* Posts by l8gravely

160 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2012

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Even modest makeup can thwart facial recognition

l8gravely

I ran into this recently, but in a more prosaic way. I was cooking some meet for a beef stew and the grease ended up on my glasses. Not enough to stop me from seeing stuff, but enough to stop my iPhone from being able to recognize my face. It was really wierd... and sent me down all kinds of wrong paths trying to figure out what was wrong with my phone, as opposed to me. Or more accurately, my glasses. Once I cleaned off the schmutz, all was well again.

Eutelsat OneWeb blames 366th day for 48-hour date disaster

l8gravely

Re: Rocket Science

Except when you need to do dates before 1970, say for a database of old Newspapers in a library collection that people might want to search on... then it's a pain. And when the library you use is abandonware and not exactly happy with newer versions of PHP without some hacking... then it's not fun.

Ask me how I know...

Brackets go there? Oops. That’s not where I used them and now things are broken

l8gravely

Re: You fool! You think your puny brackets can defeat *me* ...?

So why don't you mention what this horror XYZ is then? C'mon, share the pain with us, because that vendor needs shaming for sure!

l8gravely

Re: Any system...

sendmail was designed to be easy for computers to parse, so of course it's painful to work in. Eric has admitted he made a poor decision there. Then he compounded it by using m4 to try and make it readable.

As for perl, you think the syntax (not semantics!) is worse than any other language? You think python with forced indentation is great? Or rust, or go or C? They all suck to some degree or other.

Heck, I wish all languages would get rid of the ternary operator!

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

l8gravely

Re: So WiFi only for client connections. Really?

Still using a PCengines board for my firewall, sad to see that he's shutdown the business since I really liked his hardware and the lack of a fan. But I run OPNsense instead, which I think would run on here just as well. The only gotcha I see here is the lack of a serial console, but maybe I missed that in the details.

I made this network so resilient nothing could possibly go wro...

l8gravely
Devil

Just a fistful of dollars...

Busybox 1.37 is tiny but capable, the way we like Linux tools to be

l8gravely

and monsoonmultimedia.com is gone

I love how busybox is still here, but monsoonmultimedia.com (linked to in the article linked to from this one) is now gone. Yes!

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

l8gravely

Re: Hard truths

Heck, I remember when Modula-2 was going to take over the world!

Research suggests more than half of VMware customers are looking to move

l8gravely

We're looking to move for sure

And we're a small shop with only 5 or so ESX servers. We just want a cluster of systems so we can VMotion stuff around at will and keep the lights on. We don't; need funky storage, VxRAIL, VxWhatever. Just a management pane, VMs, and hosts with NFS datastores we can shuffle things around on live. ProxMox looks pretty good for this, if only because the price is better.

But the C-suite always wants someone to blame or get support from, and they don't trust ProxMox quite yet. But with Veeam support, it's starting to look much better.

l8gravely

Re: Open source replacements not good enough ?

And now that Veeam is oppering support for ProxMox natively for backups... even though people say ProxMox backup tools work great... it means one less thing to change in your infrastructure.

We've deployed some test instances of ProxMox on some ancient Cisco UCS hardware. Which works. It's different and I have to re-learn how to do somethings, and it's not quite as polished, but all I really want is NFS datastores, VMotion between nodes without having to tell my VMs they're moving (I'm looking at you Cisco for those crap ISE VMs which freak the hell out when you VMotion them!) and just work.

Don't really need much more than that. We're not that dynamic a shop, we don't need extran networking spun up, vritualized storage, or other things like that. Keep it simple, keep it reliable and let me get work done elsewhere.

l8gravely

Re: Consider Yourself

I'm both in agreement with you that it should be easy these days, but that it's also terribly hard because you need to get your techs used to something new. And sometimes us techies stick with the old because it's comfortable and we know it. And we're terrified of being made obsolete by new things. I've worked for years with people who insisted (resisted?) on using the GUI to do long tasks because they didn't want to learn the CLI or scripting to help automate their lives. Because it was new or different or strange or just _harder_ than mindlessly clicking on GUI buttons.

And when you're clicking away madly, you're getting work done! And you can show people! And you can look busy!

Me, not so much when I automate crap and it just happens and I get to surf the web looking for new techniques to automate my life.

Ubuntu Noble updates on hold while 20th anniversary teaser bears retro-styled gifts

l8gravely

22.04 -> 24.04.01 went well on headless server VMs

I did some headless server VMs last week without any problems. but they're just VMs, I had four identical ones to upgrade and if I screwed up I could always clone one of the others, etc.

I suspect it's more the sheer number of packages in a normal desktop rollout that caused the problems, but for targeted servers, maybe it was ok?

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

l8gravely

Re: Python script in the early 1980's?!

We had a row of VT100s hooked up to a DEC TOPS-20 when I arrived at Uni in the mid to late 80s. One of the more enterprising chaps had come up with a way to animate a choo choo train to scroll down all the terminals and then back again. Much fun to watch.

GNU screen 5 proves it's still got game even after 37 years

l8gravely

I still use it every single day, it's simply an amazing tool for what it does. Doesn't get in the way, you can manage it all from the keyboard and it makes my work be so less stressful. I've been using it for close on 30+ years now. I've looked at tmux, but the key bindings are hardcoded in my brain so I switched back. Tmux didn't give me much that I really needed.

Now to find a replacement for 'putty' which will auto-reconnect my SSH session(s) when they get disconnected. That would be really nice.

Tried mobaXterm, but it's just not my cup of tea. Expecially it's annoying re-opening the file share sidebar every time. I know I can disable it, I did for a while, but having the abiltiy to put two putty windows (100x48) side by side on my desktop is key, and mobaXterm just doesn't cut it because it takes too much screen realestate.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

l8gravely

Re: There is a proper way to do most things

On the left side of the Pond, where my late departed Brit mother only drank coffee, I got introduced to Tea at a young age and have loved it ever since. So far the best of the best for day to day is "Tetley's British Blend" closely followed by "Yorkshire Gold". Guess where Mum came from! :-)

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

l8gravely

As a learning example, this is fantastic.

I'm a total AI skeptic, but I like this article and others like it because it gives you a foundation to explore on your own what's happening in the hype(r) world of AI these days. It's interesting, and if I was more of a graphic artist maybe I'd be more interested in making silly pictures, but I'm not. I'm also very hesitant due to the hallucination problems in my co-workers, much less AI tools doing wierd things.

But as a curious person, this is some fun stuff to play with and try to figure out how it would help me make my life better. Or at least let me learn something new and keep my brain exercised. I don't see AI taking my job away any time soon, so I'm good with this stuff.

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

l8gravely

MagicWand? PeachText?

Who else remembers running MagicWand word processor on CP/M systems? I ran it on Heath Z89 boxes to do mailmerge letters on old Diablo daisy wheel printers. Fun times. Then it turned into PeachText our of Georgia, USA for a while.

Need to move 1.2 exabytes across the world every day? Just Effingo

l8gravely

Moving data is hard

I used to manage a pair of Netapp clusters at opposite sides of the country, and trying to keep them in sync so that they were DR sites for each other was... tough. We had a T3 at the time, which was huge for our small company. But 85+ ms of latency just killed Netapp SnapMirror copies, you could see the spikes in the classic sawtooth shape as the TCP Bandwidth Delay Product kept hitting us.

We tried using WAN accelerators like Riverbed, SilverPeak and others. We tried using 'bbcp' (great tool btw!) for single large files to fill the pipe. It all just sucked big time. It's just hard to move that much data when you had (at the time) 1tb of change in the data per-day. It just didn't work. It must be fun having google's resources to play with and to test things and just to learn how to do stuff better.

I really like how the data moving is under 10% of the code, it's always exception handling that bites you.

Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today

l8gravely

What kind of moron keeps backup system names the same?

I'm a recovering CommVault user (not really, still have to use it) but having done multiple migrations of backup systems over the years, you *never* get rid of the old one or it's name until it's long past the "need to restore" date. In this case, going from DAT to DLT, along with new backup software would have required *zero* need to keep the backup server name the same.

In fact, I would have set them up in parallel and run them in parallel for a bit, so I can make sure things are working. So there's some serious incompetence here in terms of management, along with the techie.

Especially since CommVault is it's own special brand of special where you probably need a windows server, plus unix media agents to actually pull the data off things.

So I call BS on this story...

NASA sends 4K video from a flying plane to the ISS using lasers

l8gravely

The real problem is the Deep Space Network... too many missions, not enough large antennas. I wonder how well lasers will work at Voyager distances? And will they impact optical or infrared astronomy?

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

l8gravely

Thank you all so much! Now I'll be printing QRcodes for my home network, and for some other networks I manage.

John

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

l8gravely

Re: Disaster Cascade

Reminds me of "melt" on my C= Amiga which when run would take a screenshot and then proceed to melt your entire screen down to the bottom. It was really cool and fun to spring on people.

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

l8gravely

And what about the Clustered version?

If I had known this was coming, I might not have spec'd out a TrueNAS M40 system for a client, which is an Active/Passive cluster pair from IxSystems. Sigh...

Meet the Proxinator: A hyperbox that puts SATA at the heart of VMware migrations

l8gravely

Re: Proxmox 8.x VM migrations hang with Ryzen gear

I've been playing (lightly) with ProxMox on an old UCS system with Intel CPUs and gobs of memory and network bandwidth. It seems to be working, but I haven't done any major work on it. I really should setup some big VMs, run 'stress' inside them, and then start doing migrations back and forth. So far I've been impressed, but not quite wild about how it all hangs together. I wish they would split the interface up a bit more to make the VMs be more central to the display of what's going on. But that's more of a what am I used to type thing.

As for AMD VMotion problems, that's news and a bit worrying. I wonder what's causing the problem? So what made you fail proxmox, besides the VMotion problems? How did you think of it overall? And if not ProxMox or VMware, what other options have you looked at?

I've also got another client with a TrueNAS storage cluster and .... it's Active/passive. And failover takes quite a chunk of time. So I'm really hesitant to do upgrades and failovers. My old Netapp boxes (which this replaced) just keep chugging along due to some legacy CIFS volumes which just don't quite work when trying to Robocopy them off the Netapp (old 8.x in 7-mode... sigh) but I do have to say Netapp makes damn nice bulletproof gear. It just runs and runs and runs. And it shows.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

l8gravely

I've had it from Eric's mouth himself that he screwed up sendmail's config format by optimizing for computer time instead of human time. The monstrosity that is their m4 based configuration language to *generate* the .cf files is just icing on the cake.

On-disk format change beckons for brave early adopters of Bcachefs

l8gravely

I don't trust btrfs either...

I've had multiple VMs get totally corrupted when trying to take a snapshot before the upgrade from Suse SLES 12.5 to 15.x, which they say you can roll back to if there's a problem. Not too likely. I had several systems work... but several also went completely sideways and couldn't be recovered. So I'm *really* leary of btrfs with my data. Right now I stick with ext4 and xfs, but hoping bcachefs becomes stable and reliable and performant all at once. snapshots and sub-volumes are going to be really useful down the line.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

l8gravely

Plan 9

I've got a treasured copy of Plan9 NiB sitting on my shelves, with manuals and everything. I really wish I could find the time to take it out and use it. The big gotcha today is a web browser honestly.

Having using various job scheduling tools, gsh (global shell), shell splitters to push stuff out to clients (tried cfengine, using ansible in a few places...) and all those other tools over the years, I have to say Plan 9 is seductive in alot of ways.

And maybe it's time to bring it back now that we can fire up VMs/containers and such easily now for testing and playing around. The GUI will be a problem, but maybe just abstracting it ontop of wayland where you have a single window that takes the full screen and Plan9 just runs it's magic inside it would be a way to play?

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

l8gravely

Re: Thank you Liam

The problem is that every library was written to help abstract out annoying to write code, or repetitive code. But every application or user needs just 50% of the library. It's just a completely different 50% for each and every project.

So if you throw away abstraction, sure, you can run really quite leanly and on smaller systems. But once you use abstractions because (like linux) you run across a metric crap ton of different architectures and systems and busses, then you need abstractions and then you get bloat.

How many of you grow your own veg and raise your own meat? I bet you all pop down to the local shop and pickup your food. Or go out and have someone make it for you in a restaurant. You've just abstracted out the light and lean process of doing it yourself! Sheesh!

So yes I'm being annoying, and no I don't have an answer for software bloat beyond pointing out that different people have different needs, likes and wants. And trying to satisfy as many of those at once is what makes software (and even hardware!) such a problematic edifice.

New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster

l8gravely
Gimp

Re: Amiga pedantry. Sorry.

I can't be arsed to remember, but I think the A2000 could use a 68010 by default? I rmember swapping one into my A1000 at the time, before I then upgraded to an A2500 with a 68020... but the memories are really dimm and I might be just confused. And yup, I'm confused. I must have just had an A2000 which I then upgraded with an 68010 myself. I don't think I ever had a onboard accelerator card with 68020 or 68030 processors, 68881 math coprocessor and MMU chip. But I do remember dropping $800 for a 80gb Quantum 3.5" SCSI drive since I was done with swapping floppies all the time. This during the era of the "stiction" problem with Seagate ST-mumble muble drives which people would have in their Amigas and PCs which would not spin up if you powered them down too long.

Memories!

Broadcom to divest VMware's end-user computing and Carbon Black units

l8gravely

KVM on linux works nicely...

KVM can be clunky at times, but it does work and work well. It's the VMotion that people will miss the most. But Cisco has been screwing that up with their various software packages that freak out for some reason if you VMotion them, which kinda defeats the entire purpose of having them be VMs in the first place....

Chromebooks are problematic for profits and planet, says Lenovo exec

l8gravely

Re: chromebooks suck

I bought the mother-in-law a chromebook 10 years ago because she kept screwing up her windows 7 (?) laptop no matter how I locked it down. And since she's a technophobe and passive-aggressive about asking for help... I just gave in and got her a chromebook. It's been awesome. Just minor niggles over all that time. I just recently replaced it because alot of sites aren't supporting the older 32bit version of chrome anymore, so I got her a new $400 one. Better screen and keyboard, and it will just *work* for her needs. She's happy, I'm happy. And I expect it to last her another 10 years.

This seems like a win win to me. Less crap in the skip to be recycled (or not). and less support hassles for me.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

l8gravely

Re: EMACS or death

I love emacs key bindings for basic editing tasks, and even reading emails using vm (viewmail). But hacking it... in elisp? No way... not going to happen, ever. Unfortunately.

I keep wishing I could use other tools with the emacs editing keystrokes. It's what my fingers are programmed for. Do I use vi/vim for quick edits? Sure! But then I find myself doing :wq! in emacs, or C-xs in vim and it all goes to hell in a handbasket for a second or two of confusion. LOL!

Of course you have to swap capslock and ctrl to make this all work well. I usually do it at the keyboard or BIOS level if I can, just do I don't have to do it inside the OS for each and every one I use.

Now get off my lawn, punk!

Author hopes to throw the book at OpenAI, Microsoft with copyright class action

l8gravely

So what about all the students reading books to write papers?

So what about all the students who read these books and write papers about the the information inside them? Is that stealing too? Just training (or reading as us wet brains call it) is what you do with books and media. It's how you learn and build upon other's works. Even citing small passages is enshrined in the Copyright Act (of the US, no clue on UK laws) as fair use.

But mostly I feel for all the monks who are out of jobs now that authors can just print their documents on a printer, without any human help! Woe!!!

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

l8gravely

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

You guys obviously have more money than you know what to do with. Or a totally an*l boss who has the pull to get the right system setup. Bravo!

Suits ignored IT's warnings, so the tech team went for the neck

l8gravely

why keep pop3 enabled then?

My question is why you even had POP3 enabled if the standard was to only support IMAP? Sure, you might need it for some wierd clients, but you push them off to a different server, or lock them down some other way.

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

l8gravely

Re: The last time I heard a loud noise and things were restarting...

I ended up replacing my Brother MFC-8860DN unit not because it wasn't working, but because it was so out of support that drivers were getting harder and harder to support. I wish Brother would just relase the source, it's not that magical pixie dust that it needs to be hidden away, it's just a BRScript (postscript like language) they need to support. So anyone, my old unit only did BRScript v2, and they're utpo v4 and v2 is pretty much only older 32bit compat distros. I didn't want to keep running older Debian relases just for printing.

So of course I replaced it with another Brother Laser Printer. I hope I get another 14 years out of it.

l8gravely

Yeah no... when I first got to my current job aeons ago, we had a problem with power to the entire building, of which were just one small part. But we were lucky and had a beefy UPS and a generator out back. Anyway, I kept getting called in on all the three day holiday weekends, because the power would go out due to squirrels getting fried on sub-station bus-bars. The UPS would pick up the load, then generator would start, and then the batteries would die. All very mysterious and all the testing we could do didn't find any problems in the system. We even took a weekend outage where we put a breaker into each of the three lines feeding our system and would flip it to see if there was a problem with only losing one phase causing problems.

Nope, the UPS, Transfer Switch (to change from street to generator power and back) all worked just fine and dandy. Queue much head scratching.

So I took it upon myself to check the Transfer Switch each month with a manual failover. Low and behold, then damn thing would only switch over two of the three phases when it had been sitting idle for a month, but if you did another switch over test right away, all three phases flipped over just like that.

Ended up with *another* all weekend outage to rip out and replace that Transfer Switch. Took about 18 months to figure out just because it was so intermittent.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

l8gravely

emacs for mail reading is wonderful!

I'm still, 30 years on, using a package called 'vm' or 'viewmail' in emacs to read and write most of my emails. It's quicker and simpler and my fingers know all the shortcuts. And more importantly, I can edit text in emacs much much much quicker and less painfully than in almost any other tool. I know enough to be productive.

But I hate lisp, in all it's forms. elisp (what emacs is written in) is a mystery to me. I've just never wrapped my brain around it even after all these years. I just find all the fingernail clippings in my source code to be obnoxious. But I still love my email tool, even when I have to goto another client for html only or graphical emails (phone mail client handles those if need be) which I can't deal with otherwise. And I miss a ton of spam crap and can whip through hundreds of emails efficiently.

Most email reader tools today are just point and click (or poke and prod on the phone/ipad) and just suck for any serious or largescale work. They're easy to use at first, but then you hit the limits and your productivity just drops into the toilet.

Linux will soon offer switchable x86-32 binary support

l8gravely

bcachefs is exciting

I'm really excited to see how bcachefs works in practice. It's always good to see a new filesystem, and even though I won't use btrfs because I suspect it will hose me if I stare at it too long (shakes fist at sky for failed SLES 12 to 15 upgrades using btrfs!) it's also good to see new ideas on filesystems and snapshots and such. ZFS had such high hopes, but the volume management aspects were horrible. Having to replace ALL the vvols when you tried to grow, ugh!

Which is why I still like disk(s) -> LVM -> filesystems levels of abstraction. Being able to move filesystems around without caring about the underlying disks is wonderful. Having each layer of the stack concentrate on it's particular area simplifies things. Keeping nice seperations between layers is also good. zfs and btrfs both tried to combine multiple layers and both, IMNSHO, screwed it up.

CERN swells storage space beyond 1EB for LHC's latest ion-whacking experiments

l8gravely

It will be fun trying to run windirstat or duc or other tools like that to visualize the disk usage, much less keep it upto date.

Why Chromebooks are the new immortals of tech

l8gravely

In-law support is awesome!

I have a mother-in-law who is a wonderful lady, but terrible with technology. I got a 32bit Chromebook way back in 2013 and it was awesome. Before that she would regularly bork her windows (8? 7? dunno...) laptop and have to call me for help. And being that I was 30 minutes away, didn't have windows at home and she was horrible at reading what was said on the screen... and terrified of making a mistake. Well let's say that it was simpler to toodle on down and help her out than spend two hours plus on the phone.

The chromebook (which still runs!) was amazing. She could read her email, see web pages, etc. All very simple and very easy for her to get around on. Occasionally problems popped up, but not often.

I ended up replacing it _only_ because chrome was 32bit only and stuck on version 78 and smugmug wouldn't load on there. $250 later, she's got a new, bigger screen chromebook and she's happy. I'm happy. And I expect this to be her last one ever.

And she can happily click on links, hit dodgy web sites, and I don't care. Sweet.

And we're now even closer to that ideal where I can get the father-in-law off his laptop and onto a chromebook as well, once all his apps move to the cloud as well. So it's a win in alot of ways, even though it's a loss in others. But for supporting family members, it's a total win!

UK flights disrupted by 'technical issue' with air traffic computer system

l8gravely

Re: It's DNS

As some one who was working on $WORK's external DNS yesterday and had my home internet go down just after the changes.... my heart started beating just a wee bit faster until I figured out I didn't take down all of our global company. Whew.... :-)

l8gravely

The /tmp disk space filled up and they have to clean it out.

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

l8gravely

Re: Pinball Wizard Master fell asleep

Elf needs food, badly!

False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration

l8gravely

Re: Noisy installers suck.

Obviously the developers of Java don't believe in this at all either, since every damn failure is a font of useless error reporting. As is python exception reporting too at times.

But I get that it's hard to find the right medium.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

l8gravely

Re: Good thinking that man

You do know that Starship doesn't use Liquified Hydrogen as fuel, don't you? It's using Methane, which is quite different, even if it does have hydrogen in the molecules.

Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid

l8gravely

Re: "execute his target script 16384 times"

I bet he assumed that cron was just a fire off once type batch system, and that old jobs would be never run again. He didn't know/realize it was a scheduled job, not a batch job.

Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again

l8gravely

Waccc'ing on the Wang

When I got to my UNI in the mid-late 80s, we have a Wang system for people to write papers on, located in the WACCC. So people used to go WACCC on the Wang....

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

l8gravely

Re: Installed Remedy

We have service now.... ugh. At least our internal admin is responsive to fixing stuff.

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

l8gravely

Packrat archiving

I've worked at a place that did design of fiddly bits and had been for many years. This team did the design and simulation work, and all the manfacturing was shipped off elsewhere. They have a standard 20 year retention policy. The process flow was more akin to monkeys on crack generating copious piles of shit, with some nuggets of gold in there. I would constantly get called asking for more disk space, or to cleanup snapshots to make space because someone had found a 400g log file that they didn't need and deleted it, which just made things worse as we *tried* to send the data to remote DR sites, but even T-3s couldn't keep up with the load.

Anyway.... all my pleas to just do all the work on scratch volumes, and to then copy just the needed data for each step of the work flow fell on deaf ears, since they had enough money to just buy more disk space, and engineering time was expensive and it was all hands on deck to get the next batch of widgets out the door, etc. And when the work got slack, no one wanted to spend time fixing the process, they just all relaxed and took it easy until the next $FIRE came around and it was 24x7 work again.

So now people are gone, businesses closed down, and I'm still there because I'm a moron and I get tasked with pulling old data back so they can "look for a spreadsheet" or "random design document I want to reference" or "the guys who build the widgets lost the plans and do we have a copy still from 15 years ago".

So the comments on backups vs. archiving really mean alot to me.

.

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