Posts by simpfeld

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.

Here's one way past Moore's law: Chips that mix photonics and electronics

Problems with pure optical computing

There have been fundamental problems with photonic computing for a long time.

One is heat dissipation, when an optical gate is off it effectively goes black so just generates heat. Transistors don't do this.

Secondly, light is quite large. Chips are already have feature massively smaller than optical wavelength, lithography requiring ultraviolet light these days. So any optical chip will have to be larger (features wise) than an equivalent electronic chip.

So basically for bulk across board/CPU maybe high bandwidth comms is the likely immediate and perhaps only possible use for photonics in the immediate future.

Surface plasmons are probably a more likely path for actual computation.

One other thing is that optical fibres have a pretty slow propagation rate has a VF (Velocity Factor) of about 0.6-0.7 (of the speed of light in a vacuum), decent coax can do 0.8-0.9. This higher bandwidth of fibre usually makes this much more preferable but for certain in computer functions this maybe a limiting factor (memory buses perhaps). I just mention this as hardly anyone seems to know this.

IETF publishes HTTP/3 RFC to take the web from TCP to UDP

The end of the IP protocol number field?

I see why they aren't doing QUIC/IP or QIC/IP as current routers wouldn't implement it, but this effectively renders the IP protocol number useless.

A new protocol layered over UDP (as we have layered a load of crap on port 443) just more layering inefficiency.

Could this not have been a full IP protocol with drop back to UDP if this wasn't available?

How legacy IPv6 addresses can spoil your network privacy

Re: I don't care what the experts say....

To be honest you can do really smart on IPv6 with Prefix Translation, because you have so many external addresses you can have 1-to-1 mapping of external to internal addresses, it should work great. Much better than IPv4 port hackery.

Sadly there is a big BUT coming, the private addresses you can assign officially in IPv6 ULAs (fd00::/8) will NEVER be used for Internet traffic (I believe usually hard coded into the stacks and will drop back to IPv4 if you try, so I have read (not tried it)). So your choice is to use an unused piece of the real address space, it's unused this week, so this may well come back to bite you.

Sadly the Ivory Tower people that architect these sort of things have made NAT IPv6 hard to do well.

A bit analogous to the Ivory Tower people that don't want to give out a decent set of private top-level domain names for internal use....

Re: Underwhelming

I have to agree. Very ho-hum. Given how rarely IPv4 addresses change (and you want this) and a fixed IPv4 address is common, I don't really see this is massively worse. Also my IoT devices (hopefully) talk to their single AWS cloud services, so not really leaking to lots of Internet sites, a TV a little more but still a very limited pool of sites. Phones and things that actually leave my house are all random assignment.

Besides I have a fixed PD delegation anyway, knowing my end device isn't a big further hole.

To be honest, I'd personally love to us pure DHCPv6 and not SLAAC at home, but Android doesn't support it! Due to a super awkward Android developers with an obsession that we should all use SLAAC and nothing else...

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085?pli=1

Microsoft slides ads into Windows Insiders' File Explorer

Sympathy for Windows users very low

If you like and choose to run Windows, realise that you have no control and no say in it's direction.

Complaining later will be too late.

Live with your computer really being MS's computer.

Shut off 3G by 2033? How about 2023, asks Vodafone UK

I'd want a phone with WiFi calling turned on all the time at that location.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

What's the alternative?

The problem with complaining about IPv6 is what else are we all supposed to do? Bodging v4 would just fix for a short while and/or would also break all clients for little gain. IPv4 with CGNAT will only buy so much time. Consider:

1/ Some mobile networks already have used up all the 10.0.0.0/8 space for the mobiles on their networks. Splitting this apart to multiple 10.0.0.0 network is very hard to manage!

2/ For busy networks we are already burning through port numbers for all these outbound services, this is a fundamental limitation of any NAT.

3/ Already an IPv4 address costs more than an computer to connect to it. That's ridiculous.

So either we all switch to IPv6 or it has be something else entirely. IPv4 just isn't going to cut it forever

French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi ups Altice UK's stake in BT to 18%, says he is not planning a takeover... at least not yet

Not sure what BT's for really

It's only the last mile stuff from Openreach that the UK cares about, surely. Nothing else of BT is really worth a damn anymore.

Let him have the boat anchor that is the rest of BT but force them to sell off Openreach (which isn't great either but it's a bit of a monopoly).

CentOS Stream 9: Understanding the new Red Hat OS release for non-Red-Hat-type people

Re: Rocky Linux

Rocky does look to have the community behind it. I have switched home machines over to this and it's working fine.

Re: No-one sane runs Streams in any business use

I would tend to agree with you. With that, it really surprised me that CERN are using Centos Streams 8:

https://linux.web.cern.ch/#update-on-centos-linux-strategy

Sun sets: Oracle to close Scotland's Linlithgow datacentre

It's in Linlithgow not Aberdeen....oh controversy!

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint laid low. Not by malware, but by another buggy Windows patch

Windows Server, a contradiction in terms

Having administered it for years, I still haven't changed that view!

Calendars have gone backwards since the Bronze Age. It's time to evolve

Re: By hand!

Until you lose the diary or it gets in a fire or the information gets stolen etc etc

Red Hat forced to hire cheaper, less senior engineers amid budget freeze

All too common

This is the sort of behaviour that buys you cost saving and better profitability in the short to medium term. But sows the seeds of your long term undoing. No problem though, the MBA who thought of it got a big bonus and will by then have moved on to the next business triumph (cost savings and long term business failure).

Worse still this kind of crap is rewarded by the stock market, make a pile of people redundant and your share price goes up. Doesn't matter that there are less people to do the work and a pile of skills will have walked out the door (so some work maybe impossible to do now), so will maybe reduce future profitability.

Having made £1bn in gross savings well ahead of March 2023 deadline, more cuts could be on BT's agenda

Re: Management Idiocy in full effect

Yup I'm surprised there isn't more of this on the Exchange building front. I don't believe BT has said anything about this, but currently I think FTTP fibres still terminate at the usual exchange?

Once an area retires copper phone lines, you are correct you could (in theory) reduce these to almost nothing. A few key sites countrywide in the extreme.

Anyone know if this has been talked about anywhere officially?

Weeks after Red Bee Media's broadcast centre fell over, Channel 4 is still struggling with subtitles

Missing a few key points here

1/ Slightly glossed over is the fact the servers are fine but the hard drives in them died. It was generally known that the noise from gas fire suppression systems can damage hard drives, but not sure it was well known. I certainly didn't know how extensively, percentage of HDD's that would be destroyed, this can cause.

A little bit more from C4 themselves.

https://www.channel4.com/press/news/whats-happened-access-services-channel-4

2/ "Red Bee Media got the pictures and audio up and running again quickly," , yes but the key thing is here not from the primary site but from a DR site.

They are all still on DR, see Channel 5 with the white and black square in the right hand corner, indicating they are *still* in DR playout. The issue is Channel 4's DR subtitle playout isn't working. I heard some concern that fixing this is dangerous whilst in DR (as they have no further DR if they break something). So changes to the Red Bee's DR being made are very limited.

Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years

Re: I've got a suggestion...

To be honest Windows is wrong to have a case insensitive file system.That quick hack has landed us all with the problem that people think this is a feature.

It's easy to decide what upper and lower case is in English but not for all the world's languages as well. This is a lot of crap to put into an OS level driver to make that work. Better to do this at a UI level.

Windows 11 gets chatty as Teams integration turns up

Re: Dear Rejects of Redmond

Yup, but like mobiles, these companies think it's their machine/platform. You changing it is unwanted to them.

As someone said recently you will likely not own any device in 15 years! Sad to say they are probably right. Routers, media devices, Alexa (and it's ilk), even door bells are all like this.

If you use free software, (which I do on mobiles and computers), things are maybe (often just a little) harder to setup. Most people will take the convenience over their freedom every day. My sympathy for their complains about lock-in is very small, esp professionals in this area who should know better.

I'm amused, for example, that people accept that rooting your phone should stop you running banking apps, for example, hell it's my phone and it's okay on my computer to bank with! But that will likely go in a later windows version, as this frog is further boiled.

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

Network Mantra

"Wire when you can. Wireless when you have to" , still and maybe always will hold.

I need to use WiFi for tablets, phone, mobile applications. But my desktop doesn't need to be WiFi, not does my TV, it doesn't move.

I hate seeing people stream 4K on their TV over WiFi about 2 metres from the ISP hub. Even if cabling is hard, over the mains Ethernet Homeplug devices

seem to perform much better than WiFi (in a domestic setting).

Finally a sensible article about WiFi. I have similar view of 5G, which is the new you'll never need a cable again technology fallacy!

Devuan adds third init option in sixth birthday release

Re: PulseAudio?

Interestingly a planned change for Fedora 34 is PipeWire to replace (and remove) PulseAudio and Jack.

Claimed to "PipeWire can support both Desktop and PRO Audio use cases"

Another unpleasant upheaval in the audio system or a decent audio system finally? I don't know....does anyone?

Cisco intros desktop switches, one with USB-C to power your laptop

Re: "when Wi-Fi gets more reliable every year"

Mantra should be: "Wire when you can. Wi-Fi when you have to"

My TV doesn't move, wire that one (or a mains extender even).

My phone/tablet needs to be Wi-Fi

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

Such a stupid decision

We are a pure RHEL shop, but RHEL is much more valuable to us with Centos. We need third-party repos and these get built with Centos. Lots of HowTos and documentation exist just because Centos exists. Centos drives ISV's to release RHEL software, as it gives a large market share. Our staff learn with Centos at home. The Centos many users find bugs we do too. Centos streams, by not being the same as RHEL pretty much stops all of these.

This decision massively diminishes RHEL! This could rank up there with Nokia, Ratner etc as bad decisions that hurt companies. RH are basically taking away eye balls from their products.....given they are fighting against Ubuntu in the server space, this is very very unwise. Why would anyone starting out look to RHEL.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

A Very Unhappy RHEL customer

This is probably the worst decision I have ever seen from RH (And I have used a RH distro for 22 years):

* We use RHEL exclusively at our company and have a large contract with RH for this. We recommend our users use Centos at home for personal learning of RHEL.

* We make heavy use of third party repos which will likely suffer/disappear now. Centos also provided a fast environment to test things we planned to deploy on RHEL with extra licensing (e.g Clustering). We need these repos to make RHEL a user friendly desktop OS.

* I use Centos for home server use, I likely will in the future switch this to something Debian based. It seems to to make no (business) sense to encourage people to learn other Linux distros, thereby moving them out of the RHEL family. Therefore other distros will be considered in the future for commercial use.

* As a RHEL users we benefited from a large Centos community providing extensive bug analysis, blogs and how-to information, applicable to RHEL.

* So many people run Centos it provides an greater incentive for third party developers to release on RHEL/Centos. What now, less incentive to release on RHEL. This diminishes RHEL as a supported platform by these ISVs so will will diminish it for us. Will Google release Chrome for RHEL without this Centos large community base. Will MS Teams (our corporate solution, rights and wrongs aside) we have relied on this being on RHEL, will MS bother!

Centos Streams is NO replacement. As it's no longer identical we can't use repos generated from it, can't guarantee binary compatibility or provide a recommended learning platform.

I fear I see some MBA thinking this will increase revenue, or the Dead Hand of IBM.

Ubuntu must be delighted.

Remember the days when signs were signs and operating systems didn't need constant patching?

Re: Why Windows?

So much agree with this. This is just asking for it to use Windows for a sign and other such devices (e.g. cash machines). It's not like you can cut down Windows easily.

Plenty of people do Linux embedded for this application, so it's not like it's impossible.

Microsoft will release a web browser for Linux next month. Repeat, Microsoft will release a browser for Linux – and it uses Google's technology

Re: IE for UNIX

Yup and then ditched it as soon as they had a monopoly in the browser space.

This was also when Netscape wasn't free for commercial use, that was why I was landed with IE for UNIX, which was.

Nvidia to acquire Arm for $40bn, promises to keep its licensing business alive

Re: Shameful

"Would you prefer random interventions in company ownership by Trump?"

No I'd prefer a STRATEGIC intervention!

Just cause Trump randomly does things doesn't mean this sort of intervention is all bad.

Maybe some conditions should have been imposed.

Shameful

Should never have been sold in the first place. Not sure many countries would let a technological leader escape like this.

Worse was the Tories trumpeting this as faith in Britain after Brexit....apparently giving away all your key industries is us taking back control!

UK smacks Huawei with banhammer: Buying firm's 5G gear illegal from year's end, mobile networks ordered to rip out all next-gen kit by 2027

Terrible Decision

No Huawei security issues shown by GCHQ testing or anyone else for that matter.

Plenty of security issues shown in US originated equipment (Cisco, Juniper, encryption standards with introduced weaknesses).

Yeah, cause UK intelligence sensitive information is travelling over mobile networks without end-to-end crypto, if so that person needs firing.

Of course we didn't want to annoy the orange one, but I guess we are keeping our options. The Chinese leader may tell him he's great and allow him to open a few hotels and Huawei will be okay again.

July? British government could decide to boot Chinese giant Huawei from the UK's networks by this month

Re: Still Waiting to See Evidence

Ermm, a third party security researcher could easily show evidence of Huawei backdoors, this hasn't happened! But it has happened with numerous US originated equipment.