Posts by Doctor Syntax

Excuse me, sir. You can't store your things there. Those 7 gigabytes are reserved for Windows 10

Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

"So it’s fine when Linis reserves space but not ok when MS do it."

What's Linis?

Linux, like any other Unix-like OS and like any sensible OS, protects itself against rogue processes attempting to eat the entire disk space* or, indeed, being driven into a corner by manglement who wouldn't invest in sufficient disk. Unix is fundamentally a multi-user OS; it also provides for protections such as disk quotas if you think you need them.

I've no idea whether MS does that or not. This, however, is something different. It's making a provision for a future process to download huge** updates by reserving the space that might be used in the meantime simply to avoid that future process checking available space when it comes to need it. I'd label that as passing the cost of failure to the customer.

* I've seen that happen in the past.

** 7Gb? Really? Like any other Linux user I've never seen more than a fraction of that get downloaded for an update. Even a full install with loads of applications you might or might not need fits on a DVD.

Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

"Of course it does."

I think you just blew his mind.

Re: Easy way to regain the 7 GB

"Zero. Linux doesn't require a swap partition."

Or allocate a partition the same size a the RAM if you want to be able to hibernate.

"You can no longer set your user storage folders to any other drive."

It just gets worse and worse. I'm glad I don't live there.

Re: Swap files eating my disk

"As annoying as losing 10% of your 250MB disk to swap space was on Win3.1, there was at least justified reason for doing so!"

What does Windows do about hibernating? Linux copies the memory to the swap space and then switches off. It means you have to have enough swap space to do that although you can do without swap altogether but then you can't hibernate.

Re: keep the users away from the system disk / partition

"that's just asking for a situation where the user has used all 96 GB of their space and would like to use some of the 16 GB free space on the 32 GB OS partition, but can't."

The proper cure for this is a bigger disk. One of the reasons for having separate a separate user area is to avoid the situation where the user - or Microsoft - has trampled all the free space.

"Manually resizing partitions is a pain"

Ah, the joy of LVM.

Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

It doesn't quite work like that. The kernel almost always lives in a separate, and not usually very big, partition /boot I have a 200M partition on this Devuan box. Debian and Devuan only keep the current and last kernels by default - others differ. There's also a partition, /tmp, that gets purged at boot - 1G on mine.

It's also very, very advisable to set up the area that stores home directories, where all your work etc. lives, on a separate partition. This enables you to reformat the entire rest of the disk and reinstall for a major upgrade and leave the bits you care about untouched. On my main laptop this is 500Gb (of a 2Tb disk) and 60% full.

Swap space is also separate - as it's also used to store a copy of memory to hibernate it needs to be at least the same size as physical memory although I prefer something bigger.

This is all minimum partitioning I'd suggest. The rest is up to personal preference. You could leaver everything else in the root partition; some installers seem to leave everything, including home directories, in root (some installers, be default put everything in root which is a crap thing to do).

A better plan is to have separate /usr and /var partitions. The former is relatively static stuff - program and library code. The latter is more volatile including another temporary directory, spool area (files queued for printing, etc.) and, in the case of Debian and friends, files downloaded for updates etc and these can be purged if more room is needed. I have a 20Gb /usr, 59% used and a 10Gb /var, 58% used. Cached update and install files amount to a little over 4G.

I also have /usr/local and /opt for other S/W not installed from the distro. They're 8Gb 4% used and 20Gb 10% used.

The root partition also contains some program binaries and libraries - stuff that might be used when the other partitions are unmounted. Mine is 4G but only 16% full. As someone mentioned elsewhere a Unix-style system is restricted so that only root is allowed to right to a partition more than

I could easily get by with a smaller disk with fewer partitions but this scheme avoids nasty surprises if I take my eye ofd things. Another thing that avoids really nasty surprises is that Unix-style OSs only allow root to write to file systems more than, sy 90% or 95% full. In practice routing OS updates are small and quickly applied so they don't provide surprises anyway but having spent a good chunk of my working life looking after Unix servers that occasionally have had ballooning overnight jobs I do like the degree of control this gives me.

There's one other factor in play here: I manage the disk with LVM (Logical Volume Manager). It means that currently a large part of the disk is uncommitted and I can use this to increment any partition - or even add new ones - over the life of the machine.

By comparison my little lightweight netbook uses eighteen and a half Gb including over 6 Gb in my home directory.

Re: Not a dig at MS, but a question.

"The solution I found is to manually purge old kernels after applying new ones."

Debian defaults to just keeping current and last. Cleaning up Ubuntu is an annoyance.

Re: All well and good...

"What the hell is a jiga byte??"

One that dances from location to location increasing the wear on your SSD.

Re: All well and good...

"just in case you wanted to roll back."

Presumably if you did it would just roll itself forward again and then some more on the next update.

Re: More than adequate

"Maybe I should mention that I upgraded it from MS Windows 10 to Linux Mint."

That answers a question I asked above. I don't think I'd run Informix DS on it, though. Maybe SE.

Re: 32GB HP and Linux GUI

"ou could do a lot of things to get a distribution to exist happily in a gigabyte or two, but most users will want a reasonably modern window manager that they already like."

Let's put this in context. I have a little MSI netbook which I upgraded to 2G, all it will take running an elderly Linux Mint. It's not running XFCE or LXDE. It's running full fat KDE 4. I'm sure KDE 4 can be skinned to look fashionably fuggly but I stick to an old-fashioned classic look, not too dissimilar to W2K. Processor is N2600.

With KInfoCenter and LibreWrite open (on a blank document) it has 40% physical memory and 100% swap free although disk cache will eat into that as it's used. It's also running an instance of a real RDBMS engine, Informix, because one of the things I bought it for was research in libraries etc. where I could quickly know up a table or two & a form to record stuff.

The disk, of course, is much bigger than that in this thread - 320Gb - but then (a) I never got round to completely throwing off W7 and (b) it's still largely empty.

"Those 32GB eMMC devices are atrocious."

32Gb used to be enormous but software is liable to bloat to fill all space available. I've never looked at any of these things but the obvious question is can you install another OS? It's surprising how capable the old netbooks are when running Linux.

Despite vows to spend more with smaller firms, UK.gov sure does seem to love legacy lock-in

Re: SMEs don't have as big ...

"Or the non-exec positions an MP will need to supplement the pittance they are paid"

It's not the MPs you have to worry about. Most likely not even ministers. For instance take a gander at https://www.printweek.com/print-week/news/1120973/3m-considering-legal-action-400m-passport-contract

Senator Wyden goes ballistic after US telcos caught selling people's location data yet again

Re: Oh the Irony!

"where I come from, lying to Parliament (or in a select committee is an imprisonable offence."

It could explain Zuck's failure to appear before a Select Committee.

Reg Standards Bureau introduces the Devon fatberg as coastal town menaced by oily blob

Re: But seriously though...

"what they hell do we do with half a bottle of well-out-of-date rapeseed oil?"

Keep it. There'll be a shortage post-Brexit. You'll probably end up boiling it with alkali (wood ash will do) to make soap.

Linus Torvalds opts for the scream test: Linux kernel syscall tweaked to shut data-leak hole – anyone upset, yell now

Re: The Scream Test

Yes, use it sparingly. If there's too much screaming going on already another one isn't going to get noticed.

Ministry of Justice abandons key plank of £280m IT project

"Magistrates now have an online calendar system for booking their court attendance dates"

Wow. What a complex task.

Now try a calendar for handling multiple big cases where there are are several barristers per case, many witnesses, including the specialist witnesses who will each have multiple cases on the go, and juries.

NHS England claims it will be all-digital within the decade

Older physicians seem to have a harder time "multi-tasking" and do sometimes seem distracted, diverting their attention away from actual patient.

And there was I, thinking it was younglings who get distracted with their digital toys, diverting their attention from whatever it is that needs to be done.

On the whole there's a lot to be said for making sure stuff is recorded, whether in writing or otherwise.

My mother had a penicillin allergy but in her 80s she forgot. It didn't matter too much as her GP knew about it. But then the GP retired and it wasn't in her notes. Possibly a coincidence but she had a fatal stroke not long after being prescribed penicillin.

Entering stuff and checking on past history inevitably takes attention but it's essential if the GP isn't to have to carry everything in their head. Perhaps the answer is to make sure systems fit into the doctors' work as effectively and unobtrusively as possible.

Re: Bollocks

"it was the Patient to Doctor responses that tended to be of Anglo Saxon derivation."

Back in my University days I knew a few medical students. I have no illusions about doctors not using A/S.

Health is inherently not digital. It's not even analogue. It's about actual physical people, not electronic representations of them. Matt Hancock is exactly the wrong person for this.

Attention all British .eu owners: Buy dotcom domains and prepare to sue, says UK govt

Re: A new low

"European politicos have been practising being cnuts for far far longer."

Objected to on the basis that Cnut was an intelligent man. For one thing he made sure that his demonstration of what happens when you challenge reality took place in safe condition.

Re: How long until the new referendum will be called?

"The black and white stay/go option was the only viable one."

Go in what way?

You just argued there were multiple leave options and not everyone who voted leave wanted the same thing. In fact, I doubt many had even considered the consequences; it was a non-binding vote and many took it as a general protest vote. Now there are realistically only a couple of leave options: the one negotiated with the EU by such Leave politicians who were prepared to take on the job, let's note, or the jump off the cliff option. The consequences of either are a good deal more obvious than they were back then including, of course, the consequence that this time it's for real.

Given that there are really only a couple of leave options available to vote for then a second preference vote works fairly well.

"You just attracted the attention of 123REG"

You think they haven't already thought of that?

Re: Don't worry, it's only money

"Barnier needs to be reminded that he is just a civil servant not a head of state nor working for one. His remit should be merely to minimise the impact on the EU not impose 'penalties' on the UK."

Could you explain how Barnier might have forced the EU Council to make this change (if you follow one of the links in TFA you'll find it was the Council's decision).

Mainframe brains-slurper sues IBM for 'age discrim', calls Ginny and biz 'morally bankrupt'

She was also one of the people originally assigned to Rometty’s “Millennial Task Force” initiative. That initiative was charged, so 57-year-old Keebaugh said, with “creating a workforce comprised of 75% millennials”.

Don't upset someone who knows where the bodies are buried.

Apart from her own case it sounds as if she could have a nice career for a few years as an expert witness when all the others sue.

You were told to clean up our systems, not delete 8,000 crucial files

Re: Thems my initials thems is.

"my initials are DEV"

Could be worse: DEVOPS.

Re: xfer

"Only the one 'from key'?"

It's a big key.

Camera stuff just goes straight into ~/Pictures/Lumix, ~/Pictures/Nikon or whatever.

Re: Oh, it gets worse...

I had a gig with someone who used a vertical market (on SCO) ERP system.

The box had been set up with very few separate partitions. An overnight job wrote working files into /tmp but cleaned up nicely after itself. Except for the odd time when something triggered the job into just keeping running so the file grew and grew. By the morning the partition holding /tmp, /, /bin &ct was at 99%. The box was unresponsive, probably because it had also filled memory and the OS was thrashing.

AFAICR the process couldn't be killed, either because it wouldn't terminate with an unwritten buffer or maybe because it was so sluggish it was taking a few hours to terminate. Attempts to free up space failed - the monster wrote to them faster than it would list files for me to delete. It didn't help that the box was in a branch office over a hundred miles from my desk. I think we had to wait till someone came in to the office and hit the switch for us. Oddly it didn't seem to do any actual damage other than needing an fsck on reboot.

Re: Same user - same problem twice

"Not everywhere has the budget for that."

Somehow they always have the budget to cope with it going wrong. Either that or they're out of business.

mv * in root

Just caught it too late. As cd and echo are shell built-ins I could navigate and list the ruins but not do anything about it. A reboot from the SCO install disks would let me sort it out but they didn't include the custom driver for the RAID. It took most of the next day to get someone to email us the driver. Putting the driver on a floppy, booting from install disk and putting everything back took minutes.

Re: rm -rf /

"Then known as Midland Cellular, it went on to be better known as Phones4u."

That might explain something. I had a 4 week gig in Phones4u days as a 2 week holiday cover plus a week either side. ISTR it took just about all that time to do the paperwork to get some disk (probably 2Gb) allocated under LVM by the admin team and permission for us on the database team could add it as another chunk to the Informix database. It did strike me as a bit over-cautious.

Re: xfer

"Old laptop" and "old backup" etc have places on my computers.

And "From key" - the USB drive on my keyring.

Low-power chips are secret sauce behind long-life wearables

"The latter, however, includes an ECG (electrocardiogram) sensor the user can activate in the case of atrial fibrillation (irregular heart rate)."

Why? So the user can watch themselves die?

Border guards probe 'suspicious bulge' in man's trousers to find he's packing fluffies

Should have just put them down on the Malaysian side and had a confederate put down a saucer of milk on the Singapore side and shout "kitty kitty".

Until now, if Canadian Uber drivers wanted to battle the tech giant, they had to do it in the Netherlands – for real

Re: Judgement of Justice Feldman.

"I don't see why a statutory test replacing a well-used body of law that's been built up over time would be an improvement."

Well-used in the sense of extensively used. "Well" in the sense of "good" is arguable.

Consider for example that civil law decisions are supposed to be taken on the basis of balance of probabilities. In an IR35 case the alternatives being argued are a contract of employment vs a contract for provision of services. Shouldn't that mean that a court should look at each factor and ask "does it fit a commercial contract for services?" as well as "does it fit a contract of service?". One of the crucial tests has been "personal service" of a named person. At one time the IR website had a sample contract for provision of services to the IR Commissioners. I may still have a copy somewhere; I took the precaution of downloading it. In the middle of that was a key man clause to the effect that someone who the Commissioners (i.e. the client) considered important to the delivery of the services couldn't be substituted without their agreement. Put that in a contract as a term the IR wanted to protect itself and it was a normal commercial clause. Put it in a contract the IR wanted to challenge and it was an indication of employment because the possibility of a commercial contract doesn't get weighed in the balance.

Then there's the back-to-back contract problem. The freelancer has a contract with the agency saying one thing, the client has a contract saying something else. HMRC got a decision saying that the provider is bound by the client side contract which he hasn't seen with terms he wouldn't have agreed to. How did they get that one through? They didn't take on a contractor able to defend himself, they took on one who was so ill that that the tribunal had to conduct the hearing in his home. What's the underlying commercial equivalent? The agent is a broker who sells something he doesn't have (the employment-like contract the client wants) in the hope he'll be able to get it. I've twice had a car dealer sell me something he couldn't get - in one case the entire model was discontinued* and in another it was just the colour. In the case of a freelancer the agent is hoping that the circumstance won't arise when the difference in contracts becomes significant in the course of business; if it does they risk being sued by one party or even both just like any other commercial transaction gone wrong where a settlement can't be achieved - it's a normal broker's commercial risk and it's not the outcome that the HMRC got a precedent on.

*Strictly speaking it wasn't me to whom they were('nt) selling it. It was picked from my employer's company car list so it was some leasing company so I had no real say and got stitched up with a lump of ghastly diesel rubbish - no I didn't want to pay to buy it when I took early retirement a little later.

Detailed: How Russian government's Fancy Bear UEFI rootkit sneaks onto Windows PCs

"Security professional and beancounters will probably come to different conclusions."

Until it goes wrong.

Re: Physical write-enable switches

"someone's going to mandate its use"

Do a proper risk analysis first.

Re: Physical write-enable switches

"You simply set the 'write-protect switch' on remote machines to 'write-enable' and leave it there, leaving you in exactly the situation you are now."

Not simply. Do a proper risk analysis first.

Re: Linux and out of date Windows machines

"It's nice when you hate Windows enough to only use it for what you absolutely have to."

Even nicer when you absolutely don't have to.

Re: Once again this proves

"What happens when (not if) your OS doesn't support your hardware?"

You switch on your computer. Your OS is sitting on your disk. Only your OS has drivers to read from disk. How do you get any of it into memory so it can run to read the disk to load itself into memory so it can run?

I know. Rows of switches on the front panel so we can toggle a first stage boot loader into memory, just like the old days.

Re: Wait, what?

"But then a) it wouldn't be Microsoft,"

It wouldn't work here if it was.

" b) it wouldn't be pretty."

Aesthetics are a matter of personal opinion. In my view my email client looks a good deal better than the fuggly stuff MS has been shipping for the last many years.

Re: Wait, what?

"There's no excuse in this day an age for anyone in IT in a business to be in the position to be able to run executables or see URLs in emails!"

There's no excuse in this day and age to have to go to the lengths you describe but marketing departments the world over employ numpties than make it necessary.

Re: Well...

"Yes, the only thing that I find more baffling ... is that Microsoft still hasn't changed that default"

Not baffling at all. They don't care. The JJ Carters of this world will happily impose this mess on 4000 users and brag about it so with a plentiful supply of administrators like that why should they care?

"System administrators should be held to a substantially higher standard for safe behavior than even their bosses"

Sadly admin privileges aren't necessarily restricted to system administrators. Not if the boss demands he be given the admin password.

Re: The real solution

As Updraft says those who want to balance convenience against security can install it with the update enabled. At least it would be a conscious trade-off for them to make. I suspect there is an economic incentive - the ability to make updates without having to have staff at a higher pay-grade than click and go. Put something on the motherboard and you have to pay people able to open the box, find the switch and eventually put the whole thing back together again without disturbing anything and without leaving the switch enabled.

Re: The real solution - amended

"all system code"

What does that mean? Firmware? OS kernel? Userland portions of the OS? RDBS engine? Services such as web server?

Re: The real solution

there's no real fix except as the article mentioned what Will Godfrey said; a physical switch.

Forget 2019's tech biz takeovers, here's the mega-merger everyone's talking about: Milky Way and LMC, coming soon

"With any galactic collision, there is a chance that solar systems like ours could be severely perturbed and may be hurled out of the galaxy. But the chances are slim, thank goodness."

Why thank goodness? With the galactic centre warming up wouldn't that be the safest place to be? And anyway, who needs a galaxy?