Posts by Grunt #1

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

Re: To The Tune Of All Stood Still By Ultravox

Is that you Midge?

I've got my coat and I'm ready for the flight to Vienna.

Five things you need to know about Microsoft's looming Windows 10 Spring Creators Update

Take cover

Redstone was the name of an ICBM

Military test centre for frikkin' laser cannon opens in Hampshire

Re: Black paint?

..toxic dose of gas?

The least of your troubles if you've been marked as a target.

Boss visited the night shift and found a car in the data centre

Re: Some people can sleep anywhere

Typical REME.

Stand up who HASN'T been hit in the Equifax mega-hack – whoa, whoa, sit down everyone

How many idiots does it take to compromise everyone's security; 143,000,000 and counting.

Why does anyone bother to willingly give their PERSONAL data to these shysters?

Really ? I should just publish it on the web myself.

"CEO Richard Smith said that the company's core consumer and commercial credit reporting databases were untouched – only the names, social security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver's license numbers of 143 million Americans were exposed."

Dick Smith, please tell me whether it is more important to lose your commercial data and income stream or my data multiplied 143 million times.

Read IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's letter to staff: Why I walked from Trump's strategy forum

Our grandfathers

are turning in their graves. They gave their lives to defend democracy and rid the world of Nazis and Fascists.

Defend democracy because as Churchill said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest."

Teen who texted boyfriend to kill himself gets 15 months jail

Committed is the correct term and does not imply it is a crime. When we start using euphemisms we lose the horror of someone deciding to take this last action of their lives and demean them in the process.

Another day, another British Airways systems screwup causes chaos

Crews or Cruz?

You choose who goes.

The Reg chats to Ordnance Survey's chief data wrangler

Re: Disagree - GPS is the future

I was taught how to establish my position on a map by looking at the ground and any landmarks. You should learn it sometime, it might save your life one day.

There's nothing wrong with GPS it's fun and I love the technology. When on the hills always think of Murphy's law, e.g. what if your spare battery is a dud? Granted you could carry a wind up charger, but it all adds weight and where's the fun in that?

OS Maps work on paper, always.

I do hope Black Sail YHA is still the same as during my stays there as a teen.

Water straight from the hill using water tanks filled with sand and reeds to filter it, I came to no harm. Absolutely brilliant place to stop off, so good I'm going to return soon.

Nothing could protect Durex peddler from NotPetya ransomware

Nothing new under the sun.

Estimated losses of £100 million so far and a 7% reduction in value in the past month.

Any company that hasn't prepared a decent DRP by now should so, before it's their turn. If you think risk acceptance will save you, you are sadly mistaken.

The most common beginning to a disaster is a sense of security.

Gaius Velleius Paterculus approx. 30 AD

French general accused of nicking fast jet for weekend trips to the Sun

Flight training

I used to play for a local rugby team while posted in the south. One of the team turned up to training in his RN Wessex 5. The pitch was very clean.

I think it was classed as training, it must have been useful as it was 1982.

Tesco Online IT meltdown: Fails to deliver thousands of grocery orders

DRPs

With all the outages occurring recently, does El Reg think it time to have a dedicated outages section?

Re: A bit mean!

Surely this is what big data is for. It can't be too hard to cross check the pharmacy orders and other items to deduce disability.

Tesco, you are missing a trick here. Ask your customers if they have a need based on disability and you will get loyal customers.

British Airways poised to shed 1,000 jobs to Capita

End of empire

Yes, a predecessor was called Imperial Airways.

It seems this country is determined to self implode. For as long as I can remember we have sold everything to the highest bidder, often foreign. Heavy industry at scale is gone. Manufacturing at scale is gone. Soon we will lose large parts of our banking business. The service industry is going abroad. Can you name a British technology company of scale or quality? What will be left apart from consumers watching day time TV( American) and living off their meagre savings and pensions. It is happening everywhere, no wonder Trump gets into power by offering a land of milk and honey or Maybe offering strong and stable government (yet another success story). I have no idea if Labour can do any better, but I understand why people hope they can. Perhaps this is the price we have to pay for improving the lot of the rest of the world, but why aren't we competing before the Chinese own everything?

Rant over and I'll go back to reading about the Industrial Revolution, now those were the days.

IBM warns itself of possible outages in lab shift screw-up

The real reason?

The relocation project was offshored and someone realised what they had done as well as the likely consequences.

Has riddle of the 1977 'Wow!' signal finally been cracked? Maybe...

Re: I'll wait thanks.

https://cometresearchgroup.org/

I wish this wasn't true.

Life would be so much more interesting if it was an alien life form.

Axed from IBM for remote working? Don't go crying to HPE

All empires fall

Horace Smith's "Ozymandias"

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,

Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the Desert knows:—

"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,

"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows

"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—

Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose

The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,

He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

Re: It's about saving money

Yes, but it's a different budget.

The truth hurts,

but it is the truth and it hurts less than lies and delusion.

Re: Typo? Looks strange

Everyone should read Richard Feynman.

IBM: ALL travel must be approved now, and shut up about the copter

Surely IBM are missing a sales opportunity here.

Get Watson to decide if travel is necessary. It's a win-win because the utilisation of Watson improves and you can reduce the number of divisional managers for expense reduction. If it works IBM can show the world how great Watson is and then sell it to everyone else.

BA IT systems failure: Uninterruptible Power Supply was interrupted

Re: A data or application problem most likely

Where's the checklist?

Re: If it got interrupted...

Fine in principle, but that assumes it is a planned event, it's an EPO for a reason.

Better to have someone knowledgeable watching over the contractor.

The Big Blue Chopper video that IBM might want to keep quiet

Re: Dilussions of grandure....

You forgot Blue Dollars.

Actually quite a useful terminology as it helped me understand when we were keeping things in-house.

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

Re: Willie Walsh

Mr White Wa(l)sh.

"We know what happened but we're still investigating why it happened and that investigation will take some time," he said.

- We're hoping some other sucker is in the headlines when we publish.

"The team at British Airways did everything they could in the circumstances to recover the operation as quickly as they could."

- The recovery they performed was no doubt a fantastic job which pulled BA out of a tailspin at the last minute. The real question is what caused the tailspin.

Re: Very Old IT Person

I suspect everyone who knows is working, worn out or resting and has better things to do. The fact there are probably too few of them won't help, no matter what the reason.

It seems the BA communications plan is to tell no-one, including passengers. What puzzles me is they have good plans for flying incidents why treat their IT differently?

At least Sainsbury's have reacted quickly.

http://www.continuitycentral.com/index.php/jobs/2015-operational-resilience-manager

If they can do it, why can't BA?

Ships

On a ship it is always the captain who gets court martialled if something major happens. Even if he/she was asleep when it happened. the same applies in an aircraft.

Re: Back in the day...

When you return to work on Tuesday ask about your DRP and sharing resources, you will be amazed how many firms are in this position. It is a risk that does reduce costs and is unlikely to occur. In most cases the major DR suppliers allow you to be locked out for 90 days. It is a first come first served business model.

The most likely scenario for multiple organisations to be hit simultaneously is through cyber attack; you have been warned.

Re: Back-up, folks?

You are wrong.

Resilience is easier to apply in a large organisation with multiple DCs and sufficient resources. It takes planning and money and the same principles apply to all organisations large and small. All it takes is to employ specialists with knowledge and experience gained on the DC floor.

In case anyone is feeling smug, when was the last time you tested your failover? Do you have a plan? Was that risk acceptance based on hard cold facts or just to save money?

Re: Heads will roll

If the executive class don't buy DR then guess what they get.

This is poor DR planning and management.

The power failure is not the fault of Tata (TCS). It's the fault of the BA management who decided to risk accept a total power outage without a hot standby recovery option or a proven and tested resumption plan.

The new BA business model ?

Send jobs abroad instead of passengers.

BA CEO blames messaging and networks for grounding

"To Fly you need Servers"

Perhaps the BA motto should be changed to this from "To Fly. To Serve".

Internal charging.

Internal charging would fix that.

Re: Encrypted traffic

How was the cat?

Perhaps they are at Cruzing altitude?

Communications fail.

Sainsbury's IT glitch spoils bank holiday food orders

They were quick off the mark.

http://www.continuitycentral.com/index.php/jobs/2015-operational-resilience-manager

...unless there was no-one in role.

'Major incident' at Capita data centre: Multiple services still knackered

DR and BC are your parachutes.

Who jumps out of a plane without a parachute and a reserve?

To all Capita clients.

Did you buy DR? If you did, was it tested?

If not, then it is your fault.

(Ditto BA)