Posts by I Am Spartacus

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: A number of things wrong with this reply

A lot of University mainframes in the 70's and 80's ran the Michigan Terminal System (MTS). This was a time sharing O/s from University of Michigan. It has several advantages over TSO or VM/CMS from IBM. First it could run a lot of cheap terminals, rather than the IBM 3270 consoles; and secondly is was considerably cheaper and came with source code.

This did NOT use REXX. But it did have a shell script of sorts, but I agree not Python.

It did however have a feature that could send a message to the operators console. It was meant for things like "Please load tape VT12345 on Tape Drive 4 with ring in".

This was used by my University colleagues to write a small assemble program that could send ASCII art messages to the OPERATOR. It was oh so funny when someone sent BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING to the operator in the remote data centre.

It was somewhat less funny when the operators decided it was a message that management were watching their every activity and, as good union members, all walked out, shutting the mainframe down in the process.

Even less fun was the poor undergraduates who authored the hack having to grovel to the operators.

To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

Re: 'Exit interview'

It was during the exit interview that I was asked why I was leaving. When I said "well, two years and not a hint of a promotion", the HR lady was shocked. "But you turned down a really good job in the main computing centre, you never even asked about it. It was going to be a lot more money with great prospects". I was stunned, and said I knew nothing about it. So she showed me the application form that I had "signed" to say I knew about the offer but was turning it down for personal reasons.

Not my signature. It was my bosses signature. He didn't want to lose me so faked a signature.

After that, the exit interview turned into HR gathering evidence for a major disciplinary action about said boss. Mean while I went back to conside my BOFH response to stuff him up. Revenge is disk best served some weeks after you have left, but when served, the recipient should be in no doubt that he has been properly kippered.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

We used to blow VAX 11/780 cards regularly

We had a then very new VAX 11/780 installed in 1980. It powered the designed and engineering office, but also extended a terminal to the lab, on the factory floor. This used to run all sorts of funky electronic test equipment. The VAX kept blocking one of the async terminal cards. The engineer kept coming in, humming, harring, but replaced the card. We must have had 4 or 5 in the ifrst year.

The lab was a fair distance from the VAX. Rather than invest in long-line remote options for the async terminal from digital, the machine room manager decided to wire up a very long belden cable which was slung from the window of the computer room, over the heavy machine room, in tough another window to the lab. Fairly cheap, but definitely NOT in the Digital approved way to connect a terminal.

For reasons I didn't understand they used unearthed power leads to their oscilloscopes. All such plugs were colour red to alert people. They also had red painted un-earthed extension leads. And yes, it was into one of these that their RS-232 asynch terminal was plugged. The cable tended to float high, not being earthed. And eventually the high voltage would flash over to the other parts of the terminal concentrator board and blow its TTL circuits.

The solution was to plug the terminal into a properly earthed supply. We never did tell Digital why the problem went away!

Sadly, the computer room, lab, engineering workshop are all destroyed and are now a nice little housing estate on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal.

Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage

Up vote and a beer

for the IR35 comment.

Indian telcos to cut off scammy, spammy, telemarketers for two whole years

Re: Blockchain?

BlockchAIn

NASA pops repair kit in the mail so astronauts can fix leaky ISS telescope

Hey children - listen to this:

NASA: Our instrument is degraded. Lets work out how to fix it at minimal cost.

MY KIDS: Dad, my computer is slowing down playing Fortnight and MineCraft. I simply must have a new I9 enabled laptop and I need it now!!!!

Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today

Well, you do have that option, but not the obligation

Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage

It happened to me....

I was visiting a SUN site in Germany. The techie I had travelled specifically to meet was coming in from a different site. He arrived, shook hands, and then said he had to leave. It seemed he had, with driving, done his alotted hours and could not continue the meeting.

So, my flight, hotel, time out of the officem was all totally wasted.

For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage

Can confirm

Once, I mistakenly, took down a database. It was quickly restored and the applications brought back on line. Outage was about 15 minutes. I was asked to go over to the trading room. When I go there the head of trading stood up, shouted over the floor "Hey everyone. Here is Spartacus, he is teh cause of you nopt being able to trade FX when the BoE changed base rates".

I barely escaped with my life and stll have scars.

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Its a PICNIC

I had one case with an application that worked everywhere, except on traders desk. London, Singapore, Switzerland, all perfectly fine. And New York too apart from one persons PC. So I get to fly business class to NY to see whats wrong. Plug in my machine and its fine. His machine, and its true the app fails and falls all over the floor with a BSOD.

So I do a trawl over whats different and find LimeWire, DonkeyKong and an early betting application install. All, I might add, totally against company policy. I delete these, and HEY, the App works. I leave a note on his desk saying I have rfemoved the apps. I email him and his local head of IT saying these apps were removed, the business app he really needs to do his job now works, and reminding him of the companies IT policy.

I get as far as JFK to fly home when I get a call. Its broken again. Yes, you guessed, he had installed his apps again,

I gave up and went home. Couple of months later he got fired, but not for this.

Karma can be a real bitch, but sometimes it plays your hand for you.

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

Well done elReg

Thanks to el Reg's team of reporters, you kept this in the public eye.

Pleased indeed to see the US Lawyers and HP's Due Diligence team reach for their latin dictionary to understand what Caveat Emptor means.

Knives out for Pritti Patel and the UK courts for ever letting this get close to a US court. Lynch is a UK citizen. Autonomy was a UK company. The deal was done in the UK. If there ever was a case to answer it should have been in a UK court.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Not screwdrivers but...Today I learned

That magnetioc bowls are a thing;

Codd almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?

Don't for get geoquel !

Thanks for this. It is a nice trip down memory lane.

I used Ingress at University and loved the ability to do test finding paths around Berkely California on Goequels test data set. This was on the geospatial version of Quel, GeoQuel.

We also worked with relational calculus. But then we had APL keyboards so the symtax was easy to type. I do recall trying an early version of System R at the IBM research centre and was shocked that the single use terminal we had was commanding the full resources of a 360 mainframe!

I met Michael Stonbraker and Eugene Wong in London many decades ago. Lovely man to talk to.

Thanks for memories

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

I cut my teeth on DEC equipment

Still with top loading washing machine type disk packs.

We had one which kept falling off line, and brining it back required a reboot. These were the days when there was a key that slotted in the top which set the bus address number The microswitches were faulty, so heavy use of the disk, with the heads moving in and out, caused the unit to wobble and shudder just enough for the address to change.

Oh, how I miss these.

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Re: "Users would type into an X-terminal"

Most probably X.25, which as a packet switch system in use between banks long before DECNet or TCP/IP, or even SNA.

We used them in the bank I briefly worked at. That was using Sperry Univac 1100. You remember those? The ones with 6-bit bytes and no lower case charcters. Solid as a pile of jelly.

Re: The City: A chap knows a chap...

I read that and I can still hear the voices in my head

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

SO much or Oracle dos not work as you expect

I was also working with my team of Oracle DBA's. They had set up a backup programme using the Sequent supplied backup system. We were running on Sequent compuyters with Sequent disks. This is important. This was back in the 1990's

We also had a MASSIVE table. Gazzilions of rows that grew at a rate of round about a million per day. So we had a regime. Each month we create a new partition which we distributed over the disks. Older months tables were set to READ-ONLY, thus we knew queries would not take a lock. This all ran fine. Backups happened automatically. New partitions were created at month end and everyone was happy.

Right up until the Sequent engineer came in and wanted to takle a list of disk serial numbers. We thought he would know what he was doing, this being a vitally important (and not cheap) production data warehouse. He staretd at the front, and noted all the disks. We went round the back, opened the cabinet doors and knelt down to take the lower level disk IDs. And that was when he knocked the master power switch.

The disks all dropped off line, red lights flashed on the consoles, but he very quickly restored the power. The active partition was trashed, but thats OK, because we could restore from tape and roll forward. But the pervious months partitiions were not so lucky. But hey, we had Sequents backup program. Simply restore the damaged data and we are good, right?

WRONG! Most of our data was missing. It seems that Sequent does not backup a read only partition. We only kept about a months worths of backup because tapes were expensive, so when we restored and rolled forward we got tables spaces with loads of empty space. Major panic ensued because there was a regulatory reason for us having the data.

Sequent\'s did look into this. They scanned and scoured our backup tapes and eventually came up with a solution. Without any form of a lie, their solution to the missing data was to hand me, formally, an insert to our manual set that stated the backup solution they had sold us "Did not support readonly tablespaces".

And that was when we threw the Sequents out, ditdched Oracle and moved to DB2 on RS/6000 SP'2.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Re: Ugh I hated SCSI cables

I'll see your 120 pin EDAC and raise you the complete back plane of a VAX 11/750, when the massbus started playing up. Me (sysop for the VAX) and a Cray engineer (very bright guy) spent a happy early morning with a pulse mode oscilloscope trying to figure out why the VAX occasionally crashed the Cray it was connected to. Yup, two bent pins on the backplane. Feeling of achievement when we tweaked a pin by less than a mm and everything was rosy,

Mines the one with the HP Oscilloscope manual in the pocket.

Standards-obsessed boss ignored one, and suffered all night for his sin

Re: EMC Symmetrix

The pair that we had delivered were a bit of a palavar. First the freight elevator didn't quite make it to the 5th floor (I know, who puts a data centre at the top of a building), so we had to unload all the disks, take them up, then take the frame up. EMC then had a type of hover cushion that they used to make movement through the office easier. Mind you getting them up the step that allowed us to have the raised floor was fun.

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

Re: "We welcome Fujitsu's decision to pause bidding"

Hold on their Tiger.

Fujitsu bid against others for the Post Office Horizon contract. Reports are that they came very well down the scoring matrix, scoring just 7/10 as likely to succeed. And yet they STILL won the bid. Because they were the cheapest.

Not looking so cheap now, though, is it.

As I kept saying when looking at IT contract bids, its not the original bid price, its the TCO that counts.

Postgres pioneer Michael Stonebraker promises to upend the database once more

Well, no, its more than that

If you have every admistrated and As/400 system you will have realised that SLS is a double edge sword. It is wonderfully easy to work with. It is responsive giving you near linear access times to any data, where as directory designed storage (think VMS, Linux, Windows) you have to navigate the directory tree.

But weher it breaks, and breaks very badly, is upgrading the storage. Our system used RAID-5 as the underlying disk access, but implemented in hardware. To add a new array of disks you have to shutdown the system, off load the data to tape, add the new storage, reconfigure the RAID system and then restore data from tape. When you have a couple of 100 GB of data on a year 2000 version of AS/400 with DLT as a backuop, that is painful. And risky!

I think this is one of the lessens that Stonebreaker is bound to address.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

We have one of those as well. The sockets in the downstairs lounge are not on the downstairs ring main. They are on the upstairs ring.

And yes, I did find out the hard way.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Re: Shocking!

Indeed dress sense matters. At one data centre in the very early 80's we had machine room operators, who changed tapes, watched the pretty lights, and occasionally types a command into one of the many consoles. We had a lot of problems with our Cray-1, which was running some very long jobs, often for days at a time. It would just stop. Needed a reboot and was fine, but we lost the whole of that job.

After some investigation we found the a number of the lady operators were walking past this iconic and very tactile machine, and just ran their fingers over the outer panels. It seemed that the use of a nylon overall, and nylon tights created quite a static charge.

The unions were furious when all female operators were banned from going close to the cray, but when the data centre manager explained that the alternative would be a check that they were wearing silk underwear it was decided to go with the first option.

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

Confirmation bias

Was with someone in the early days of DOS. She put in the dreaded "del *.*" on her C: drive. But its OK. She realised the error "OH, God, I didn'y mean to do that".

DOS prompts "Are you sure?"

And she replies, whilst talking to me, "Yes I am sure I didn't mean to do that".

Sorry - But I did laugh

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Re: Fun with magnets.

It was almost certainly a Techtronix vector graphics definitely did have a degausing button on them. Given that the terminal was next to, and probably associated with, the drafting table, it almost certainly was one of the then goto terminals for graphics.

Menacing marketeers fined by ICO for 1.9M cold calls

Where do I send my bill?

As one of those constantly cold called, I want my compensation.

Britcoin or Britcon? Bank of England grilled on Digital Pound privacy concerns

Its reallt Britcon

I agree. I see no benefit, other than to reduce banking charges for business. For consumers and the general retain public we already have digital currency. We use every time we tap to pay, either with a card or a phone. We use it when we send money via EFT. Why would we need, or even want, a blockchain backed currency with a separate wallet that we have to manage?

For business, which pays a much high transaction cost than consumers do via high street banks, then there MAY (and I stress the MAY) be some advantages if this reduces banking costs and improves transaction speed. But that is very marginal.

Ex-Twitter employees pull Musk back to money table over missing severance

Lots of paper work

I am assuming that the lawyers have now amassed a large amount of paper, probably several ring binders full per tweep, what with personal statements contracts of employment, severance notices, legal filings.

Can I assume that these are now known as the X-Files? The truth will be out there somewhere.

I'll get me coat. Its the one with the Catatonia CD in the pocket.

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

Worst person in the office is the one....

That send you an email for something that can easily be done next week, or even next month

And then send you a whatsapp "did you get my email - its been 60 seconds and you haven't responded"

And then calls you to see if you got the WhatsApp?

No, Blair, I am just ignoring you because you are irritating

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

This sounds familiar

I recall the same problem when we installed an 11/780 in 1980, Trafford Park, Manchester. Sadly, the VAX, the factory and the whole company have now gone.

Oracle's revised Java licensing terms 2-5x more expensive for most orgs

Re: This sounds like a

Exactly this. Years ago, Oracle tried stitching my company up with a £3.5M bill for using a small Oracle database, claiming that everyone who saw, or who could poentially have seen, a printed report from the database was in fact a user, and hence had to be licensed.

After a protacted set of increasingty fractioius arguements we did a corporate transition to DB2. Oracle were told to leave the building.

Sucks to be you, eh Oracle?

Linux lover consumed a quarter of the network

Actually - This is me right now

But all I am doing is an Intellij sync of a new Spring Boot project and the network is hosed.

Its so bad, I am having difficulty browsing el Reg.

It's 2023 and memory overwrite bugs are not just a thing, they're still number one

Re: This crap should be fixed in hardware

Came here to say exactly this. Actually. I did, read firther down.

There is an alternative

If you have your program divided into P and D memory spaces you can avoid all the issues with buffer overruns changing the execution code. P-Space is the only memory space that can be address by the program counter and thus execute instructions and its marked read only as soon as the space is loaded into a process; D-Space is data space. Its read/write (sometime read only) but can't be used to execute commands.

DEC had this right in the 1980's with the VAX/VMS systems. Its all this crappy X286 derivatives that we have to use these days that let us down.

Barracuda tells its ESG owners to 'immediately' junk buggy kit

Re: Full replacement

The suggestion on another thread is that he firmware has been corrupted in a way that prevents it from being replaced. I imagine that this means the firmware has been corrupted to (a) Always allow new code to be installed silently, thus contiuing the intrusion, and (b) silently prevents any further update/downgrade/replacement of the firmware.

It has to be something pretty low level to force a full blown replacement of hardware units.

Instead of Halt and catch fire, this is more halt and be incinerated

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Re: gigaspandrels

I ask ChatGPT about Mu-RAM.

Spartacus: tell me about Mu-RAM

ChatGPT:

I'm sorry, but as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, there is no information available about a technology called "Mu-RAM." It's possible that Mu-RAM refers to a term or concept that emerged after my knowledge cutoff, or it may be a lesser-known or specialized topic that is not widely covered in the public domain.

If "Mu-RAM" refers to a specific technology or concept, please provide more context or details so that I can try to assist you further.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Spanning Tree

Well played Sir, very well played.

Spanning Tree

Oh, well played sir, very well played.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Can Confirm.

Can confirm that when halon goes off it does sound like a small tactical bomb. Especially if you are not expecting it.

Under floor halon globe blew the dress completely off one of our female tape operators and another drove the senior operators chair across the consoles and broke his arm. Unions had hell to pay for this.

No fun was had by anyone that day.

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

Re: Upside down images

Very good indeed!

Uptime guarantees don't apply when you turn a machine off, then on again, to 'fix' it

Got to love 5x9's uptime

I love the 99.999 % uptime. Thats a downtime of 0.0001% or about 52 minutes a year.

Interestingly I did have one box, a Tandem non-stop server, that absolutely refused to go down. Even when the power went off because the computer room was flooding this box stayed on, serving credit card transactions, storing them up to pass to the customer services Sequent when that finally came back online hours later.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

X.25 anyone?

I remember, vaguely, a time when we got X.25 connections. Great for connecting dumb teletype style terminals to your new sparkly minicomputer. All was well, until someone decided to connect a whole network of IBM 3270 terminals remotely over X.25.

There is a a price for the connection and price per packet. Al wel and good if all you are doing is sending a line of data in, with a couple of lines of output back, when the operator is present.

IBM 3270's were not quite like that. The controller used to poll the terminals at very regular intervals: Terminal 1- Anything to send? No. Terminal 2 - Anything to send? No. Terminal 3 .... until it gets to the end of the terminals and repeats. Endlessly. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, until the BT bill came in and the accountant lit up with an explosive "WTF".

Not my gig, not my problem, but I did laugh.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Mort and the unversal logic

“He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.

Which was going to be hard, because there wasn't one.”

― Terry Pratchett, Mort

Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …

High pressure halon release

I worked in a large data centre that was protected by Halon. It was quite the thing at one time. This one had halon globes in the roof and floor voids, Each globe had a pyroelectric charge attached. There was a trickle current through the charge just to show it was connected - any break in the circuit would show up as a fault. To trigger the system in manned hours an alartm would sound and everyone rushed to the exit, to be counted out, and when everyone was confirmed out the system would be fired. Sound good.

Until the control unit failed in the middle of a day and sent a "Fire" voltage down the circuit. The globes expploded whilst people were in the room. One went off under the airvent by the main fram consoles. This knocked the senior operator off his chair, against a rather unforgiving desk and broke his arm. Another went off in teh take room, where by chance, a femail tape operator was changing a 2400' tape. This one simply shredded her dress and left her wearing bra and panties.

As you can expect, the union had a field day, demanded c ompensation, danger money, etc.

At the inquest as to what had happened the scary part was not that the system triggered, but that half the globes actually didn't explode.

Fire icon - well, you know.

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

Re: air CON

I had that at an ofice I worked in. Two rooms in the office, each with its own thermostat, controlled by the HVAC plant in the basement. And it caused endless problems. One room would be boiling, the other like the arctic. The A/C engineer finally got them both balanced. All was fine until someone tweaked one of the thermostats because the temp was wrong. Nothing happened, so she tweaked it a bit more. Then the other team also noticed that their temp was wrong, so adjusted theirs. and the first team goit worse.

It seems that the initial installers had wired the thermostats wrong. Each one was controlling he a/c for the other room.

Thunderbird email client is Go for new plumage in July

f it ain't broke, let's break it!

Wise words, but if the children get in to the dev lab's it will be forgotten.

Four top euro carriers will use phone numbers to target ads and annoy Google & Facebook

In a time long ago ...

I worked for a now long-gone telco. One day the marketing and techie types had an away day to come up with new ideas for telephony products that were innovative, liable to earn lots of revenue and upset the major ex-government monopoly. For reference, alcohol was involved.

We came up with a great system: free phone calls. No line rental, no phone charges, just a totally free phone system. But customers would have to opt in to it by complting a fairly detailed life style questionnaire. Each member of a household (except under 16 year olds) would need to complete one, and every member of the household would be given a PIN number. When you want to make a call you have to enter your PIN, The system then plays you a targeted ad. When the ad completes you get your free call. One ad per call.

We were told by a well known advert company we brought in to validate the idea and to make the ads that it was "the most evil, intrusive idea they had ever come across". We all looked rather downcast, but they then said "We just wish we had thought of it".

So, I claim my part in prior art!

GitHub CEO says EU AI Act shouldn't apply to open source devs

FOSS = Free to abuse AI

EU: "Hey that sofware you released has AI capabilities. It is scanning X, Y and Z and making unwarranted assumptions and deductions. It needs to be licensed un the EU AI Act"

Developer: "No, Its Free Open-source software"

EU: "OK, thats fine, as you were".

So the FOSS community thinks that because its not paid for software it should be outside of any laws? I know its going to be a burden, but then I find it a burden to fulfil the law as well. You know, all that not doing tax evasion, not employing child labour, not being racist or sexist and vodiing modern slavery. I would earn much more, even as a FOSS developer if I could just ignore the laws I don't like. But that is not how the world works. At least, not unless you are part of the wild west, it seems.

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

The joy that is printing

I did an audit of a place which processed very sensitive information. The ultra, company critical stuff which, if released to unauthorised parties could bring the company to its knees. And as this was a small country, bring down the government as well.

The computers were all in secure areas. The code was well protected. Password were secure and changed regularly, with decent password policy and no password reuse. The users were in a separate, locked room, with key card access. They even needed their key cards to access their terminals, so going to the loo meant that their screen automatically locked. It all looked great.

Until I went through the control points for a typical job run. The run was securely started. It was properly audited. The processingwas done and saved in secure file sets, and then the results were printed for examination.

Me: "And where do the printouts go"

Senior Operator: "Oh, we put an elastic band around the line printer output and put it in the pidgeon holes outside the print room."

Me: "You mean the open area, in the corridor, where people walk past all the time?"

Senior Operator: "Oh, yes, I can see there is a problem here!"

Next week they ordered a new printer for the secure room!

Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Teams outage

Productivity is up significantly