Posts by Nate Amsden

Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

damage done already

Got a price estimate back from HPE last week memory that I quoted in October is 10.6X more last week with a 2 week expiration time on the cost. For me at least that just means not buying anything DDR5 related this year(I have nothing that uses DDR5 today). Can stick with my old servers/storage for another year, no capacity issues at all. I really wanted to upgrade some of my older systems(oldest in service servers just entered their 12th year of operation), after waiting years to get budget I finally got some this year...guess I will use what I can to refresh network gear, some of which is 10-11 years old.

At least everything is on 3rd party HW support, and the reliability of all of my gear has been outstanding.

Founder ditches AWS for Euro stack, finds sovereignty isn't plug-and-play

not self hosting

"Compute ended up running on Hetzner, with Scaleway filling in gaps like email and container registries. Bunny.net handled CDN and edge duties, Nebius provided GPU capacity for AI inference, and German identity outfit Hanko took care of authentication. "

I don't see any self hosting there. That is using SaaS and IaaS.

Self hosting is you have servers/storage/network in a data center and you run it end to end(with some exceptions perhaps like CDN).

AI gets all the good stuff, including Micron's speedy 28 GB/s PCIe 6.0 SSD

Re: sas is fine for me

I believe they both had controller failures, I don't have the logs from the first failure in 2023 anymore but I recall the events saying the disk was not responding anymore.

Most recent failure was last month first error was

pd 14 port a0 on 3:0:1: cmdstat:0x1a (TE_PATHSICK -- Path is sick), scsistat:0x02 (Check condition), snskey:0x0b (Aborted command), asc/ascq:0x47/0x82 (Vendor-specific ASC/ASCQ code), info:0x0, cmd_spec:0x0, sns_spec:0x0, host:0x6, abort:0, CDB:28001441CED000000800 (Read10), blk:0x1441ced0, blkcnt 0x8, fru_cd:0x0, LUN:0, LUN_WWN:0000000000000000 after 0.001s, toterr:95, deverr:39

then 2 hours later

pd 14 port a0 on 3:0:1: cmdstat:0x1e (TE_UNITATT -- Unit attention error), scsistat:0x02 (Check condition), snskey:0x06 (Unit attention), asc/ascq:0x29/0x2 (Scsi bus reset occurred), info:0x0, cmd_spec:0x0, sns_spec:0x0, host:0x6, abort:0, CDB:8800000000019977E8C0000000200000 (Read16), blk:0x19977e8c0, blkcnt 0x20, fru_cd:0x0, LUN:0, LUN_WWN:0000000000000000 after 0.000s, toterr:96, deverr:40

few seconds later

hw_disk:5001173100A6357C pd 14 port a0 on 3:0:1: cmdstat:0x1a (TE_PATHSICK -- Path is sick), scsistat:0x02 (Check condition), snskey:0x06 (Unit attention), asc/ascq:0x29/0x7 (I_t nexus loss occurred), info:0x27174e00, cmd_spec:0x0, sns_spec:0x0, host:0x6, abort:0, CDB:8800000000019974DCC0000000200000 (Read16), blk:0x19974dcc0, blkcnt 0x20, fru_cd:0x0, LUN:0, LUN_WWN:0000000000000000 after 0.002s, toterr:97, deverr:41

about 90mins later the RAID rebuild was complete and the drive was disabled

No indication that the drive went to read-only mode(unless that is buried in the hex codes somewhere).

None of the drives report less than 84% wear life remaining, really blows my mind still how reliable it has been. Zero read or write errors reported on any disk(except the ones that failed but those stats were reset when the drives were replaced).

sas is fine for me

Using decade old SAS SSDs in my data center. Works fine (cheap too), don't need nvme. Have had just 2 SSDs fail on my oldest all flash array in it's 11th year of service.

Amazon's $200 billion capex plan: How I learned to stop worrying and love negative free cash flow

How are they paying for it?

Alphabet recently announced they were going to issue some bonds(unsure how much) that wouldn't mature for 100 years... I see no mention of the word "debt" in the article. If Amazon decides to take out a ton of debt for this as Oracle is (and perhaps Google) then they may very well be in big trouble...as the debt markets continue to deteriorate. but if they are paying mostly out of their own cash then no big deal. I think I heard that Oracle is planning to issue tons more stock to try to cover some of their bills, in addition to the debt (instead of making it all debt, which they probably realize they wouldn't find enough investors to buy that debt).

Dear Oracle, we need to talk about the future of MySQL

Re: Lots of hot air

yeah makes no sense to me as someone who moved to MariaDB about a decade ago(zero application changes required). In the time since I have not come across anything (mostly open source but also commercial) that mandated Oracle's MySQL for anything.

Intel welcomes memory apocalypse with Xeon workstation refresh

waiting

For an updated version of the socketed Xeon E3-1240L v5 25W quad core. Been looking for years can't find a newer chip. Emphasis on socketed and 25W and can run ECC. I expect mine to run fine for another 5 years but would be nice to see something newer.

Broadcom 'bulldozes' VMware cloud partners as March deadline looms

Re: Why am I ashamed of my tribe ?

VMFS is another reason. I shit on Xen back in 2008 when my manager didn't want to pay for VMware. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that I realized that none of the competition Xen, proxmox, KVM(commercial or open source) support a reliable shared filesystem SIXTEEN YEARS after vsphere released sub LUN locking. Red hat has a couple of offerings from 3rd parties(one is Veritas, forgot the other, both require additional licensing for the filesystem, guessing they don't get much usage as hypervisor storage).

HPE supports it but I suspect it doesn't work well yet(they all seemed to try GFS2 a 20+ year old cluster filesystem and abandoned it due to bugs they are unwilling to fix). I don't like the complexity of using ceph as a block storage platform for my VMs, when I have nice high quality fibrechannel storage systems that have hummed along for a decade without issue). VMFS has been flawless for me personally at least going back to my first usage of it in 2006.

My mind is still blown, still in shock really.

As Oracle loses interest in MySQL, devs mull future options

Re: There is already a fork

I'm sure it's a great system, though for casual people like me(not a DBA) for no other reason than the syntax/setup is so foreign to me from and admin standpoint. I'm more comfortable with Oracle DB than postgres from that standpoint even though I haven't touched Oracle is about a decade(I still do miss Oracle EE with the vast instrumentation and performance analysis it has, haven't used that since 2007ish though used Oracle SE up till about 2016, at the time it was hosting my vCenter 5 database, and yes I know vCenter DB runs on postgres since then which i have no issue with since I never have to interact with it directly).

I know it's my fault but it's just super frustrating to have to do multiple web searches to find the most simple things how to do basic things in postgres every time (because I don't use it often enough). Takes forever to get stuff done(for me). My org does have a DBA so I just ask him to do the vast majority of it these days(which isn't much, maybe less than 1% of the work he does for mariadb already). He's not fond of it either for the same reasons though probably knows it much better than me (I hope anyway..).

maybe not 100% compatible(there are issues with that even between versions of mysql or mariadb), but my org moved everything from mysql(5.x, technically percona I believe) to mariadb(10.x) a decade ago and there was zero issues with any applications(both in house developed and external). I think we even replicated directly from mysql to mariadb at the time(but I could be remembering that part incorrectly it was a while ago).

There were some issues when it came to using galera clustering but that was galera specific, didn't apply to standalone instances, actually ran into another such issue just yesterday with an old app, trying to upgrade to a newer version of it on a clustered galera mariadb, failed to apply schema updates because the new table being created lacked a primary key so the cluster rejected it, temporarily moved the app to a standalone instance to get around that and can fix the primary key(s) later and import back to the cluster(tiny DB)

Power scarcity drives datacenters to Texas, where the juice is

better for the rest of us

Feel bad for those in Texas getting exploited by this situation but for the rest of the country that seems like a good thing for them(including me in California). Data centers especially mega ones don't bring many jobs of course, and are a huge drain on resources. If Texas's leadership wants to give that stuff up, well that's their choice, and less pressure on the rest of the country to do the same till this bubble bursts.

I do love data centers, but am a strong believer in the data center/customers must bare all of the costs of electricity and water(among other things), not the surrounding communities, should be zero special incentives for such facilities. Texas' leadership probably doesn't care about any of that though.

RondoDox botnet linked to large-scale exploit of critical HPE OneView bug

confused

(Nevermind can't delete this)

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

kernel has a stable ABI?

Does it now? can you load drivers from different kernel versions and have them work? I do recall somewhat recently upgrading my kernel and having vmware workstation prompt me to compile new drivers for it. I know at least before 2010 I spent what felt like endless hours making custom boot disks for CentOS/Fedora for installing on bare metal as the drivers for things like the NICs had to be injected into the boot image(the image included drivers but did not support that particular revision(s) of NIC), and if you tried to load (or force load) a driver from a slightly different kernel rev you'd get a nice ugly error.

Last time I recall specifically dealing with hardware that had drivers which required a special kernel version was in 2016 when I got a Lenovo P50 laptop (running Mint 17). I assumed the wifi worked but since I am wired in at home I never tested it. Till I went on a long trip months later, and that first night at a hotel I realized the wifi driver did not work. Intel's website for the drivers specifically cited a requirement of some newer kernel version, which Mint had, though it was not the default. I had to do some trickery downloading the debs and anything else I needed on my phone, then transfer over USB to my computer to get it working.

Unlike most windows at least where the same drivers can be used across a wide range of kernels and in some cases even major versions of windows.

It's this problem IMO that has made the Android ecosystem such a mess from a hardware compatibility standpoint, as the manufacturers have to expend far more effort to support newer android on older hardware due to the fact they can't just plop their older drivers on the newer kernel(I assume at least, no personal experience).

Or maybe it just has a stable ABI in some other part of the kernel. But this driver thing has been an annoyance for me for over 25 years now. I have long since given up any hope(maybe as of 2002) that it will ever get fixed as the developers long ago said they don't really care.

The last supported version of HP-UX is no more

Re: RIP

Back in 2004 I was at a company that used HPUX Integrity Itanium servers for big Oracle databases. I recall they had redundant out of band management cards on them. At one point we did a big network upgrade moving from older 24-port 3COM switches(I don't remember the model but have a picture taken a year or two later http://elreg.nateamsden.com/2004-network.jpg ), that may of been gig? But I think they were still 10/100 on our backend network. The network was quite a mess, none of the cables were labeled and everything was going to a single rack, very tightly packed. We were going to a new pair of 48-port Extreme Networks Summit 400 switches.

The migration was basically unplug everything, remove the switches, put the new switches in again, and plug everything back in again. During this process we caused a network loop, somehow plugging both ends of the same cable into the switches, no idea how that happened but it took a while to track down just unplugging ports till the loop stopped. I recall at one point our manager was saying "we need to prepare to roll back soon". The network engineer and I(I was the server/app/ops guy) looked at each other and said, no way we can't roll back it will take so much longer.. anyway we found the loop and fixed it.

Where Itanium comes into this story is that loop caused all of the Itanium out of band management ports to hang, from what I recall there was no other systems that had lasting effects, once the loop was gone everything was fine except those out of band Itaniums. The back end engineer in charge of those systems contacted HP for suggestions. There may of been a reset button on the cards, if so, they tried it and it didn't help. HP insisted those cards were hot swappable, and to just yank the card and re-seat it and it would reboot with no impact to the running HPUX system.

So they yanked it on a lower priority system after hours and the system promptly crashed hard. It came back up, but clearly not hot swappable.

The next year or so the company funded a project of mine to basically rebuild everything, all new servers, new network, new back end storage, and new Itaniums (I had nothing to do with the back end). Built it out much better then, though we still made mistakes since we were learning as we went.

The company later moved to RHEL Oracle systems after I left on x86(when I first joined they ran HPUX on PA-RISC). I recall years later still being told their largest customer, AT&T was demanding they return to big iron Unix(didn't care which), and AT&T said they'd even foot the bill. Apparently Oracle on Linux was super unstable, at least for the databases they were running (largest single instance OLTP in the world, by that point maybe it was 70-ish TB, it was mid 50s TB when I left 2-3 years earlier).

Letting Nvidia sell H200s to China is closing the door after the horse has bolted

seems weird

China was going to develop it's own tech regardless, the trade policies may of accelerated some of that for sure, but doesn't really change the outcome. If for no other reason than their own security. Nvidia knew this too, they just wanted to get as much $$ as they could while they still could. This was always about profits.

Window Maker Live 13.2 brings 32-bit life to Debian 13

Re: Impressive

I used AfterStep myself for many years(late 90s to mid 00s) I assume because windowmaker was more popular(though Enlightenment was most popular among newbies) and I wanted something different (same reason I chose Slackware originally over Red Hat in 1996, went to Debian in 1998). Seemed quite similar in UI to windowmaker, I think both could use all of the same "applets" or whatever they were called. But it is what got me hooked on using tons of virtual desktops and using edge flipping (move mouse to edge of screen to move to adjacent desktop), which became a critical part of my workflow through to today where I run Mint+Mate with a Gnome app named brightside which hasn't seen an update since 2004 (last released with Ubuntu 16), though managed to get it to build cleanly (and 17 other dependencies) on Mint 22, so happy to continue to have a consistent interface for a few more years yet. Brightside provides the edge flipping functionality to Gnome, and I have not found an alternative to that tool (last I checked anyway). AfterStep was last updated in 2013, though I think I switched to Gnome v1 around 2006/7.

I even ran LiteStep on Windows XP at one job I was at about two decades ago, not quite as nice as AfterStep but worked well enough. The company's IT team couldn't figure out how to open control panel on my computer so I suppose that was a nice side effect.

Your mention of GNUStep triggered an Afterstep memory since it stored some things in ~/GNUstep I believe, other than that I have no idea what GNUstep even was(assuming it was something..).

sample screenshot (removed a couple of private things just in case) from 2002, at one point I ran with something like 64 virtual desktops but no screenshot of that unfortunately. Today I use 24 virtual desktops(all but 3 currently in use)

http://elreg.nateamsden.com/x-desktop-02-27-01.jpg

Block all AI browsers for the foreseeable future: Gartner

how long until

Chrome has this kind of stuff assuming it doesn't already? Reminds me of recent comments from cloudflare saying people can't block Google's AI scrapers without blocking Google's basic search scrapers.

No AI anywhere in my life yet anyway. Don't have a need for it. Not ruling it out forever. Wife says she plans to start to talk to AI soon, after a close friend says she talks to AI all the time, and her cousin's husband is obsessed with talking to AI. Kinda scary really.

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

where's Germany

They were supposedly investigating twitter 2 years ago for massive fines... what's taking so long...

Cloudflare suffers second outage in as many months during routine maintenance

Re: Trend

Everything is relative... my last CDN outage was 9-10 years ago. Cloudflare certainly seems to go down more than others. I mean I can't remember the last time I saw a news article about a big Akamai outage for example, or Fastly (which is another CDN that competes with Cloudflare).

Re: Non-disparagement?

The screenshot in the article implies Cloudflare implicated themselves in the text of the error page.

I don't think Cloudflare cares if their customers complain about it, especially given how open they are with regards to outages and public root cause analysis etc.

Re: lack of decent alternatives

I've been an Imperva customer past 3 years, pretty happy. Prior to joining my current org I had never heard of them before, and that was despite doing a lot of research about five years ago about CDN alternatives to Akamai. At previous org we started with Akamai, then we switched to a small CDN startup named "Instart Logic" (apparently their investors also invested in the company I was with), ran with them for several years, obviously slashed our Akamai costs a ton by moving to them.

Eventually Instart Logic ran out of gas, and collapsed. Akamai acquired their assets and some of their customers(including me). I was quite worried really, expecting Akamai to jack up the rates especially when the contract was done. So I spent weeks looking into alternatives including Cloudflare, CacheFly, Internap, Fastly, Moovweb and Verizon. (I did not know Verizon operated a CDN at the time, my manager suggested checking them out based on their past experience). But Imperva never came up.

Fortunately for us Akamai honored the existing contracts even at renewals. Our traffic wasn't going up, but neither did our costs, so didn't need to panic after all.

Then I came to my current org 3 years ago, and they used Imperva. For the most part been a trouble free experience. Cost is higher for sure what I was paying for Akamai's honoring of Instart's pricing for previous company, but we get a lot more security things now vs before we had none.

I did talk again with Fastly and Cloudflare last year when we were thinking about renewing Imperva for another 2 years. At the end of the day, the Imperva pricing was decent, there wasn't anything that stuck out about Fastly or Cloudflare's proposals that made me want to jump ship. And I'm the type of person who, you really need to give me a reason to leave, in addition to incentives from others. Imperva to-date have not given me a reason to want to leave, so I imagine will renew again next year. I did manage to slash the costs quite a bit though by moving a large portion of our traffic off of Imperva onto Cachefly. That traffic is just static content and not subject to PCI controls(which Cachefly is not compliant for). One thing that annoyed me with Cachefly is I signed up mainly for their ~$300/mo plan as that was plenty. But they actually signed me up for an unlisted "white glove service" plan for more than double if not triple the price. Didn't realize it till it was too late, but got them to fix it on the 2nd year renewal. Fortunately nobody internally ever raised an issue with the initial higher costs from them.

So maybe in your case you could look into offloading some of your traffic to a provider like Cachefly.

Also will add, haven't had a noticeable CDN outage in about a decade(that was with Instart Logic).

Server prices set to jump 15% as memory costs spike

Re: Yay!

Maybe. Never looked into it. My account on eBay has an excellent reputation as a buyer but have never sold anything there.

Re: Yay!

I'm planning to retire several TB of registered ECC DDR4 next year, originally just planned to take the servers to e-waste and drop them off but maybe I need a better plan for just the ram anyway...

HPE positions Morpheus stack as enterprise alternative to VMware

Re: Where is the free/community edition?

I don't know when the "free esxi" started, but my history with vmware goes back to 1999 with vmware ("workstation" but it was just called vmware) on linux. Later I worked with VMware GSX (which AFAIK never had a free version), and later VMware server(re-badged GSX, which may have been free?), before going to ESX 3.5 in 2006/2007. I didn't personally use a free esxi till vSphere 5 I think it was(perhaps the free license was available earlier, I'm confident they had free 60-day trials earlier). And of course vmware workstation throughout(not free until post broadcom acquisition).

key thing is options. AFAIK you are not forced into any greenlake anything if you don't want it. I priced out Morpheus and VM Essentials recently. I do hope to use VM Essentials(probably don't need morpheus) but waiting to hear better news on the storage front regarding cluster filesystems on shared block storage. Unsure if they can make it reliable in the next 6 months or if it will take longer. They have lots of incentive to get it working right since they sell a lot of block storage arrays for this purpose exactly.

John Henry still leading the race vs AI in customer service

Re: curious

weird, wonder what that has to do with AI then.

curious

Is "John Henry" a reference to the Terminator? (Specifically Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), that's what it reminded me of anyway, I haven't yet read the article but I searched for the name elsewhere on the page and it only appears to show in the title.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator:_The_Sarah_Connor_Chronicles

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Re: Damn.

I was thinking the exact same word, damn... I remember using Kingston and Kingston ValueRAM back in the 90s before switching to Crucial(after realizing ValueRAM was just a mixture of different brands of memory chips) at some point and have been 100% crucial for everything since. Pretty much been happy the whole time past 20-25ish years.

Though I did happen to get a memory stick in a package this year that had a pair that was DOA, very surprised never had that happen to me for memory before. Crucial did replace it but it took about 6 weeks to get the replacement, fortunately I wasn't in a hurry. It took a little convincing to get them to believe the stick was DOA. It was brand new from B&H, came in a pack of 2. One stick worked fine in either slot, the other stick the system would not POST at all, in either slot.

I too don't care about RGB or overclocking, or even super high performance just want the bog standard regular stuff but want high quality, cost is less important. Though I did like the big heatsinks on the pair of Crucial Ballistix memory I got in 2019(2x4GB), I guess technically that was "overclocked" (got it for a day 0 Ryzen 3700X running Linux Mint that did nothing but handbrake encoding for 4 years). Just "retired" those memory modules earlier this year, only to install them in a refurb Dell XPS 8930 I got from ebay for one of my sister's kids for xmas.

Maybe the next obvious thing to switch to is Samsung memory? Though I've never looked into how(or if) one can acquire such memory, maybe have to go through a 3rd party brand or something..

Two Android 0-day bugs disclosed and fixed, plus 105 more to patch

Re: Does this matter?

I think in most cases, for most users, the biggest threat is just installing super questionable apps, which I think most users don't generally do. Think of the news stories about various at least Android apps that have been found to be malicious. Their install bases tend to be tiny compared to the market as a whole. So your personal risk factor in general is quite low regardless of how your device is patched.

I have said for a long time, the best form of security is "don't be a target". Most people are not targets. People that are targets, don't really have much choice (thinking politicians, perhaps journalists, important leaders etc). A nation state(or similar) is not likely to deploy their fancy malware broadly, they want to target those that they really want to get and not let the world know what they are exploiting and how. You may get hit anyways, but in my 30 years on the internet the real world likelihood of that happening is super remote(was much more likely 25 years ago when people were directly connecting their operating systems to the internet with dialup modems)

For computers, really just keep your browser relatively up to date(even Windows 7 still has Firefox being officially supported through ESR for a few more months!), and if you need to go to a website that is questionable ... (I would say gaming sites especially those that offer cracks and stuff, along with the "free" porn sites) use another computer or at least use a VM or isolated browser to do that stuff, and be sure to have decent security software installed(maybe you trust windows defender enough, or maybe not.. assuming you use windows - I've used linux on my desktop/laptop since 1998), and don't connect directly to public networks(includes public wifi etc) unless as a last resort. I'll tether to my phone in the rare cases that I am traveling with a laptop before I consider public wifi, or even hotel wifi, for me all of that is last resort. It's PROBABLY FINE, but I'd rather not if I have an alternative.

Have to be patient

The article makes it sound as if the users have control and can just go update their devices, when in reality of course they are more often than not in a situation where they have to wait for their carrier or device manufacturer to release the updates(assuming they release them at all).

I know El reg knows this as well, which is why the tone of the article was rather odd to me.

For me, I will upgrade to Android 15 soon on my S24 Ultra. Samsung has underestimated my ability to dismiss their upgrade notifications 5-6x per day every day the past 6 months, and unlike security updates, upgrades cannot be forced on devices(well at least not on my device after I set some setting that I forgot what setting it was now).

Samsung also underestimates my ability to dismiss their requests for me to agree to their new privacy policy ("in order to get access to the latest offers and perhaps AI stuff")!

I am generally pretty careful what I use my phone for though, such as disabling auto MMS download, I really don't use it for any payments, or buying online(unless it's a last resort), I use my computer for that stuff.

I'd be happier if rather than major version upgrades to just get the security patches for as long as a particular version of Android is supported, and only when support is gone entirely upgrade to the next version. Reality is of course most carriers(perhaps manufacturers too) I think abandon the older versions the moment a new version comes out. So for example I am on Android 14, which from what I can see still gets security updates from Google, but those updates don't get to me since my carrier/manufacturer wants me to upgrade to 15 instead.

UK gov blames budget leak on misconfigured WordPress plugin, server

perhaps not practical for everyone

I opened a new WordPress site to the world a week ago, https://cultofthe.cloud/ "Revealing the staggering level of (often times wilful) ignorance regarding hyperscale public cloud IaaS adoption". Been pimping the site on LinkedIn since.

But the main point is my site is pretty simple just 12 pages and some images. I thought about security being a bit paranoid, trying to limit plugins to bare minimum.

I decided to put a whitelist of urls in my apache config so if you're not coming from a specific internal IP space you can only access a short list of urls(any attempts to get other urls are redirected to an error page using rewrite rules), and can only submit GET requests on most of them. At first I was only interested in locking down the admin interface then realized I could probably lock it down entirely. Works pretty well.

Add to that I did decide to use a cache accelerator plugin(forgot the name) basically caches the content in static HTML files to serve up instead of dynamically generated stuff.

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

just waiting

For Google etc to use this as an excuse to remove extensions entirely in the name of "security". (Of course remember what they did to ublock origin. I've never used Chrome myself). For the typical user may make sense. Though I'll of course always prefer the extra control (and associated risk perhaps) with having a less locked down experience(android is the lesser of two evils in that regard compared to apple, though google is trying their best to close that gap). Feel the same way of course about anything that is forced to be encrypted/signed/etc.

GrapheneOS bails on OVHcloud over France's privacy stance

is this real

Is this real or just a political statement(of sorts)? I mean my impression is GrapheneOS is open source already, so not much to hide there. If France asks(or has already) them to put back doors in, and they refuse would OVH terminate their access anyway? I'm sort of guessing not, I mean they could in theory "ban" GrapheneOS from devices in France(good luck enforcing that?). I just suspect GrapheneOS would never really drive much scrutiny(if nothing else due to the very low number of users they have).

Guessing more of a political statement, which is fine... though it may of been a more powerful statement had OVH said "the government is telling us to terminate your access because you won't put back doors in your software". (certainly not a bad idea to have a backup in place in the event that happened)

Praise Amazon for raising this service from the dead

I've never used SharePoint (though annoyed that so many orgs seem to want to use it as a general file storage not the CMS that is is, when there are cloud things like Azure files that are built for file shares - note I haven't used Azure anything either), but at my first SaaS gig two decades ago we did use Visual Source Safe For version control of our internal documents. Fortunately I never had to deal with the fallout of that. There was one person we had who knew VSS and was tasked with recovering our VSS on the many occasions it decided to corrupt itself.

Shai-Hulud worm returns, belches secrets to 25K GitHub repos

Re: At some point you have to blame the downloaders

Most devs care as much about security as they care about how much their cloud bill is (Which is not at all). Pretty sad to see how many people are willing to just download a shell script and run it (often as root) blindly.

At least with Linux repos there's often some checking that goes on before something is published. I run my own repos so systems only shnc against a known state.

I remember back in 2007 I would manually build RPMs for all of the ruby gems our app used at the time. Built them for probably 3 different operating systems/architectures. In 2013 at another org came the first request for NPM. I planned to do the same but noped out pretty quick. What a disaster that was waiting to happen(blindly downloading dozens lf hundreds of dependencies).

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

i did this too

About 24 years ago. Personal sever that had high uptime don't recall how high. I either drove it from home to office or vice versa. Office was maybe 5min from home. Had it on a small cyberpower ups. I don't remember much other than at one point in the office parking lot i drove over a curb and messed up my alignment a bit(old crappy 1989 car). But it probably wasn't more than 497 days as back then I think still had the kernel rollover bug for uptime.

These days I have personal servers that have been up over 4 years. A few servers at work a few weeks away from hitting 6 years, at least a few switches at over 7 years of uptime. In all cases software updates either aren't being released anymore or nothing worthwhile to update to.

Veeam bets on more VMware alternatives, including Red Hat and China’s Sangfor

Re: Like Proxmox but…

Maybe not impossible(?), just stupid. If I were to use Proxmox in this way(I have never used Proxmox) I could export unique LUNs to each of my systems (assuming Proxmox includes fibrechannel drivers and hopefully MPIO?) and even if the volumes are not shared between hosts, and could format local ZFS on each node or whatever to do stuff.

I do find it interesting/sad that it seems none of the open source hypervisors can handle shared storage like VMware? I just checked last night for Xen after reading an article here about that again. They technically support GFS2 but apparently no storage migrations allowed with it. Ubuntu LXD (their container/VM solution) does not support GFS2, Proxmox does not last I checked, and I saw a comment here recently from someone trying HP VM Essentials that DOES support it and had major issues.

Then I realized something I forgot a long time ago, I think it was vSphere 4.0 that introduced VAAI, which included "sub LUN locking"(hardware accelerated by the storage), Broadcom calls it "Atomic Test & Set (ATS), which is used during creation and locking of files on the VMFS volume". Of course that was over fifteen years ago now and the competition still doesn't have reliable locking, hopefully this race to improve the alternatives fast tracks this for GFS2 or the creation of a new file system. Though at the time that feature was limited to Enterprise Plus licensing, unsure if that ever changed.

Dug up an old blog post I wrote on the topic from September 2010 - http://www.techopsguys.com/2010/09/07/vsphere-vaai-only-in-enterprise/

So perhaps some org (HPE is probably best positioned given they sell a lot of SAN stuff) can implement this feature on the open source side, since the hardware out there has already supported this technique for such a long time already, would be ideal if they could just leverage the existing support. Maybe they can't get all of VAAI, but this one part seems super important.

I remember getting into arguments with my then manager in 2008, we were a very small vmware shop, just a few ESX 3.5 servers only using standard licensing - no vCenter, no clusters etc. He didn't want to pay the cost for VMware, and wanted to use the free Xen included with our CentOS systems instead. I pushed back saying Xen wasn't good enough IMO (I had no experience with Xen just a "feeling"). I remember at one point he called me a "pussy" out on our open floor plan office for not wanting to try Xen. I laughed it off. I left the company not too long after. He directed my former co-workers to then deploy Xen. They tried, for a month, and gave up. The critical failure was they could not get a 32-bit CentOS system running on a 64-bit Xen hypervisor it would just lock up every time, and they couldn't find a fix. Our standard was 32-bit for some of our apps as running them in 64-bit mode literally caused memory to explode.

Many years later I reached out to him just to say hi or something and he eventually apologized saying I was right, he was wrong, Xen(at the time anyway) was a piece of crap compared to VMware.

But wow, that was literally 17 years ago. It's just shocking that Xen and others still are that far behind on basic things like storage. There's a reason the last version of vSphere that excited me was 4.1, I want a rock solid foundation for my systems, all of the bells and whistles on top are far less important to me. vSphere was one of the most solid pieces of software I've ever used, with the caveat that I ran conservative configurations and stayed well behind the curve (running 4.1, 5.5 6.5, and 6.7 at least a year past EOL before upgrading).

how much of this is real?

Because Veeam doesn't support HPE VM Essentials directly, they instruct you to install agents on your VMs: https://www.veeam.com/kb4737

Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats

sounds like cloud

Sounds like "use the cloud", only worse. Fortunately this one doesn't impact me, have not had a use for such "AI" tech for anything so haven't used it.

I'm real close to launching my new website "Cult of the cloud - Revealing the staggering level of (often times wilful) ignorance regarding hyperscale public cloud IaaS adoption" (built upon a blog post of mine fifteen years ago about how IaaS is broken by design)

11 articles almost 40,000 words written mostly last week. No "AI" of course either, but several sleepless nights as my brain went into overdrive wanting to get the info out.

Just waiting on some lazy friends to review it before I open it to the world. I asked 7, so far only one has given feedback.

FCC looks to torch Biden-era cyber rules sparked by Salt Typhoon mess

this administration

would try to convince people that drinking water is bad for your health if Biden had come out and told people to "drink plenty of water"

(of course if you drink too much you will drown...)

Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some

I'll wait

I'm patient, give them a year to figure out this ESU stuff maybe I'll sign up then..

Server virtualization market heats up as VMware rivals try to create alluring alternatives

Re: Ditch the emotion

I agree to some extent. Prior to broadcom, vsphere enterprise+ was about the same price as it was 15 years ago minus the 32 core limit per license (?). CPUs have gotten so much more powerful not to forget inflation during that time.

I think even if you doubled the enterprise+ license it would be worth it. But they went far farther than that of course.

Re: Ditch your viewpoint

I was willing to do just this for VVF. Not VCF. The only thing I care about is esxi and vcenter. At current VVF pricing I could eat the higher costs with massively slashed core counts vs old servers I have now. Cost would still be good. But VMware refused to quote more than 1 year and actually wouldn't even sell VVF by itself they said the only option is upgrade some existing licenses. If they'd do that and give me 3 to 5 years of licensing up front I'd go for it. But they won't.

Also specifically said VCF prices are going up this month (new fiscal year), so waiting to see what that is like (won't change my mind just curious).

Re: I'm hopeful

Damn, sorry to hear that. Appreciate the info though. I had a feeling I'm going to miss VMFS more than I thought... hopefully with customers working through issues they can figure things out over the next few months.

I'm hopeful

for HPE VM Essentials. Though they have been terrible to-date releasing much of any info. On one of my fishing expeditions to find out more info I came across an excellent PDF document on some server in Italy. It answered most of my questions, almost all of them, the only remaining ones are around "how well does it work...". My biggest questions are around fibrechannel storage with GFS2(not as if GFS2 is a new filesystem, it's apparently 20 years old). Have read mixed results on that for other platforms at least. HPE supports it out of the box(unlike Proxmox last I checked). I got ~300T of HPE 3PAR fibrechannel flash storage across multiple arrays I don't plan to stop using anytime soon.

But this document is awesome(27 pages long, even has feature by feature breakdown comparing them vs vSphere), though found out apparently it is an internal only document not meant to be released, they have since removed it from the site in Italy. I actually found it doing web searches trying to find info about GFS2 and KVM. I sent HPE as strong wording as I could they need to get this info out there. The doc answered a ton of my other Qs and really made me feel good about using it. Only paranoia bit is are they not saying all this stuff in the doc yet because it doesn't work well? maybe..

I haven't spent TOO much time looking at other alternatives but from what I have seen, at least for my use cases(not ripping out my storage), nothing seems to come close to VM Essentials (not even Ubuntu's LXD product)

Also helps that Ubuntu 24 (which VM Essentials runs on top of) is my standard OS anyway. 90%+ of what would be deployed on it is other linux VMs.

I plan to evaluate it in 4-5 months, giving it more time to mature.

Canonical pushes Ubuntu LTS support even further - if you pay

hopefully individuals can pay too

Unlike MS where they make it pretty much impossible for individuals to get LTSC legally

AI companies keep publishing private API keys to GitHub

move fast and break often

Clearly breaking so often nobody has time to care about security. Someone nabs their cloud keys and starts stealing resources they probably will think it's normal activity (bill so high already what's another million between enemies)

Google’s Ironwood TPUs represent a bigger threat than Nvidia would have you believe

cost

Surprised the article doesn't mention cost, maybe just isn't any info. But the vertical integration has got to provide some pretty huge savings to Google vs using a 3rd party for their chips. Also appears they use their own networking as well, which will save a bunch more. I suspect similar will be true for Amazon/Meta/Microsoft(who all have already or I believe are making their own "AI" chips). Add in China making their own stuff, Nvidia is probably going to be in a world of hurt (relative to today) in the not too distant future(especially once the current generation of accelerators age out, over whatever effective lifetime they are expected to have). I'm also sort of assuming most/all of the non Nvidia players won't be(or maybe/probably can't) using CUDA? Having so much of the market not leveraging Nvidia's tech will shake em up quite a bit.

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

As it's been shown/exploited countless times over the past couple of decades, it's easier to ask for forgiveness then ask for permission.

Re: The Legendary Legend

Lack of stability in NT is what drove me to Linux in 1998. I was using DOS/Win3, then as I was in the pirate scene at the time I used many betas/etc of Win95, and not long after the release of 95 I got sick of it and switched to NT 3.51 Server (friend worked at MS and sent me a real install CD for it). Then NT4 came out and I moved to that(I had pretty good hardware at the time, I recall I was an "official" beta tester for NT4 and they sent me a set of CDs with the betas at one point), memory is hazy how much I liked (or not) NT 3.51, but NT4 wasn't great for long and I was already dual booting Linux and Windows, then decided to just dump windows entirely. Ironically(?) earlier this year I decided to formalize some of my older hardware as retro gaming type things, setting up fresh SSDs on two older laptops with XP/Win7/Win10, and setting my Ryzen system which till then was only used for video encoding, as a dual boot Linux/Win11 box to run games in Win11.

In an era where games on Linux is maturing quite well, I took the opposite approach. I was playing Unreal Tournament and other Loki games 25 years ago on Linux(and other games with Cedega years later), but now I don't bother with games on Linux computers. Main reason I don't want to risk stability on my main system which goes months between reboots. Second is I have the other hardware already so I can just set it up the way I want(and finally a decent desk setup with lots of monitors with switches for HDMI and audio). There isn't really any personal data on any of them so MS can spy all they want for systems they support still I don't care. I even bought fresh copies of Win10 Pro one laptop, and Win11 pro for my Ryzen direct from MS, the first MS operating systems I have paid money for(as stand alone products) since Win95(obviously got copies of other MS OSs through computer purchases etc).