Posts by msage

Users of 123 Reg caught out by catch-all redirect cut-off

I left 123-reg a few years ago, I did move to OVH as I only need them as a registrar and I do the rest myself. However, I've just moved all my domains to porkbun, they are cheap and the support is great (although not in the UK, so there is a bit of lag at some points in the day!

Rebel without a clause: ISP promises broadband with no contract

Plume SuperPods

I had a quick google and it appears they are using plume superpods, a brand and device that I've never come across, the reviews seems ok, but they require a subscription to manage (I guess that's the £15 fee)

Wi-Fi slinger Ubiquiti hints at source code leak after claim of ‘catastrophic’ cloud intrusion emerges

Ad removal...

I can't see anything in the thread that says that Ubiquiti promised to remove house ads it added to the web-based user interface of its UniFi gear. They said they would make them easier to dismiss, but not remove them totally. As a unifi user I am seriously considering moving away after the last 18 months or so of bad firmware, ads, etc, etc

Cisco issues blizzard of end-of-life notices for Nexus 3K and 7K switches

Why did you ask Intel? Surely Switchzilla would have been the better company to ask?

Chrome release cycle accelerated to four-weekly frenzy

Desktop OS

"...which may be a little concerning as it recently crept past macOS to become the third-most prevalent OS shipped with new PCs."

Which is the second most prevalent? I had a quick look at stat counter to see if I could work it out, but I couldn't see anything that would back this up. And by macOS do you mean OS X?

Reddit gets downvoted as site takes a Wednesday tumble

Seems to be taking another snooze!

That's what makes you hackable: Please, baby. Stop using 'onedirection' as a password

Password Services

I use keepass and self host; I agree about the number of commercial services being a really high value target.

The other thing that people don't seem to have mentioned is the password vault is only as good as the password protecting it (or 2FA). You could use a password generator to generate the most complex passwords in the world and store in a vault with a password of Password1 and it's all been for nothing. In some ways the password vault industry might have made hacking more devastating than before.

Very little helps: Tesco flashes ancient Windows desktop on Scan-As-You-Shop device

I do this too, I love the way people look at you as if you're nicking everything!

You spoke, we didn't listen: Ubiquiti says UniFi routers will beam performance data back to mothership automatically

Re: "In other words, you ain't got no choice."

Or OPNSense.

I was a long time user of pfSense, but was using it for customers sites, something their license began to restrict, we would sell hardware with pfSense installed on it, according to our interpretation of this https://www.netgate.com/blog/its-still-free-to-use.html that wasn't allowed. I haven't looked back at the project recently so this position might have changed, however, OPNSense which is a fork doesn't have the same restrictions. Also 3 years in I find the OPNSense GUI more usable and a regular release cycle is good too.

Not trying to start a holy war, each to their own :)

Accounting expert told judge Autonomy was wrong not to disclose hardware sales

Auditors....

OK, so if HP are right, why didn't their auditors pick this up and explain it to them during the due-diligence? I mean HP are basing their *whole* case on them not doing the due-diligence properly? Unless Autonomy lied or obstructed the auditors, which I have seen no evidence they did through the regs coverage. From the beginning of this case, it's confused me.

HP are basically saying that autonomy over inflated their sales, given the cost of the take over you would think the financial auditors would have picked this up before the sale, if not surely they weren't doing their job properly (so HP should be suing them - I suspect this might be part II). And yet magically after the deal doesn't look so good for HP they suddenly discover that the same financials they had access to show something totally different?

The whole thing stinks of buyers remorse, I am not sure how HP have managed to get it this far.

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

But Microsoft software doesn't stop working. I can still fire up a Windows 3.11 machine if I want to... From the article the sonos's will actually stop working all together.

Microsoft picks a side, aims to make the business 'carbon-negative' by 2030

Re: Mildly depressing!

Except for all the DCs they run for Azure, O365, etc... That's a pretty big smokestack

Re: Truly hope this is not just a marketing ploy

Given that Windows 10 will run on the same spec PC as windows 7, why would you chuck it out?

No Mo'zilla for about 100 techies today: Firefox maker lays off staff as boss talks of 'difficult choices' and funding

Re: Step up the game

That's what netscape did when it launched a free version. They never recovered and I am sure things are far worse now. Netscape had a product it sold, MS came along with IE for free and Netscape switch to a freemium model. I just don't think there are enough people who would pay for a browser... If you're a big corp who needs to customise it to your needs you've probably got enough money to take the opensource chromium and roll your own and I can't think of any home/SMB/prosumers who would pay for a browser. Not to say I think it's a bad idea, I just don't know who would cough

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

Re: The RPi 4 is a complete fail

You mean other than the fact it works for the vast majority of users? I haven't got a problem with any of my 3 Pi 4's which are in daily use since I got them... They are doing a mixture of tasks, none of them have had any issues (wifi / hdmi or usb power)

Sure, we made your Wi-Fi routers phone home with telemetry, says Ubiquiti. What of it?

Unifi video / protect

And this just on the back of the great advert fiasco. They released an upgrade to the unifi video controller that advised customers to "upgrade" to unifi protect that has nowhere near product parity with video. They reversed that one, but to do something worse less than a month later... Not good news

HMRC's HTTPS howler: Childcare payments site cert expired at 1am on Sunday, down for hours

Except enforced HSTS won't allow you to proceed with an expired certificate ;) so you couldn't make a proceeduntil the certificate was renewed.

The story so far: How's that Autonomy High Court battle with HPE looking at half-time?

Due Diligence

OK, I might be being thick here, but....

1. Surely HPE did some due dil that's why they employed Deloitte to do it.

2. If HPE should be suing anyone it should be Deloitte, who if found to be guilty should...

3. Deloitte should be suing Autonomy for hiding stuff when it did the due dil.

I really don't understand how HPE can think they can win, they *paid* a 3rd party and then went with their recommendation, surely deloitte should be the ones on trial here. Either Deloitte didn't get the information in which case they should have recommended that HPE walk away or buy for less. Deloitte did get the information and didn't pass it on to HPE, therefore, they are the guilty party or, lastly, Autonomy lied to Deloitte and therefore Deloitte didn't have the information and would have made an inaccurate recommendation to HPE.

TLDR; how come HPE are suing Autonomy (i.e. Lynch) rather than Deloitte...

Mystery Git ransomware appears to blank commits, demands Bitcoin to rescue code

Re: The Microsoft curse

Literally only one company in the entire article is owned by Microsoft :/

Backup bods Backblaze: Disk drive reliability improving

Re: "Backblaze has just four brands in its estate"

That's only part of the story though. HGST was acquired by WD however, part of the acquisition was that it had to operate independently. I think that has now changed and HGST are properly consumed by WD and that the HGST brand will disappear (however, with the time line in the BB article, I believe the HGST drives were HGST (although owned by WD)).

A2 Hosting finds 'restore' the hardest word as Windows outage slips into May

Re: The Cloud...

Even if it is written in the contract, why would you not make your own backups too? The bottom line is that no contract or SLA refunds are going to get your customers back (and most of them are up to 100% of the monthly cost or something, so aren't worth toffee).

Data doesn't exist unless it is in at least 3 places (one of those needs to be on a different site to the other two).

Plusnet vows to shove a sword in members area 'White Screen Of Death'

Re: Hateful website

Broadband usage; I was going to say that doesn't work, but it seems they've finally got it working. Just like it was months ago. But in an iFrame by the looks, and a bit bodged in because CSS popups cause scrollbars to momentarily appear in the iFrame. But hey, it's there!

Good spot! Glad this is finally working again!

Begone, Demon Internet: Vodafone to shutter old-school pioneer ISP

Re: netcom.co.uk

Yup! As first line support we were trained in getting both Linux and Windows customers online. Our Technical manager went on to work for linux.com and other famous faces.

We were also one of the earliest ISPs to support SMTP ETRN to push mail down to customers servers on dial up.

supreme.demon.co.uk

My first internet routable email address was from a BBS hosted on demon. Used to dial in once a day to check my mail and the board... Happy days. I paid a fiver for that email address for life... it doesn't work any more. Bye demon. The next ISP I used (and worked for) was netcom, not the netcom but a canny company in the uk who managed to register netcom.co.uk before the netcom came over.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

Caution

I agree with the comments here although I have worked with fellow techies take things way to far in the caution direction leading to nothing getting done and being stuck in a perpetual risk / change loop. While things should be planned, risk is not the reason to not do something.

If you don't do something, you end up with systems that are 10-15 years old because they just run and you run out of support. Then you have major upgrade issues as most of the time you have to step upgrade to versions that also aren't supported.

In my mind it is all about balance.

Tesla's chief accounting officer drives off after just a month on the job

Wonder if Tesla will do an 80's Apple style meltdown... On the plus side arguably it saved the company and made it what it is now.

I wonder if they can tempt John Sculley out of retirement :)

Whoa, AWS, don't slip off your cloudy perch. Google and Microsoft are coming up to help

Azure

That's interesting in the UK public sector Azure appears to be king. I work with a number of local authorities and central gov QUANGOs and the Microsoft cloud appears to be the platform of choice. I think in part this is because of the O365 feeder drug... Then comes SQL server, then dev environments and before you know it everything but the legacy application infrastructure is in Azure, with SaaS offerings picking those up (again normally hosted with Azure). One of the big reasons the organisation I currently work for went Azure is because we already had expressroute and storesimple, so moving to AWS no matter how good their pricing and services we would need to bring in a direct connect connection.

From a personal perspective, Azure DNS seems a lot better than Route 53 from AWS, I have found it easier to interface with programmatically .

Again this is just a reflection of what I have seen.

Another German state plans switch back from Linux to Windows

Windows laptop over Direct Access, get a strict security policy via GPO, use Bitlocker to secure the local HD, and use the power of their local processor.

- I agree and what does the FOSS equivalent stack of this look like? I don't think it exists. DA is seamless (when setup correctly) the user doesn't even know it's happening. Bitlocker can be integrated into AD for easy resets. Intune can manage the device as if it's local and push out new policy.

Mobile Devices

I suspect they handed out Windows laptops / tablets, because they couldn't find an equivalent. It is very hard to buy a laptop without a Windows license and Linux "convertibles" just don't exist in the same quantity / quality of Windows ones.

Take the Surface / Surface Clone market, these devices really do make a difference to field workers, I have yet to find one that works as well with Linux. If you want your staff in front of the citizen (which you do for a lot of local authorities activities) then you don't really have a choice.

I can see from this fragmentation that support becomes more complex (your first line need to be able to do first line fix on Linux and Windows).

Another genuine question is, is there a good MDM for Linux? There are plenty of enterprise grade solutions for Windows.

I hate to say it, I don't think this one is Microsoft's fault lads and ladies.

You wanna be an alpha... tester of The Register's redesign? Step this way

Date ordering

I like that the timelines are now correct. I might finally be able to let go of www.theregister.co.uk/Week

So the 'Year of Linux' never happened. When is it Chrome OS's turn?

Data Slurpage

This whole Windows / Android data slurping being a reason to move to Linux isn't as clean cut as it used to be, the majority of people trying out Ubuntu, which is bad for data slurping too... :/

MPs slam 'dismal' cost savings of government procurement body

Or could it be...

As an IT person in the public sector, we have been told to use CCS, more often than not their pre-negotiated pricing is more expensive than we have managed to get on our own going direct to suppliers (and we are small). This has been the same for all the public sector organisations (central government, local government and quangos) that I have worked in for the last 15 years.

CCS do not offer value for money to the public purse and that is why they don't get used!

Google's Deepmind NHS deal 'inexcusable', says academic paper

OK... but...

I agree that any data sharing needs to be covered by rigorous policies and audited.

However, given the value of this study and the compute power that these big companies have, I would rather the NHS used them than spent billions of the public purse to build their own compute resource that we would then, as a tax payer, have to pay to maintain and run.

If it was a choice between sharing my data with google and saving patients lives, they can knock themselves out (there is nothing of any interest there anyway!) or having the public sector run another IT project that goes nowhere and costs millions and million. I know what I would choose.

I'm not saying that there should be carte blanche but I think with the right safeguards this is the right route for the public sector to take.

AWS's S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn't get into its own dashboard to warn the world

Nest....

Errr I have a question... Why is nest sitting on AWS? Google not prepared to eat their own dog food? That I think was the most interesting part of the whole story!

3... 2...1... and 123-Reg hit by DDoSers. Again

DNS /= Registrar

I used to use 123 for DNS, but now simply use them as a registrar for domains, they are still pretty cheap. Then I either use Azure DNS or Amazon Route 53 for the name servers. Yes, Azure / Amazon cost a bit, but compared to the hassle of 123 it is well worth it.

Cambridge University Hospitals rated 'inadequate' due to £200m IT fail

HP....

Good old HP and their outsource to us save money routine!

The guys on the ground worked hard, but the lack of project management and EPIC buy in was amazing.

Windows 7 and 8.1 market share surge, XP falls behind OS X

Re: Now students, please use "free" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence.

While agree with most of what you said for the home market...

Powershell.

Jellybean upgrade too hard for Choc Factory, but not for YOU

Re: So let me get this right...

you mean the microsoft that supported XP, Win 7, Win 8 and Win 8.1?

Gotta love MS bashing!

Sonos rattles begging bowl, hopes for $130m cash stream

Gramofon / Rocki

If you are wanting to stream spotify / other streaming service to an existing hifi take a look at the gramofon or the rocki. Both quite inexpensive and work well.

Festive streamers caught in Vulture's claws: Gadget-ogle for audiophiles, video geeks

Audio Streamers

I think it's worth looking at the gramofon and the rocki too. I have a couple of the gramofon units and for sending spotify round the house they are awesome!

Trousers down for six of the best affordable Androids

Re: Not mentioned: Moto G v2 also has Dual SIM

Dual SIM... I know it's not popular here, but the Nokia 530 and 630 have full dual SIM support, i.e. both active at the same time. You pick which one you want to use for outgoing calls or can set rules depending on what you want to do.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/mobile/support/product/lumia630/smartguidance/?action=singleTopic&topic=GUID-1AF29027-8B2D-42C7-8220-BA52917EE9B6-8_10

Shaking that AAS: It's time for vendors to stop selling storage

Time and Cost

For me the big thing buying from traditional vendors has been a lack of any pricing online. This means they can weasel into my organisation to try and start selling to me. I understand the model, but with the "cloud" vendors and the pricing online it makes it a lot harder to justify 3 or 4 vendors coming and taking my teams time to do a proper investigation of the system they are trying to sell. In short.. Use the internet as your salesman!

It's a pain in the ASCII, so what can be done to make patching easier?

Patching Servers

I don't think it's only windows servers that need a reboot after certain patches. I am sure my linux servers need a reboot after certain ones too. Admittedly not nearly as much...

Microsoft’s 'FIRST NOKIA' arrives at £89

Re: A year too late

Not sure about your point here. MS have said every 8 phone will get an upgrade to 8.1 making the 520 current...

Who loves office space? Dell does: Virtualization to banish workstations from under desks

teradici

Dells answer to the local client was the FX100 . Using PCoIP rather than RDP / ICA. Was very good for the modelling data we used it for :) You do have to put a PCoIP card in the rackmount workstation too thou!

M

Yes! New company smartphones! ... But I don't WANT one

Moto G

I am surprised you wrote off motorola so quickly. The moto g is a very capable android business device. Can be managed by google apps (if that is the MDM of choice) or exchange. It's very cheap in the UK and has a brilliant battery life for a smart phone.

Entanet calls on equity firm Mobeus to back £14m MBO

So bad you mention the downtime twice...wtf.

Bring Your Own Disks: The Synology DS214 network storage box

Re: DF118

ReadyNAS Pro 4 user here. A great device.

Good for running VM's (VMWare over NFS or iSCSI (it's a certified device) or Hyper-v over iSCSI). Supports CIFS out the box too. Has a reasonable range of plugins... but... Netgear have abandoned the old ReadyNAS range and users and managed to kill of the community. Yes it works and works well now, will my next NAS be a ReadyNAS... dunno!

HP’s ENORMO-SLAB: The Slate 21 MONSTER tablet

Re: Slate 21 Owner

Thanks for the link, I already have a 'tooth keyboard that works brilliantly, I was thinking more along the lines of a game pad type controller. The one mentioned in the article appears not to be available in the UK at the moment and some others seem excessively expensive!

Slate 21 Owner

I read this review with interest! Every other review I have read just didn't get the device at all... which is a shame.

I bought one of these when they were first released, I have wanted a tablet for my kitchen for a long time.

I use this system in my kitchen and the only limitations I have found are with the software in the play store, for example, some do not pick up the Ethernet connection as a network connection. I hope HP release Kitkat to this device as I feel it will really help the 1Gb of RAM they chose to put in it! I would love to see a "hacker" community built round this device. I use an elgato EyeTv with my slate 21 and this makes it an excellent digital TV, with the recipes and web browsing and a few quality games this is the tablet to own!

Worms the 1990s hit is amazing on this device and thoroughly good family fun.

I am toying with getting a "controller" for this device, any recommendations?