Posts by Peter Gathercole

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: One step too few

I was involved in creating a DR plan where we were told up front that the DR company would provide systems of the right architecture and of suitable size, but were also told that it would not be a like for like replacement (this was fair, not many DR companies would keep IBM SP/2s in their inventory).

But it did make the design of the plan a lot more complex, especially as while they could provide compatible tape drives, they could not provide a suitable tape library.

So, we invented a way (this was before official methods were published by IBM) to write mksysb images of the TSM server to non-bootable tape through the control workstation (no directly connected drives in the SP/2 nodes!) which would be installed using a copy of the install CDs, to provide any missing drivers for the new hardware. It was really strange during the development to take an image from a Wide SP/2 node, and install it on a little model 7011-220 desktop system with almost no memory and much less disk space!

During the DR test mandated by the 1998 electricity de-regulation process, because there was no automated library, we ended up putting all 200+ tapes from the offsite DR set out on a table with everyone and their IT director taking turns to find the tapes to feed into the tape drives on request from the TSM server.

And it worked! (apart from a slight wobble regarding the TSM default admin password used during the DB recovery). I don't know how true it was, but the aforementioned IT director boasted that we were the only electricity company who passed the regulator monitored DR test first time.

One thing this taught me was they you really want the NIM server and your TSM server on separate hardware, so you could get these up first to bootstrap the rest of the AIX environment, regardless of how complex it was, a mistake I've seen in too many environments.

We used the same process some time later to construct a duplicate environment when the supply and distribution arms of the company split, and we had to move one of them to a new location.

Happy times.

Re: Aircon and networks

I've related this story before, but in the '80s, I was working at a campus site some distance from the nearest large town. The power was always a bit flaky there, so they had a decent UPS with diesel generator that would even keep the Amdahl mainframe running.

So one afternoon, there was a violent thunderstorm, which lasted several hours. There were repeated brown-outs on the power, and each time, the UPS cut in and initiated the diesel generator start, but the power returned before the generator was stable enough to provide power.

This does not seem like a problem, but one of the things that happened when the UPS cut in was that the air conditioning in the machine room stopped (it was not on the UPS by design), and then took several minutes to restart when the power returned.

So each time there was a brown-out, two things happened. The available power in the UPS started dropping, and the machine room temperature started rising.

Eventually, it was decided to shut the machine room down, because it was getting too hot, and would completely exhaust the UPS. And everybody except the core operations staff were told to go home, as they could not really do any work without the systems.

All this could have been avoided if there had been a manual override on the generator, to start it and leave it running, but nobody had thought that that would be required when the system was designed. It was soon added afterwards, though.

Co-inventor of Ethernet David Boggs dies aged 71

Re: ..without using his network tech

You are right. non-switched hubs still used CSMA/CD. But that is why I specifically said "switched 10baseT and later". I have not seen an un-switched Ethernet hub for 25 years or so.

(actually, that's not quite true. I still think I have a 10base2 to 10baseT repeater somewhere which was not switched, but even that was rescued from the bin of one of the companies I worked for. I stopped using that when I stopped using 10base2 in the house, which was when I started using WiFi in about 2002)

..without using his network tech

All credit to the man. Ethernet was the breakthrough networking product, but...

What we use today has very little to do with the original invention of Ethernet. The clue to what it was is in the name, ETHERnet

When you launched a packet on baseband Ethernet, it was effectively sent without knowing whether it was received (and the adapter had to listen back to the packet to even know it had been transmitted correctly and did not collide with another packet). And it was really broadcast, to every system on that segment of the network (and all other segments if you used simple repeaters). It really was launching the packet into the ether, though constrained to a cable.

Most of the technologies for the original 10base5 and 10base2 Ethernet, like CSMA/CD have fallen by the wayside. I suppose that the basic framing has survived, as has some of the packet addressing, but switched 10baseT and later effectively threw most of the baseband stuff away. Now, 'Ethernet' networks are a series of point-to-point links, mostly arranged as connected stars, with switches handling the routing of the packets beyond the initial link. No longer do packets reach all nodes (except for specifically broadcast packets).

Most of the network magic happens at higher levels, like ICMP, ARP and IP, and these are not synonymous with Ethernet (in fact they are independent of Ethernet, and can use pretty much any Layer 1 technology), and I don't know how much David contributed to the protocols above the physical layer that we use today.

When I worked at AT&T, they had an Ethernet implementation that did not use IP. Similarly, the original DECnet used a proprietary addressing mechanism that only used Layer 1 addressing.

The real reason why Ethernet (and many other Ethernet-like networks) gained traction was the relative simplicity of the physical installation. You ran a single cable, from one end to another, around the office, and tapped in wherever you needed it (well, there were rules about where you could tap in due to the wave propagation properties of the cable, which affected both 10base5 and 10base2 to different degrees). This was a major benefit compared to other communication technologies, which needed hubs or some other type of central controller, requiring a concentration of individual cables to each device.

It's funny that the replacement technologies, like 10baseT went back to the individual cable to a hub/switch, but this became possible with structured cable strategies.

I'm not diss'ing David's memory, more the implication that Ethernet and TCP/IP are thought of in the same breath in the article.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: I'll see your Atari ST and raise you a Commodore PET @Roger

And if you are talking about DEC VT1xx and following terminals, the electronics were in the monitor, not the keyboard.

Re: 1980s

Yes, but that's the point of the other systems mentioned. The processor was in the keyboard for the 480Z. That wasn't the case for the 380Z, which IIRC was an S100 bus based system. The processor, storage, graphics card et. al. were in the big black box, and the keyboard was... just a keyboard.

And I'm sure it wasn't the first 3 box design, either, and although it could classed as a personal computer as defined in the late '70s and early '80s, it sure as hell wasn't an IBM PC.

Canonical puts out last update to Ubuntu 20.04 before 22.04

Re: It should just work?

Some of this is not Canonical's fault. If you choose the Nvidia binary driver, you will find that Nvidia drop support for older cards periodically. If yo have something older than a gtx7xx card there is a good chance that support may be dropped shortly.

If you put the current open-source driver on (nouveau) driver on, it will probably do most of what you want, for cards going back 15 years or so. But doing that from the command line can be a bit tricky.

Re: "There should be a few more point releases to Focal after Jammy comes out."

The only problem with the 'free' Ubuntu Essential Subscription is that you have to prove that you've done things to aid the Ubuntu community, like taking an active part in the community forums.

I'm a Ubuntu user of 15 years (first install was Dapper Drake). In the past, I pointed people at Ubuntu as a good distro. to move to from other operating systems, but I've never really done anything measurable to aid the community, so I can't get it.

Google's Chrome OS Flex could revive old PCs, Macs

Re: Funny - when I type 'distro' my Mac autocorrects that to 'distress'. Foreshadowing?

... talk about misinformation

I could spend ages countering all of your statements, but it's not worth the effort arguing with someone as opinionated as you.

Real-time software? How about real-time patching?

Re: Site Acceptance Test

I had an experience in a taxi in Milan one time I was there for training (I can't remember whether it was receiving or giving, I've done both there).

On the way to the hotel from the airport, the taxi driver decided to go head-to-head... with a tram. I don't know how much she missed it by, but when we pulled up at the hotel, she seemed to wilt a bit, having obviously scared herself too.

You should read Section 8 of the Unix User's Manual

Re: IBM did marvelous documentation

The original paper documentation for the RS/6000 was pretty good, having a reasonable UNIX-type manual with all the normal sections, together with a number of additional manuals on using, managing and programming for the RS/6000. Took up about around a metre of shelf space.

I suspect that this was because they were late to the UNIX market (yes, I know about the 6150, but that was a very halfhearted system), and wanted to try to impress people to switch from Sun, Apollo and SGI workstations, while having a stab at the VAX BSD and Ultrix, and HP/UX commercial market as well. That was certainly their intention with their telephone support, where they spent a lot of money recruiting people who could actually answer the questions directly without having to escalate.

But eventually, they stopped automatically shipping the paper manuals, making them a chargeable option on the order, and switched to an on-line (not internet, hosted on the system), CD (or on hard disk) Hypertext system.

Nowadays, it's all hosted on the Internet, and frankly a bit rubbish, as much of the info relates to very old AIX software that is no longer used, or has been watered down and spread about so much that it is almost useless (at least they've removed the section on graPHIGS which existed long after everybody stopped using it!) The RedBooks now contain much more useful information, as long as they last.

Re: IBM did marvelous documentation

IBM also used to combine packages into big boxes strapped to pallettes when shipping kit, and sometimes needed to fill empty space to keep things from moving around.

I wish I had kept one of the boxes that said "This box is intentionally empty". It had an IBM part number and everything.

12-year-old revives Unity desktop, develops software repo client, builds gaming environment for Ubuntu...

Well....

Don't take this the wrong way, but almost everything listed in the article consists of assembling things that other people and projects have done.

He obviously has a talent for building and packaging distro's from other people's code, which is a skill in itself.

Even something that he did write, (Una) is written in bash, and his Gamebuntu is manipulating the packages repos that are used to install a number of game related packages.

Again, these are tremendous skills for a 12 year old, but I see no reason to believe that he's the next Ken Thompson.

Brocade wrongly sacked award-winning salesman who depended on company insurance for cancer treatment

Re: A timely reminder

There is a difference between the outsourcing of the provision of healthcare, and outsourcing the funding of healthcare.

In this case, it's the funding that's the issue.

The outsourcing of the provision, particularly parts like operating the buildings, cleaning, equipment supply, and employment of non-medical personnel is already well established.

In NHS hospitals, I believe that most clinical personnel are still directly employed by the NHS trusts.

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Re: Hitting Enter....

Well, on ZX81s, I had a 6 character program encoded in the graphics character set that loaded a number into the "I" register of the Z80, which was used to store the base address of the character table.

Typed it into a REM in the first line of the program, with a call to the address of the first byte of the REM (which was one of the few fixed addresses in a program on a ZX81), and the display became a scrambled mess with no way to fix it. The only way was to power-cycle the system.

I used this method on my own ZX81, which had an extra 1K of static memory added under the keyboard, to provide programmable character sets. It puzzled a lot of people who saw my ZX81 displaying everything in lower-case, and I had some interesting times drawing music on the screen, and playing it at the same time on a Quiksilver sound board.

Sure, the James Webb Space Telescope is cool and all. But try making one out of Lego

Re: paper plane to space

I hope it still exists somewhere, probably in some dusty corner of Spaceport America.

I think we ought to locate and repatriate it, and have it displayed somewhere as a tribute to Lester.

Linux distros haunted by Polkit-geist for 12+ years: Bug grants root access to any user

Re: Polkit @Warm Braw

Given the history of UNIX, and the fact that the initial movers and shakers had got completely fed up with some of the design extremes that were going into Multics, I would say that in the initial work providing the split between privileged and non-privileged was a design choice, not a design error.

As I understand it, the privilege model of Multics, although good in principal, put far too much demand on the systems of the time. And the UNIX privilege model fitted in well with the USER and SUPERVISOR hardware privilege model of the PDP-11 system, which fed into a lot of UNIX and C design.

Should it have been changed? Well, it was extended (the concept of groups was added to UNIX quite early, but which the full scope has been forgotten over the years). UNIX does not have to be all-or-nothing, but it has always required to have one user which could do everything. It's the implementations that has made anything that was not being run by an ordinary user run by root, but it does not need to be like that.

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

Re: Won't happen in my lifetime @charles 9

You do that, and many IoT devices won't work. Most of them work by calling back to a known system on the Internet as a command and control server, and then sit waiting for instructions. You then connect to that internet server with an app on your mobile phone or something similar every time you want to control the device.

The same is basically true of internet printers.

(Please note, I am aware that some smart devices work without calling home, but you generally have to have some form of controller installed on your network. I'm also aware of that abomination uPNP)

Re: Won't happen in my lifetime

You would need a compromised router, and even then, if the ISP tried to advertise a route for one of the recognised private address ranges (10.*, 192.168.* etc.), it would probably at the minimum be ignored by their upstream provider or peer ISPs, or at worst, get that ISP blacklisted for breaking all the rules for addresses in private network ranges.

Routers running NAT will not forward any packets inbound unless they have an entry in their NAT translation table to allow packets. And this will be for "established" connections only (the From address and port must match the table entry that was made when the "outbound" connection was set up).

From a NAT perspective, everything else will be dropped.

But that is not to say that a router can't have other port forwarding rules beside NAT. For example, many have what they refer to as a "DMZ" route (although not really a DMZ) that forwards either specific ports, or in some cases, all packets not matching other rules, to a single IP address on the internal network. This allows you to put another firewall inside the router to provide alternate and possibly more controllable packet filtering (for many years, I had a Smoothwall instance to do just that).

Of course the joker in the pack is uPNP, which is always turned off in my network, because it has the potential to break all of your carefully crafted firewall security.

Re: IPv6 is actually there in the home user worls

I think the poster was talking about carrier-grade NAT, where the ISP is also doing NAT, so several customers appear to come from a single address.

Re: Won't happen in my lifetime @refined

"As for security, of course that is a consideration. IPv4 or IPv6 doesn't change that. NAT doesn't somehow hide the nodes on your private network - assertions of the contary lull users into a false sense of security. In reality this simply trusts your ISP to keep your LAN secure."

Well, it depends. NAT does not 'hide' your internal machine. It's not obscurity or invisibility. It adds an extra 16 bits (the port number) to the address of a single system, while effectively blocking all of the rest of the ports to that system.

So there is no 'hiding'. Via the (normally ISP grade DHCP for home users) router IP address, someone on the internet, with the DHCP information from the ISP can identify where the system with the NAT'd address is. To identify the exact machine you will also need the ephemeral address/port table from the firewall, which may no longer exist if you try to retrospectively try to find the system, but it is possible to approximately locate the system.

But what you gloss over is that trying to directly talk unsolicited to a specific non-NATd port on the 'hidden' machine will fail. This is the security you get with NAT. It's not magic, and it's not invisibility, but it is some security.

Want to probe one of the SMB ports on the hidden machine? You can't. The port (the SMB one on the firewall or broadband router) will probably either be closed, or possibly be redirected somewhere completely unexpected (altough even that's unlikely, given that NAT only forwards inbound packets on established connections). I think that you've forgotten the 'established' part. Trying to get to a system on the internal side using the address and port number of an established NAT connection, but from a different system on the Internet will fail. It's not a general port-forwarding route (and it's certainly not PnP routing).

What it allows is the end user to mostly forget packet ingress security. Do you remember when systems attached directly to the Internet using a modem or USB router? If you didn't have a 'personal firewall' installed on it, you would probably end up with some successful direct attack on your system. Since NAT became the norm, this level of concern mostly went away. This is not a trivial level of security.

Where raw IPv6 changes this is that the internal system is directly identifiable from it's address (even temporary IPv6 private address parts will tend to persist for long periods of time). An IPv6 boundary router will still be able (and should for security) to do port filtering to prevent packet ingress to specific servers, but it does little or nothing at all to hide a system.

Epoch-alypse now: BBC iPlayer flaunts 2038 cutoff date, gives infrastructure game away

Re: A fix for this @codejunky

I'm not talking about ancient comedy shows. I'm talking about the documentaries, especially the natural history ones, the costume dramas, QI, old Top Gear (although this is long in the tooth now) and so many other shows (I hesitate to mention Stricly, but it is popular). I would have mentioned Dr Who, but....

The Reith lectures. The BBC Proms, the more I think, the more there is.

Many of these shows would never be commissioned by other channels, so losing them would be a loss to many people who claim to never to watch the BBC.

And like it or not, BBC news provides a better (IMHO) view of what is going on than Sky or the ITV news. And not just at a national level. I don't know whether you've ever listened to what is laughingly called news on the commercial radio stations.

Nothing's perfect. Maybe more oversight is needed, and not just from the BBC Trust who are just like the inmates running the prison.

Re: A fix for this @codejunky

It's funny how so much of the other channel providers on broadcast TV carry material originally produced for or by the BBC...

But the statement yesterday from Nadine Dorries was just a smack in the face for the BBC. I mean, saying that holding the license fee down to was to benefit the poor and the especially the elderly, when this government or one of it's immediate predecessors was responsible for dropping the over 70's free TV license, forcing the BBC to pick it up, and then abolishing it completely.

I wonder how many of the people she's talking about actually do already pay a lot more than the license fee for other subscription TV services (OK, I know there are many people who do really struggle day-to-day, and they deserve a lot more than just keeping the license fee down, but that's not all of them).

And then suggesting that there may be a Government fund to pay for certain important content and radio! This just flies in the face of the editorial independence of the BBC, and risks just making it a government mouthpiece.

The existing license, though enforced by the law, is actually not government money, and has given the BBC the ability to claim to not be funded by the government. It's not perfect by any means especially in this day and age, but nobody has yet come up with a real viable alternative.

Many UK governments have disliked the BBC for being independent and either too left wing, or too right wing, depending on their political bent, but this one appears to be the one actually trying to break it!

Another step in the demise of UK democracy.

A time when cabling was not so much 'structured' than 'survival of the fittest'

Re: They had it coming.

I had to lay some fibrechannel and ethernet cables a few years ago (it's not my primary role, but hey ho). Unfortunately, the person arranging the supply of the cables made a mistake and ordered cables about three times too long, but the timscales on the project were just too tight to go through the process of getting the correct length cables.

No matter how hard I tried with cable ties and serpentine routing, I could not keep the extra length tidy (especially the fibre, because of the minimum bend radius). As time goes by, every time I look under the floor, I regret not pushing back about the too long cables. It's just a complete mess now.

Re: Screwdrivers in wrong places.

My worst experience. HT inverter on a CRT TV.

A few days ago, I noticed I still have the scar from the HT burn on the back of my hand 45 years on.

Another still visible scar is from where I was reaching in to replace a tube in a guitar amp, which was to be fair turned off, but the belt from one of the still charged capacitors caused my arm to jerk back, causing me to gash my hand on some of the sharp metalwork.

No defence for outdated defenders as consumer AV nears RIP

Re: My own @Boris the Cockroach

But with Linux, you have to jump through several hoops to have your *system* owned by malware downloaded from the Internet.

I'm not saying Linux is invulnerable, but just think. It's quite unusual for any out-of-the-box Linux system to have their primary user running as an admin (root) account. You can do it, but it's a decision you have to make. And without root access, your files may be at risk, but the system files are not.

There have been ways of jumping the privilege barrier, but that requires code downloaded that can then try to take advantage of other issues on the system, so it has to be a multi-stage attack.

Historical versions of Windows (MS-DOS based ones) did not have that level of protection. WinNT versions did have the protection, but it was quite normal for the main user to use an admin account which side-stepped this protection, at least until Windows 7. Modern Windows does a much better job, but there still seem to be many vulnerabilities known.

Back to school for Microsoft as it prises apart the repairable Surface Laptop SE

Re: Misleading @elsergiovolador

I think you are making assumptions about how enthusiastic enthusiasts are. From what I know, in order to replace BGA chips you really need:

1. A board heater

2. A hot air re-work station

3. Possibly a board magnifier or appropriate micro work microscope

4. The correct BGA templates for the chip to form the solder balls

5. The correct solder paste

6. Flux, tweezers, de-soldering braid, scrapers etc.

7. A ultrasonic board cleaner

and on top of this, you need an appropriate clean space with ventilation and light, a certain level of dexterity, and quite a lot of patience.

Whilst you could, with a bit of luck, get away without some of these, I would suspect that your failure rate for repairs would go up if you didn't. And many people would only do this once a year at most.

It may be possible for a school, or maybe a group of schools to get together to put together a workshop containing these things, But I suspect that for all but the most dedicated enthusiast, this level of outlay would be spent buying another computer. A lot of the YouTubers (with the exception of people like Louis Rossmann, who work out of a repair shop) shy away from serious soldering jobs of BGA and SMT components.

It's certainly not something that you would do on your kitchen table in an evening. No, most people are at a level where they will remove some screws, maybe a little glue or double sided tape, and undo clips to replace components, and not go any further.

Db2, where are you? Big Blue is oddly reluctant to discuss recent enhancements to its flagship database

Re: It's still a thing?

Wow. Someone other than me that remembers AT&Ts RFS! This was an add-on on top of SVR3, and required System V STREAMS to work. I set it up with AT&T R&D UNIX during my time at AT&T.

It had many advantages over NFS, such as full UNIX file system semantics, but had a flaw in that it needed an "Advertising Server", if I remember the terminology correctly, to track the available network services and their state.

At the time I was using it (mid 1980s), I think that this server was a single point-of-failure for the networked filesystem, and recovery of the state after an outage of the AS took quite some time. The recommendation was that you made it a powerful server. I only had a 3B2/400 available!

But it enabled some magic things like named pipes and device files between different machines in the networked filespace.

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

Re: HAZMAT suit please, nurse, gloves please!

I lost one of my Model M keyboards to either Tizer or Irn Bru (it was orange and very sticky).

I now know how to fix it (and have fixed another, this time contaminated with full-sugar Pepsi), but unfortunately I did not have this knowledge then, and wrecked the membrane when trying to fix it.

None of the kids owned up to the issue.

The Ghost of Windows Past haunts a street corner in Bermondsey

Re: easy fix:

SpinRite is GREAT software, but becoming less and less relevant as time goes by.

I don't know how old Steve Gibson is now, but he's not been updating SpinRite as disks get bigger and the attachment methods change. It worked with pretty much any IDE drive out there, but could not cope with all features of all SATA drives and controllers (but if you found a system with a SATA controller that still worked, it still was great), and may not work at all with SCSI or SAS disks, and only has limited value for SSDs.

But if you scan a 500GB SATA (or larger) drive, then the scan and recovery time ran into DAYS, not just hours. The problem is that although it's very well written in single-threaded 8086 assembler talking directly to the disk controller, it does not make full use of modern systems. But maybe you need to keep it single threaded with the head over the same track for multiple reads for it to work.

We really could do with another Steve Gibson with a deep understanding of hardware, but people like him are now few and far between.

Re: What I want to know is

Microsoft realised that the netbook concept could seriously affect their penetration of the home market, so they re-vitalised the already withdrawn Windows XP, creating the Windows XP Netbook edition.

This was an entirely cynical move, bringing back to life an OS Microsoft had been trying desperately to kill.

But unfortunately for everybody, even this cut-down, limited version of Windows was too big for the first generation of netbooks (the original EeePC 701 could be bought with as little as 2GB of SSD, and only had 512MB of RAM, although the smallest UK model had 4GB of SSD).

Because Windows suddenly became an option, people started buying it with Windows rather than Linux, found the devices were too slow and limited, and the devices lost the interest of the public. So the manufacturers made them bigger, more powerful and thus more expensive, and put spinning rust disks to hold the bloated OS, eventually leading to the Ultrabook segment of the market.

So, Microsoft killed the cheap Netbook market dead by reversing one of their own decisions, and put Linux adoption in the home market back, possibly forever (at least if you don't include Chromebook and Android).

If only they'd kept their money-grabbing hands off the market, we would have had small, cheap and usable laptops a long time before Chromebooks came along, and Linux would be more accepted. But maybe they achieved their goal.

OK, I know that the shipped Linux variants on the early Netbooks was quite crap, but I put Ubuntu running on my EeePC 4G up to Lucid Lynx using the internal SSD, and put 12.04 on it running off a USB drive when the SSD became too small. The real killer for this system was the relatively slow processor and SSD, and the size of the screen!

I do still have an early Acer Aspire ONE still running, because I could upgrade the RAM and also able to put a ZIF to M2 m-SATA adapter to allow me to replace the sloooooow SSD that came with the device.

Who you gonna call? Premium numbers, but a not-so-premium service

Re: Wrong number

Ah, the heady days of Kenny Everett on commercial radio (they gave him a bit more latitude than the BBC who fired him - twice), before he went completely bonkers on the telly. I still have the 194 Capital Radio tee shirt I won in one of his competitions in the '70s, although unfortunately it no longer fits!

Whilst his TV programs were funny, they went over the top as far as I was concerned.

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Re: run out of paper...stop everything

The AT&T system used in a PBX was probably a 3B2.

For the 5E and 5ESS International Exchanges I had a small amount of involvement in, they used 3B20Ds (a special version of the Western Electric 3B20 mini, arranged as a fault-tolerant dual processor cluster) as the Administrative Module to control the exchange.

I know that after I left, they switched to using systems from Sun for the AMs.

Whilst at AT&T, I also used somewhat strange systems called 3B15s, which were like 3B2 model 400 but in the form of a minicomputer, with SMD removable disk packs. These were used for recording call data for charging purposes.

When you consider that AT&T at the time owned 'UNIX' and were the people who defined System 5 and the UNIX trademark and source code, it's a bit rich to call it 'strange'. Stunted, maybe. Unfriendly, maybe again (but what was wrong with sysadm anyway), but strange?

Re: Reclaiming Private Call Costs

I once worked at an organization where I heard of one of the contractors, who had privileged access to the phone system and the block lists, set up his own premium rate number, and then called it from his desk phone for hours.

Was not a big surprise that he was escorted off-site when the management found out.

Wi-Fi not working? It's time to consult the lovely people on those fine Linux forums

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

My father called me in some distress because he couldn't get to the Internet from his Thinkpad T60, and needed to do some transaction or other with someone who only provided a Web interface.

Spent about 20 minutes hacking around checking the access point before I discovered the WiFi switch (which is on the front left of that model) was in the off position. He though he must have moved it when trying to open the lid latches.

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

We cleared out my fathers house earlier this year, and we found folder after folder of printed manuals for his devices. I had no idea he was doing this, but I guess he wanted to be able to try to find things without having to bother anyone else, and felt this was the best way.

I often wondered why he was getting through printer cartridges as quickly as he did.

A bit sad, really.

Windows Terminal to be the default for command line applications in Windows 11

Re: Been using it for a while

Um. VT102 was strictly a monochrome (IIRC, either green, grey or amber on black depending on the exact model).

The colour model in the VT100 range was the VT125, but that required and external monitor for the colour display (the internal one only being greyscale), at least in the docs. I've seen.

And the colour support was incompatible with the PC console colour escape codes that we know today.

So I would say that if it's ANSI compatible with PC colour codes, it's probably more like xterm-256color.

Intel's mystery Linux muckabout is a dangerous ploy at a dangerous time

Re: Performance subscription model?

To be fair, IBM is quite open about it's licensing and charges, unlike this latest Intel move (in fact IBM sells the idea of temporary resource uplift as a feature). But even this could change in the future if these mechanisms are in place.

Intel updates mysterious 'software-defined silicon' code in the Linux kernel

Re: Some things never change

I'm pretty certain this is capacity. You can (or at least could, not sure now) buy, at a discount from the full price, servers with inactive processors and memory, and later buy the licenses to use this extra capacity, and add them without even having an engineer visit. This was called Capacity Upgrade on Demand CUoD)

IBM also provide 'time limited' licenses, which were there so you could license and use the additional resources for a short period, presumably to get you over humps in the workload. This was confusingly called the very similar Capacity on Demand (CoD).

Interestingly, for the Power 7 775 supercomputer clusters, IBM over-delivered on purchased capacity, in a system they called "Fail in Place". The idea was that the customer could use the extra capacity, but then when devices failed (CPU or Torrent hub chip), the failures would be counted against the 'extra' capacity, and not repaired.

Simple failures like memory or adapters would be replaced, but more complex failures would be left, so long as the capacity did not drop below the purchased capacity. At various points in the life of the system, the remaining capacity would be evaluated, and if it was deemed insufficient for the remaining life of the system, repair actions would be initiated.

This worked close to the theory, but it was found that when certain "Fail in Place" components failed, like the Torrent chip or the optical links, because of the complicated mesh network topology, it could affect communication speeds between adjacent octants (hardware partitions within single drawers).

This is a problem with step-locked HPC tasks, and any jobs including any node in the same compute drawer in the cluster could be slowed down. This meant that they ended up fixing things that they thought they didn't have to when the systems were designed.

Some things never change

You know, this sounds suspiciously like what IBM, Amdahl and some of the larger mini-computer manufacturers were doing in the '60s, '70s and '80s with microcoded processor extensions.

Pay a fortune, have an engineer turn up with a super secret floppy disk, and get a whole load of new instructions added to your processor.

The only difference now is that we have the Internet, so they have to protect this code with cryptography, to prevent it leaking.

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Re: Captain Obvious

Agree. Quel was pretty mature even before Postgres, it being the query language for the original Ingres that came with BSD tapes (not sure about later ones, but it was definitely on the BSD 2.x tapes). I used it in 1979.

I've had arguments about how long SQL has been around. Most people talk about SEQUEL (Structured English QUery Language) from IBM from the mid '70s, but Ingres was the first RDBMS available under a permissive license.

Apparantly, the name SQL came about because SEQUEL was already trademarked, and Structured Query Language became a backonym.

Can Rust save the planet? Why, and why not

Re: Experience

As I worked on the languages queue at a UK support centre, I have found (or at least investigated and documented) compiler errors.

The worst one was a bug that did not identify stack wraparound in the generated code. It generated code that crashed due to stack corruption a long time after the corruption actually occurred. Was absolute hell to identify, and even worse to try to explain to the development team that actually needed to understand it to fix the compiler (I documented the stack corruption and the sequence to make it happen, but did not have access to the source to find the actual cause).

The worst part was that the company that reported the bug (and who were unable to compile their code so they could sell it on this platform) went bust before the fix was generated. I called up to give them the good news just days before they shut down.

Microsoft adds Buy Now, Pay Later financing option to Edge – and everyone hates it

Re: We like shiny things the most

Not the first time a computer company has moved into financing, although the context is different.

IBM used to make a pretty penny in the '80s and '90s by offering financial services for their Mainframe customers, making a double win from selling the mainframe and then gathering the financing costs (and, incidentally, being able to lock the customers into IBM Support as well).

It was enough to be broken out into a separate income stream in the annual financial report. Not sure whether it still does.

Re: Bangs?

I have herd them called "Shriek" in the past, but I can't remember the context.

Pling was largely popularized by the BBC micro documentation, although I'm sure that it was used before that.

Bang was used before Slashdot, in UUCP/UUmail mail routing.

When civilisation ends, a Xenix box will be running a long-forgotten job somewhere

Re: COBOL in a nutshell.

But when COBOL was king, chances are that the systems were small, and every byte of storage saved was important. That was why a lot of programs written in the 60s and 70s used a one byte packed decimal field for the year (at least on systems with 8-bit characters).

It was not COBOL that was the problem, it was the coding standards of the time!

I was told to use that format against my better judgement for some RPG code I wrote in my first job, in the early '80s. I was told not to worry about it by the Data Analysts specifying the program, but I left a comment in the source saying that it would break come 2000 anyway.

I often wonder if my code was still in use in 1999/2000. If anybody had any incorrect parking fine reminders in Rushmoor Borough Council in 2000 because of date arithmetic problems, let me know!

Ah, yes, but the main bit that wasn't compliant was probably just the user interface that only accepted or displayed two digits for the year when trying to set or display the date.

As 32 bit UNIX and derivatives use a 32 bit signed integer for the number of seconds since 00:00 on 1st January 1970, the internal clock is just fine for keeping time, at least until 2038. It's the human readable bit which had problems.

Of course, the hardware clock which kept time when the server was off can also be a problem, but how often do you boot a UNIX system (I remember one problem on an IBM J30 where the clock battery was in the I/O cage that was removed when you had to install an I/O card, resulting in the system losing it's time when expanding the system. A Bull designed system, not IBM really).

There were also a number of leap second and leap day problems in the conversion to human form on some vendor's UNIX systems, which were easily fixed, but obviously would not have been applied to a system that had no maintenance done to it.

UK.gov emits draft IoT and smartphone security law for Parliamentary scrutiny

Re: The bill imposes duties on consumer product manufacturers

If you force the user to change the password on first use, there should be a warning of this, together with the password rules, and an instruction to think up two passwords (just in case the first one is rejected) before powering on the device.

It's just too tempting, when suddenly prompted for a new password, to reuse one used elsewhere, or to invent one on the fly that is either so obvious, or immediately forgotten.

Holding a copy of a complex password is awkward too. Do you use a 'phone app? What happens if you forget/lose your phone. Back it up to the cloud? Do you really trust the app developer (to not leak your access password) and cloud provider? Paper? Well... better use a mnemonic to obfuscate it, and remember the mnemonic.

I don't know the best answer. I once tried using a phone password database. I forgot the access password and hadn't written it down anywhere!

Munich mk2? Germany's Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

For documents, what makes Libre an immediate problem is MS's use of propriety default fonts.

As soon as you move documents between the two, they just don't look right, and sometimes the format is changed because of different font/page metrics.

There are also macro problems, especially in spreadsheets, and Impress has problems with slides and notes compared with PowerPoint. But chasing Microsoft's changes is a moving target.

Re: Good for them!

When my wife complained that she didn't like the look of Windows 7 (after using XP for some time), I decided to put a Windows XP skin on Linux on the replacement laptop I gave her (her needs are quite low, so she gets hand-me-down laptops when I upgrade, and she still likes 4x3 screens anyway).

She's not really commented much about it, she just got on and used it like nothing had changed, but then she really only uses it for the Web, and was already using Libre Office on XP.

There are a couple of Windows programs she wanted, so I've crafted Wine to run them for her. The only thing she can't do is install more Windows software for herself, but that's so infrequent that it's no problem.

Re: Windows 11

I used UNIX Edition 6 Shell (really horrible), then Bourne shell proper in Edition 7. then used DCL on RSX-11M before coming across DCL on VAX/VMS. Of course, since then I've used KSH, bash and a whole host of other shells at various times.

DCL on RSX-11M was like the cut down little brother of it's VMS sibling (but still better than it's precursor, MCR). One of the things that was good is was that the help system was very closely integrated, so not only did it allow auto-completion of commands, you could also get help with parameters while you were typing the command. These features were on the VAX/VMS, but not (so much) on RSX-11M. They also relied on the command being in the command database that DCL used.

The file versioning was a feature of FILES-11 filesystem that had various levels, but all had versioning.

On systems with limited space, versioning was a real problem, as it chewed through space very quickly. People soon had to learn how to use the PURGE command,