* Posts by J. Cook

2099 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2007

VM to ProxMox migrations- Anyone done one, and how was it?

J. Cook Silver badge

VM to ProxMox migrations- Anyone done one, and how was it?

Have you done a VMWare to ProxMox migration? what sort of pitfalls can one expect (datastores, cluster configuration, etc.) during the process, and what sort of impact would it have on the business in terms of downtime, outages, etc.

The scenario I am looking at is taking an 8 node VMWare cluster, pulling roughly half the nodes out and converting them to ProxMox, and then most likely cold-migrating / importing the VMs from the VMWare cluster to the proxmox cluster.

The hardware is Cisco UCS, the storage is iSCSI.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

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Re: I've got a tenner...

both.jpg

BGP and DNS are incredibly easy to screw up if you don't know what you are doing.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

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Re: Why do they need a submarine?

.. And Murphy was an optimist.

How hard would it be to rig up something that goes boom on a timer and will last long enough to hit the spot where the cable is? no need to drag an anchor around or dive down to it.

I'm just throwin out wild-butt guesses, and I'm probably very much wrong. :)

The self-created risk in Broadcom's big VMware kiss-off

J. Cook Silver badge

If I could upvote you twice, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

We are not what you'd consider a large shop- 25 hosts, and ~400 VMs. I have zero problems with migrating over to ProxMox (Cisco's appliances apparently support being run on it), but setting up the clustering, high availability, and load leveling is the real spice that makes life easier for us.

In order to set up a hyper-V based cluster? lots and lots and lots of licenses, which means an equally sized railcar of money, and a radically different approach on how things work on it.

HP CEO pay for 2023 = 270,315 printer cartridges

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Joke

So that's qwhat NeuraLink has been working on! /sarcasm

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

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Pirate

Re: Harks back to

Been there, done that, had the CIO copied on the "This is what I will need to do to action this dumb-ass idea of yours that doesn't actually need to happen, certainly NOT on a holiday when the floor is a mad house, I will wait for your explicit written command to proceed, starting with the machines that run the floor."

Had a reply from the CIO not even ten minutes later asking if I was really going to do that, because he knew that there was no way on this planet or any other that I'd actually go through with it. He also stated to hold off and that he'd talk with boss about Why We Don't Do Changes On The Fly In The Middle Of Busy Times. ::feral grin::

J. Cook Silver badge
Devil

Re: You were warned to shut things down!

... Does it matter? /snark

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Joke

"Pinkie, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I think so Brain, but where do we get rubber pants in our size?"

Curious tale of broken VPNs, the Year 2038, and certs that expired 100 years ago

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Pint

Re: Subtitle

Came here to post the same thing, and was beaten to it. :D

Oh look, the NTP server says it's Pub-o-clock in my area. ::snerk::

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

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Yeah. So is the newest set of updates for Windows 11, because Microsoft cares even less about beta testing than apple.

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: I love Apple...

iTunes (at least the windows version) has problems recognizing identical tracks on devices when it syncs, with the end result being that I have an iPad pro with a LOT of music duplicated, and the only real way to de-duplicate it is to manually remove the tracks that it doesn't think are part of the master library. (wiping the device is not an option, and removing all the music from the device will force me to restore all my purchases over the last... 8 or so years the hard way.)

To my knowledge, most of the music Apple has no longer has DRM, but it's an easily solved issue, which is to transcode it to something else. (Yes, I KNOW- Lossy format to lossy format BAD, etc.)

I do like physical media, which is where a good deal of my music came from, and I'll cheerfully buy a physical CD when the opportunity presents itself.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

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Boffin

Re: Series Hybrid

... Can I interest you in Edison Motors? They marry a Cat C9 diesel with a 175KWh battery pack and a full electric driveline. (the diesel feeds into the battery pack instead of direct drive, much like a train's power train.) https://www.edisonmotors.ca/

40 years ago, an astronaut first took flight from the Space Shuttle

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Go

Re: Fake!

Purple screens over here, but then some of the guests do tend to blue screen on occasion...

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

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Re: A wasted trip

Ah, the good ol Livingston PortMonster... Fun memories.

For [ISP], I did a similar job to "Edmund"- I was a field tech that occasionally got to go to a site at 2 in the morning (or usually catch a red-eye flight with replacement parts in two) to be remote hands for stuff.

At one point [ISP] had a bunch of Portmaster 2e units connected for dial-in internet to a large quantity of 28.8 modems that were all shelled and put on a custom-built card rail setup, with a heaving large power supply that could run a rack's worth of modems. That was before companies like US Robotics decided to make a rack mount modem bank, and probably a year or three after that 56K came along and [ISP] swapped over to all digital for the landing points

I did get to play with the portmasters that got pulled from sites as they were decommissioned; fun things, but for only having 20 ports on them, they were bulky. The modems and their custom rack mounts we tossed, I think- the boss wanted at least one of them, because he was the one that built the things.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

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Joke

Re: Fuses?

Usually, but like the old TV repair joke goes, "A three hundred dollar TV Tube will protect a ten cent fuse by blowing first."

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Go

Re: literally fell out of the back of the cargo truck taking them from the airplane

Maxim 11: Everything is air-droppable at least once.

When I worked at [ISP] back in 2000, we had a couple times where the Stupid Shipping Gang had ben called in for our stuff. The first was a Juniper M40 that was dropped off the back of a truck somewhere, landed on it's side, speared with a forklift and then delivered to us. We were not amused at the boot prints on the side of the box, the neat rectangular hole, the dent and scratch in the back of the unit from where the forklift tine was in contact with it, and all the Shock Watch and "Tip 'n Tell" indicators were tripped. Two MILLION US kopecks it had cost us, and to it's credit, it survived and served in our lab there for a time. I credit the wooden crate it was shipped in and the copious amount of foam packing inside it that it survived.

The second time? was a pair of Cisco ASR10000 units, fully loaded. The bare chassis was 50 grand at least, and the cards were probably more than a house. These both were also dropped off a truck, and since Cisco shipped them wrapped in cardboard (two layers!) and expanded foam, they were unusable when delivered- the packaging was held together with tape, the chassis was all bent to hell, we couldn't get any of the cards to move, and the department director, along with our Cisco rep, had some really nasty words for the shipping company, and by nasty words meaning "filled out a couple pages in the book of the obscene and profane" nasty. Words that were banned by the Vatican nasty. :)

LockBit shows no remorse for ransomware attack on children's hospital

J. Cook Silver badge
Unhappy

Asked about the reasons for the attack, the gang reportedly responded by sending the hospital's financial disclosures, suggesting it either thought it was indeed a corporate entity or confused the meaning of "nonprofit" for an organization that generates zero revenue.

Another fun fact to keep in mind:

In the US and depending on the type of non-profit, the financials of the organization may already be publicly accessible via the organization's form 990 (which is an annual report filed with the organization's tax return.) So Lockbit dumping that was kind of pointless.

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

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Go

Re: "Out-of-date" routers?

a year or two ago, I spent some real money (roughly 800 US pesos!) and swapped out my aging set of WRT54GLs with a small-ish Ubiquiti setup. Two APs, a couple managed switches, the firewall and 'cloud key' device (which is the management unit for the whole thing), and haven't looked back. They update themselves in the wee hours of the morning when no one's using it, and the things are capable of MUCH more than what I use them for. ( I don't do the camera or access control thing with them, because I'm not that paranoid, although I might get one and put it somewhere as a cat-cam or something...)

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: Explain again to me

Alternatively, there are Compact Flash to IDE adapters, which is effectively a low-rent SSD for that age of machine. Buddy of mine uses to use those for point of sales terminals, because all kinds of stuff that was incompatible with electronics somehow managed to find their way inside a mostly sealed box. (One time it was eggs- our guess is that some chucklehead poured a container of pre-scrambled eggs on the unit...)

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

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Coffee/keyboard

Re: Disappointed

:: awards you one internet ::

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

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Boffin

You can blame Microsoft for the large number of corporate internal networks that use [company].local as their Active Directory domain, because at one point they recommended it (according to wikipedia, anyway.)

I will be honest, I have no idea how difficult changing the name of an Active Directory is after it's been created, and I'm a little leery of trying it. (It's probably be easier to stand up a new one and migrate everyone over. )

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

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Go

THIS.

Just ask MCI Worldcom, and every other telco that all used the EBITDA method (and some creative accounting) to show how profitable they were, when in reality they were trashfires.

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

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Go

Re: click bait

DING DING DING!!!!

It's like a car- the manufacturer sets a 'recommended' maintenance schedule, it's up to the owner to follow/adjust it for their specific use case.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

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Go

Re: This far down in the comments

Along with stripping out _some_ forms of password protection, too, unless the chuckleheads went full paranoia with the "let word/Excel encrypt the document" button. I'm sorry Karen, but your grandmother's chocolate cake recipe does not require military grade encryption, and unless you've remembered the password on your file, you'll have to type it back in from the magazine clipping your grandmother got it from originally. /sarcasm

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

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FAIL

Re: "to make printing a subscription"

As an interested party, do you have a link to back up that statement?

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: Toner cartridges do not need chips

There are both colored marks and plastic nubbies on the cart bays for that purpose, and if you manage to force the thing anyway, you've likely broken the cart and the printer, and that's an assembly that's stupidly expensive to replace. (as in "replace the entire unit, ya numpty!" expensive)

Or else, the cart's chip tells the printer what color it's assigned to, and the printer won't work unless they are all installed in the correct slots.

J. Cook Silver badge
Boffin

Re: HP Toner

The brother color laser MFP that I have only whines that I've put a non-OE cart in, but it doesn't brick itself, and I've been getting the expected lifespan out of the carts.

:: puts on printer tech hat ::

For the record, every color laser printer I've ever work on, or with, is largely a stack of consumable items stuff into a frame with the electronics to drive it all.

the toner, the fuser/fixing module, the image drum(s), the image transfer belt- those are all consumable items, and any of them can cause a quality issue. I think the most exotic color laser I've ever dealt with were the 'carousel' style units (HP CLJ 4500, and a Kyocera model that I forget the name of) that had the carts on a rotating carousel that built up the image one toner at a time over four passes.

And the wax crayon Tektronix Phaser was even more exotic- 20 minute warm up from cold start that burned a set of the crayons during the warmup, but once it was warmed up, it could crank out full bleed color page in 6 seconds and it was quality. (unless you did something stupid like force a black crayon into the yellow hole, which is why the crayons were different shapes.)

wonderful printer, but horrifically expensive to buy and feed.

J. Cook Silver badge
Go

Re: Strange words

And the LJ4, as long as it's fed maintenance kits on the regular, is likely still chugging along.

The engine on the 4si was good for about 2-3 million pages before it needed an overhaul, as long as you kept up on the maintenance kits for the beast.

I will note that [RedactedCo] at one point had a 4250 with 2 mil on the counter back in 2007 or so; the department that had it probably ran a box of paper through it every month. (they ended up getting their own copier that was used to handling that volume a few years later.)

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

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Boffin

Yeah, but that only removes about half the weight- you still have a great fricken big transformer in the guts of the machine, and that weighs a fair amount. And then, it's off-center, so having a second (or third) warm body to do the lift and shift is easier on everyone's bodies.

The largest UPS I've ever dealt with was a pair of 5kVA Smart-UPS units, and even with two others with me, I used my handy-dandy lift table to rack the bloody things, because we wanted them 5 units up from the floor in case the place flooded. AND we pulled the battery modules out first.

(There's a damned good reason why I have that lift table- You can only rack so many disk shelves by yourself before your body says "screw this, no" and something important in your body goes pop.)

:: wanders off humming We All Lift Together from the game Warframe ::

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

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Joke

Re: Appropriate response

It was a well trained goat, with the sole exception that it kept eating what little clothing the actors were wearing, or removing them from the set. /rimshot

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Joke

Re: Appropriate response

I think I've seen an adult movie about that one.

But really, with a sheep and a goat, while on a horse?

Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form

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Re: Why?

More or less for nostalgia.

Technically, I could probably poke around and find a working Amiga 1200 or 2000, but I have no room and no time to noodle around on one anymore.

I have a Picade sitting on a desk; it's cute, but it hardly gets used.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

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Facepalm

You know your coding skills are either genius, or an absolute dumpster fire when you look at a script that's 5/10/ years previous to solve some stupid issue and you comment "Who the f&%k WROTE THIS SHITE!?!?" and then realize that it was, in fact, you, and the code still works exactly like it's supposed to even though it's using a scripting engine that's four or five major versions newer.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

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Go

Re: Thank you for today's belly laugh

Yep- Except they spel it KWALITY. /sarcasm

My beef is with whoever decided that a recovery partition of that size was 'large enough', given that the smallest, cheapest drives anymore are 128 GB drives, and more recently, 256 GB drives; given the hassle with resizing the main partition and rebuilding the recovery partiion, a prudent engineer would have asked for at least a full GB, or better, 2 GB. the end user won't miss it, and the enterprise users won't care anyway,.

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

J. Cook Silver badge

Well, if you want to spend quite a LOT of money, there are industrial TVs built for the entertainment industry and other businesses that are essentially stupid HDMI monitors...

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: @Andy The Hat - Big brother is creeping up behind you.

Yeah, but the insurance companies have rather a lot of money to hire lawyers and fight it until you are utterly broken mentally and financially. At least in the US, anyway...

At least one of the companies here has been caught canceling someone's insurance because a person's teenaged child was not on their policy, despite the fact that the teenager has no wish to drive the car, the parent does not give them the keys, etc.

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: Perhaps it's time for vehicle makers to take note.

Personally, I'm planning on keeping my 2011 truck going as long as humanly possible, and if Edison Motors is able to build up an installer network for their 1 ton pickup retrofit kits, I'll be trolling for an 80's or 90's era 1 ton truck as a restoration / EV conversion project.

J. Cook Silver badge

I can more or less guarantee that they do not, can not, and will not update the infotainment on anything older than 10 years. Hell, you are lucky to find the user manual for the infotainment on such an old relic on their web site, let along any sort of update. (which means that the people who bought the vehicles with the in-dash GPS were the original "pay to keep what you bought running" victims.)

Broadcom ditches VMware Cloud Service Providers

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Re: Mergers and Aquisitions

both.jpg

Once I get a couple days free, I'm going to start work on getting a proxmox cluster built in a sandbox.

One of the problems with the entire VMware debacle, though, is that Cisco will not support any of their virtual appliances if they are not running on a supported hypervisor, and Proxmox is not one of those; This means that we'll be stuck with a couple ESX boxes just to run those for a while. :(

Windows keyboards to get a Copilot key – but how quickly will users jump?

J. Cook Silver badge

Yup; when I still had a logi keyboard, I ended up doing that with the power/sleep button.

For various reasons, I'm using a different keyboard altogether now (a Keychron K8, which I'm much more pleased with.)

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

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Boffin

So....

one of the many hats I wear at [RedactedCo] is email admin. Which means that when I'm not having prolonged, pitched battles with the support team about Why We Keep Office and Outlook especially Up To Date, I'm occasionally assisting the InfoSec team with their phishing tests, so I (usually) have advanced notice of tests.

Some of the ones that we've done.... are pretty clever, and have nearly caught me. Some of the other emails we've gotten (actual phishes!) are.... not so clever.

While I'm not officially part of the InfoSec team there, I work pretty closely with them (one of my other hats is the web filter admin) and before we had a dedicated InfoSec team, a lot of the incidents landed on both my desk, and the desks of the other admins, so I have at least half a clue as how to go about things properly. :)

J. Cook Silver badge
Trollface

Shameful confession time:

I have a post-it note on the bottom of my keyboard at work.

It says "bet you thought there was a password here, huh?"

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: PC-Board Dust Blankets

All of that. ALL. OF. THAT.

Back when we were still running physical boxes, we had to move them to a new data center, and we decided to give them a good cleaning out before we racked them in their new home.

This was always done outside, because no one wanted to deal with the cloud of dust, ash, and other smoking byproducts that managed to get sucked in. 'gross' doesn't begin to describe it.

Broadcom to end VMware’s channel program, move partners to its own invite-only offering

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WTF?

So... previously, it was a 'per socket' pricing. Let's half the pricing, but move to a 'per core' pricing, which would indicate that if you have a 2 core processor in a single socket, your pricing will remain the same. If you have, oh, a 16 core processor in a single socket, your pricing is going to go up by a factor of 8.

Did they hire someone from Oracle for their pricing scheme rework? /sarcasm

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

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Re: Half a pirate

Technically, in the US you are breaking the DMCA. (I am not a lawyer, your mileage may vary, etc.) for the audacity to break the DRM on the ebooks. But I expect you knew that, or you are not in the US, so it doesn't apply to you.

J. Cook Silver badge
Go

Re: Broadcom may get away with it but...

Same here; one of my multi-year projects, starting this year, is to find a workable replacement for VMware in our environment; I figure I have until our support contract expires to find a workable replacement that will also allow a migration across platforms without having to rebuild some 400 plus VMs. Thankfully, I also have a lab for this, and I can probably poke our VARs to see if anyone has some expertise for hire.

J. Cook Silver badge

Re: downsize the picture to 1000*600

Part of the problem is collecting on the debts, even on a court judgement- hiring someone to collect a debt can get expensive, especially if it involves travel, and Anon may have decided that it was just not worth the cost of collecting. In the US at least, bankruptcy will trash your credit score for 7-10 years, and is a punishment in and of itself. It's not this magic 'get out of debt free card'- there are consequences for doing it.

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Trollface

I'm upvoting this for the elegance, the entire philosophical argument being presented, this... masterwork of trolling.

Bravo, I say. Bravo!

J. Cook Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Apple sus

My relationship with iTunes is... a love/hate one, mostly for the reasons Master Campbell as stated. :)

While I do like the ability to buy the album or song that's running through my head on a whine (and if I have enough credit loaded into the account), I utterly despise how it handles playlists, syncing multiple devices, and randomly going "sure, the bits are on your device, but you aren't authorized to play that audio file that you bought a month ago because reasons.

However, there's a way around that: a) I make sure the music purchased is DRM free in one way or other; and b) I mirror it to other drives that house my media collection. If needed, I have a program that will cheerfully transcode the apple codec(s) to mp3. Said program is free (Foobar 2000), but getting a windows compiled port of LAME can be a bit of a bother at times, so I have the installers for both stored with the other installers I common use for my system builds.

With AppleTV producing an adaptation of the (excellent) Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, I'll have to figure out some way of capturing it for offline viewing, which may just end up with me going the same route as getting Nimona on off-line media- hoist the colors and fire up the ol' bit-torrent client and download a pirate copy.

On a related tangent, I've found that MakeMKV will rip UHD*, Blu-ray, and DVD media, and was worth the purchase price, although I'd recommend using a pre-paid or 'disposable' payment method for it. (I had some unauthorized purchases on my card about a month or two after purchasing that program, but I'm writing it off as coincidence, because the card information could have been gotten from a skimmer in the same time period.)

* UHD - aka the 4K discs. MakeMKV will read those as long as the drive supports it; I've gone a step further and gotten a drive that can use the LibreDrive firmware, which makes life a touch easier.

J. Cook Silver badge
Meh

Re: This is why I prefer unrestricted offline-capabilities

g1. play music that you have on physical media or locally stored.

g2. watch videos that you have on physical media or locally stored.