* Posts by Anonymous South African Coward

3211 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jan 2010

C'mon SPARCky, it's just an admin utility update. What could possibly go wrong?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: rm -rf *

Disk clone...

Back in the days I was stationed at a toll plaza. Things were fairly quiet most of the time, and I was playing around with OS/2 Warp v4 (yes, long ago).

Then a dev asked me to clone one HDD of a lane over and configure it for another lane (the clone).

It was IDE drives, set one as master and one as slave (I was never a fan of cable select) and run Norton Ghost. I also made sure the correct HDD (original lane HDD) is master and the drive with OS/2 on it was the slave.

A quick <tappity><tap> and away goes Norton Ghost and clones the HDD.

Removed the master HDD, set the slave to master, reboot... and up comes OS/2

Suffice to say I made another clone from another lane, but it was a success, and I fixed my own boo-boo.

Lesson learnt. If possible, use different sized HDD's.

Also, with Clonezilla you can identify the HDD a bit better as it gives you a more verbose description of the HDD you want to clone to/from.

I miss those gay, carefree days without spam, cryptomalware and shouty bosses/clients.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: different colors

call me new, but I use different colored terminal windows...

I also had a lucky recovery from doing The Wrong Bloody Thing on the wrong RDP session.

Nowadays every server I remote in to has a tiled bitmap set displaying the server name and also which site it is. Helps a lot if you have got a lot of RDP sessions open.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Breaking servers with routine maintenance

I think it's time to petition for new servers.

Non-Windows, hopefully...

I also don't like to update my hosts. They're running without issues, so the only thing that can get updated, is windows defender.

And before I get lambasted for not applying security updates : I don't trust Microsoft and their gung-ho approach to windowsupdates either, see what've happened to Suck10

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Bah, just rm all the bad puns

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Oooh, XTree Gold... another name from the past...

Can AI-enhanced virtual sports presenters do the job? It's a big ask

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: De-de-de-de-deja vu

Sna-sna-sna-sna-snap, I was abo-abo-abo-abo-about to post a Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma-Max Headroom thingy...

UK contractors planning 'mass exodus' ahead of IR35 tax clampdown – survey

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Interesting times lie ahead.

Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Had a Frankenserver as well.

For backup storage (like a NAS) using Server2003. Yes, it was a long time ago.

It performed the job well, but near the end of its lifetime its SAS RAID card was corrupting data, so I chucked the whole thing.

BOFH: Darn Windows 7. It's totally why we need a £1k graphics card for a business computer

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Excellent one.

Tech can endure the most inhospitable environments: Space, underwater, down t'pit... even hairdressers

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Ex fruity genius...

Opened a PC that was in a bar acting as a POS.

I sweared, but it did not help, the machine stank.

So glad I don't do these sort of jobs anymore, it is somebody else's problem now.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Carniverous computer

Probably a bloody disgusting job to clean that controller... easiest is to get a new one and claim the old one's popped a vein and kicked the bucket on its way to pension meadow.

Atari would love to ship its VCS console but – would ya believe it – there's yet another delay. This time, it's the coronavirus's fault

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

lol

so what else is news on this piece of vapourware?

Virtualization juggernaut VMware hits the CPU turbo button for licensing costs

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

And the ghost of SCO rises up again.

I can remember with SCO Unix you need to buy a licence to "unlock" other CPU's (on a dual CPU setup) or eved multi-core CPU's. Without this licence, you're stuck with one CPU only.

Things I learned from Y2K (pt 87): How to swap a mainframe for Microsoft Access

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Joke

Prehistory of our favourite bank, TSB?

'Windows Vista' spotted doing a whoopsie over EE's signage

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

I used Vista on a couple of craptops* a longish time ago.

Surprisingly it was stable, and people was able to do their work. I expect the ghost of WinME to haunt me with this Vista abomination. But no, these was the most stable I've seen any M$ product to be. Which is totally weird.

Anyways.

I upgraded one of said craptops to Win7, and found that performance was improved, but not drastically though.

*IIRC it was Mecer W565M laptops, was good and solid, but in today's age and time these are relics and not worth the time or money, unless you want to install Linux Mint or FreeBSD on it.

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Anybody remember the notorious Kalok hard drives?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: One of our office...

but also that it turned it on like a PHB in a bondage parlour...

That's two new keyboards then.

Excellent!!!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: This used to be so common it has a name.

Indeed. Some twenty years ago I replaced one PC's crashed hard drive a few times. I was suspecting its user of performing unjust percussive maintenance procedures on the machine. But it turned out to be a dodgy HD controller on the mainboard, which needed to be replaced.

Had a client we delivered a brand-new Netwre 3.12 system to. Said server had a VLB IDE HDD controller, and was mirroring to two HDD's (Netware's SFT II)

Anyways, client phoned later (I was on standby) and complained about data getting hosed. So I did a reinstall, restored data, and all was well - until a few hours later.

Took the machine to the office, ripped out the fancy VLB ISA IDE card, plonked in a standard ISA IDE card, reinstalled, restored, and delivered to customer.

No more issues.

I left that buggr'd VLB IDE card somewhere, somebody snaffled it later on, and I chortled with glee.

Canadian insurer paid for ransomware decryptor. Now it's hunting the scum down

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

It is things like these that make me want to get out of IT. I'm getting too old for this sort of scheiße.

Ding-dong. Who's there? Any marketing outfit willing to pay: Not content with giving cops access to doorbell cams, Ring also touts personal info

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

/points and laughs at IoT owners

Coronavirus claims new victim: 'DEF CON cancelled' joke cancelled after DEF CON China actually cancelled

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Website tracking and showing the number of outbreaks etc.

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

morbidly fascinated!

Protestors in Los Angeles force ICANN board out of hiding over .org sale – for a brief moment, at least

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

How hard is it to start up another organization, or even create your own .org stuff?

Not AC since I'm genuinely interested and want to know if anybody can just create their own stuff etc.

Curse of Boeing continues: Now a telly satellite it built may explode, will be pushed up to 500km from geo orbit

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

“This satellite is a backup and we do not anticipate any impacts on consumer service as we retire it. We are replacing it with another satellite in our fleet,” DirecTV told The Register.

Translated it means "something will bork badly, but we will scream at our technicians until the problem is fixed".

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

You haven't lived until you have tried to load Multimate from a vast number of 5.25inch floppies

Bah, I think Novell Netware 2.x was the worst.

*mutters darkly*

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: My favorite Novell feature...

Now that was a lovely feature.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Hmm

Yup, Netware 2.x used VAP's...

...and Netware 2.x was a bitch to install.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Ahhhh! The heady joy-filled days of handcrafting Autoexec and Config.Sys files to achieve over 512k of useable memory (including networking).

Baaaaah... I used OS/2 - and it was a breeze freeing up RAM for most games...

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Hah... Since Novell was so finicky with CAL's...

If you connect DOS workstations to a Novell server, each DOS workstation takes one CAL.

But if you connect a Windows wankstation to a Novell server, it'll happily use two (or more) CAL's... which will give you grief if you have 9 dos users, 1 windoze user and a 10-user Novell licence...

...it happened to me, I now got severe flashbacks, double damn.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

ARGH

Memories of plug-and-pray Accton NE2000 compatible network cards now is resurfacing again...

With coax networks you usually got a jabbering network card which'll pull the entire network down, especially after a lightning strike, and it was fun trying to find the culprit.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: All washed away like tears in rain

IIRC it was vrepair.nlm. A quickie Google confirms it as vrepair.nlm

something that actually worked for once... I used it once or twice in my early career.

BOFH: When was the last time someone said these exact words to you: You are the sunshine of my life?

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Pint

Excellent start to Beer o' clock

Hi ho, it's off to the pubbe we goe...

Clunk, whirr, buzz, whine. Shared office space can be a riot and sounds like one too

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Pint

You know what: they should rename hardware products that contain moving parts to match the annoying noise they produce. The Western Digital BuzzDrive, for example, or the HP WhistleJet. And given the unexpectedly loud amplification of a vibrating alert when a smartphone is resting on a tabletop, Huawei should consider marketing its next model as the Fart Mate.

Gold.

'ere you go... ---->

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

They're whispering subliminal messages to get you to buy more Internet o' Schitte stuff...

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

We have an old book with electronic projects in it somewhere in the house.

I want to look at it and see if it got a wiring diagram for a proper amplifier thingy which you can build yourself. And just add some good qualitay speakers, kit them all up nice and professionally and you should get a nice bit of business from people not interested in IoT or crapware frippery but good down to earth stuff without needing any kind of software upgrades.

Bluetooth and other stuff should be a doddle to add if I can get hold of the right person(s).

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Owners of older kit like Marantz, Blaupunkt etc will probably be very smug.

And I'm talking about pre-y2k stuff.

I still prefer to buy a basic set of headphones that ain't got chippery in it which requires power or shitware updates.

Have anybody informed Greta of Sonos' decision to make more landfill?

ICANN finally reveals who’s behind purchase of .org: It’s ███████ and ██████ – you don't need to know any more

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

All I will say is ███████ ███████ █████████████████████ ██████████████ and ████████████████████████████

Amazon to ask court to block DoD's $10bn early Valentine's date with a Microsoft JEDI

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

The first rule of Fight Club...

Problems at Oracle's DynDNS: Domain registration customers transferred at short notice, nameserver records changed

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Some how Oracle managed to pas my credit card details to a third party. Is that even legal?

If you're in the EU, then GDPR their asses.

That is not legal, since you never agreed to it.

But IANAL.

Behold the Internet of Turf: IoT sucks waste energy from living plants to speak to satellites

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
Trollface

Greta will be most impressed by this news.

She will most certainly tell all vehicle manufacturers to stop using traditional energy materials (petrol, diesel, batteries etc) and instead to have a patch of grass on the car's roof which'll power the car's electric motor.

Boeing aircraft sales slump to historic lows after 737 Max annus horribilis

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Can't believe nobody noticed that's a 747 in the header pic

Still one of the best looking airliners

Especially when it is flying.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

And they want to remove pilots from the cockpit?

Yeah right.

Totally Subcontracted Business: TSB to outsource entire IT estate to IBM for a cool $1bn after 2019 meltdown

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Wait, what?

How many bank branches do the mothership have?

Aren't they putting all their eggses into one basket by doing this sort of thing?

Personally I would've used a number of diverse solution providers, all using different infrastructure etc, so if the one goes down, the whole banking rigmarole does not go down as well.

Probably a beancountery type thinking it is safe to put all their eggses into one basket and save costs that way...

Whirlybird-driving infosec boss fined after ranty Blackpool Airport air traffic control antics

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Entitled snowflake?

There's always the cheaper route - take a chauffeured limo or drive yourself, but don't moan at ATC, their job's already stressful enough as it is.

There's something fishy going down in the computer lab

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Lovely punnery as usual, kelp it up, and keep on making waves all over the show.

BOFH: You brought nothing to the party but a six-pack of regret

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Laxative cake

Haribo Sugar Free Gummy Bears is a surefire thing. The latest I've read on Amazon's reviews page is this :

To preface this, I will state that it is not good to upset anyone in the military supply network. This is especially true for a supply NCO (non-commissioned officer) who can be both creative and vindictive to those who earn his ire.

One of my biggest pet peeves was troopies who walked into my supply room and decided to go through things on my counter or desk. It is for this reason that I purchased two bags of these sweet little revenge snacks.

I briefed my minions that morning that the snacks were to be unsullied by their hands. I told them that I would know and it would not go unpunished by both myself and the higher powers. They thought I was joking, but decided to not test my authority before my eyes.

With that said, I placed the bowl on the back part of the counter just in reach of anyone loitering inside my supply room. The rules were posted for all to see when they came in. So, they were warned. A large sign that said, “If you touch my stuff, you will be punished.” They decided to test me, I guess.

On this weekend, we were set to do general cleaning and maintenance within the Battalion. So, my desk was rather busy (Battalion Headquarters supply room). I was in and out of my office all day. However, I made sure to take general measurements of my bowl of horror every time I came back.

Shortly before lunch, my unholy wrath began to strike. My supply room is one door down from the latrines and the row of male commodes is on the other side of the wall from my desk. It was the first, but was not the last.

It was initially heralded by the sound of Gabriel’s trumpet escaping the sphincter of one poor soul. He hit the latrine and sounded as if he kicked the stall door open. For the next thirty minutes, I listened to the sounds of a live humpback whale being butchered by a blind man wielding a chainsaw.

It was not long before another troop, this time a female, made her way to the latrine. She came from the indoor pistol range and had to cross in front of my door. I saw a pale woman with sweat streaking her face. She was hobbling with one hand on the wall for support and the other on her stomach praying for just a little more time.

For lunch, I ripped into an MRE (the Army brown bag lunch) and listened to the ever-growing chorus of those who had so far snuck down half of my bowl of brightly-colored Improvised Colon Explosive Devices. I was not sure if the other side of the building was seeing the same activity in the latrines, but the smell reached my door by the end of lunch. Good thing I was stationed with an Infantry unit for the first four years of my career, so I was accustomed to bad odors.

One of my minions did not return from lunch, so I volunteered another to perform a possibly suicidal scouting mission into the male latrine in search of my wayward soul. He was there, and had been since the beginning of lunch.

By 15:00 (3:pM), I was told that the unit was being locked down and there was an emergency meeting in the Battalion briefing room. I had a suspicion of the reason, but attended as I was ordered to do so. By this time, my bowl of gelatinous bowel howitzer ammunition was one quarter filled.

The meeting began slightly off schedule. At 15:22, the Sergeant Major walked into the room and looked as if he had just performed a three-day combat operation without sleep. The Battalion X.O. walked in not long after and looked as if he had been intimately assaulted by a rather insistent horse. I used all of my military bearing to keep from cracking a joke about cavalry officers walking bow-legged.

The Battalion Surgeon walked in and told us that there was a high chance that the unit had come in contact with a strange stomach bug. Roughly half of the battalion was complaining of stomach cramps and explosive diarrhea. It seemed to mostly be affecting HHC (the headquarters) and C Co. (the company that was on the same side of the building as us—also the medics). Until symptoms cleared up, the unit was in lock-down and cleaning mode.

I went back to my supply room with the intent to bag up the remaining evidence of my involvement only to find that the bowl was missing. My minions were too wrapped up to notice anything, though. So, I began a search for the evidence that would probably land me in front of a firing squad.

The empty bowl was located in the admin offices. Someone found it and decided to liberate it from my supply room for the only group that I didn’t want to upset. But, they had already consumed the remainder of the biological weapons. As I left with the bowl, I heard the familiar sound of incoming fire from the senior pay clerk’s desk, followed shortly after by what sounded like Lamaze breathing.

That weekend, the entire building was cleaned from one side to the other. MREs were consumed in the hopes of plugging the torrential flood of liquid terror and every door and window was opened with fans going over a cup of pinesol in every room. Three-quarters of the enlisted and half of the officers were hit with the mystery stomach bug and the medical supply room was in desperate need of more I.V. kits.

I don’t know if my message got across, but it was definitely an entertaining weekend.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

"After the laxative cake of 2012 no one's going to take snacks from us," the PFY points out. "Still, if we kept visitor groups small..."

Beautiful. Think I'm going to do the same.

'No BS' web host Gandi lives up to half of its motto... Some customer data wiped out in storage server meltdown

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Somebody asked me why I don't back my company data up to the cloud.

This is one reason why. Imagine you'd get hit by crypto-malware, and just before you're ready to start restoring data, your backups goes TITSUP.

Second reason is - I want full control over my backups. Who have access to it, where it is, and how old it is.

And the third - $$$. It works out cheaper long-term to store it yourselves than having it out on somebody else's purdy compoota (or RAID array).

Back up a minute: Private equity outfit coughs $5bn for Veeam

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Got Veeam backup agent installed on a server2012 installation which I've inherited.

Happy with it as you can backup inside a VM or the whole host (if you want to) without any fuss.

And you have a clear indication of what got backed up and how much.

Can't rate it high enough.

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Community Edition?

Better download those editions before they change their minds.

Blackout Bug: Boeing 737 cockpit screens go blank if pilots land on specific runways

Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

Re: Odd behaviour

We seem to have a downvote sniper.

Seems said sniper targeted your post.

Probably will target my post as well.