Posts by simpfeld

Attackers are cashing in on fresh 'CopyFail' Linux flaw

Distro Disclosure didn't happen?

If they told the Kernel Security team on the 23rd of March. Why didn't they tell the distros security teams?

I thought they normally tell them?

HP's remote desktop push retreats as Anyware heads for end of life

RGS Remains - So Many Questions

So RGS remains, I thought they'd announced that HP Anywhere was replacing this and RGS would get no further development?

And give RGS doesn't support Wayland, what future does it have ? Or will it now get some new development?

Leaked memo suggests Red Hat's chugging the AI Kool-Aid

Enough with Fedora too

I used to run everything RH and RH like (RHEL ws/server work production), Centos (home server and test), Fedora (see what was coming and enterprise testing this) but to be called a freeloader by them.

I refuse to use Fedora and help them for free improve their product like I used to submitting bug reports and howtos, no matter how good.

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

Re: Remove rc.local? NOOOO....

Yup pretty much everything doesn't need SysV init scripts (everything has switched).

But rc.local is really useful for a few lines to fix up a few boot funnies.

In my case, SELinux funnies with NFS daemons and a USB stick for LUKS keys.

Without putting in a ton of effort to dig into root cause of these minor issues.

Also there isn't really a better place to put qdisc setup.

I guess I'll be copying /lib/systemd/system/rc-local.service to /etc/systemd/system/rc-local.service before the next upgrade.

Bill Gates-backed startup aims to revive Moore's Law with optical transistors

Big Issues

The big issues always were, this was the next big thing in the '80s for a while.

Optical wavelengths are just too big for today's circuits, so not very high density.

Hence today's chip layouts can't be seen by an optical microscope any lithography no longer uses visible wavelengths.

A bigger issue is heat. An electronic transistor when off no current flows.

An optical transistor when off essentially goes black, so just generates heat.

That's a big problem with upping density.

Amazon Web Services’ US-EAST-1 region in trouble again, with EC2 and container services impacted

Azure Down

I thought it was Azure that was down today.

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status

The status board looks none too clever.

Mobian makes Debian's latest 'Trixie' release pocket-sized

There are too many of these

There are at least 5 mobile phone Linux distros.

None are really at all feature complete and each have very limited handset support.

These aren't their faults, limited vendor support and mobile networks.

I wonder if more pulling resources between these would help.

Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'

Two bald men fighting over a comb?

Are we in the territory of two bald men fighting over a comb?

Not saying it's not good, just that Ruby doesn't need more roadblocks.

It's like the other great Ruby project puppet, being closed further by it's owner Perforce, it was fighting for it's existence before....what are the thinking?

VMware to lose 35 percent of workloads in three years – some to its friends at ‘proper clouds’

Only 35 percent?

With their behaviour you'd really want to be on the exit slip road already.

Re: Madness

All true, however there are a very large number of sites that don't use these VMWare features, they just bought VMWare as it was the safe, nobody got fired for buying VMWare, option.

Not sure RHEV/oVirt skill are so problematic as they are all KVM and this is a pretty common skill, any half decent Linux admin can work with this. If I was a VMWare admin I would be learning those right now.

Bigger sites, I'd be looking at Nutanix and cloud, as in the next few years you will be in milking territory for Broadcom.

The summary here seems to be just go to Nutanix as they are most feature rich. Probably better to see if you are really using these features and therefore if a cheaper solution would meet your requirements. If not Nutanix will be there.

Virgin Media scraps wholesale network rival to Openreach

FTTP rollout

Will this slow their FTTP roll out I wonder.

VMware price hikes? Between 800 and 1,500%, claim Euro customers

Re: Cuck

Other things to consider.

If you can take the price rises great, but remember, Broadcom has cut off a lot of resources from home labs/self learners.

This will start to make staff availability harder as the years drift by.

VMWare is on the path to be a legacy technology, it will be like mainframe technology. Still super reliable but no one is interested in this.

Also you do have to ask yourself how many 3rd party software and maybe more importantly Hardware vendors will be interested in supporting

this if market share starts to disappear. Could we see a day with Broadcom's own hardware being required because of it being too hard for them to support

from every server vendor? This isn't Linux they have to maintain their own kernel.

These aren't going to be a problem now, but looking out 5-10 years ? Not so long in enterprise terms.

This was a dynamic ecosystem, it isn't now.

All I'd say, just keep your eyes open and look beyond today's value provided to ensure you don't get technologically marooned.

Apartment living to get worse in 5 years as 6 GHz Wi-Fi nears ‘exhaustion’

Ethernet when you can, Wi-Fi when you have to

Ethernet when you can, Wi-Fi when you have to

My Phone and tablet need WiFi. My TV doesn't, it's not moving about.

I have seen a TV right next to an ISP router on WiFi, I even offered to give that person an ethernet cable, it offended me so much.

Fedora 42 beta has so many spins, it'll make your head whirl

Re: About maintenance using SSH....................

waypipe does remote Wayland pretty well:

waypipe -c lz4=9 ssh -p port -l username 192.168.1.x gnome-terminal

Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke

syncserver

About the only thing Firefox has for me us you can host your own sync server. Though its hard and badly documented.

I don't know anyway to sync chromium browsers without using Google.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Re: Needs more processing power

I think this looks more like a display driver issue or something else going on.

I've being playing DVD ISOs since the Pi3 era and Pi4 was happy doing full 1080 blu-ray ISOs.

I'm happily running H265 4K video files on my Pi5.All with plenty of CPU headroom left.

I'm likewise using a LibreELEC Kodi to be TV friendly but should still be capable on a RaspberryPi OS.

Next-gen Wi-Fi to trade ludicrous speed for the boring art of actually working

Any chance of making a WiFi that can replace (30 odd year old) DECT for telephony?

People tell me DECT is better for voice...even though I don't personally struggle with WiFi calls.

Broadcom makes VMware Workstation and Fusion free for everyone

Re: "Desktop tools are, we suspect, not very lucrative any more."

You do wonder how much effort a free product is going to get now.....or left to wither.

AMD grabs a quarter of x86 market with desktop gains, but server growth slows

Who's still wanting Intel chips?

I don't know who is still buying these compared to AMD?

You'd think 50% each would at least have happened by now.

Microsoft closes Windows 11 upgrade loophole in latest Insider build

Re: This always works for me

Reducing your exposure to the windows pathogen seems the correct approach. I have a Linux host with 95% of the apps I use , and a Widows VM for the few apps I can't get.

Continuing to fight to keep windows just opens you up to being data harvested to death (forced MS accounts) and now forced HW upgrades.

Microsoft claims it didn't mean to inject Copilot into Windows Server 2022 this week

Re: The last place anyone needs this shit

"The last place anyone needs this shit is a server", I thought when you said that you meant Microsoft Windows!

AlmaLinux 9.4 beta prepares to tread where RHEL dares not

What a mess?

What a mess you have created (IBM|Red) Hat!

Must be a total nightmare for ISVs and 3rd party repos to support all this, especially bug reports etc.

Say hello to containers and flatpak's to be the only ways to support all this.

VMware's end-user compute unit reportedly headed to private equity firm KKR

Being disconnected with core technology

I'd wonder more about the impact of these changes on the technology.

Will the products on each side be impacted by being disconnected from advancements in the other.

Even if they have an intellectual property sharing deal, having say, desktop as no longer being part of VMWare will mean no (a lot less) consideration to this being paid by VMWare to this when making changes.

Top five reasons to move from CentOS to RHEL (according to Red Hat)

Re: After almost 30 years ...

Couldn't agree more!

I have been a Red Hat user, supporter and customer of Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) from about 5.x.

As a customer of RH I benefited from the large install base Centos brought, vendors providing their software in RPM, but mainly the benefits were third party repos and FAQs/howtos made largely by Centos/Alma/Rocky people.

I too have migrated my home servers all to Debian from Rocky, a bit of a pain but I got there.

I used to provide bug reports for Centos (checked on RHEL) for things I spotted at home, to make RHEL better.

But more importantly I provided early testing of Fedora in corporate environments (plus at home), in the hope that when the RHEL release came it would be more bug free in a corporate setting. I also would benefit at home by these improvements trickling down to Centos/Alma/Rocky.

Now why should I help Fedora to just be largely called a thief by Red Hat. Thanks for that...Not a nice thing to call your customers who often used Centos for prototyping before buying the real thing under RHEL. My desktops and laptops switched to an Ubuntu spin.

Red Hat you largely had a nice symbiotic relationship going with Fedora and downstream Centos. I believe a massive own goal! Short term gain at the price of the long term.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Why is toplevel query to "zghjccbob3n0"?

From the ICANN document, why is "zghjccbob3n0" so popular? What is it?

A rare piece of sanity

This has been resisted for so long, and was so obviously needed.

I have .lan at home mainly as OpenWRT uses this and it's quicker to type than .internal.

To be honest I'd reserve common ones used (identified in the report) and not just one, then just move on.

i.e. .home, .internal, .lan, .corp, .localdomain

I can see it actually being more sensible for an AD domain to be companyname.{corp|lan|internal} than a real (as recommended by MS).

Companies often forget to renew real domains (then your are stuck).

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

Re: Bye bye, BT OpenRetch

I hear you, but most broadband issues do still seem to be Openreach.

All the issues I have had in different places are Openreach. A dodgy shotgun style cable being left by Openreach when it should have been replaced when we had broadband installed. A bad connection in the cabinet,tech showed us a bad plastic covered join.

A horribly congested link from the Exchange (we were told, where Zen had no direct presence in that Exchange), it would be great during the day (65Mbs) but would drop top 0.1 Mbs in the evening even though the syncing speed was still very high.

And of course they have the hardest job to provide broadband on an ancient physical infrastructure.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

Re: From what I can recall ....

Yup and lots I see are at the start of roads on corners.

Fedora 39 waves goodbye to modularity, but has enough spins to make your head spin

I used Test on the latest Fedora

I used to test Fedora on my company's enterprise environment (AD, NFSv4, WiFi etc) and home desktop, and reported issues back to Red Hat in the hope of getting these fixed before they became issues on new RHEL releases. I was a large RHEL customer. I used to benefit personally by having CentOS/Rocky at home. Nice symbiotic relationship.

Now with being called a freeloader and worries about the viability of essential 3rd Party Repos on RHEL, I see no reason to help RH improve their distro, given they are freeloading off my efforts!

Home is now Debian 12 Servers and Ubuntu based.

OpenELA flips Red Hat the bird with public release of Enterprise Linux source

What is this distro going to be?

Maybe someone can help me with this...

What direction/philosophy are they taking with this?

Is this going to be an effective new distro tree that is developed independently (that the members will derive from)?

OR

An effective new distro tree that is using Centos Stream patches (that the members will derive from)?

OR

Just a new name for the upstream RHEL sources?

Personally after using RH and RHEL for decades professionally (and recommending to many people and the companies I've worked for), and using Fedora and Centos/Rocky at home. Contributing bug reports and enterprise experience of their product back. This was only practical at work and home by use of 3rd party repos to make this practical, largely maintained by Alma/Rocky/Centos people. For us all to be called leeches, thanks for that.

I'm now done with them and have already moved my home stuff to Debian and work will likely follow!

Where do people feel most at risk of being pwned? The pub

More open WiFi Paranoia

..from a VPN company.

Sure you can grab registration details (maybe) most of these are often (usually) HTTPS now. But pretty much everything is encrypted now going out to the Internet, what danger is there now.....really

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

Re: The network is token ring.

I seem to remember it was originally an HP-UX system when built. I wonder what it is now?

Amazon Linux 2023 virtual machine images still MIA

This is the most ignored thing with the RHEL debacle, EPEL (and other 3rd party repos e.g. rpmfusion) are largely virtually essential for making RHEL useful in a general sense. RH kicking this wasps of this ecosystem (which mostly built these repos) will make RHEL much less useful.

Oracle, SUSE and others caught up in RHEL drama hit back with OpenELA

Re: founded to create continuity for all Enterprise Linux downstream distributions

I wonder if just a directive from their corporate Daddy to increase profits after they splurged on buying Red Hat. This will likely come back to bite them, but those C levels will have had their bonuses by then and moved on. RH themselves used to say if we make money from bits we aren't doing it properly....

SUSE announces its own RHEL-compatible distro... again

Maybe directly they don't care, but when repo's built with downstream repos start to drop out (or look pretty empty), RHEL will become very un-useful to lots of sites (certbot, vlc, ffmpeg) etc etc

And a LOT less how-tos and guides, which are usually written by Centos/Rocky/Alma people.

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

Re: What's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine too.

RH were making great profits for many years. I think they just aren't making the stupid increase in profits that IBM expects of them.

Fedora Project mulls 'privacy preserving' usage telemetry

Re: Why would anyone

Sadly I think you are right.

I have used RHEL commercially and recommended buying it (and have run a very large RHEL subscription account). Wanted to run the same thing at home (so used Centos later Rocky).

As a RHEL subscriber benefited many times from the many eyes of Centos (howtos, bug reports, forum posts) and the repos with essential third party software built with Centos (e.g. certbot, vlc, nvidia driver rpms, ). The extra audience provided by Centos gave me more 3rd party software availability. Additionally, just a few weeks ago I had a bug I found in Rocky ( I tested on RHEL to report), pushed upstream and has been fixed.

Without all this RHEL just became a whole lot less useful and usable. If you run a single commercial app maybe not, but in the real world RHEL just now looks hard to use as a general purpose distro.

I have used RHEL systems for many many years (decades) and contributed to this ecosystem (many many bug reports, howtos, occasional patches)

And to Fedora, I run this as a desktop (home and work) to see what was coming up in RHEL a few years down the line and to help stabilise it for this point. So my RHEL and my home Rocky deployments would be improved.

Why would I do this now? I just don't feel like doing this anymore. If my home servers head to something else my desktop will too.

RH you have utterly destroyed the ecosystem you have built. On some short term hope of gain.

At the weekend I downloaded Debian for the first time in decades and I have started playing with this in a VM. I have decided what desktop system I may use, maybe Debian maybe something else Debian based.

It's all very sad.

Linus Torvalds calls for calm as bcachefs filesystem doesn't make Linux 6.5

Re: Rights and Wrongs

BTRFS seems to have had issues with things like RAID 5/6 forever, but not really something I know about the reasons on priorities of BTRFS.

The Bcachefs patreon page has some discussion. Not sure on the validity (or the other side of the argument) but it's interesting:

https://www.patreon.com/bcachefs

ext4 - which works - mostly - but is showing its age. The codebase terrifies most filesystem developers who have had to work on it, and heavy users still run into terrifying performance and data corruption bugs with frightening regularity. The general opinion of filesystem developers is that it's a miracle it works as well as it does, and ext4's best feature is its fsck (which does indeed work miracles).

xfs - which is reliable and robust but still fundamentally a classical design - it's designed around update in place, not copy on write (COW). As someone who's both read and written quite a bit of filesystem code, the xfs developers (and Dave Chinner in particular) routinely impress me with just how rigorous their code is - the quality of the xfs code is genuinely head and shoulders above any other upstream filesystem. Unfortunately, there is a long list of very desirable features that are not really possible in a non COW filesystem, and it is generally recognized that xfs will not be the vehicle for those features.

btrfs - which was supposed to be Linux's next generation COW filesystem - Linux's answer to zfs. Unfortunately, too much code was written too quickly without focusing on getting the core design correct first, and now it has too many design mistakes baked into the on disk format and an enormous, messy codebase - bigger that xfs. It's taken far too long to stabilize as well - poisoning the well for future

Rights and Wrongs

I do hope this gets merged soon, it looks like a decent Next Generation filesystem architecture that might replace the muddle we have at the moment without ZFS licensing issues or BTRFS (alleged) architecture issues. And has data integrity checking without the layering nightmare of stratis.

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

Re: "AI to take over in customer services"

They never seem to get that the reason I called is that the website didn't allow me to do the more complex thing I'm trying to do.

As an example, I have a locked out account just now with MS and I can't get a number anywhere to talk to a human being, the automatic reset doesn't want to play with this account. Stuck at the moment!

Fedora 38 will still support framebuffer X11 and NIS+

Re: NIS+

To be honest following the link to Fedora on this they say removing NIS(+). So presumably/possibly the biggest issue was removing NIS support, as opposed to NIS+ support.

NIS+ being nothing like NIS at all.

I can imagine a number of sites might still use NIS, was used a lot in HPC. Can't imagine NIS+ is used now by anyone, no one really used it when it launched. Sun Solaris originally only provided a NIS+ server, but so few people used it later versions came with a NIS server too.

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

Google is Open Source done differently

When you look at most Google Open Source projects, there is no real community directed activity.

It's just Google chucks it over the wall.

Android is like this

Another example. Chromium has no ability to sync passwords, bookmarks, passwords etc to anything that isn't Google's cloud.

Bugs for this are just closed for Chromium,

IPv6 for Dummies: NSA pushes security manual on DoD admins

Re: "recommendation to assign IP addresses on the network via a DHCPv6"

Quite, wonder if it will change the obstinate engineer who says SLAAC only in Android.With this very long running bug:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

Re: Daft

You'd think so but IF you can get to heat pump, it's actually 4-5 times more efficient to burn gas in a power plant and heat homes with heat pumps, than burn the gas in homes directly for heating. Kind of amazing.

Vodafone and Three's UK arms locked in merger talks

Re: Poor three

Vodafone were stupid slow at rolling out 3G and 4G.

Lots of areas you could only get GPRS, within a few miles of a city boundary for a long time!

Three was a dream after this level of service.

Re: Into the last year of my 3 contract

I tend to find most networks are worse in Central London than elsewhere in the UK with the sheer number of people. But agreed Three is worse than others!

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

Bigger question where did they get the Pi 4

They seem to never been in stock anywhere these days (and haven't been for months).

Strike days should serve as 'wake-up call' to BT's top brass, says union

Re: Greed

It's also hard to understand the stupidity of a boss taking a massive pay rise and not thinking that might be a red rag to a bull. What was he thinking!

And with staff having foodbanks in some offices.

Windows Network File System flaw results in arbitrary code execution as SYSTEM

I used Windows NFS

But only to share Windows files out for Linux desktop users. So light usage. It was okay for this (maybe very okay), but the lack of reasonably handling of filename case issue would prevent me from doing anything deeper with it.

One thing was there is no group ownership file that you can set in the GUI even though this is stored in NTFS and used by their NFS. I had to write my own chgrp in PowerShell :(

Would have been easier if they had just exposed the NFSv4 ACL's mapped from NTFS ACL's (they are pretty identical), but they only map ACL entries for owner, group and other (everyone on NTFS) to basic unix perms. Hence the need for a chgrp.