* Posts by Smelly Socks

32 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Sep 2009

Cloud Software Group effectively snuffs open source XenCenter via a README file

Smelly Socks

XenCenter is not XenServer

XenCenter is just the windows management console. This has been moribund for years. Probably best to put it out of its misery.

The hypervisor (XenServer) is still a thing.

-ss

UK mulls making MSPs subject to mandatory security standards where they provide critical infrastructure

Smelly Socks

bonfire

This is part of the promised bonfire of red tape (lighting the way to the sunny uplands?)

Oh wait, it's about suffocating smaller organisations in bureaucracy. Business as usual, then! Carry on!

Xero, Slack suffer outages just as Let's Encrypt root cert expiry downs other websites, services

Smelly Socks
Devil

expiry

"there has been a sudden uptick in downtime right as Let's Encrypt, which provides free HTTPS certificates to a ton of organizations, let one of its root and intermediate certs expire"

they totally shouldn't have let this expire. That's so slack of them.

-ss

'OK, everyone. Stop typing, this software is DONE,' said no one ever

Smelly Socks

the costs of fossilised software

When you said, "The site I hosted with that company didn't need an upgrade, it was running fine with almost no attention at all", what you really meant was: "I was not interested in bearing the cost of maintaining my fossilised software, and got a bit grumpy about the whole thing when my service provider made it clear that they were no longer interested in bearing the cost of maintaining my fossilised software either".

Centos 6 dates from 2011 and ships with packages and core o/s software from that era. It is completely true that an admin can stick with these operating system versions in the longer term, and this is a viable option which is regularly used by high value software installations. The problem is that there is a substantial cost in doing so and when you're maintaining low-cost sharing hosting services, costs matter quite a bit.

So it's not just about sticking with centos 6: it's about sticking with e.g. python 2.6, php 5.3, apache2.2 and a pile of other ancient software versions which are no longer supported by their developers and which are basically moribund. It's about committing to your user base that the hosting company will assume responsibility for fixing security problems in Django because the oldest maintained release of Django was released in 2015 and requires python 2.7. It's about not being able to provision any more customers on servers like this because you simply cannot sell python 2.5 and php 5.3 in 2017, which means that according as customers migrate off this platform, you're ending up with a much lower density of customers per physical server, which drives up the cost.

It's about the tool chains and automation software (e.g. puppet / ansible / salt) required to support cabinets full of older servers like that, which drives up the cost.

It's about having a support desk that can deal with issues relating to lots and lots of different software versions. It's about installing multiple software versions on these platforms and attempting to ensure that none of them are fighting with each other, which drives up the cost.

And it's about having to bear the clean-up cost when some customer who refuses to upgrade causes the shared hosting platform to become riddled with malware because this is inevitably happens, and drives up the cost too, and by a good deal too, because it needs to be handled by people with clue and people with clue cost money to hire.

So in case you're tempted to stick to your guns and moan that your fiver-a-month sharing hosting platform isn't offering you the long term stability that you want in order to continue to run your ancient and unsupported software, please bear in mind that there is a substantial cost to doing so, and that one way or another, someone needs to bear that cost, and that someone will be the customer because that's how supply of services works.

The only issue of relevance is deciding how that support cost is borne: whether through direct upfront cost increases, or by upgrading the platform, or by letting the platform rot and having customer attrition through neglect. Of these, the least bad long term option for the hosting companies is upgrading the platforms.

Otherwise I quite agree that it would be nice to have your cake and eat it.

Windows 10 backlash: Which? demands compo for forced upgrades

Smelly Socks

wrong pic

Isn't that a Mac that's being smashed in the pic?

PRO TIP: using better stock photos will stop silly whinges like this

-ss

ISP Level 3 goes TITSUP after giganto traffic routing blunder

Smelly Socks

Goooood morning Malaysia!

https://twitter.com/TMCorp/status/609167065300271104

catch it before it's removed

-ss

EU VAT law could kill thousands of online businesses

Smelly Socks

The odour of hypocrisy

No doubt the normal UK approach to the EU was followed:

1. Politicians and mandarins from the Ministry of Misery campaign long and hard at EU level for new regulations to scratch itch-du-jour.

2. New regulations introduced by EU.

3. Daily Mail declares that said new regulations cause cancer and the politicians and mandarins from the Ministry of Misery berate the EU for forcing legislation down their throats, but they'll just have to implement it anyway because it's more than their job's worth, innit.

Say, did someone mention that HMRC is going to clean up with these new vat rules?

-ss

Police arrest suspect in BIGGEST DDoS ATTACK IN HISTORY

Smelly Socks
Mushroom

I don't think we got the hint

i think the headline should have been in bold and not just capital letters. Just to make sure everyone knew that this was like really important, know what I mean? And italics. Maybe underline also. Hey, does your CMS support <blink>?

-ss

Can a new TCP scheme give wireless a 16-fold boost?

Smelly Socks
Facepalm

what are you going to pessimise?

For sure, encoding schemes like this work for individual connections, but my oh my they don't scale. If your wireless connection is dropping packets, particularly on 3g, then the underlying layers will be doing a mad scramble to try to deliver the packets reliably. 3G is particularly good (or bad depending on your perspective) at this and you can often end up with crazyass packet RTTs due to multi-second retransmission when it goes to massive lengths to get your data through.

But at what cost? Bandwidth spectrum, that's what. You've already got the lower layers doing fancy retransmission stuff, and if you augment this with upper layer packet spray, you will end up wasting a huge amount of spectral bandwidth. This sort of nondeterministic thundering hoards problem will cause overall network performance to fall off a performance cliff and then everyone will be unhappy because everyone's multi-layer retransmissions will be fighting with everyone else's. IOW, total fail.

The same happens on wifi, but to a lesser extent because it the MAC retransmission will time out sooner.

Turns out there's no such thing as a free lunch. Who knew?

-ss

Metric versus imperial: Reg readers weigh in

Smelly Socks
FAIL

oh please

Metric only, no exceptions. I refuse in principal to vote.

1/2L of beer is fine because that's the sort of measurements my beer bottles come in anyway. As for plane altitude, get a grip. Ever tried to convert 35000-38000 ft to miles high? it's not that I'm stupid or lazy but it's easier to convert 11000 meters to km (true story).

facepalming jaded by imperial imbecility,

and tyvm but get a grip,

-ss

The iPHONE 5 UNDERMINES western DEMOCRACY: 5 reasons why

Smelly Socks
Unhappy

h8r.

that is all.

-ss

VMware kills vRAM memory tax with vSphere 5.1 server virt

Smelly Socks

networking

you didn't mention anything about the networking upgrades. The virtual distributed switch system has been completely overhauled so that you can now actually do upgrades without having to rebuild from scratch as before. SNMP support now looks vaguely useful, and the link aggregation system finally supports LACP. At last. Who knows, in a couple of years, they'll have networking which will be on a par with the early 2000s.

-ss

Twitter titsup: Our failover was actually just FAIL ALL OVER

Smelly Socks
Mushroom

whodunnit

It was the cleaner wot did it. She pulled out the power from the twitter web server to vacuum behind it.

10m years ago there was less CO2 - but the Earth was warmer

Smelly Socks
FAIL

explosives

dr page, please stick to analysis of things which go bang. It's far more entertaining and unlike climate change, you actually have expertise in the area.

-ss

Theresa May: No emails sniffed in web super-snoop law

Smelly Socks
Thumb Down

pedophiles

she forgot to mention pedophiles. i won't support her plans until she mentions that they're really about pedophiles and not the government implementing warrantless snooping on its citizens in a way that would have made east germany blush with envy.

-ss

Hollywood gathers to pick over Limewire’s corpse

Smelly Socks
FAIL

I see what they're up to here.

Oh no wait, I don't. They're just being friggin retarded.

-ss

LimeWire settles with record labels, to pay $105m for copyright hurt

Smelly Socks
Pirate

The artists

I'm glad that the record companies have the artists first and foremost on their minds. Can they just confirm exactly how much of this settlement the artists will be seeing?

-ss

/Bucaroos, because I need someone to tell me who are the pirates in this argument

Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!

Smelly Socks
FAIL

Rolling blackouts

I'm trying to figure out how this correlates with the rolling blackouts that some colleagues in Tokyo were talking to me about a couple of days ago.

I'm sure you're right, though - and they're wrong. After all, what would they know about electricity?

-ss

Attack hijacks sensitive data using newer Windows features

Smelly Socks
FAIL

headless chickens

danger level adequately summed up here:

http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-April/034957.html

-ss

Iranian web developer faces death over porn site charges

Smelly Socks
Pint

web site address?

Sorry, but what URL did you say this bloke worked on? I want to check to see just how unislamic it is...

-ss

[beer, because beer is unislamic too]

Windows 7 Backup gets users' backs up

Smelly Socks
Paris Hilton

"EVAR!"

at least get your spelling right: "Worst. Thing. EVAR."

Paris, because she wouldn't spell it wrong.

-ss

Hull Daily Mail exposes depraved local porncoder

Smelly Socks
Megaphone

Outrage!

I always knew that he was a prognosticator and a procrastinator! And that he came from a family of THESPIANS!!!1!!1!!!11

Please excuse me for a few moments while I write a strongly worded letter to the authorities.

-ss

Apple ambushed in Barcelona

Smelly Socks
FAIL

A one-way trip down mediocrity lane

If I were Steve Jobs, I'd want all my competitors to get involved in a project like this.

-ss

Google to mobile industry: ‘F*ck you very much!’

Smelly Socks
WTF?

google's approach

> "They don’t know what hurt they’re doing, and they don’t care."

please excuse me while i cry a river for the mobile phone industry.

-ss

Catholics slam PETA nude adopt-a-mutt poster

Smelly Socks
FAIL

Loud mouths

Bill Donohue is a one-man-band. This Catholic League nonsense is just a front for his froth-at-the-mouth rants. Have you not set him on /ignore?

-ss

Brussels agrees pan-European ID standard

Smelly Socks
Alert

STORK?

sorry, don't believe you. not even a bureaucrat could be a big enough prat to come up with an acronym like this. tell me you're pulling the piss about it?

-ss

Dell refunds PC user for rejecting Windows

Smelly Socks
Paris Hilton

ehhhhhhh?

eh, what's new about this? Dell have been refunding peoples' windows license fees for years, with hardly a quibble.

Slow day in the back-office, then?

-ss

(paris, because only she could have pretended that this was news)

Wolfram Alpha API lands with price tag attached

Smelly Socks
FAIL

Ewwww, look at the small print!!

Some classic stuff here:

"Wolfram|Alpha may terminate Your license to use the Wolfram|Alpha Marks at any time for any or no reason."

"You are required to provide a hyperlink to www.WolframAlpha.com on every page with Results. All hyperlinks associated with data provided by Wolfram|Alpha must navigate directly to Wolfram|Alpha."

The prohibitions section is quite some fun too.

-ss

Blade Network nabs $10m in funding

Smelly Socks

Why Juniper invested

The Juniper EX2500 is a rebadged BNT 8124, so if Juniper wanted to continue this rebadging relationship, it would seem sensible to do a bit of investment in the company. Gives you more welly to kick with too, when things go wrong - as they often do.

Apple's iPhone loses carriers money, claims researcher

Smelly Socks
Paris Hilton

Awwww

please excuse me while I shed a tear for the poor, poor operators.

NZ woman sacked for SHOUTY EMAILS

Smelly Socks
Paris Hilton

In my day..

...we'd be hung, drawn and quartered for SCREAMING EMAILS IN UPPER CASE. And that was for a first offense.

-smelly

Paris, because only a dumb blond could think that this sort of ocular abuse was o.k.