Posts by -tim

Watch out VW – French prosecutors are pulling on the rubber gloves

Farfegnsmogen

State law in most states downunder allow for full refunds for cars as they weren't what was represented. Nothing like trading in a decade old car for the original purchase price.

Official: North America COMPLETELY OUT of new IPv4 addresses

Commas were used for octal IP addresses as in 177,0,0,1. That still works on some systems.

The ; would have made command lines in unix very unfriendly and the - had been used for UUIDs. The / was adopted for network size options but the : was used for a port ID. I still think the , would have been a better choice.

Penny wise and pound foolish: Server hoarders are energy wasters

At $.10 kWh, power in watts is about the price in dollars. 100W = $100/yr. Most places have power costing from about $.05 to about $.20 per kWh so half or double.

Modern A/C systems have a better efficiency. A cheap 2.5 kW split system can now move 400 Watts out of a room with 100 Watts of electricty but larger systems are less efficient.

For idle sytems, the ram may be the largest power cost. Spinning drives and graphics cards can also eat up loads of power.

Top QLD sex shop cops Cryptowall lock; cops flop as state biz popped

Backup? What is a backup?

Lots of people think they make "backups"

What did they miss:

1) Archives

a) Tax office wants something from X years ago

b) Boss needs a customer file from long ago

c) How did we work thought this type of problem in the past?

2) Near line backup

a) "opps I deleted my report for a customer"

b) PFY just doesn't understand how to configure something so its rollback time

3) Disaster recovery

a) File server raid card died and we can't get one that talks to the existing disks anymore

b) The building burned down

c) The crazy guy in development was sacked and now all the files are funny

d) Synolocker is running on the sales XP box

How to build a server room: Back to basics

The joy of small computer rooms...

Figure your power and then double that. Then double it again.

If you have 800 mm deep racks, you can't put modern servers in them.

If you have 1.2 m deep racks, you need 1.2 meters in front of them if you expect to put rack mount servers in them. 600 mm deep racks are only useful for cable termination and sometimes not even that.

You need at least 600 mm on all other sides.

Raised floors are cool but they come in 600 mm x 600 mm (or 2 ft x 2 ft) and you can't cut them and be useful in a small computer room. That means you need at least 5 tiles in a line per rack (600 mm behind, 1200 for the rack, 1200 in the front to load the rack). You need 600 mm on both sides and you better figure on two racks. For 7x5 full tiles is the minimum. Builders cut floor tiles to fit the room, not the other way around so either you have some sort of extra stuff around the edge or your tiles have to go in like a jigsaw puzzle where every piece is rectangular and white.

You need 1 kW of cooling for each kW of servers. A reasonable split system can do 6 kW of cooling but you also need two for redundancy.

Your UPS and cheap generator won't run a 6kW air conditioner but it can run a 2.5kW one.

We have 2 racks that each take about 1 kW and we have two 6 kW A/C and two telco grade 48V systems hooked to 16 truck sized deep cycle batteries. We can run 8 hours (except for that A/C thing) and the solar can extend that for another 4 (except for that A/C thing with a more effecient sun heating load bit)

You want LED lights hooked to the UPS. You want a phone in the room assuming tbe PBX is there too and you might want a way to power if assuming the POE switch isn't in the UPS.

A rack can weight 2 tons. Make sure the floor can cope. Even if it isn't that heavy, it can put massive loads in very small areas on a floor.

Make sure you have the door on the alarm and put in smoke detector in the room.

Did I mention that you need to double your planned power? And then double it again?

The last post: Building your own mail server, part 1

Re: Effective spam filtering need lots of spam

I have a domain that is over 20 years old (with plenty of email address published in usenet and on the web and archived mailing lists) and that is the level I need to process so that my spam level is less than 1%.

Effective spam filtering need lots of spam

I figure you need about 500,000 spam messages a month to be able to filter it out properly while minimal false positives. That means you have to be able to throw out about 10 gig a month of data over your home network. It is easy to collect that much if you just put in some random email address in a web page but the spammers will throw away the ones that look randmon like [e-mail] but [e-mail] will get far more spam. Common names all get spam as well so alice, bob and smith will get spam very soon after starting up a new server.

There are antispam services that you point your MX records to and they do the filtering and then deliver to your home server. They can install SSL certs so they only deliver to your dynamic IP address and some can do IPv6 which you might find is static. I have a computer in a data center in LAX and I've about given up on trying to filter spam and letting others try. I'm currently using MXGuardian which seems to work but is getting expensive as I keep finding more and more email address I set up years ago that are still being used. Most of the services are cost per doamin, cost per mailbox or cost per message. With over 100 people using my vanity domain over the last two decades, any of those options get expensive. My habbit of using a new email address everytime I print business cards just adds to the expense.

IPv6 is great, says Facebook. For us. And for you a bit, too

Re: There's begillions

You can subnet a /64 but lots of things won't like it. Most won't care and if your up for static assignments for servers, it does make sense. The default assumption is that your device's hardware mac address fills up the lower 64 bits so you need the top 64 bits as a /64 network address.

I've tried to explain the IPv6 world as a /64 is much like a Class C /24 where everything on the network can talk directly to everything else. The /56 or /48 that your ISP may hand out is much like a Class B /16 where its split inside into Class C. The /32 that ISP get are more like the old Class A /8 where your have enough infrastructure that major parts are dual homed differently. At least a /56 can hit the global BGP tables so if your ISPs let you, you can broadcast parts of their blocks to your other ISP which is something very few would ever even consider in the days of IPv4/24.

It seems faster

I'm seeing 10% faster and when you add in the fact that most tracking and ad sites (except google) don't do IPv6 at all, I'm finding turning off IPv4 isn't a real problem with many sites and speeds up things even more.

GCHQ wants to set your passwords. In a good way

Re: Someone Tell PCI

You might find the PCI requirement is 90 days so quarterly changes miss by a few days a year.

Blueprints revealed: Oracle crams Sparc M7 and InfiniBand into cheaper 'Sonoma' chips

Cheaper chips?

Why do I think this won't lead to reasonably priced systems?

We bought a bunch of X1 and V100 sun boxes about a decade and a half ago when they were at the $1,000 price point. The only reason we are dumping them now is we can't buy disks for them since their PATA controller chip has a bug with disks over 120G. The SPARC IIi that is in those made with modern techniques and a SAS/SATA/PCIe in the X100 box would be great for appliances and so far we are using more power trying to virtualize them than the old stuff too. 15 years ago a $1,000 SPARC box would outrun a $1,000 x86 box for most loads. Today a $20,000 SPARC box holds its own aginst a $6,000 x86 box.

Carders fleece $4.2 million from Victoria's MyKi transport agency

I found it amusing that a friend's black market Oyster card from London would cause the Myki terminals to crash.

Australian online shoppers and Netflix to be fully taxed in 2017

This will not turn out as planned

There are only two minor issues with this plan which won't let it bring in as much money as they think. The first is now GST won't be collected as often on things over the $1000 limit as the processing system won't work properly.

The second reason is that any large group that has to send in a massive amount of GST will end up playing high speed automated foreign exchange currency games. I figure that will knock at least 5% off the AUD early some morning resulting in a massive unfixable currency problem.

Cheers, Bill Gates. Who wouldn't want drinking water made from POO?

Re: Please!!!!

The tech can't filter out pirons and the only one we have found so far that kills humans is the type that causes mad cow (and mad human) disease. It is expected in many other untreatable medical conditions as well.

Oddly enough the best way to kill human effecting pirons is to put them in ocean water.

IT jargon is absolutely REAMED with sexual double-entendres

IT's older than than you think

Does this have anything to do with the fact that many of the names for cpu parts like registers and buffers come from terminology of the pipe organ?

Australia's marriage equality vote should take place online

Facts please?

At the last Liberal Party state conference in Victoria, the powerful members had a vote for same sex marriage and it passed by a majority.

The PM's opinion on the matter is in the minority of his own party.

Dying cipher suites are stinking up TLS with man-in-the-middle vulns

Old macs

Most mac owners seem to hand off their older toys to family members who only need a computer for things like online bills, banking and taxes. All PPC and 32bit bootloader macs have broken browsers and aren't supported by any of the major vendors who can't seem to find a way to throw their source code at an older version of xcode and build a fat binary.

'Sunspots drive climate change' theory is result of ancient error

Re: Science?

The total radiative output of the sun seems to be about the same in times of high sunspots vs low. Sunspots can make about 2% of the sun appear cooler yet the total energy seems to be the same within about 0.2% variation of which some is not related to sunspots. There are minor shifts in the intensity of very small areas of the spectrum and most of those aren't near the IR range where they would have the most effect. It is more likely but still very improbable that some chemical like a CFC in the high atmosphere has a higher green house gas equivalent if the sun is producing light that is shifted slightly closer to the blue side of the spectrum but that is very unlikely considering the ease that most university chemistry labs could prove or disprove that.

One of the two main theories that haven't been fully tested yet involve the concept of how gases in the high atmosphere align based on the electromagnetic field and the magnet field consistency changes more that the total radiative output due to sunspots. The theory is that gases align in the magnetic field and that effects how much they radiate back to the ground increasing their green house gas equivalent. It is like the concept of how LCDs work by blocking or unblocking light based on an electric field. There have been some attempts to study this at the limits of where balloons can fly but a theory says it will be happing above that which happens to be a region where it is very hard to get accurate data. Another untested theory involves links between the sun and earth core magnetic fields but the scale of the numbers put that way beyond the butterfly in Africa flaps its wings to cause a hurricane in the Atlantic sort of provable.

Buy a Tesla for the good of Australia, say country's dino-burners

The duck graph is already starting to bite in Victoria as the 4 pm drop off of solar is currently offset by old coal plants that have to start heating up well before noon.

Another small issue with abandoning coal in Victoria comes down to who will protect the brown coal from wild fires if it isn't the power generators? Eastern Victoria has some places that are a wild fire away from a century of underground unstoppable coal fires.

Your security is just dandy, Apple Pay, but here comes Android

If it quacks like a duck...

These nice 16 digit tokens that everyone is jumping to as a way to bypass some PCI-DSS issues leave out one small problem. If it looks like a card number, from the PCI-DSS point of view, it is a card number.

It is amazing that we are still not using strong public/private key encryption to move data around the credit card networks.

Regulator okays Optus exit from HFC network

Re: What's going to happen?

Magani,

Your ISP's wholesale cost per megabit will go up quite a bit. The nbn might have to split some of the Optus segments which should speed up the network where local congestion is an issue. I wonder how they are are going to provided a wholesale network to existing Optus customers which are all currently on a network that has no ability to function as a wholesale network and can barely cope as a network allowing service resale.

US State of Georgia sues 'terrorist' for publishing its own laws ... on the internet

I wish the state the best of luck

I hope they manage to get this all the way to the US Supreme Court where it will be shot down for the next few decades. Some states that formed the US had already determined that concept of Crown Copyright was a bad idea by the early 1700s and had refused to pass any laws allowing it.

Bureau of Meteorology picks Cray-zy fast 1.6 petaflop supercomputer

Will it run solitaire?

Do they need a better computer?

The BOM forecast aren't even close to the accuracy of about 20 other groups who do better every time?

The same BOM that clears the radar data every 6 minutes to restart the next pass at 6 levels rather than keeping the last N-1 levels and averaging it for continuous one minute updates?

This is the same BOM that can't arrange to continue the oldest weather station in Melbourne that is essential for the long term science of research of global recording temps for climate change because of a rent dispute involving groups who both want good science?

I haven't seen anything they can do that Win 3.1 machine can't cope with.

Pan Am Games: Link to our website without permission and we'll sue

Re: "...mockery..."

A good degree of mockery?

That wasn't even dodgy cert holding help desk level mockery. I would expect at least PFY level mockery from any Reg reporter.

BB10 AND Android? How BlackBerry can have its cake and eat it

I've just switched to blackberry

After years of playing with different smart phones and always going back to my old S40 Nokia I ended up with a BB Q10 and they do most things right. I used the phone for a week without ever signing up for an account with them and the hardware is happy to talk to my servers and my cloud. The only issues were that it had some trouble importing a few bizarre contacts, its IPv6 doesn't work with my home wifi router, and it can't use just DAV for its calendars and needs CalDAV. It did take some tweaking to the notifications since its default mode is "sleep mode is off mode" which is isn't the best someone on call 24x7. Its permissions for apps is much better too as you don't need to hack the thing to tell it "this app doesn't get that permission". The sand boxing seems to work very well too for both BB and Android apps. I like the real keyboard on a device that was just about as large as I'm willing to carry around.

Awoogah: Get ready to patch 'severe' bug in OpenSSL this Thursday

It looks like if you built something aginst the 1.0.1o or 1.0.1n and used the other shared library, someone might be able to do very bad things to your server. Until patch thur comes around, it might be wise to check that the version that is being linked aginst is the version that the programs were built aginst.

Wind River VxWorks patches some TCP sequence spoofing bugs

So my $20,000 NBX phone system still has this bug even if I reported it to the owning company at the time? And it still hasn't been fixed?

Triple glitch grounds ALL aircraft in New Zealand

Didn't the OOD books tell us about this?

Oh wait, the OOD books were about how we could model an aircraft and assume a helicopter was close using inheritance and not about the real world at all.

In the olden days, the flight controllers would write the data on a card and pass it from station to station based on where it was or their best guess if it lost communication. If all else failed, they could grab a pen and make a copy if the plane could be in more than one area.

Modern air traffic control assumes controllers know where everything is all the time. Old air traffic control assumed that the controllers had a good idea but when when things went wrong, all the pilots would continue to a plan and there were ways out when those plans didn't work out even if there was no communication. Oddly enough, one has had far fewer issues than the other with no gains in traffic between the two systems.

Oracle confirms David Donatelli hired to head hardware unit

History?

Sun grew because they sold a bunch of systems into computer science departments right before the dot.com bubble and the people who used those knew them as the fastest and best computers they had ever used so when a CEO asked, they recommended Sun. These days that isn't ture so the next generation of specifiers aren't going down that path.

The insidious danger of the lone wolf control freak sysadmin

Re: Internal wikis - do they ever live up to expectations?

Internal Wikis can work but only if you have a real librarian to manage it.

Disk is dead, screeches Violin – and here's how it might happen

Re: This will kill X blah blah blah!

I can't pop open an hard drive and read the bit stream using a jtag probe. I can with an SSD.

It isn't the controllers that fail, its the database the controller keeps about how it mapped the blocks that fails assuming the controller hasn't decided to EOL the drive. If a file system uses lots of extra data to checksum that, the blocks can be recovered and reassembled. There are off the shelf programs that can recover amazing amounts of data from scrambled blocks of even common file systems so I expect that it is easier to recover some data from a broken SSD than a broken spinning disk.

Don't panic. Stupid smart meters are still 50 years away

Re: WHY. in other countries, are utilities ...

North American utilities have been using common form factor meters for years and those meters don't require any wiring changes to swap out.

When this was tried in Australia, there were several homes that had fires soon after someone touched the wiring since the old insulation broke off after being touched for the 1st time in decades. There is also the problem that many old meters had worn out and the new meters provided a huge shocking bill the 1st time they were read.

I don't understand why they don't start putting the smart meters on the poles where the customers can't tamper with them and the can communicate to the world with ease.

Les unsporting gits! French spies BUGGED Concorde passengers

Industrial espionage goes way back.

Espionage isn't just spying, but actively trying to adjust the outcome to help your side.

One of the first published cases of espionage was when buyers were sent to Portugal to drive up the prices of cannon balls by out bidding the Spanish even if they bidders never bought anything. The result was the Spanish ended up buying inferior product at an inflated price. There was a book published in the 80s or 90s with "C" on its cover that described the details but I can't remember the full name of the book or its author.

Mainframe staffing dilemma bedevils CIO dependents

It can't be useless, the power bill proves it

The only thing worse then special mailframe software to keep the big iron in place is special hardware. I used an IBM 3081 with custom hardware add ons. At the weekly status report meetings, the head sysadm used to report the uptime ($today - $install date) in some random time unit (like miliseconds, deca centuries, centi synodic months) which would be recorded and plotted by the manager who never questiioned or recored the units. The sysadm calimed it made the uptime graphs more interesting. Somehow I expect the old array of boxes are still converting power to heat and producing no useful results just like it was doing in the early 80s.

NBN build contracts rejigged, without Telstra

Who does the real work?

It cost about $85,000 to set up a van with the tools need to install and cerify fibre but the only people allowed to operate that equipment have to pass a long certifed test that mixes in a few industries for good measure. The current data cabling requirements include sections so installers don't drill into power in walls but that is just for the datacabling certificates. Electricians installing power points can't touch data cables without an extra cert and data only cablers can't touch the power at all. Working in the pits have other sets of requiements and dealing with pole mounted cable is even more. To get the good subcontract gigs requires several years of training and apprenticeship, the very expensive white van and a ROI that would worry a bank manager that holds a mortgage on a nearly paid off house.

Facebook farewells flaky SHA-1

Win/win? for who?

I can buy a $80 usb device that does 90 billion sha2 hashes a second from a bit coin vender selling me the slow stuff. What is weak and what is stong is still up in the air. The descracker built by EFF did 90 billion keys a second and cost 1/4 million.

Turnbull's Digital Transformers discover log files contain more than meets the eye

Prviacy act?

Sending what pages I visit to google is a violation of privacy act stuff. The government shouldn't be using outsourced web analytics packages that are covered under laws of a different country.

The PTV in Victoria already seems to see the need to send my planned journey details (including street addresses) to a company in Germany just so they can tell if my browswer is out of date.

Patch-crazy Aust Govt fought off EVERY hacker since 2013

Is that just electronic attacks?

Do the stats include people just walking off with servers?

Airplane HACK PANIC! Hold on, it's surely a STORM in a TEACUP

Say it isn't so!

Rockwell Collins says their new moving map needs to be connected to the ARINC bus for some features:

http://www.rockwellcollins.com/~/media/Files/Unsecure/Marketing%20Bulletins%20Rev1/BRS/MBAirshow%204000%20BRS110087.aspx

Virtual pilot's eye view using the aircraft's flight and navigation information. Requires pitch and roll labels to be available on ARINC busses.

Kiwi company posts job ad for Windows support scammers

Do they have a qualified candidate already?

I figured they turned one of their many received CVs into a job advert.

Take cover! Out-of-control Russian spaceship to smash into Earth within hours

It fell out of the sky.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2015/05/07/progress-59-update/

Mozilla to whack HTTP sites with feature-ban stick

Re: why, why, why... what is the point?

Why is simple, it allows the cert issuers to snoop on metadata. While there are ways to do certificate revocation that don't ask the CA everytime you talk to your bank, they aren't well supported. That meta data links your computer to the remote site and typically provides enough data to figure out what pages you went to with absolute certainty just by using the the netflow data (which your ISP is already collecting) combined with the CA's data. Oddly enough you can't do that with http without looking inside the packets. There is no plausible deniability with https as there are records it came from your computer, not your network.

Remember that all major CAs were founded by spooks. Some of them are much better at their jobs than most of the "security experts" on the net.

PayPal adopts ARM servers, gets mightily dense

Harder remote exploit vector?

The ARM is much harder to play games with when trying remote exploits as it tends to take many more complex steps than x386 code to acchieve the same hacker goals but they are steps that can be done.

I'll be happy with ARM CPUs for my server loads but I have concerns about how its many instruction sets can be used together to do return based programming when hacked. It would be much happier if I could mark a page a "instruction set type X only" to help prevent any random bit of data being used for remote exploits or even disable some of them on boot so they can never happen.

Debian ships new 'Jessie' release with systemd AND sysvinit

Re: systemd a copy of Solaris SMF

AIX was the 1st to try this and it failed. Solaris tried this is failed. Is there a trend?

SMF is a major reason why so many people dumped Solaris 10 (and failed to abandon Sol 9).

However, you only need a tiny little svc.startd program to grab a contract and sleep to the end of days and the old init system is still all there (even in 11.2). Even better, in 11.2 they rewrote all the SMF scripts using a new tool which means a bit of perl script should be able to turn them back in to proper init.d scripts. A modern 11.2 system can be stripped to less than 40 processes outside of what it is supposed to be doing. With 50 processes, it can be both a parent LDOM and root zone too. I've played with system where instead of isntalling pkg://minimal-server, i used just pkg://package.pkg and it is about the smallest sol 11.2 install that I think is easy to make.

Google: Go ahead, XP stalwarts, keep on using Chrome safely all YEAR

unsupported?

Tell me more about this "officially discontinued support for XP on April 8, 2014." because it seems to be that they are still supporting it, they just aren't doing it for free anymore. There are plenty of compaines that looked at the $200/year/machine support fee and signed up.

Daddy Dyson keeps it in the family and hoovers up son’s energy biz

Who is keeping score?

He gets points for making prototypes out of cardboard. The fact that his core tech is based on the same concept as a 1956 Filter Queen tech costs points. Since the old school metal one moves far more air at nearly the same pressure, the new plastic stuff isn't such a winer. Dyson also loses points for failing to certify any of their modern hepa filters. Is an H14 or U15 that hard to put in the marketing materials assuming the modern ones can even get close?

/mines the one with the vacuum gauge in the pocket

//and the dust in the other

Comcast: Google, we'll see your 1Gbps fiber and DOUBLE IT

2 gig is far behind the curve.

Google's stuff in Kanas City is lots of different technologies since it is an R&D project. All of them can do faster than 1Gig up/1Gig down. A friend plugged his google fiber link (which was supposed to go into his google device) into a 10g ethernet switch and it was getting proper packets. From what I can tell, they are running up to 10 x 100 gig links to each node and then that node is doing 1 gig ether or 10 gig ether or xPON or whatever as last mile. The basic fiberhood had 2 parallel 100 gig connections to 4 nearest and maybe 2 additional long haul connections far away. That is just a guess based on what I've seen in of their gear and packet traces.

Smart meters are a ‘costly mistake’ that'll add BILLIONS to bills

More Smart meter fail?

The 1st smart meters were the ones where they started transmitting so the guy at the meter spent about 10 seconds less at each meter and then someone spent a far longer time with batteries every few years.

The next take was the custom frequency/sms/whatever meters hacked into normal digital meters which is fine for areas with new rollout where there is decent network coverage but not so good in other places.

The local guys decided to roll out an IPv6 Wimax network for their meters which mostly weren't upgraded. Of course people figured out you could torrent over that network with a card removed from someone else's meter. With billions of IP address IPv6 didn't need security because the address space can't be scanned except that we know all 8 bytes of the /64 network number and 5 out of the low 8 bytes which means hacker search space is just a couple dozen million packets.

Then there is the radio in my brain crazy issues to deal with.

I figured a smart system would put the meters up on the poles were they can talk to each other without much in the way, hard to tamper with, fully under the utility control, cheaper because one meter could do many houses. It would reduce risk to burning down houses when the old meter boards had undetected flaws and there would be some redundancy when the new meter was reading far more power use than the old one because someone put in the wrong current transformers.

/two firey icons and no zappy ones?

Australian online voting system may have FREAK bug

Re: Ah, political speak...

It means your brown envelope campaign contributions are best delivered to hackers rather than the politicians.

GoDaddy float values puppy-bothering hosting company at £1.9bn

Deep pockets?

Public compaines tend to fold much faster than private ones when the lawsuits come in and they know the were wrong. How long before the 1st class action suit about "they stole our domains" happens?