Posts by el_oscuro

Bezos might beat Musk to Mars as NASA recruits Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket

Re: Back to square 1. Do not pass Go. Do not collect ...

That assumes that Blue Origin actually has a rocket. Something that I have seen no evidence of.

Casino giant Caesars tells thousands: Yup, ransomware crooks stole your data

Re: Just to make sure I have the timeline correct

Pro tip: If you ever go to one of those DEF CON conferences, bring a burner phone and laptop and wipe both before letting them anywhere near one of your networks.

Re: You Have to Defend Your Own Data ...

That doesn't always work. I got a letter from a life insurance company saying they had lost my name, SSN and DOB in a breach. I never provided my data to Equifax, but they lost it anyway. At least they paid me almost $10 for it.

Online tracking is alive and well in link decoration

Re: Is anyone surprised?

I remember that, and I consider Google buying Doubleclick to be the moment they turned evil. Kind of like Boeing buying out McDonnell Douglas.

Equal Employment Commission sues Tesla for racist discrimination, retaliation at Fremont plant

I wasn't aware that the old Twitter was a "carefully curated and censored echo chamber" of "the liberal left". Unlike Parler, Gab, "Truth" social, and now X, I don't thing "the liberal left" has ever had any echo chambers like those.

Toyota servers ran out of storage, crashed production at 14 plants in Japan

Re: Lost in Translation?

I am a DBA, that is the literal description of the job. Make sure you have backups, and more importantly, make sure you can restore from them. If you have practiced a restore in the last 6 months, you aren't doing your job.

Farewell WordPad, we hardly knew ye

Re: Abiword and rant

When did notepad get better? It has basically the same functionality as I could have written with about 20 lines of code in Visual Basic 30 years ago. I think they might have added tabs and the ability to open multiple files, but that is about it. They could have made it better by adding regex search and replace, syntax highlighting, block copy and paste, and other features that modern editors like VI have had for years.

History repeats

They pulled that crap before. I was running Visual Basic on WFW 3.1 and trying to create help files. The documentation said to "Create them as RTF files with word or another editor". So I used the editor I already had, and the help compiler tool GPFed every time. Calling Micro~1 support, the the only solution was to create them - with Word. And sure enough it started working after I bought word and saved my files in it.

Re: slow transformation

Net user is your friend. I use it for all user management. Changing passwords is a lot easier with it than using the GUI, especially on RDP.

I will be one of the ones that miss wordpad

I have a locked down admin workstation without a Word license, and can't install other software like Libre Office. So when I have to open a word document, it is with wordpad.

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

The newest build of Windows?

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

I once had a project like that - took 2 weeks to set up Oracle failsafe on Windows. And in the end, my entire output of the gig was a single Windows .BAT file and instructions on how to use it. The project was a success.

Re: Failover backup redlining

I am a DBA and I like it when my servers are at 20-30% CPU usage. That means my database is working well and the application is well designed. If you are at or near 100%, there is something wrong with your database and/or application. On one of our databases, it was routinely getting hammered and was at 100%. Performance was terrible. And I found out why: The application was executing a query to look up a static value over 30 million times during the login process. Stupid shit like that is how you get to 100% on database server, and no DBA wants to see anything like that.

Data General and EMC

Way back in the 90's, I used to work on Data General servers. They were pretty nice, but NT4 didn't really support them, and required loading special drivers at boot to recognize the SCSI drives.

And then there was EMC (known as "Even More Complex"). I had to administer those SAN's with symcli, and that process is not for the faint of heart. Make one mistake and you could potentially corrupt a critical database. I never made any, but that was because I double and triple checked every single command, all while ensuring we had good backups and verifying standby databases were in sync.

We my contract ended, that was the job I was glad I no longer had. My replacement wasn't so lucky and he corrupted a database. Of course there were no backups and the only standby was out of sync. I got called back to help with the recovery, and it was a mess. The outage lasted several days.

30 years on, Debian is at the heart of the world's most successful Linux distros

Ubuntu's killer app

For me, the real killer app that Ubuntu has is the LTS releases. Besides the 5 year support, you can also upgrade them in place. I had a laptop that started with Ubuntu 6.04 and upgraded it all the way to 16.04 without ever having to reinstall. 16.04 ran fine on that 10 year old laptop, and I might still have it now if the hardware hadn't failed. Most other distros (including Debian) don't have that type of LTS releases.

Cigna sued for using software to deny healthcare insurance claims

Re: "does not involve algorithms"

That would be too obvious, and might be too much for our bought and paid for politicians to not do something about. I figure it is something more like:

[code[

#!/bin/bash

if [ $((1 + $RANDOM % 100)) -gt 70 ]; then

CLAIM_STATUS=denied

else

CLAIM_STATUS=approved

fi

[/code]

BTW, I am a "customer" of Cigna and my healthcare is a clusterfuck, Everything about this is true.

MOVEit body count closes in on 400 orgs, 20M+ individuals

I'm in the Equifax breach (and the OPM too). Probably lots of others. I'm sure whatever the Chinese and Russians don't already have, they can get from my Facebook shadow profile or Google. And I immediately put a freeze on all my account for all 3 credit reporting bureaus.

I also got a settlement check from the Equifax class action suit - for $10. Apparently it is a lot more than most other people got.

Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama

Re: What's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine too.

True. They made the fortune 500 before IBM bought them out.

Oracle Linux

I remember seeing Oracle Linux when it first came out and was surprised it made it past the lawyers. It was a pretty blatant ripoff of Red Hat. The boot up screen even used to say "Welcome to Red Hat Linux". I'm surprised that Red Hat didn't throw a sue ball just for trademark infringement, if nothing else.

Re: Opensolaris anyone? @containerizer

On of the things I loved about AIX is that they had a GUI admin tool for performing complex tasks - that had an option to generate scripts. Made deployment to the 50 remote AIX boxes a lot easier.

Re: Opensolaris anyone?

Solaris was actually replaced with Exadata which actually runs Sun intel hardware.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Re: Um, Remember /etc/inittab?

I remember that - and it was pretty easy. Much easier that systemd when it breaks. On one box, it broke after a graphics driver update and just had a blank screen. After a lot off Googling, I was able to boot into a shell, where I found the error message:

"The logind failed to start. Please run journal control for more details."

And the details were:

"The logind failed to start."

Lots of Googling later, I was getting absolutely nowhere. So I found a website: without-systemd.org that had instructions for removing it. I deleted systemd along with the gnome desktop and all the dependencies and replaced it with sys5 and XFCE. That was years ago and I haven't had any issues since.

Doesn't come on floppies anymore

Disk 1 of 2,560

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

You do know that Linus named the version control system "Git" after a term he used to refer to himself.

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

Slackware still exists and is fully maintained. 30 years now

http://www.slackware.com/

Re: If ChromeOS is Linux...

I don't think you can still get Slackware on floppies, as that would require about 2,500 of them. But it is a great way to learn Linux. There are good tutorials on installing it, but make no mistake - you will be formatting partitions from a command prompt. You will learn a lot about Linux if you install it.

BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him

Re: turn around three times and punch yourself in the face

My solution to that "we have always done it that way" is to simply change it without asking for permission. I just tell them: "I made a change that I think you will like: You no longer have to do steps 4 through 7. Everything else is the same. Just skip steps 4-7. Please try it and let me know if you like it."

I have never been asked to roll back one of these changes. But I have gotten free beer after a few. It is amazing how well people respond when you actually make their jobs easier.

Re: and the Bay City Rollers reforming

Iron Maiden is also still going - 40+ years and 13 studio albums. The lead singer, Bruce "Air Raid" Dickerson is type qualified in the 747 and other commercial jets. He has survived cancer, but they are still making albums and touring. The single from their latest album has over 30 million views on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/FhBnW7bZHEE

Re: Oh the pain!

I had something like that a number of years ago. We were evaluating database replication products, and management asked if there were any alternatives to Oracle Goldengate. So the Dell salesman called me and asked if I wanted to evaluate their Shareplex product. I said: "Sure. Just send me a link to download it, and I will install it on some test machines. If it works well, I will recommend it to management."

... Crickets

Re: Oh the pain!

A few years ago, I got an email supposedly from my credit union, urging me to login soon as I hadn't logged in in awhile and my online access might be disabled if I didn't occasionally login. I called the credit union and they didn't know of any such emails, but weren't sure.

I looked at the links and every one of them went to some janky NCR.COM subdomain with the credit unions URL as a parameter. So I fired up a Kali VM and opened the link. All it apparently did was redirect to my credit unions website. So I tried it with a different URL and sure enough, it redirected to that.

A a trivial open redirect vulnerability - on a major banking corporations domain. Makes it past all spam and phishing filters because NCR.COM. Spammers and phishers could abuse the hell of out of NCR's domain with it. You would think NCR would like to know about something like that. But when I clicked on the "contact us" link, you of course needed an account with them to even talk with anyone.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Waiting for the gotcha

I had something like that happen to me. Coming over to London from the other side of the pond for a G5 summit, all of our equipment was 110 v. So we had transformers to convert the 220 to 110. Our setup was very important, so we had to test every piece of equipment in isolation plus as the full set up. So I plugged one of the laptops into the 110 v transformer and booted it up fine. Then I plugged a surge protector into that same transformer and it immediately exploded. Puzzled, we connected a volt meter to the "110 v" transformer and it was actually putting out about 400 v. Seems the lapop's auto switching power supply was capable of handling the 400 v.

Re: The one law of TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC

I bought Netflix at IPO for about $6 a share and sold it about 5 years later at $70. Nice profit. But that was before streaming, when they were still just renting DVDs.

Re: PSUs

That sounds wicked cool. In the days of TRS-80s and Apple ][, I had a project to make a controller for a flashing model railroad crossing This project involved a bread board, a control chip, resistors, capacitors, diodes, and such. It was powered by a 6v battery. Just as I had everything set up and was getting ready for a final test, I accidentally connected the battery with reverse polarity.

The chip literally caught fire and exploded. Cost me a whole $3 to get a replacement.

Re: Hmmm

Isn't 5v at 2a also the specs for a standard USB charger? If you had a multi meter and a soldering gun, you could probably adapt the plug to a USB cable pretty easy.

Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing

My first project with Oracle

I worked for Oracle in the 90's as a DBA consultant. While waiting for all of my security paperwork to get processed and get a long term assignment, I was twiddling my thumbs in the corporate office. At the end of the day, almost Beer O'Clock, my project manager comes in and says "I need you to install a database in Norfolk tomorrow morning". Given that Norfolk was 250 miles away, I would have to leave that evening, and Beer O'Clock would have to wait until I got to my hotel.

Anyway when I arrived onsite the next morning, the Sun server was still in the box. It took them all day to set it up and install Solaris, while I twiddled my thumbs. The actual database installation took about 30 minutes, after which I drove home. So including the travel, 2 days of billable time for 30 minutes of actual work.

I used to give Oracle database recovery classes where I had a database with those cartoons loaded in it. And in my problem statement, I said: "This database contains priceless items. It is not like you can go to dilbert.com and download them again." I guess I was right.

BOFH: The Board members are looking very ill these days

Re: Compassion

*Not* clicking on that link. El-Reg needs an icon for comments on this subject. It is practically a requirement.

You've been pwned, how much will each stolen customer SSN cost you? How about $7.5k?

They need a red team group like the one I am in to test their systems. We don't report to anyone in the development groups, and our job is literally pwn them. We get extra points for irony and spite.

Re: SSN theft

When I encounter a new oracle database, one of my first SQLi queries:

?p1=' union select owner, table_name, column_name, null,null from all_tab_columns where column_name like ''%SSN%''--

Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home

Re: Video on Ring's servers is the problem

On option is Blink (which is unfortunately also owned by Amazon). They try to push you towards a cloud subscription of course, but also have a local storage option which I use.

Re: Meanwhile in London

Here on the other side of the pond, Republican states like Texas do remember the Stasi - and are trying to recreate it.

By order of Canonical: Official Ubuntu flavors must stop including Flatpak by default

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

You are basically describing Oracle. You have $ORACLE_BASE, $ORACLE_HOME and so on. But Oracle manages to combine all of the worst of a tarball type install with all of the jankyness of a Java GUI installer. Plus different patch sets, one off patches and a separate patch installer tarball, which must be patched itself in order to install the other patches.

I read somewhere that to patch one $ORACLE_HOME takes an average of 4 hours. And based on many years of experience, that sounds about right.

Take the morning off because Outlook has already

In the rare times I am not getting a 404/timeout/500 error when trying to open an email, Office "365" is literally changing the UI for every email. Sometimes my previous/next email buttons disappear, sometimes it is the delete. Other times they get moved to the ... button.

And what has been broken since the first of the year? Read emails. you know, that functionality where when you read an email, it gets marked as read. Or at least it used to. But I can read an email, reply to it, go to the next one - and the email I just read remains flagged as unread. I have hundreds of "unread" emails in my inbox now.

Re: Microsoft proves that the 365 branding was a terrible choice

Of course, there is this one: Micros~1.

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

Re: Orbit

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to defying gravity. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Home Depot sent my email, details of stuff I bought to Meta, customer complains

Re: Unhash?

It's trivial if an unsalted hash like MD5 is used. All FB needs to do is hash the emails and store the hashed value in the database. It is basically the same as sending it in clear text.

$ echo [e-mail] | md5sum

204f7f3db175147a889be577eb1b51ec

Re: "consent fatigue"

You know you can download a host file which blocks a lot more, correct?

https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

It's too bad I don't have a way of editing /etc/hosts on my phone.

You can also of course use a Pi-Hole and set that to your DNS server. Works for phones too, but only when they are connected to your wi-fi.

Re: Annnnnnnd...

So you have confessed - you are the real BOFH.

Three seconds of audio could end up costing Fox $500,000

Re: Harmony by disharmony

The one time I heard that for real was about 10 years ago. My wife called me from her work, which was about 20 miles west of me. They had got hit with a massive thunderstorm all the power was out. I looked out the window and saw it was a bit breezy. Then the baseball game I had on went to the alert. About 2 minutes later we got slammed with the "derecho" - 70MPH winds, lightning and flash flooding. The whole thing was over in 10 minutes. But we (and most of the rest of the US east coast) were without power for days.

Re: Harmony by disharmony

Growing up on the other side of the pond, we get those tones about once a month: "This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. If this was an actual emergency..."

Also on Friday mornings at 10am, there was a local siren with a similar tone. But everyone knew that if it was for real, we could kill our ass goodby.