Posts by Random K 63 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2012
>This is a pointless article. We all know what a VM can do and advantages of it.
OK, I'll play devil's advocate here. While I get your point about legacy I/O, even KVM supports PCI and USB pass-through with some effort. I would think that would cover a fair bit of legacy kit (excluding ASI cards, proprietary daughterboards, and other such horrors which couldn't even be physically connected to more modern kit). I once had a VM talking to an ancient PCI Fax modem for example. No idea why, but it was the only card I could ever get to send reliably through our supposedly 40+ year old telecom wiring.
None of that gets to the real point of the article though. Keeping aging servers and applications around can (and likely will) end up costing way more than a rip-and-replace. I know how awful those experiences can be first hand, but isn't keeping stuff around that's difficult to impossible to replace/repair the IT equivalent of playing Russian roulette? If you're an old hand who knows that box inside and out that's great, but what happens if you get hit by a bus? I guess I just read the article less as "virtualization will solve all your problems" and more "people have come to expect access to modern tools for backup/migration/failover so get your old shit in order". Do you want to deal with the disaster when lady luck decides, or do you want to at least get to plan for the pain of migration?
Overclocking the E series chips has always been a little tricky. On my Ivy-E 6 core for example I've had to completely replace my CPU cooling setup, buy a new case, and upgrade the fans as the cooling gear I had for my previous overclocked 2600 just wouldn't cut it (like at all).
OCs are also pretty modest compared to consumer i7/i5. My 3.4Ghz i7-4930K OCs to just over 4.4 for stable daily use with decent water cooling (and a 280mm rad). If I dial memory speeds down to 1600 (from 2133) I can get 4.6 out of it and it's mostly stable. With 6 cores and quad channel ram there are just too many things interacting to easily get the crazy 5Ghz+ speeds that quad core i5/i7s can do.
Add to that Haswell's integrated VRMs and the silicon lottery gets that much harder. This release and the E series as a whole is all about the epeen pure and simple (still cool though, might have to upgrade if someone finds a golden batch or something). Windows user, because these are for toys...
Well the good news is you are at least able to map internal (think NATish) ip6 addresses to external internet facing addresses on a 1 to 1 basis. This allows for some level of centralized management, the use of custom addresses corresponding to floor/room number/whatever. Of course that still means you have a whole new set of management headaches as such 1 to 1 mappings are not terribly simple to manage once you get a fair number of connected devices going. I'm sure there are already tools around to put mapped ips into groups for management purposes but I can't help but feel like subnetting and NAT are too useful to leave behind. On a software defined network though ip6 sounds like a non-issue.
While I do agree with your assessment of Microsoft's approach to their customer base, you're dead wrong about this driving new customers to Office 365. If your outfit does any BYOD at all then surely "how can I edit excel/power point from my iPad" must be toward the top of your most frequently asked questions list. A single night's hotel bill for any of your traveling workforce is likely to be near or above the $70 that an annual subscription costs, so I wouldn't expect to see that as an issue. Consumers will probably be a harder sell for sure, but I'm shocked it took MS so long to try something like this.
The real beauty of self encrypting drives is that you can reset their encryption keys and thereby effectively delete them almost instantly. It also helps with RMAs in that even after a drive no longer seems to be functioning properly you can wipe the encryption key and happily ship it back to the manufacturer (safe in the knowledge that you are still in compliance with various data protection laws). No replacement for OS level encryption if that's something you need too, but definitely a nice feature to have.
"I am not sure the raid hardware knows about trim commands for instance."
I've found that consumer drives actually work fine. Use RAID 1/10, increase over-provisioning (I just double whatever the drive shipped with), and back up to spinning disk (preferably in another chassis/location). Samsung drives have great garbage collection which does the job nicely. All this assumes you have periods of idle time (at night usually) for rsync and garbage collection though. You could even use a clustered file system if you need realtime multibox redundancy at SSD speeds, though you'd still have to have some time each day for garbage collection. Also 10Gb/sec networking probably. That's all a little over my pay grade though.
Well perhaps he won't know their exact salary, but if the American folks were paid over and above "normal" and this Indian guy was going to get 50% of "normal" the difference in lifestyle/dress/etc should be pretty obvious wouldn't you think? Seems plausible that a 50%+ disparity would be noticed pretty quickly.
Apparently I'm not the only one who finds it hilarious that a company which can't even seem to properly support SIP on their VoIP devices/PBXs (or unified whatever the hell they want to call them) is complaining about standards. Funny, they weren't the least bit interested in open standards back before they started bleeding red ink due to competition that wasn't afraid to build inter-operable systems. If this keeps up I might have to go renew my certifications. Cisco training might be worth something again!
"You can even turn on data compression right at the top of the stack on a Windows server, but of course that is only for the criminally insane."
This absolutely made my day, but you sir owe me a new keyboard. Tip of the hat to anyone else who's survived this nightmare and lived to tell about it.
IPv6 does indeed solve the NAT issue from a routing perspective. That said, one to one "NAT like" address mapping (in your stateful firewall) is sooooo tedious to do manually. Even a decent sized home network with 10 or 15 devices can be troublesome if you want to grant different rules to different users. Granted, many will probably find in the end that "IPv6 NATing" actually works better than creating blanket rules for a particular subnet or whatever, given the obvious granularity that becomes possible. Unfortunately, it'll be a while before decent automation for this task reaches the unwashed masses (you, me, SMBs, schools, etc.), and large enterprises aren't likely to lead the way either as size=inertia in my experience.
"...it's a popular misconception that an employer can't make honest references."
Well maybe in the UK, stateside it depends on what state (or even sometimes the county or city jurisdiction) you're in. Quite a few have made it illegal to say anything at all other than simply to confirm hire and end dates. Not only can you not say anything negative, you're obligated not to say anything nice either (though I would doubt you would face much risk of legal action if you had nothing but good things to say). As such, getting those calls about a former employee can be a somewhat harrowing experience as it's difficult to know exactly what rules apply to any given situation (and they can and do change without great fanfare).
In defense of AWS:
While that's totally understandable for those living outside the US, those of us state-side are essentially stuck with the NSA looking over our shoulder regardless of where we choose to park our data. Since my packets originate here the destination isn't terribly relevant unfortunately. If monitoring is an unavoidable reality, AWS is a wonderful service. I quite like the idea that I can spin up testing VMs, destroy them at the end of the work day, then resurrect them from S3 the following day thereby saving quite a bit over dedicated or cloud hosting from another provider. As a test platform it's really hard to beat.
I suppose Mint might be more useful to a Windows XP (or Gnome 2) refugee, but I've not had good luck getting people exposed to Windows 7 or OSX onto Mint. Since most people with these old machines will have used at least one of those at work/school I'd lean more toward Unity as the more user friendly interface. That's probably hard to fathom if you were used to Gnome 2 and experienced the abomination that was early Unity. As of 13.4 though its really becoming quite mature and is is a joy to use once you get over the learning curve. I, like you, initially resented being forced through that learning curve and went over to Mint, but Canonical had some tough decisions to make with Gnome 3 looming ahead and in the end I came back and now believe they made the right call. (I also missed getting security advisories, come on Mint...)
With normal people (non-technical) Mint has been a non-starter every time I've tried to get anyone to use it. For example, I set up a small company with System 76 desktops (which replaced XP Dells) a few months ago and didn't have to do any training whatsoever. Everyone from the baby-boomer management to the high school student warehouse folks just took right to it. Several of them have even contacted me to find out how to install Ubuntu at home. Mint is a very nice desktop OS, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't recommend it to Windows users. The 3 times I tried to get that done they were over to Windows 7 in a week, but 12.10 onward no one has yet rejected Ubuntu. Seeing this happen is what convinced me to give it a try myself.
Mathematically, wouldn't men run into the exact same number of assholes in any given day? Perhaps said assholes express themselves differently toward women (misogyny, objectification, etc), but I'll go out on a limb and posit that such individuals probably almost universally express their assholishness in a whole variety of ways. If someone's a jerk their gonna be a jerk no matter who they run into. Whether the conduct of male jerks toward females is more reprehensible (or perhaps simply perceived as offensive by the target) than some other gender configuration however could obviously be a subject of debate.
To suggest that assholes are only a problem for women however, is to needlessly isolate ones self from the billions of men who share your distaste for assholeish behavior. I think this is the logic you're missing here. Welcome to the real world where we all have to deal with assholes. Give enough people access to a public forum and some perception of anonymity and you'll have to deal with assholes.
"But we do have something that the East Germans didn't have: a working ballot box."
While I have to agree with the sentiment of your post I think you'll find that the NSA and their various programs enjoy widespread support with both establishment Republicans and Democrats. This would seem to indicate the presence of a false choice at least on this particular topic. Furthermore, the majority of voters in the US openly support some form of domestic snooping. It would therefore seem to me that the court of public opinion would be the logical place to start if you were interested in bringing about change. Fear of voters in their district doing as you have directed is far more powerful (and attainable) in a country where the donkey or the elephant form such a major component of individual identity.
Visio replacement? Fear not Linux user. You want yEd. Works great on Linux/Windows/OSX and has much better options to add custom icons than Visio. The learning curve is not trivial, but once you get up and running you'll find it much more powerful and efficient. Also it's 100% free.
I wouldn't be so sure that an HVAC system suitable for such a data-center would be cheaper than simply replacing a few hundred/thousand/whatever servers every now and then when this sort of thing happens. If a (probably very cheap) rubber gasket can reduce hardware failures by a decent percentage and they install a warning system so they can move the compute load off-site (and temporarily shut down the facility), then such an HVAC system wouldn't sense.
Have an upvote on me. RHEL/CentOS with any GUI is bordering on silly. Having a new and largely untested desktop environment is just outright craziness. I would venture that MATE would stand a decent chance of fizzling out before Red Hat got through with the necessary evaluations. That said, in 3-5 years who knows. RHEL turns slowly but it does move.
The point about dual NVRAM mount points still stands and mLAG != LACP. The switches themselves obviously know what's going on, but they're not going to appear as a single logical switch to attached devices which breaks LACP. Therefore, with mLAG your switches are making decisions independent of the LACP settings on attached servers. STP would probably still bail you out if you did something dumb enough (oops wrong port), but having no automatic verification sounds frightening. I really don't think Cisco/HP have anything worth looking at that's less than $100/port, which is the real point I was trying to make.
Saying the 6500 series is for SME is kind of a stretch in this economy (though VSS is easily as good or better than anything I've seen from Netgear/Dlink/ect.). I mean those are like $4,000 for the damn chassis. You still need to buy modules, fans, and power supplies on top of that. Got multiple buildings? Then you'll need a chassis in each one. Good luck getting that approved.
You're right to point out Cisco Nexus gear as vastly superior, but it's just completely out of the question financially so it'd better be. If your SME can afford those then you're going to hire a koolade drinking CCNP or better anyway so Netgear/Dlink/HP/Dell/etc are out. I'd argue that Juniper would be the lower price gear to compare to those, but most enterprise guys I know act like Juniper doesn't even exist. I'm admittedly in over my head on "real" Enterprise gear, so perhaps there's a good reason (other than that they've spent their entire careers working in the Cisco ecosystem) that they seem to dismiss Juniper.
Don't get me wrong, I love me some CLI, but Netgear (and I presume many other) "Smart" or "Managed" SME switches have the ability to simply back up their running configs over HTTPS. In fact, I have some 52 port 10/1Gbps Netgear switches that actually have 2 NVRAM pools. You put your default stack configuration in NVRAM1, and then back it up to NVRAM2 after confirming everything works (make sure to download that old backup into cold storage, maybe a USB drive, first). If you screw something up, just change the running config over to NVRAM2 and you're fine. The configuration propagates to all switches in the stack in less than 90 seconds. I doubt you could even ssh/telnet/walk over to and plug in a console cable/etc to that many switches and log in (let alone paste and activate your configs) given the same time period.
If you screw up royally, or a rampaging escaped gorilla destroys one or more switches, you can just upload a cold storage backup via the web interface. Again, those settings propagate to all stacked switches in less than 90 seconds. If you feel like it (just hate the GUI) you can even open the backup file in your favorite text editor and make any changes you like there. You still have to know what you're doing, but I don't miss Cisco's IOS at all. You can't "copy run start1" and "start2", let alone set up link aggregation groups involving ports on multiple switches using their hugely more expensive hardware. When a $1,300 Netgear outclasses a $4,000 Cisco you have to wonder.
As a Portland resident who does not regularly don Ray Bans or sip Pabst my first reaction to your characterization of our fair perpetually overcast city was indignation. Before I could even finish reading the summary of the podcast however, the chickens in my tiny urban back yard were startled by a gaggle of twenty somethings riding expensive bicycles despite the rain. You win this round el reg...
"The only thing I'll really miss if MS where to fail would be AD, but it wouldn't be that great of a loss."
You should really check out Samba 4. All the familiar AD features, and you can even use the Microsoft AD management apps you already know and love. For single domain setups (basically 90% of SMEs) it's already stable enough for prime time as a Primary Domain Controller (IMHO), and most of the issues with multi-domain configurations and replication are nearly sorted. No need to live without AD after all.
I couldn't agree more with the router firmware bit, but wouldn't a simple MD5 checksum sort out any issues with improperly transmitted packets? I mean hell even Android phones use these for ROM updates. One has to hope the IIS is packing tech at least on par with a $99 mobile. Probably more likely down to incomplete testing (due to say budget cuts, outsourcing, etc.) or a few too many flipped bits (cosmic rays and all that). Just my $0.02...
Intel's SSD tools application actually "secure wipe"s the entire SSD (including over-provisioning space). The program is a cinch to use too. The only other SSD maker that offers better software would be Samsung (their "Magician" software even optimizes your OS for you and gives you manual control of over-provisioning), and I've personally had better luck with Samsung drives as far as longevity is concerned. Granted, a few dozen drives is not much of a sample set...
Storing backups at home? Doesn't sound like good access control (in the classic paper accounting sense). What happens when the employee doing this gets canned or the company owner keeping backups is suspected of fraud? A safe deposit box at your local bank branch is a much better place for those external drives, and they're often either free or cheap-as-chips with a business account. That way you have a record of who has accessed the drives that is kept by a disinterested third party. It also comes with the advantage of being able to send a minion to get the drive (then directing the whole thing remotely) if you happen to be out of town when things go titsup. In the SMB space there is usually a good chance that IT is a one man/woman show.
This seems ominously like evidence that there will be no Ivy-E for the LGA 2011 socket. Come on Intel, I NEED that 8 core (22nm) part! Ok, not really need per-say, but many enthusiasts bought into the 2011 socket anticipating such a part. A minor clock speed bump is not going to cut it. If Haswell comes out with no Ivy-E counterpart then 90% of X79 owners are going to feel like they've been shafted by Intel. I also see that "official" PCIe 3.0 support is still lacking (though it already works fine "unofficially" if your mobo vendor has been kind enough to enable the feature). I guess this is the price we pay for AMDs total lack of a competing product in this space. I can only pray that they get it together...
This is Cisco we are talking about. A lot of their products "support" open standards. In practice however, one always finds the implementation to be hobbled beyond any usefulness and prone to any number of inexplicable errors and hangups. To go back to your Microsoft analogy: Cisco supports open standards like Microsoft once supported Java. Thus, I look forward to watching Cisco's long march toward irrelevance continue.
This is the most technically inept article I've seen in years (maybe a decade). Anywhere. Nothing personal, but Iain Thomson clearly needs to either find a new gig or apologize for slapping his/her name on an article his/her grandmother threw together after reading an Intel press release. I'm fairly certain you could find Amish who could do a better job. At least that would be forgivable. For shame El Reg, for shame.
Upvoted.
An HTPC / home NAS really makes life easier when you've got your whole family's collection of mobes, tablets, laptops, consoles, etc all wanting to get at the same data. The advantages of a full fat OS over a "smart" TV are fairly obvious. My wife and daughter may never use the mouse/game controller/keyboard on the coffee table, but having that option is great. I also like the advantage of having one interface that controls/records antenna, ripped movies, streaming content, console emulation, and BlueRay. And, if I decide I'm sick of that interface I can easily swap it out for another one or customize the one in use.
I'm not so sure I would go so far as to say Vista/7's security is equivalent to what UNIX and Linux had. Perhaps you could more accurately say it was similar to, an approximation of, an attempt at, or even a feeble shadow of those features. Still, I'm not discounting that it was big-time progress on Microsoft's part.
I would up-vote this a thousand times if I could. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the ONLY defense against being forced to hand over such records is not to have them. In the US there are no standing laws that would force Twitter to retain any record of these sorts of online interactions so perhaps this will serve as a wake up call. Such a stance on privacy could be a major selling point for their service in fact. The only use I can see for storing historical tweets would be for data-mining purposes, so perhaps such a move would be difficult for Twitter financially though.
Quite right. For this mission to have any lasting cultural impact all attempts should be made to include those who are not impressed by the mere thought of a robot tooling around on the surface of Mars. The first broadcast of recorded music from another planet is an outstanding achievement that should not be so easily dismissed by puritanical "science enthusiasts". This combination of boffinry and creativity appeals to a wider audience, and gives the mission meaning to many who would otherwise perhaps not have even heard about it. Those art fans get to vote/lobby and thus shape NASA's budget. If this mission is widely popular then cutting NASA's budget would be politically unthinkable.
I personally have a deep appreciation for both theoretical physics AND blues slide guitar. Are you suggesting the one is somehow superior to the other? Get a clue. I don't much care for his music, but Will.i.am seems to be a stand-up guy. A geeky kid who went to a science magnet school and seems genuinely interested in kids attitudes about science and even themselves. He also did a song for PBS' Sesame Street encouraging kids to be persistent, work to be their best, and keep a positive attitude. My 2 year old daughter absolutely loves it. Are you going to say that's garbage as well because it doesn't teach anything about science?
I think one only needs to look at the performance of 22nm vs 32nm Intel Core i5/i7s available today to get an idea of how small the gains from process shrink really are. Don't get me wrong 2.5% is nothing to scoff at, but it's not revolutionary. Add to that the heat dissipation issues associated with the smaller surface area and I think one could make a compelling case for the argument that we have entered the era of diminishing returns in process shrinks.
One could try to make the argument that smaller chips are cheaper to make (which has historically been the case), but the development costs associated with shrinking die size are going up a an alarming rate. This has been discussed in several articles here on el reg as a matter of fact. While I agree with your conclusion that AMD is in serious trouble, I think it really comes down to $$$ spent on engineering, not die size. Intel is outspending AMD at such a rate that even the thought of AMD bringing something competitive to the table should be seen as a complete embarrassment for Intel.
Yes, web hacks indeed. I'd leave the graphic designers out of this though as they are facing a similar blight as of late. Funny thing is, the clients never seem to care about the efficiency of your code or true cross-browser compatibility (even if the former would save them a lot in operating costs and the later would cut down on support overhead). Those hacks charge a lot less to boot.
I myself had to close up shop, and watch a lot of good friends get eaten alive in the job market. Ended up in SMB IT of all places. These days I count myself lucky to be out of that whole shit-storm. I wonder how long it will take till there is no one left who can actually write code and not just copy, paste, and replace a few numbers. Then again that is how it was in the beginning...
Getting a notification that your teenage son/daughter has been texting while driving sounds like a sensible and useful feature. When they get home you can question them about it, and punish/scold/discuss as necessary to encourage safer choices in the future. I could see this actually achieving the kind of positive impact the designers are shooting for here.
Disabling the phone or preventing texts however is only going to make your kids angry with you. There is a big difference between "I know what you did any you're not going to get away with it" and "I am watching your every move, always ready to step in and correct/prevent your stupid choices". By actively disabling texting you are essentially making the decision for the child and they're simply not going to learn anything that way. Add to that the fact that some percent of them will probably attempt to troubleshoot their phone when it is unable to send a message and you've now made the problem even worse.
Bahahaha! You've obviously never been to a gun show in the south. I've seen a (maybe 16 year old) kid buy a 9mm with not so much as a paper filled out. Asked for the Glock, handed they guy some cash, walked away from the table. Of course that was 3 or 4 years ago. Perhaps things have changed, but that's just one more thing I don't miss about Texas.
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