherwise been a happy customer for many years). My home router doesn't know how to talk to Zonomi, but all I've had to do is cron a curl call every day to update Zonomi if my IP changes. And it's free.
It's nice that TB is going to get some love after years of neglect, but I'd rather they put some work into native support of EAS or EWS. I know IMAP is available from Exhcange but my last two employers wouldn't enable it.
There are some add-ons which can help, but they're of variable quality and suffer from frequent abandonment.
Long time EN user here. There's not much on the market quite as good, but the quality over the last 2-3 years has taken a serious nosedive. Long standing bugs and issues are ignored for years, while unasked-for features (emoji support for example) get shovelled in. Beta versions are released, the community feeds back to EN only to see all those new bugs appear in the general release anyway.
Someone needs to take their dev teams (or at least the managers) by the scruff of the neck and rub their noses in what they're currently pushing out. You get the distinct impression nobody at EN actually uses the product themselves.
SSH doesn't just mean a text terminal. You can use it to tunnel through multiple hosts to get to your endpoint very easily, basically a simple VPN solution, especially when used as a SOCKS proxy.
Organisation totally locked down from the outside? SSH out to a friendly host and create a reverse tunnel for whatever service you need (within reason). Bang - you've got your entry point for working on the move!
Maybe a dead man's switch is a good idea. If you don't access your e-mail account for a month, e-mail the password to your next of kin.
Google has such a feature: you can nominate someone to be the recipient of your account details after three months of inactivity.
In some respects Apple's stance on customer privacy is quite admirable, in this case they've clearly lost the plot though. It's strange how these examples of dreadful customer relationships are always a 'misunderstanding' once the media gets involved.
Really? Does anyone walk around their house with their phone all evening? Mine goes straight onto the charger when I get home, I don't want to lug the damn thing around for basic home functions to work.
A solution that worked off something a bit more passive like RFID-with-range could be worth the aggro, a device that costs pence that you could stick to the hem of your PJs or embed under the skin (for the brave) could be a goer.
In a sysadmin role I invariably find that the odd day I need to wear a collared shirt and a decent pair of trousers is the day I end up having to crawl under the floor space following cables or heft kit in/out of the data centre. Sod that, jeans and t-shirt look much better when covered in dust than a shirt ever does.
If you work in an organisation that the management think of as a 'Windows shop' (even though 90% of your estate is actually Linux but only requires 20% of the manpower to manage, so is effectively invisible) then await the day a manager insists that you investigate using MS tools across the estate because it's got to be better than that free rubbish you currently use.
I wouldn't be surprised if half the problem is due to all those new PS3's and PS4's plus every single new game requiring a massive update when first started, that must put quite a load on their infrastructure on Xmas morning.
I was going to rent a film on PSN tonight but can't get into my account (it was fine yesterday and Xmas day though). Oh well, I expect bittorrent will deliver where the multinational corporation fails.
I've got tickets to see KB and wouldn't even bother taking photos with my phone, let alone get in everyone's way and record a video on it.
But I wouldn't mind taking a few snaps with my decent camera. The ticket conditions (as pretty much standard) forbid photography and I don't want to risk getting it confiscated on entry so I won't bother.
But it pisses me off that photography is generally forbidden (even if largely unenforceable now that just about everyone carries a camera with them) but crowds of numpties gather at the front to hold their phones aloft without being challenged by venue staff.
Set a random 20 char password, buy yourself a Yubikey and configure that to send the password for you, assuming you're not using a service that works with the OTP functionality. Works on any machine as it's basically a USB keyboard as far as the OS knows.
Yep, something like LastPass will work across all major browsers and devices. Use two-factor where possible with a Yubikey or Google Authenticator - LastPass, Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Evernote accounts at least can all be made more secure this way.
I use LastPass and have it automatically generate 20 character random passwords for every site I need to log into. I don't even know the passwords myself in most cases so even hammer decryption won't work on me.
Nonetheless although we can do everything possible to be secure we'll always be at the mercy of the likes of Adobe clowns who are able to get my credit card details hacked. Changing my password for my Adobe account is no big deal, but changing my card is a PITA.
This apparent danger has always been cobblers. If it was a serious risk then the airlines are putting their passengers' lives at risk by not confiscating all such devices on boarding. They don't let us on with guns, pneumatic drills or welding gear for obvious reasons but for these deadly electronic devices they're happy to stick with the honour system.
> I think pill-boxes were/are a rural thing - I only started to notice them when I moved out of the city, and there are plenty left, particularly at spots where roads cross rivers or canals. They were, after all, built to last.
I was playing in pill boxes, gun emplacements and acoustic mirrors while living in Kent in the 1980's. I think many of them are still there around Hythe, Folkestone and Dover. And there were some awesome (though somewhat dangerously dilapidated) martello towers from the Napoleonic era to be explored around there too.
Ah-ha, at least one of the acoustic mirrors is still there: http://goo.gl/maps/XFyMA
It's not clear from the article but I'm sure these drones aren't autonomous, there must be a motion capture system out-of-band which is doing all the processing and drone control, hence the white sheets to give good contrast for the system's cameras.
Being able to do the same thing with autonomous drones must be much harder just due to their viewpoints, even if the processing and drone comms could all be done on-board. I guess that'll all be do-able in the near future though.
Still very impressive nonetheless.
Ridiculous miserable sods. UKNova probably did a huge amount of good for rights owners as free market research in what old content people were willing to pay for. Certainly they played by the spirit of the law (if not the letter of it) and did everything to ensure that the only content available wasn't commercially available elsewhere.
UKNova will be greatly missed, it's really a model for what the broadcast companies ought to be doing themselves.
I'd like to have known how bad the rolling shutter issue is with these. As Jan 0 says, some sample video from each camera would have been useful.
For what it's worth I've got a Kodak PlaySport Zx5, it's completely bomb-proof, no discernible rolling shutter problem, standard tripod mount. I'd replace it with something similar with better low-light performance though.
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