* Posts by DougMac

252 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2013

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Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish

DougMac

Except I've had my car broken into even with the crappiest radio I could get, and they still tried to take the $20 radio.

I'm not sure the bunch of carrots they pulled out of somebody's graden and left behind in my car quite made up for it.

Sure didn't cover the cost of the damage they did to the old beater to try to rip out a $20 radio.

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

DougMac

Questionable "costs"

Most people give away Ultra SPARC hardware now-a-days to other collectors.

The only people paying large amounts of money for any SPARC gear is the poor soul trying to maintain their mission critical whatever that company management is too shortsighted to pay for migration off of ancient museum level hardware that should have been migrated a decade ago, and they run around with their head chopped off shoring it up the dam that is about to burst with anything they can.

If they don't spec out the last generation of UltraSPARC that they want to target (ie. generally the last hardware that OpenSolaris supported) and looked for something slightly older, they'd find tons available for free or the shipping.

But I'd agree that there is no reason I'd look to run Illuminos on SPARC for any reason what-so-ever. No matter what version of Ultra SPARC they want to support.

DougMac

You'll for sure find interest on the Rescue mailing list for your monitors. I don't know how much action you'll get since it will cost hundreds of $$s to ship those beasts.

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

DougMac

NetOp

I loved using NetOp. Worked on so many things where other solutions barely did.

Crafty: Cricut caught out by user revolt, but will cloud stop play?

DougMac

Nothing new for Cricut here

Cricut reached their position in this niche market by changing the game plan every couple of years, aggressive licensing and patent litigation, and in general screwing over all their own customers over and over again.

Since their target audience just wants to get the thing done, rather than research the history of the horrible company, they keep going, suppressing any competition that comes up.

This is just same-old same-old as what they've always done.

Security pro's time-travelling Twitter bot suspended after posting download link for Adobe Acrobat for MS-DOS

DougMac

Atari is a shell of a name bounced between a new different company every couple of years.

I doubt there is anybody around trying to defend Atari IP. While Nintendo is very active about defending its' IP.

I think the OP was pointing out that there is a very large community of retro-gamers looking for old game ROMs and IP, vs. a 30 year old program version that probably has had zero users in the last 20 years (but there's always going to be that one guy...).

The torture garden of Microsoft Exchange: Grant us the serenity to accept what they cannot EOL

DougMac

Re: If there was an alternative to Outlook

Its not necessarily Outlook.

Its Calendaring. That is what everybody wants, but nobody else has any decent response to it.

There are some fringe 3rd party calendar solutions, but they are mostly here's something, do these 10 steps to set it up and hopefully it never changes/breaks again.

People could live with 3rd party email clients, mail setups, but they can't live without a working calendar, and the one built into Outlook/Exchange works too well compared to anything else out there.

VMware warns of critical remote code execution flaw in vSphere HTML5 client

DougMac

Re: Not sure why flash client is even brought up?

H5 client went feature parity with and surpassed Flash client in May 2019.

DougMac

Not sure why flash client is even brought up?

Why is historical old flash client even brought up in the article?

Is it, "we never had problems with the old setup so it must be the new UI that is the issue"?

Sort of like the eternal IT quote "it always worked before you upgraded it".

People always forget that the old setup had its own issues all the time too.

The wastepaper basket is on the other side of the office – that must be why they put all these slots in the computer

DougMac

Re: Once I had a discussion with a developer...

The good ole days before CPUs needed additional cooling and just ambient air in the case worked fine.

Fans/heatsinks ontop of PC class CPU chips didn't really get into vogue until 486 class PCs, especially AMD or overclocked ones.

DBA heroes don't always wear capes. Sometimes they just have a bunch of forgotten permissions

DougMac

Forgot the first rule of scheduling...

The OP forgot the first rule of scheduling. Don't tell anybody your _real_ drop-dead date.

Tell the people you need things from your drop-dead date is several weeks/months before when you really need it, preferably at their minimum "request time" they require.

Always give extra time for your delivery than what you really need.

Apple offends devs by asking for Developer Transition Kits back early, then offering them a measly $200 off an M1 Mac

DougMac

Re: An M1 Mac Mini isn't going to break the bank

I'm not sure why people are complaining about a device that doesn't match what users have in their hands. Wouldn't you want to test your code against the hardware that has been shipping since last November?

I did think it was a weird move by apple to charge so much for a device rental, big enough to make people think they "bought it". I probably would have done something like rental of $100 month, and you get the first 4 months free. 4 months probably bridges you until the real units ship, but you'll still get plenty of hangers on that can't be bothered, so they'll just keep getting dinged until they've more than paid for a new one.

There's always going to be those that "lost them" as they put them into their collectables vault, and Apple can just keep dinging them until they find them.

You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously

DougMac

Re: "the occasional overheated Apple III motherboard"

That was the fix Apple techs gave out as well, although suggestion was inches, not feet.

Pop quiz: You've got a roomful of electrical equipment. How do you put out a fire?

DougMac

Re: My manager used halon...

I'm puzzled, why would Halon, an inert gas, need to be sealed off from the rest of the building?

If there is something burning in a building, _everybody_ should get the fsck out of the building immediatly, having seals between hoomans and burning toxic chemicals won't do diddly.

Halon doesn't kill you, the products of burning things kill you, especially all the PFTE and PVC byproducts as they burn. Halon at an effective dispersion is at 10% of the air at most.

Halon works by disrupting the actual chemical reaction of burning, it doesn't "displace all the oxygen" or "alter the oxygen to not be breathable" as so many common myths have it.

It is an Ozone depleting gas, so that is why FM200 was developed. Same things apply though.

HP bows to pressure, reinstates free monthly ink plan... for existing customers

DougMac

Re: Alternatives?

Dell didn't make printers. They whiteboxed Lexmark and in your case, Xerox printers.

Just like Dell doesn't make Network switches. They just go with whatever Chinese OEM gave them the deal that week.

DougMac

'For life of printer'

So, the plan will all go away in about 8-12 more months, given the average track record of how long an inkjet printer lasts until it mysteriously breaks itself.

AWS is fed up with tech that wasn’t built for clouds because it has a big 'blast radius' when things go awry

DougMac

Don't most datacenters have separate battery rooms?

Don't most datacenters have separate battery rooms?

All the ones I've been in do bigger than some enterprise that has 5-6 racks in the basement.

Although I can certainly sympathize with the horrible firmware on just about any management systems dealing with power.

Typically I have to firewall them off completely from anything else management, because things like APC transfer switches respond to any stray SNMP scans no-matter what, and start sending email alerts out. (APC/RARITAN/TRIPPLITE/etc/etc/etc) managed rack PDUs are horrendous security nightmares. Up to a certain age, they had open SMTP, FTP, etc. etc. Why do you need to manage your rack PDU with FTP? Because you CAN!

Bare-metal Macs-as-a-service come to AWS. Intel for now, M1 silicon in 2021

DougMac

Re: It's not cheap

Compared to $59/MRC at MacStadium, which is where everybody already needing this service already is at. I wonder who they are targeting that they think they can get that price out of them compared to the established biz?

It's always DNS, especially when a sysadmin makes a hash of their semicolons

DougMac

Source control for config files goes way way back. I was doing it in the 90's.

Just because git is only a youngster and it's the devops culture now, doesn't mean other solutions weren't around long ago. My favorite for the period was RCS (released in 1982), and I still to this day have some config management solutions writen around RCS (exclusive locking for the win for system configuration files, not so great for source code).

SCCS was around earlier (1972), but not as wide spread as RCS and later CVS got.

People just reinvent the same thing over and over again, shift it around, and call it the all new revolutionary way.

Crooks social-engineer GoDaddy staff into handing over control of crypto-biz domain names

DougMac

Re: Security is a priority or a parody

But GoDaddy isn't cheap. Mainly upper middle of the road.

GoDaddy is a marketing company with a registrar/webhost bolted on the side.

They make themselves look far far larger share of the market than they really have.

Docker finally enforces pull rate limits, but reckons only 1.5% of users are affected

DougMac

Its always the 1% outliers

Its always the 1% outliers that abuse things, and take up 99% of the service.

Days before the US election, phishers net $2.3m from Wisconsin Republicans

DougMac

What?

What kind of vendors do they have that $millions are paid out without a second thought?

One would think that a single state's campaign would be paying out $10,000's on invoices in general.

Cisco warns VMware vCenter bug puts hyperconverged tin in ‘unrecoverable’ state

DougMac

Exactly. Cisco seems to be a year behind on supporting anything VMware, meanwhile VMware seems bent on having a 6-month release cycle with EOL'ing old releases as soon as 2 years old.

Leaving Cisco to support the trailing edge just before things fall out of support.

Microsoft? More like: My software goes off... Azure AD, Outlook, Office.com, Teams, Authenticator, etc block unlucky folks from logging in

DougMac

Re: ADFS

We had problems with Microsoft's systems reaching our ADFS server.

Seems to have been hit or miss per account.

Frames per second? Windows Terminal brings back text animation with the VT100 blink

DougMac

Re: I'll take a pass

>> the dumb terminal look is just not causing me any excitement. I spent to many hours looking at the blinking cursor in the 70's and 80's.

I think a big consumer of these things are youngsters that want to experience more of what it was like back-in-the-day.

I think those of us who lived through it the first time don't necessarily need to have the full experience again.

Can't decide which OS to run today? Why not Linux inside Windows inside macOS?

DougMac

VMware has already displayed its virtualization kernel running on Raspberry Pi's (ie. ARMs).

I suspect they would have the heavy lifting out of the way already, ready to wrap it up in a GUI.

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks

DougMac

Honestly..

Honestly, in this day and age, I'd *rather* information updates to the avionics systems came on something like floppy disk rather than tethering to the Internet.

Sure, they could upgrade to Flash disk or something. But then again, the 747 was first produced in _1968_

I'd imagine there have been quite a few package upgrades since then.

VMware's flagship vSphere now in never-ending beta, if you're up for it

DougMac

Yes. Various dates for various tools, but vSphere 6.7U1 in 2018 was feature complete HTML5 interface.

Everything else that used flash has other various dates, but I assume that is the big one you want.

Cisco restores evidence of its funniest FAIL – ethernet cable presses switch's reset button

DougMac

Re: I hate those boots with a passion

Double down on this.

I have to start jamming screw drivers in there in order to get some of the stiff plastic to release. Although I have ended up with unsuable switch ports because I couldn't get one of those stupid cables out of the port without more destruction than I wanted to attempt.

I've never had a tab break off unless I was trying to yank it back through 10'++ of tray.

In that case, I usually destroy the cable anyway, because screw it, my time is too valuable to sit and unbraid a single cable at a time through the tray. Just snip the end, pull it through, buy another.

It seems like its only there to pacify people that they spent $25 on this one cable it must last forever and reused 1000 times. Instead, buy 25 of the $1 cable and have extra on hand.

Here's why your Samsung Blu-ray player bricked itself: It downloaded an XML config file that broke the firmware

DougMac

Re: Why...? Just Why?

Data mining, retaining data to try to sell it off.

Its our future.

Dell ‘exploring’ VMware spin-off, insists they must keep their special relationship

DougMac

Re: Cool, cool

VMware works extremely well for those that are willing to pay the cost. I think there's a lot of options out there now-a-days for those that don't. I have a handful of other hosted VPS boxes out there that get forced rebooted a couple times of year each due to some problem or the other.

I'm not sure what you mean about their management being wonky behind a VPN, that's how I access our datacenters every day. No difference vs my local lab.

Anything needing windows for management is ancient history. Its all linux (proton) boxes all the way down.

vmotion is speedy.

So, sounds like you're remembering back a decade (ie. release time of VMware 3.x) and how much slower servers and networks were back then.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

DougMac

Re: Speaking about the f*ing manual...

It makes me chuckle to see the colo people in other cages oh so carefully label and string up the server keys, paired with each server, to make sure they don't get the mixed up...

When Dell only changes out the lock/key type every 5-10 years or so and I have a bucket of keys that would fit any of their servers depending on how far down deep you want to dig for it.

Remember when we warned in February Apple will crack down on long-life HTTPS certs? It's happening: Chrome, Firefox ready to join in, too

DougMac

Re: 2 year cert valid for 390 more days in sep 1st?

5 year certs haven't existed for xx number of years. The longest you've been able to get is 2 year certs since March 1st 2018.

Got $50k spare? Then you can crack SHA-1 – so OpenSSH is deprecating flawed hashing algo in a 'near-future release'

DougMac

Re: Old devices

Because of this and other deprecated ssh stuff, it forces me to keep around old systems, with all updates turned off so that I can still get into old gear that doesn't have any upgrade path but is still in use.

The alternative is to turn telnet back on and telnet into them. :-(

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork circa-1977 exhumed from MIT tapes, plonked on GitHub

DougMac

Odd? We already had this?

The original MDL source to Zork has been out for a number of years.

Ie. see this github repo

https://github.com/itafroma/zork-mdl

Perhaps this is signifigant as to be closer to the epicenter.

I believe the main problem right now is that there isn't a original MDL compiler extant that can handle compiling this code, although I believe there was some work to create a MDL compiler that can handle this code.

Firefox to burn FTP out of its browser, starting slowly in version 77 due in April

DougMac

Re: "FTP is an insecure protocol and there are no reasons to prefer it over HTTPS"

I use FTP all the time in a variety of forms (if you want to call sftp doing FTP, but also use FTPS quite often).

Granted, I _never use_ a web browser to do FTP, I have a dedicated FTP client on the various platforms I use. It is extremely handy to move files in and out of disparate environments.

I wouldn't care if Firefox drops FTP support, if you want to use FTP, use a dedicated client.

Surge in home working highlights Microsoft licensing issue: If you are not on subscription, working remotely is a premium feature

DougMac

Re: The most simple way is not mentioned here?

Linux seems to have a lot more support than you think. Linux anyconnect download is here

https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286281283/type/282364313/release/4.8.03036

If you have something not-cisco, and don't have to do proprietary Cisco wrapped up SSLVPN that anyconnect is, Linux has a plethera of options for IPSec VPNs. IPSec is IPsec. While there are many options, there are also many solutions.

There are many RDP clients that work well on linux. I don't think anybody would tend to think VNC is the only option. My main day-to-day RDP option is built ontop of FreeRDP that works better than the Microsoft RDP client on windows.

Of course that still doesn't account for the RDP client license that Microsoft will make you get because you aren't using their desktop OS that conveniently bundles said license with it. Also a Microsoft auditor will come in and inform you that if there is any chance of non-windows desktops ever connecting, that you'll need to buy RDP client licenses for everybody "just-in-case".

DougMac

Re: The most simple way is not mentioned here?

Linux seems to have a lot more support than you think. Linux anyconnect download is here

https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286281283/type/282364313/release/4.8.03036

If you have something not-cisco, and don't have to do proprietary Cisco wrapped up SSLVPN that anyconnect is, Linux has a plethera of options for IPSec VPNs. IPSec is IPsec. While there are many options, there are also many solutions.

There are many RDP clients that work well on linux. I don't think anybody would tend to think VNC is the only option. My main day-to-day RDP option is built ontop of FreeRDP that works better than the Microsoft RDP client on windows.

Microsoft's latest cloud innovation: Printing

DougMac

Re: Windows 365 Cloud ?

Microsoft maintains their own, and all the big email players have moved to their own inhouse filtering/RBL. External filters and RBLs are only in use by companies that haven't migrated into one of the big players.

OOTH, Microsoft's Postmaster services actually can clear out blocks if you know how to work their system (which is draconianly difficult). As opposed to say, Google, which tosses their hands up in the air and say maybe it'll clear in a day, week, month, we dunno.

Anybody putting something in front of the Microsoft setup is probably not using it right as designed, which requires end users training it (ie. flagging SPAM, moving HAM out of SPAM folders, etc). Many users don't want to bother training their SPAM filter, so they throw something else in front.

You. Drop and give me 20... per cent IPv6 by 2023, 80% by 2025, Uncle Sam tells its IT admins after years of slacking

DougMac

> Who, aside from some enthusiasts, actually wants ipv6?

Anyone who is behind a massively overloaded CGNAT box that can barely keep up.

Death and taxis: Windows has had enough of clinging to a cab rooftop in the London rain

DougMac

I just wonder at what point that these software companies making signage think that a windows license is worth the cost of deploying these, and all the baggage that goes along with it.

I'd have thought everyone would flock to a linux digital signage or something with loads less license fees; although looking at the digital signage market, the license fees are not cheap, and the ones I've seen in the wild haven't been any more stable than windows anyway. There was one by my car park that turned from a bulletin board to a digital sign, back to a bulletin board for like 6 months until they finally seemed able to fix it again. I'm sure they were glad that they paid all that $$ so we have a nice smooth screen to tape their paper printouts to again.

Firefox, you know you tapped Cloudflare for DNS-over-HTTPS? In January, it briefly knackered two root servers at the heart of the internet

DougMac

The author of the article doesn't quite seem to understand the nature of the setup of the root nameservers.

There aren't only 13 root-servers. There are over a thousand root-servers arranged in 13 clusters, each cluster run mostly by different organizations (yea diversity)

They are anycast, so that your connection will connect to the "closest" one as BGP routing determines. If an organization does do maintenance on a few of the the root-servers, they'll stop doing the BGP anycast announcements so that traffic no longer hits that particular server(s) that is under maintenance.

So, technology much like the global content server networks like CloudFlare, Akamai, Edgecast, etc. run the root-servers as well.

Admins beware! Microsoft gives heads-up for 'disruptive' changes to authentication in Office 365 email service

DougMac

Re: Dum question

Yes. Older Outlook clients have a crappy IMAP implementation, most people used POP email with them to stay sane. Many others just chose it as default.

That method of deleting email is only the _default_ for POP (vs. IMAP where the default is not to delete). You can have your POP email client do a variety of options for download & delete, or delete on a schedule, etc. etc depending on options you tick.

DougMac

There definitely have been outages I've noticed on my work email.

They must have just lined up with your usage not requiring access at that particular time. Too bad that wasn't the case for me.

Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months

DougMac

Re: I understand

>> As for lets-encrypt - I set it up for someone almost a year ago, and haven't had to get involved since. The renewals are automated.

Unless you routinely update your code packages (ie. installed the package from a PPA or make sure to go get the newest code from their github), the certbot client from two years ago isn't going to work after this summer when they disable ACME v1 as well.

So, not quite plug and forget.

Outlook more like 'look out!' as Microsoft email decides everything is spam today

DougMac

Re: Outgoing or Incoming?

I've had to disable the SPAM filter on my company Office365 because it was catching way too many false positives, and not catching the actual spam.

Virtualization juggernaut VMware hits the CPU turbo button for licensing costs

DougMac

Re: vSphere vs Hyper-V

The only people running Hyper-V are the ones in the simplest setup possible.

If you are serious, and have the full SCVMM cluster setup, Hyper-V has already torn your guts out with its issues and problems.

The only shops I've touched that are happy with Hyper-V are single-host virtualizing a few guests. Very happy with the price. Aren't big enough to care about full on clustering, moving VMs from host to host, etc.

Everybody else in the cluster realm can't wait to get rid of it.

Take DOS, stir in some Netware, add a bit of Windows and... it's ALIIIIVE!

DougMac

Or the limits of the chip and systems of the era.

The PC was started being designed in an era when 4k was in common use, and was released with 16k as the entry level point when the hardware was ready. It used the 8088 chip, which could address a max of 1MB, and IBM needed room to map the BIOS, video, etc. into the upper areas of the memory map, which was common in that era before virtual memory mapping chips became defacto. That is the 640k dividing line, at a point of 40 times the memory that the base unit shipped at. Even if they had it higher, the BIOS and slots still needed to be mapped in somewhere in the 1MB space that was the max the 8088 could address.

The Apple II had similar design constraints from an earlier time, but nobody goes on about the 48k limit of its design until they did some bank switching on the ][+ to get that extra 16kb of RAM or more on the //e and //c.

XMS 2.0 wasn't done until 1988, (seven years after the PC was released).

Even when PCs were shipping with 80286's, which could address a whopping 16MB of RAM, most PCs of the time didn't have more than 1MB of memory.

By the time the 80386 came out, and things could address lots of memory, it was the software lagging behind, with most people insisting on running MS-DOS of the era of 16k machines.

DougMac

Windows server software required CAL licenses from the start. The big difference between Netware and MS is MS didn't _enforce_ license count, whereas Netware did.

After years of MS making it near impossible to actually figure out how to properly count, license or even buy said CAL licenses to be properly licensed, just about every windows user punted and didn't care.

Most people buying file servers compared the properly licensed cost from Netware against a vaguely licensed MS Server, or perhaps CALs didn't even come up in the conversation. Once the rollout went out and they weren't counted, audited, or were anywhere to be found, it was instant conversion over.

DougMac

OSX upgrades had the vendors abandond almost every scanner made for OSX in the past.

My Fuji Scansnap used to bring me smiles using it about just how well it ran, which changed overnight to one of the most frustrating things I own after OSX got upgraded.

VueScan can handle the older hardware when the makers all abandoned it. I'm not sure its at a level of bringing me smiles, but at least it is functional.

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