Posts by EXAFLOPS'R'US

BOFH: There's no 'I' in team, but there's a 'u' in suck

Anyone else think

That Simon's work deserves a TV series? Or perhaps even just a new character on the IT Crowd called Simon - somewhat based on his antics....?

Sony PSP2 to keep in touch with 3G

Cool

Does this one have a proper implementation of PKI?

Sony sues PlayStation 3 'hackers'

Er no...

You don't need any jailbreak hardware to do this.

Copy the current modified firmware to a USB stick and install it. Voila.

The dongle hasn't been required since the firmware is now signed with Sony's key.

Diary of a server failure

Redundancy is the issue here

When building servers and networks, one of your first goals is to remove any single point of failure from your design. If you are able to accomplish that by also having live offsite replication on the other side of the country/world then that's a really nice thing, too. You could also look at a VSAN solution with replication. There are opensource products like OpenFiler and some other more expensive, but worth it VSAN products like Lefthand SAN.

Once that is accomplished, you need to have data snapshots in place (backups, archives) and a DR plan that works backwards from a recovery time window. You may have a failover server offsite, or if the MTTR is long enough and budget low, a hardware purchase agreement in place to supply you with a replacement server within eg.48 hours.

There are some wonderful backup solutions available, such as ShadowProtect and Veeam, which worth well with VMware ESXi, although you'll need to be running at least VMware vSphere Essentials for Veeam licensing restriction. Disks are cheap.

Data is expensive.

Good solutions don't have to cost the earth, either.

World's most advanced rootkit penetrates 64-bit Windows

Back to the 90s

I remember back when boot-sector viruses were the norm. Over the last 2 decades, this changed to infected EXEs, then email worms, then drive-by malware and then hidden services and rootkits. Over that time traditional antivirus vendors seems to have forgotten about bootsectors and MBRs and focus purely on file-level detection. Whoops. Round we go again. Considering how easily it is to compare the boot-region with a known good example, or indeed a previous backup of the current boot-region, it's damn negligent for the current generation of antivirus applications not to check for this!

I've personally had to clean TDL4 from a few clients' machines in the last few weeks - I have to say it's extremely impressive in its sophistication. Additionally, most of the TDL4 specific removal tools and my favourite ComboFix, which 'clean' the MBR, only replace the first chunk of the MBR and not the whole code, causing Vista, in particular, to go into a 0x0000008E endless loop on boot up. The fix for this seems to be to use 'Testdisk' to write a new MBR, which kills the boot process completely, then using the Vista CD, repair startup option to create a fresh boot-region.

Apple spews Judas Phone signal bar 'fix' to world+dog

Software Fix ... actually, could be easily done.

Considering that most people wouldn't be using WiFi *and* UMTS at the same time during a call and the apple multitasking is pretty crap anyway, surely the easy answer is to power OFF the WiFi antenna circuit (via software) every time a call is in progress..?

$10 says that's either in the software update, or else Steve owes me millions of dollars for a viable fix with recalling the phones. Hey, maybe I should quickly take out a patent on that! <chuckle>

StorageCraft promises two minute server image resurrection

Ditto

This product is amazing. Wouldn't use anything else. Implemented it across hundreds of sites now and it's saved more that a few people's rear-ends. Backups every 15 minutes, you can virtual boot the backup images or even have a standby machine running a delayed restore job say every 1/2 hour or so as a hot standby.. AND replicate over the internet, using a standard conenction, to a DR site.

Symantec licensed their engine for Symantec Livestate Recovery / BackupExec System Recovery, but isn't as feature rich as the ShadowProtect suite.

2 thumbs up!

The new exchange product (OEM of Kroll) is pretty good, but Nucleus Exchange Recovery does a faster and better job for 1/3 the price.

A Rumba with a Roomba

yeah.. maintenance wasn't an issue

I used to remove and clean the brushes, wheel, sensor etc every week.

The gearbox bearings were a known design flaw, hence the revised gearbox.

Short story is the Roomba doesn't survive a 1-cat, 2 bedroom apartment :(

I spend only slightly more time vacuuming with the Dyson than I did cleaning the Roomba and I don't have to get my hands dirty on a weekly basis.

Wait til you've had one a while

You might get sick of constantly picking hair out of the brushes and having the corners of the room never vacuumed. Then your gearbox blows up, causing it to jump up and down while it goes forward, to an audible 'clunk-clunk-clunk' followed by the yankee voice 'Clean Roomba's brushes!'.. so you buy another gearbox off Ebay, with metal, sealed bearings that aren't supposed to choke up with pet hair and die... and 6 months later it dies too...

'Clunk-Clunk-<cough>-<gasp>-Die..' :(

Good concept. Flawed execution.

My new Dyson on the other hand..... pure brilliance!

Wannabe Jedi drool over potent laser 'lightsabre'

Hmmmm

"Gatso be-gone"? :) LOL

Conroy pledges to stop spams infecting Aussies' portals

The Puppet Master is...

... Christian lobby groups. They've admitted as much on television a few times.

Three In-Car Wi-Fi

What's the sodding point?

Different kettle of fish if any of the car's nav or entertainment equipment talked to it, but in essence it's just extra drain on your laptop battery as plugging the 3G modem in directly draws less power.

Mine the one with the sim card slot in the dash and full integration.

NOAA goes to Cray for climate super

Energy / CO2

<chuckle> I guess I have no problems with the Yanks spending vast sums on money and lots of CO2 / electricity to run this puppy.

I guess they don't think CO2 causes global warming, either :)

US boffins synthesize self-replicating bacteria

Oh shiyut

I just finished playing 'Prototype', that had a lot to say about the potential issues and threats. Hmmmmm

LSI gets 1 million IOPS from 1TB of flash

Maths

"Now LSI has done it with six LSISSS6200 320GB PCIe SSS cards in a single white box server running two Intel Xeon 5590 processors. That's just 1.02TB of SLC flash. "

6 x 320GB = 1920GB in a RAID0

Still impressive for 1.9TB of SLC goodness.

Steve Jobs: 'Pad? That's my word'

I found this to be pretty funny, on the subject of relevance

From http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/an-open-letter-to-dr-laura-schlesinger.html

Time for a change of pace. This came via e-mail from Marshall Auerback:

In her radio show, Dr. Laura Schlesinger (a popular conservative radio talk show host in the USA) said that homosexuality is an abomination according to the Bible Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, and was attributed to a James M. Kauffman, Ed. D.

_______________________

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination… end of

debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God’s Laws and how to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual unseemliness – Lev. 15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev. 1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2. clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination – Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this? Are there ‘degrees’ of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really

necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev. 24:10-16. Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan,

James M. Kauffman, Ed. D.

Professor Emeritus Dept. of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education

University of Virginia

Oh, and to help quantify my previous post,

I do believe in God. I just have trouble with man-made organised structures that get setup around Him.

Palm OS on an iPhone - there's an app for that

Great news!

This means the legacy ERP Palm apps we run in Styletap on Windows Mobile can now be run on iPhones.. meaning I can finally ditch this piece of crap HTC!!!

Thanks Styletap!

Germany warns surfers against Firefox

Sandboxing

I've had the same experience - except for the fact that I use Sandboxie!

So when I watched the AV duke it out with the dodgey website, it was the effort of two mouseclicks to kill all processes running in the sandbox, then empty the sandbox and move on with life. In all, I lost 10 seconds of my life and had no data loss at all.

TRY it people! http://sandboxie.com

Paris - she knows what sandboxes are all about.

VMware cuts entry vSphere prices

You need a VSAN virtual appliance

Have a look at Openfiler (there is a freebersion) or FalconStor (there is a free version).

In the commerical world, Lefthand VSAN (HP punt it).

You can setup a VSAN on each of those boxes and replicate the data between them. Then you can connect back to itself using iSCSI and benefit from the replication. It'd be smart to run extra NICs in the server and separate the replication traffic onto a separate virtual switch and the new NIC... and then via either crossover cables or some decent layer 3 switches.

Virtualisation and vendor support

Lie. It saves time.

Too many times in the recent past I've had vendors play the 'we don't support xxx virtualisation' for this app 'card' (this includes MS Office, with a telephone re-activation issue after a 'VMware Converter' migration - was told they wouldn't support office activation under VMware Workstation, only ESX!! Ended up just renaming the %allusers%\application data\microsoft\office\data.dat file, as per normal, and it activated fine).

Nowadays I don't mention that it's running in a virtual environment *at all* unless the vendor asks the question as part of the troubleshooting. eg "Hey, is this, by any chance, running on ESXi 3.5?"

F*ck them and their shoddy excuses to get off the phone. So far I've yet to have an application issue actually relate to virtualisation.

Derr

What, you mean like when the user adjusts the clock, or it syncs with an external time server?

Aussie net censorship turning Chinese

To quote a great man

F*&k Conroy and the horse he rode in on.

Hubble peers closely at Pluto

Handful of pixel, dithering, etc

Yeah, I guess that's why it looks like a 4x4 grid of brown and orange squares blurred and wrapped around a ball. FFS, you can't get interpret information from the equivalent of less than a 9 pin dot matrix printer output. This is more what you'd call 'ART'.

Tiny TV could make billions for FCC

@ Destroy All Monsters

Are you just trolling? :)

"immediate end of civilization predicted"

then

"climate deniers"

- these are the 2 polar opposites of the debate - definitely not tarred by the same brush.

The math is what the sceptic / denier issue is all about:

Chicken Little says, "The sky is falling."

Johnny Sceptic says, "Really? Can some show me some emperical evidence to back that claim?"

Chicken Little repeats, "The sky is falling. The IPCC authorites say so."

Johnny Sceptic says, "Okay, but that's not evidence, that's Argument by Authority. I can show you a petition from 31000 scientists (petitionproject.org) who say that you're wrong. Can you show me some actual cause and effect methodology or some observational evidence to support your argument? I don't want to see your flakey computer models which couldn't even predict the global cooling we've had for the last 9 years - they aren't emperical evidence, either."

Chicken Little repeats, "The sky is falling. The debate is over."

Johnny Sceptic asks, "Political debate? What debate, did I miss it? Last I heard Al Gore still refuses to debate Lord Monckton, despite growing pressure to do so. If it's scientific debate, bring your evidence and let's have it out!"

Chicken Little repeats, "The sky is falling. We must act now!"

Johnny Sceptic says, "You mean act before we discover a reason not to? One word - climategate."

Chicken Little says, "We're polluting too much and that's going to cause to the sky to fall, we need to invest in research in renewable resources."

Johnny Sceptic says, "I agree that researching renewable resources is a good idea! So let's do that for the right reasons. Taxing the wrong thing (CO2) is a lousy way to solve a problem. 80 billion dollars in the US alone has been spent so far researching climate change. How many schools, hospitals, roads, disease research grants, etc. could have been funded with that same money."

Chicken Little repeats, "The sky is falling."

Johnny Sceptic says, 'Go away!"

Doing the maths on Copenhagen

@ Count Ludwig

Why not just head over to wattsupwiththat.com - you'll find plenty of people to debate with, myself included. It's all out in the open for everyone to see, discuss and add to - unlike the methods that GISS and CRU use to 'massage the data' we get to see.

While you're there, why not check out some of the shiny articles that thoroughly debunk AGW. It'll save you some time debating.

I'm cheering too!

But not just because we don't have an unelected global government (see page 18, section 38 and 38a of the draft Copenhagen treaty).

It's because Anthropogenic Global Warming is a complete crock of sh$t.

Funny thing is - I am *all for* cleaning up the environment. I was raised by hippies, FFS. I am 'alternative' - born and raised, in the flesh and savagely p$ssed off with this whole sordid affair.

What I don't believe in, is being lied to by the government and mainstream media and bending over and taking it like a b$tch... and then pretending it was all my idea to start with and that I actually enjoy taking it from our 'overlords'.

Climate change has happened since this plant formed. It will continue to happen if the entire human population disappears.

Have a look at global temperatures for the last 500,000 years and see if you can jusitify the current alarmism about global warming. Here's a bunch of graphs with references to NOAA's raw dataset (so you can verify for yourself, rather than taking it on faith - this being the major difference between SCIENCE and RELIGION):

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/12/historical-video-perspective-our-current-unprecedented-global-warming-in-the-context-of-scale/

If this doesn't make you sit back and scratch your head, you're probably and unwitting part of the Climate Change Cultists - there are methods in place to deal with the brainwashing you've received.

I'm waiting to see the results of CERN's CLOUD experiment. My money is on Henrik Svensmark's observations on SOLAR WIND and COSMIC RAYS (CRF) affecting cloud formations on Earth, thus changing the amount of solar radiation actually hitting Earth's surface.

Makes a hell of a lot of sense and doesn't require a global web of douchebags controlling mainstream media and the peer-review system to make it happen.

I'm not even going to start on the temperature fudging by the powers that be, but if you review the rest of the website on the link I posted, you'll be hopping mad about it.

Peace and real science...

Microsoft volume licensing website takes festive holiday

*&^% MS

Yes, it's been exceedingly difficult for the last few weeks (!) to roll out new networks. Whatever happened to not pulling the plug on the old one until the new one was online??

Juggling server virtualisation and database workloads

Reasons

Fault tolerance / high availability.

Portability / ease of hardware upgrades.

blah blah blah..

If you are worried about performance, you should think about using SSDs anyway. Makes for I/O heaven :) I've got Windows VMs that boot from off to completely booted, all apps loaded, in under 5 seconds. I luuurve SSDs :)

vSphere hosts can scale up to 250000 IOPs.. That satisfies most database servers. Unless you're Google or someone :)

Pitchfork-wielding mobs encircle smart meters

Here's an idea

Maybe the old analog meters that were replaced were under reading?