Posts by Chairman of the Bored

Sysadmin’s plan to manage system config changes backfires spectacularly

My worst config error?

Been so many, but I think the worst one in terms of financial impact was dd'ing a hard drive image over a live, mission critical volume. An encrypted volume at that.

This was my firm so I couldn't very well fire myself. Backups worked (*), but we were out many man-hours of work.

But I was a late on a deliverable and had to tell the customer it was because I had personally screwed up.

Causative factors: impatience, overconfidence, lacking a questioning attitude. Performing a rather aggressive admin action on a production system. dd is a fairly blunt instrument, could have chosen a better tool.

Things that went well: Having a comprehensive, tested backup. Honesty with customer and staff paid off in the long run.

(*) Wish I had made a binary image of the boot sector and anti-forensic stripes of the encrypted volume key store though, might have been able to save some information

Ok, we need some beer over here!

Two pints:

One for the OP to have the courage to admit the mistake, and the second for his management to have the wisdom to chalk this up to a learning experience

Cheers!

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

Re: Batteries

Ive said it many times, "The greatest threat to man is an independently wealthy woman with battery operated toys"

Unless you're the one with the batteries I guess.

Mine's the one with the hydraulic apparatus in the front pocket.

Re: Darned tech!

Was that BA Flight 9?

In an act of truly epic British understatement the pilot announced: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."

Too much distress? I'd be drinking myself into a coma!

Darned tech!

A bunch of us were fighting a Windows problem; lots of BSOD. Naturally in the course of fixing it we did an awful lot of rebooting.

Our Windows tech walks up and says, "Hey, you guys don't understand what's going on. Just rebooting the machine won't fix anything."

Me: "OK, smartass, YOU fix it."

Tech: "Sure!" He reboots it and it works.

Me: "WTF??? We just did the same @#$&*! thing half a dozen times!"

Tech: "Yeah, but I understand what's going on"

Take my advice and stop using Rubik's Cubes to prove your intelligence

XKCD 457? In my professional opinion...

...the device depicted in that XKCD appears to have a front clasp. Useful thing, that. Should be fairly straightforward to go base jump into the canyon and avoid having to solve the cube entirely. Just sayin'

Re: 1970's black-and-white

Black and white? No way, man - I saw all kinds of colors. And smoke. And the smoke talked to me, and the lines were lik... Damn! Time for another whizz quiz? Dude, not mine - I'm just holding it for my mate.

I'm fairly certain I had am amazing time in 78 and 79, but I'll be damned if I can remember it...

Mystery sign-poster pities the fool who would litter the UK's West Midlands

Re: If you're going to put up a sign...

Nahh, I never eat and drive. It interferes with my drinking.

Real litter problem around here are massive 18-wheeler garbage haulers shipping waste from the paradise of New York City into my fly-over county for dumping. The law says these loads must be covered and of course they are not, and they leave a vast swath of filth in their path. Those of us who care and try to keep our community clean cannot possibly keep up.

Coppers cannot be bothered to do a damn thing about it. Can see the patrol cars speeding along - doing 20 over - and ignoring a rolling fountain of crap in front of them.

But drive 5 over just after the speed limit drops from 55 to 25 ... you know, right after the hidden sign ... and you've got a court summons. F$cking pathetic wankers.

If you're going to put up a sign...

...do what this outstanding young lad did:

I had a commute that took me through the kind of community that has a very low speed limit in the middle and derives a large portion of its municipal revenue using radar guns. One beautiful morning there was a young teen with a hand-painted sign "DANGER! ROOKIE COP WITH RADAR 1/2 MILE".

Eventually he put out a tip jar. I paid handsomely, one must reward good enterprise and all that.

Doctors join wombats in sh!tting bricks to help parents relax about kids chowing down on Lego

Pity the poor pill cam

The Chairman was having some internal faults that endocscopy and colonoscopy could not isolate. So after another day of fasting and, er, flushing my buffers I found myself ingesting a small camera bot with a wireless backhaul. Its a tough pill to swallow. Literally.

Post scan ... it was a tough day for other reasons, and I was feeling a little low. Thoughts of "how can life get worse?" started going through me head.

Alas, upon arising from the Seat of Contemplation, I saw staring at me from the bowl my faithful little robot, its little LED light glowing fitfully. And I thought to myself, "No matter how bad my day has gone, that little robot REALLY had a s#!tty day. No worries."

So if I'm asked to participate...

...can I legitimately say "no, I don't give a s#!t and keep my job?"

Oh my chord! Sennheiser hits bum note with major HTTPS certificate cock-up

Gold plated tat ... and star employees

A two part story about some great employees...

Part 1:

An engineer working for me was in a Best Buy (for right pondians, think of an ironically named version of Currys). In this Best Buy he observed a salesman foisting gold-plated HDMI cables on an unsuspecting elderly lady, "Ma'am, you see, the gold plating prevents the audio from having hiss and crackle..." As this was a bridge too far, he engaged the salesman and saved her a load of cash. Actually, after his analog/digital explanation she was so pissed she abandoned her multi-thousand dollar TV order. Our hero got ejected from the store, told he would be arrested (for what?) if he ever re-entered, and called some things I'm not going to repeat here.

Part 2:

He never re-entered. But morale around the office suddenly became extremely high. It turns out that somebody bought some TV-B-Gones (https://www.tvbgone.com/) and clandestinely installed in the store so that the TVs on display would turn off. My people set up a seemingly random succession of "customers" who would rotate out the TV B Gones as they ran out of batteries. Hard to sell overpriced crap when it keeps shutting off, and your employees are running around with their hair ablaze.

I'm proud of these people but a little upset I wasn't invited to participate.

Life ain't fair

Now that I've worked long and hard enough to afford network connected, software infested, high-end audio tat...

...my hearing is shot from decades of exposure to cooling fans, screaming managers, pleading customers, and so forth. Maybe the whole 'go to war' thing might not have helped, either.

But, that's why I've got a 100W stack with an ominous subwoofer. To paraphrase Trump, "Crank her up! Crank her up!"

Mines the one with the hearing aids and Metallica tickets in the pocket...

Check your repos... Crypto-coin-stealing code sneaks into fairly popular NPM lib (2m downloads per week)

Re: Debian vetting & trust

Yes... And I'd also submit that audio under Linux has gone from 'usable' to 'confusing as hell' in the last eight years.

Big data at sea: How the Royal Navy charts the world's oceans

If you liked the article..

...you will love this podcast:

http://omegataupodcast.net/277-life-and-work-on-hms-enterprise/

Seems like the officers and men of HMS Enterprise are a class act.

Great article, El Reg

Pasta-covered cat leads to kid night operator taking apart the mainframe

Back in high school...

...my friends and I behaved somewhat irresponsibly with a classic piece of kit.

We had some Tektronix 4051 vector displays. We were left unattended, bored, and near an open toolbox. Hilarious outcome. Reversed polarity on the horizontal deflection circuit and got to watch our teachers pull their hair out figuring what we had 'done to the software'

One surmised quickly what we had done and asked rhetorically whether he should congratulate us for coming up with the mod or punish us for being an annoying bunch of cheeky bastards. He went with "both"

Microsoft sysadmin hired for fake NetWare skills keeps job despite twitchy trigger finger

The inverse case

@interview, paraphrased:

Suit: "Well Mr Chairman, impressive resume. One show stopper is that we really need 10yrs experience designing in $tool"

Me: "Thank you, sir. But consider... $tool has only been out for five years. I should know as I participated in its beta.

Whatever punter tells you they have ten is..."

Suit, skating nicely: "Excellent. This is why we need a man of your..."

Me (internally): WTF should I work for these guys? Oh, wait, mortgage is coming due...

Between you, me and that dodgy-looking USB: A little bit of paranoia never hurt anyone

Re: My superiors?

@Dr Syntax,

I didn't discuss anything with SD because the assistant in question is purely a yes man. His only job qualifications are that he is swingin' and looks good in a suit. Every firm's got them.

I just filed it under "ignore"

Re: USB bricker?

@Duncan Macdonald, you're quite right and rather devious. Combine your reverse bias concept with a small old-school xenon strobe circuit and I will buy you a pint. And keep you the hell away from my 'puter, of course.

Re: My superiors?

@AC, I totally agree with you this should be an actionable offence. We have the lockers, signs, a polite but firm receptionist and so forth. There is no excuse to have a device in the room...

...but it all depends on who you are: in the service we called this "different spanks for different ranks." Sucked then, sucks now.

I have no doubt that I or any other working stiff could get sacked for bringing a phone in ... but execs get a free pass. And this REALLY pisses off the workforce. Technical types crave consistency, and this includes consistency in policy and its application. Stuff like this can grow a little seed of discontent into a full-blown insider threat problem... why do we insist on tempting fate?

And this is not just in IT policy - my team was rocked recently when we lost a good man because his accesses were yanked. He and the wife were separated. He started seeing a new gal and got popped for moral turpitude. I won't claim that my guy's decision making process was sound, but what burns is the manager who sacked him had a well-known affair going on with his admin... including some navel exploration and offshore drilling done on company time. WTF, over?

USB bricker?

I presume the concept involves a USB device that attempts to brick a host.

Most ports are indeed defended by TVSes. But volume and board area are low and cost is definitely a consideration. What you find is decent ESD performance and low/moderate hardness against conducted EMC threats.

See: https://www.st.com/en/protection-devices/usb-port-protection.html?querycriteria=productId=SC1489 for a typical approach.

Any reasonable EE student with with DC/DC converter design experience can build you a thumb device that will overmatch the protection. What I dont know is whether you just destroy a USB bridge IC and bring down part of the USB bus, or can cause more extensive damage.

Fun Def Con talk on on USB impersonation

Please look up Dr. Phil Polstra's talk "One Device to Pwn Them All"; DefCon 23.

Video link, if you don't mind being tracked, hacked, and perhaps sacked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cYW7oPNw4

My superiors?

I find one wanker - a senior executive - texting away on a personal iFone at the start of a sensitive briefing. Phones are not even allowed in the entire building, let alone in a brief. So I quietly and politely ask if I can take the phone to the front desk for him.

Slightly embarassed, my Dear Leader gives me the phone and I secure it.

Upon my return I find him banging away on a BlackBerry, and there is another BlackBerry as backup. Oh, FFS!

A couple of days later some swinging dick working for Dear Leader attempts to slap my wrist for embarassing Dear Leader.

With leadership like this what difference does it make what sort of USB stick is left in the executive head? Parking lot? Tossed through open window of BMW parked in the "executive reserved" space?

Another 3D printer? Oh, stop it, you're killing us. Perhaps literally: Fears over ultrafine dust

Toner dust?

When I was in college I ran a copy and print shop. A big industrial Xerox machine - which cost the better part of $75k when a $ was really worth something- used these massive containers of toner. I want to say 10kg at a go.

Screwup one: not paying attention I slipped and dropped a tub, dumping about a kilo of powder inside the machine.

Screwup two: not thinking very clearly I grabbed the nearest vacuum instead of the proper HEPA one and touched the nozzle to the powder. The resulting pillar of black filth out the exhaust looked like the ash cloud that did in Pompeii.

I probably should not be left unattended around 3D printers.

French president Macron insists new regulations needed to protect us all from Facebook's claws

France? Seriously?

So Macron unilaterally disarmed the metadata feeds, IMSI catchers, and other slurp feeding his National Commission for Control of Intelligence Techniques (CNCTR)?American-style knee-jerk legislation passed in 2015 after the Charlie Hebdo incident gave them sudo su power over the French public, and I recall the French public was not impressed.

So Macron is now for privacy? [Crickets] Didn't think so!

Persuading world+dog to love Microsoft's AI assistant a step too far for Acompli founder

"100M+ users depend on every day"

He's either barking mad, or just a punter about to flunk the next whiz quiz - for cause. Either way I think I can see why he is being encouraged to succeed elsewhere.

Web Foundation launches internet hippie manifesto: 'We've lost control of our data, it is being used against us'

"Listsicle?"

An outstanding new noun that I shall plagiarize immediately. It seems to concisely summarize an accretion of futility.

Roscosmos: An assembly error doomed our Soyuz, but we promise it won't happen again

Aerospace quality

I work with a guy who used to be an aircraft heavy maintenance tech. We were discussing formal tool and component accountability procedures for a high quality line we are working and I asked how rivets and other fasteners in aircraft are accounted for as they are not serialized.

Tech: "They're not"

Me: ?

Tech: "You sweep and vacuum out the rivets and fasteners from wing tanks and whatever the best you can. That's why the fuel system has strainers and filters."

Me: ??

Tech: "Well, yeah, they have their limits. Thats why on your Airbus or Boeing the fuel intakes are not in the lowest part of the tank. Sometimes if the wing is gutted we will pull all the crap out of the sumps. Usually they're there forever"

Me: whimper

Tech: "To really eff things up you need a socket head floating around or similar, that's why we have accountability at that mass level. Every part, every shift"

Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity

Re: Noted scientists

Maxwell! Go on, then, have an upvote. Einstein himself stated:

"Since Maxwell's time, physical reality has been thought of as represented by continuous fields, and not capable of any mechanical interpretation. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton"

When I worked in a computational electromagnetics R&D effort the supers were named "Maxwell" "Faraday" "Dirac" "Gauss" "Petunia". Three Brits, one German, and a HHG reference in an American lab...

Sputtering bit-blasters! IBM's just claimed densest tape ever record

Re: Long live tape !

Anyone here remember the Iomega Jazz drives that were supposed to be our small business archive salvation circa 1995? Or zip disks for that matter?

I happened upon a box of Jazz cartridges a month ago and had a nearly irresistible urge to destroy them. Not just destroy ... but go completely retro. Annihilation with extraordinary prejudice!

Death to perfidious media! (looking at you, RDX)

Watch closely as NASA deploys the world's biggest parachute at supersonic speeds

Re: Empathy

Aye! But at least I got to launch...

Re: I like the PPE the technician is wearing

38Deg with humidity. I think you need to start drinking immediately!

Would love to go to Oz; colleagues who have worked there have enjoyed the country and its people immensely.

Re: Good news

Good news w Venus is the atmosphere is crazy already one can burn petroleum like its the 80's! CO2?

No worries, the atmosphere is something like 96.5pct CO2. 150ppm sulfur dioxide. Sulfuric acid clouds. Kind of like the rust belt town I grew up in, just slightly more badass.

Now if we can somehow do nuke-powered carbon sinks... one wonders...

I like the PPE the technician is wearing

Official Range Safety Certified, Gov't issue ... flip flops?

Having worked on similar ranges and dealing with the Range Safety mafia I salute our hero's refusal to wear the fully enclosed, steel toed, multi-kilogram, nearly non-removable foot anchors that are required - even at sea state zero in Virginia heat and humidity.

I might recommend a trip to a nearby West Marine store for a decent pair of boat shoes though.

Pirate radio = drug dealing and municipal broadband is anti-competitive censorship

Re: Murica, land of freedom!

Work out what the words are based on context? No way, that's f$ckyngh ridiculous!

Apple might be 'collateral damage' in US and China trade dust-up

Re: 3D Printing reply

"... I doubt that 3D printing is going to massively improve on the economics of this."

My firm is heavily invested in 3D for rapid prototyping. But what really amazes me is what happened when we put a 3D machine in the machine shop:

Productivity and quality of the conventional shop shot upwards. With the 3D machine the guys print all sorts of jigs and rigs to make their production, build, and inspection processes more effective. Need a bespoke tool? Draw and print rather than 'make do' with a standard but less optimal tool.

Yes, Americans, you can break anti-piracy DRM if you want to repair some of your kit – US govt

Chipped valves?

Here you go- this is a bit nontechnical but it gets the point across:

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185027-the-vacuum-tube-strikes-back-nasas-tiny-460ghz-vacuum-transistor-that-could-one-day-replace-silicon-fets

I have some actual papers on this, but alas I'm on travel and armed only with a landfill Android. If more is needed reply and I will dig up the links when I return to civilization.

Circuit board repair

@DropBear,

Repairing circuit boards is really not that big of a deal. Id encourage you to get a solder trainer board (*) and learn it... its an extremely rewarding skill and opens up some amazing hobby and career opportunities.

I've really never had an employee who could not get at least to the point of soldering leaded quad flatpack components. Most could do leadless QFP. Ball grid arrays, alas, requires some rather pricey kit and specialist training.

The only thing I'd caution is that life is too short to skimp on good tools. A decent soldering station (Metcal or Pace) and a good binocular microscope are a must. Also, take the time to make sure your work area is ergonomic.

(*) or go on oshpark.com ... go to the 'sharing' tab, and order a circuit board that does something fun rather than just a practice board.

Re: What does that really mean?

Sounds like my first marriage. I think this calls for a stiff drink!

The D in Systemd stands for 'Dammmmit!' A nasty DHCPv6 packet can pwn a vulnerable Linux box

Too bad Linus swore off swearing

Situations like this go beyond a little "golly gee, I screwed up some C"...

Our brave El Reg vulture sat through four days of Oracle OpenWorld to write this cracking summary just for you

"Impenetrable barrier?"

Let's see...

Highly complex software systems? Check

In same network? Check

Can't wait to see what the next Def Con will present about that one!

I used to think barriers are impenetrable, but then I've got to explain why I have these kids running around...

Apple boss demands Bloomberg Super Micro U-turn, Russian troll charged, NSA hands out cash, and more

Connecticut...

So West Haven pays off criminals? There is form- the adjacent town of New Haven {used to be | is} a significant node in the American Mafia network.

The city fathers probably mistook the ransomware rip off for a more familiar shakedown or protection racket.

F5: Don't panic but folks can slip past vulnerable firewall servers, thanks to libssh's credentials-optional 'security'

I like the defensive programming reminder from AWS

I'm not a good programmer and my knowledge of formal cs-jitsu is poor. I can't get an object to do what I want it to if I beat it with a cosh.

But! My embedded code has worked very well.

That's because I try to pre-compute everything I can ahead of time and load up ROM with lookup tables and whatnot. No ROM? Fine, static structures. State machine? No problem. I'm going to give you a table of pointers that cannot be modified at runtime. And because the state machine exists as a table ... we can formally evaluate its truth.

Lookup tables and fixed point arithmetic... I consider it a personal accomplishment if I can avoid having to do any floating point math - even in instrumentation systems.

Raspberry Pi fans up in arms as Mathematica disappears from Raspbian downloads

Re: Idle thought, at what point does fedex's bandwidth beat your ISPs?

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -Tanenbaum

"Well, go on then, get this disk pack to Norfolk! Step on it!" - my boss, long ago

Re: On the other hand...

@GrumpenKraut, well please have an upvote and pint on me. The Sage tool looks very interesting and I will definitely explore this.

This is why I love the ElReg forums... people know stuff and we all learn!

On the other hand...

...I get the arguments about pre-installed apps and bandwidth wastage. The appropriate implementation would have been a .pdf on the Desktop instructing users downloading an 'educational' image how to install Mathematica. Or, have an image for download optimized for secondary- and post-secondary education that has Mathematica installed. Problem solved.

We need to remember that a primary goal of the RPi Foundation is the creation of a computer that is cost effective enough for even extremely poor school districts throughout the world. I think the theory is that we will build global wealth and address income inequality by helping others get the tools they need to build up themselves and their societies. Will it work? Who knows ... but I sure think this is a more decent and ethical approach than hand-outs and whatnot that just build dependency and help the richer people maintain a degree of smug superiority. AND we get and outstanding piece of kit; what's not to like?

To that end Wolfram Research (Mathematica) contracted to provide free access to Mathematica. This tool is absolutely fantastic for the physical sciences, theoretical and applied mathematics, and electrical engineering. I've used it for all three and one of my organizations spends literally tens of thousands of $ annually on contracts with them and does so gladly. My first exposure was on a NeXT Workstation (remember those?) at university in 1992, at which time we were told it would revolutionize pure mathematics. It did. And now Wolfram (the man) wants to share his creation, I say let's raise a pint but also eliminate the download pain.

Sure, offering this free on educational kit is kind of like offering hits of an addictive substance ... the marketing hope is obviously that students will get hooked on Mathematica and when they are in a position to purchase software later in life will tilt the scales in Wolfram's favor. Worked for Apple back in the day. But I'm just happy if we get disadvantaged students to the point in life where they are making software decisions.

Disclaimer: Yes I'm a major fan. But I also use MathCAD, Matlab, GNU Octave, Maxima ... basically whatever tool will make a specific job easier. I am a software polygamist.

NASA chief in Moscow: 'We will fly again on a Russian Soyuz rocket'

Re: What did the OP really mean to write?

@AC, excellent points. I've definitely been in the position of trying to perform a full, comprehensive study into a failure and felt the pressure of having a Harvard Preschool of Management type declaring "we will be done by X" when we haven't even estimated a value for X.

Failure investigations are difficult to plan for and budget, but hey - if you're just a politician everything looks easy.

What did the OP really mean to write?

He wrote "bullish tone" but I think I might have misread it as "bull$hit tone"

Administrators... I've known too many.

-CB