Posts by gbiz

Red Hat tries on a McKinsey cap in quest to streamline techies' jobs

BITD ...

they possibly were the worlds best open source engineering organisation. It wasn't by chance they got 80+% share of the enterprise Linux market. But back then the C-level & senior management, had a clue. (Aside from sales. They were a bunch of clueless tw@s even then)

Chris Wright has been at RH long enough to remember the old internal memo-list maillist, before management split it into friday-list to stop people openly flaming dumb management decisions. Before coming out with shite like that he should ask himself what reaction it would have got on there.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

A&A actually work out a tiny bit cheaper.

I called Zen to cancel my contract, the person in sales i got through to tried to transfer me to the the cancellation team, but they were all in a meeting. He said that if i'd replied to the email they'd have discussed it, though didn't say if i'd done that it'd actually change anything. I pointed out the email doesn't suggest this change was negotiable, the only option is to pay extra.

Thats what i suspected. Thanks :)

Just looking at the A&A pricing & it doesn't seem much different to Zen, unless i'm missing something (very likely). I'll give them a call tomorrow.

88.96.96.xxx

If they are selling off outliers in their address pools, you'd like to think the first option they'd offer people would be to move them into their main address block.

After receiving the email from them I was thinking about posting "Zen will be next" in the comments on the Virgin Media article the other day.

I've been with Zen since murdoch took over Easynet. I switched the day that was announced. Email i just checked suggests Dec 2005. (*)

I use a few of the addresses in my block of 8 (vpn, mail, gateway, occasional web, router), so i'm someone who won't easily be able to adjust my setup to single ipv4. Certainly not in the 30 days they're giving us to prepare for the switch, without cost. They don't offer a /30, so to keep my setup working will cost an extra tenner a month. F*** that.

The email they sent me states "We consistently review our network's usage and our recent review revealed that most of our customers primarily use just one IP address. To optimise our resources, we will be adjusting the IP addresses assigned to your Zen service down to one". Er, that'll be most not all customers. There was no consultation on this. No long term notice, just 30 days. I _think_ for a few years their new customers get a single ip addr, so this is going to impact those who have been with them longer. My original contract with them certainly states the service includes 8 static ip addrs. Since then, the only time my contract with them has been modified was the switch to the fttc service & when i spoke to the sales droid about that, i asked if i'd keep them after the switch & he said yes. The email from them regarding this change suggests the 8 static ip addrs were never guaranteed in the contract so they're free to make the switch. Surely if they're just looking to de-fragment their ipv4 blocks then they could move customers to new ones within their main block.

TFA doesn't mention that a few months back they also removed the free hosted web site. OK it wasn't much, 1GB of space, but enough to host a few images & docs. It was useful to me. Since it's removal I'd been meaning to host that here, using another of these static ip addrs, just hadn't got around to it yet.

The ipv4 address blocks this change frees up must be worth a fair bit. A cynic might think that this, and the removal of free web hosting, are the sort of thing that companies do when they're either desparate for some short term revenue, or after they've been taken over by an investor looking to asset sweat. As is the way in this country now, f*** customer loyalty.

I guess a switch to A&A is the best option. Anyone got any other suggestions ?.

FYI for those who are saying they've not heard anything yet, i got my email on jan 24th, subject "Notification of changes to your IP addresses". It got filtered into my Zen folder & i only noticed it by chance.

(*) That made for an amusing conversation a few months later when i was in doing a RHEL & RH Satellite presentation to what was the old Easynet Unix team & their new Sky management. The chat during a break for coffee ... them: "who do you use for internet ?" me: "errr, up to a few moths ago Easynet, now Zen". They laughed. I clearly wasn't the first who'd said that.

Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in

workshy.layabouts++

I'd hope the cull would fall heavily on EMEA management & HR, but as is the way with these things it'll probably be the decent people at RH who lose their jobs first.

UK internet pioneer Cliff Stanford has died

Demon were my first access to the internet, about the same time as i started with Linux (SLS with kernel 0.99pl5), so i guess some time around the end of 1992. I'd used uucp through work, but this was my first proper tcp/ip internet. In the Brighton local call area at that time we also had the option of Pavilion, but i went with Demon. I don't remember Mistral being an option, they must have started just after this.

Modems were expensive, but i had an understanding boss who let me take home one of the work USR 9k6 modems each evening & weekend. I finally got my own modem after a 2 week job in NYC that needed modems for a backup ppp link between sites & we'd got a couple of the then still unratified V.fast spec (Boca iirc). When the job finished, the modems were surplus & i got to bring one back with me. Fortunately the modems at the Demon end supported that protocol & it connected at the full speed.

Like a previous poster, i was stuck thinking of a hostname. I'd had tarka dhal with my dinner that evening, so i ended up with "tarka"

I stuck with Demon until the end of the 90's when work (IBM) offered me the option of WFH including them paying for an ISDN line at home. I don't remember the reason for it, but for the ISDN i switched to Easynet, who shortly after started offering ADSL & IBM funded switching my home line to ADSL.

My hazy recollection for the first couple of years online most of my time was spent downloading Linux patches. Binaries & full source tarballs were too large to download so I kept my system updated by downloading & applying patches & building from source. The kernel would take all night to build :)

RIP Dr Peuto, Zilog and Sun's bright SPARC

Re: No mention of the Z80,000 ?

Zilog used a Western Electric WE32100 based CPU board, designed i think with engineering assistance from AT&T, for their 32-bit Unix systems. Someone in one of the engineering teams at Zilog told me that they'd wanted to use the Z80k but developing & maintaining the Z8k based 800 h/w & ZEUS had been way too expensive, they needed a cheaper solution. The 32100 meant they could use the close to vanilla SVR2 from the 3B2. All the heavy lifting had been done, they only had to add support for the Zilog unique items - ZBus, I/O cards, peripherals etc.

The ZBus Interconnect backplane & card cage were retained between the 16 & 32 bit systems, so in theory all you needed to do was swap the CPU board, though iirc customers opted for the new scsi controller to replace the old E-SMD or ST506 disk controllers, & the QIC tape with larger capacity.

(Company i worked at in the 80's was the UK master reseller for Zilog computer systems. I used to fix the boards).