Posts by buchan 11 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Oct 2012
> So they virtualised their virtualised platform?
Not really. They made their new virtualised platform compatible with their old one.
Specifically, David Woodhouse completed the work to allow the Linux kernel's kvm hypervisor to support Xen hypercalls.
See:
* https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.12-KVM-Changes
* https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.12
* https://lore.kernel.org/kvm/20210111195725.4601-5-dwmw2@infradead.org/T/
> Right, because version numbers between different things are always equivalent. Version numbers are an objective metric of progress.
No, but in this case they do seem to be.
Go read the recent release notes for OpenOffice 4.1.11 (e.g. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/AOO+4.1.11+Release+Notes which notes 3 "improvements" and "4 bug fixes") vs. LibreOffice 7.2.5 "This version includes 90 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility. The changelogs provide details of the fixes: changes in RC1 and changes in RC2." ( https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.5/RC1 , https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.5/RC2 ).
OpenOffice is basically on life support only.
> Given how many times the spooks seem to leave official laptops in strip clubs or in the back of taxis, how long do we think it will be before top secret data is found in a misconfigured S3 bucket?
You'd need to have gained access to the government network first. These regions won't be connected to the internet.
> Oh, yes. Hell yes!, compared to Linux.
You mean Debian, not all Linux distros, many of which are more pragmatic about things like firmware.
> Users who choose MacOS do so because they do not have to know how anything behind the curtain works.
Until you venture out of the Apple eco-system, and find that some hardware doesn't work as well with MacOS as it does with Windows or Linux. One example I have run into recently is MacOS 10.15 refusing to connect to a Logitech MX Master 2S (until you install a 3rd-party Bluetooth utility called blueutil and force it to pair). There are many threads about this on Apple and Logitech support forums. But, connecting to it on Linux works without any hassles or command-line use.
> Users who choose Windows do not need to know what happens behind the curtain to get things done.
> Users who choose Linux must know how things work otherwise there is a strong chance you won't get things to work at all.
In my experience, not any more than Windows users.
My wife and kids use Linux on a desktop computer at home. Yes, I installed it, but I didn't need to use a CLI at all to get anything working for them.
However, I regularly have to help my mother with her Windows laptop. While fixing these issues may not necessarily require CLI use, the issues are often more frustrating, and troubleshooting is more difficult because of lack of deep access into the OS.
> The historic "The Luxury of Ignorance" essay, http://catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html, tells the story...
This article is 17 years old. Even at the time it was written, there were more user-friendly distros where printing was as easy to setup as Windows (assuming the printer was supported), but even Fedora has had usable printer configuration out-the-box for at least the past 10 years.
BTW., Apple now uses CUPS for printing ...
4 days before this article, AWS launched a similar feature for EBS:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-multi-attach-for-provisioned-iops-io1-amazon-ebs-volumes/
> Each EBS volume, when configured with the new Multi-Attach option, can be attached to a maximum of 16 EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone. Additionally, each Nitro-based EC2 instance can support the attachment of multiple Multi-Attach enabled EBS volumes.
> Multi-Attach for Provisioned IOPS (io1) volumes on Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is available today at no extra charge to customers in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions.
> By properly, I mean something like the client connects to a 'storage Director" service, sets up a persistent connection and requests the location of a specific storage bucket along with a flag of "Inform me if the location of this bucket changes".
And when your "storage Director" service is taking millions of TPS, how do you scale it?
When it is taking millions of concurrent TCP connections, how do you scale up to handle more connections (taking into account that you only have ~64k TCP ports available per IP address)?
> basically AWS need RPKI and DNSSEC implemented NOW but so much for the marketing dept taking that onboard... we need someone who cares and has the technical ability to actually champion it...
DNSSEC has nothing to do with this.
For RPKI to help here, it would require the entire internet to support and enforce RPKI, so I don't know whose marketing dept you are talking about ...
> Linux desktop and why it is and will remain POS together with all applications for it
If your distro is too old for the normal binaries, or to use Flatpak (the better solution for any distro released in the last 4 years), use the AppImage:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/appimage/
"LibreOffice AppImages were tested and run on these old versions of stable distributions and their newer versions - Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Debian 6, Fedora 12, openSUSE 11.3, Mageia 2, PCLinuxOS 2013.07.15, Puppy 6, Salix 13.37 (Slackware), CentOS 6"
> I used to work at HP and we setup thousands of Red Hat servers. I don't think any ever had any UI installed. They were all on virtual machines in data centers and SSH was the only access into them.
Sure, and my previous job was providing infrastructure for an ISP (couldn't use "cloud" or other people's data centres for some deployments), where the the entire stack (virtualisation = RHEV, OS = RHEL, application server = JBoss) was Red Hat, and yes, the servers didn't have an X server installed, and only the minimal X libraries for the JRE package to install.
> If you did need X11 for some special software package it was probably just VNC with TWM.
Why would you install VNC for X11 when you could just use, you know, X11 (and e.g. ssh)?
> For desktop Linux, there are much better distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, etc.
There are cases where RHEL is the better distribution. One of them is that the supported IDE for JBoss is JBoss developer studio ( https://developers.redhat.com/products/devstudio/download/ ) which is officially supported on RHEL. While it works fine on other distros, it's easier to get the same experience on a developer's machine (installing the jboss server from yum etc.) for deployment-related issues when running RHEL with access to the JBoss yum repos.
> You wouldn't want to pay for a RHEL license to get patches for a desktop system.
You don't need to: You can https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download/ since
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available/
Device/"ROM" updates were over-the-air via the package management infrastructure. i got my N900 with PR1.1, but PR1.2 on it. When it had connected to the net, I got a green flashing arrow icon in the status menu, clicked it, and was told PR1.2 was out, asked if it should be updated to, and later prompted to reboot.
The same thing happened with PR1.3, and now (after one download) happens with community updates.
Of course, you could also update with 'apt-get upgrade', especially in the event the update tool told you you needed to reflash, which usually occurs when there is too little free space.
(posted from my N900)
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