Posts by Arbuthnot the Magnificent

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Re: Universities are the absolute worst for shadow IT

A few years ago I went back to Uni to do postgrad study. We were constantly nagged about saving energy, but every evening you'd see hundreds of monitors sitting displaying the login screen for the managed desktop environment in offices - sometimes even on projector screens in lecture halls. I put a ticket in to IT suggesting they at least enable display power saving. A week later the ticket was rejected as "you can't run group policy on a monitor".

How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'

Lift emergency panels

A few years ago I was working on the design and procurement of telecoms for a new hospital. One of the jobs was liaising with the lift company to connect phone lines to the call panels - these were analogue ports off our shiny new PBX. The possibility of putting on-hold music on the channels came up over a cuppa, with us trying to think of the best / worst possibilities. I suggested "Free Falling" by the now legendary Tom Petty.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Collingwood alumnus here, virtual pint on me!

Boffins rewrite the book on how Earth's oceans developed

Re: That's right...

I've read your reply three times and I'm still not sure whether you agree with me or not, so I'll just upvote you anyway, because who cares.

That's right...

...BOFFINS! Are you listening, IOP?

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

I AM a boffin

Physicist here, I demand to retain my boffin status. Although of the male persuasion myself, I have many female colleagues who are also indisputably boffins.

Bringing the IBM Thinkpad 'Butterfly' back to life

Re: Low bar

For sure, unless he is literally gathering sand from the beach to make his own CPU from scratch then what is the point...

Do try and cheer up a bit, you assassin of joy.

Re: Low bar

Some of us are actually interested in the fun, hackery aspects of computing.

Who writes Linux and open source software?

Re: This is old news ...

"...who really cares who contributes.."

Because it's MS. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Re: Server boot time

I work on an HPC cluster with hundreds of modern high-spec servers, running bare-metal Centos. Total boot time is probably 30 or 40 seconds, but it's irrelevant because they take 10 minutes to flipping POST anyway!

Re: The problem is desktop components on servers

"...I've argued the people making the decisions for some Linux distributions are only using it on their personal laptop"

You don't have to skirt around it, you can just say "Poettering", I don't think it summons him...

China’s Baidu reveals generative AI chatbot based on language model bigger than GPT-3

Pasteurised is best!

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Fresh out of school I did an industry placement at Sanyo in the 90s, and we were issued a handbook of cultural differences and do's and don'ts for interacting with the Japanese management. It was quite a shock for a kid from a backwards northern village.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

Yup

2007 ThinkPad, 2012 home-built PC, 2014 LG phone. Enough spares to last for ever. Thanks Linux and LineageOS.

Fancy a quick tour of DragonFly BSD 6.4?

Dragonfly

I've tinkered with Dragonfly a bit over the last couple of years. It's well worth keeping an eye on https://www.dragonflydigest.com/, which posts some interesting and eclectic stuff.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Re: Not only two signs...

I work in an office built in a wooden superstructure on the roof of a university, alongside a couple of telescope domes belonging to the astronomy group. The high-tech solution to stop us turning on the corridor lights (which would shine through the window and spoil their view) is that the switches are taped to the off position.

Commercial repair shops caught snooping on customer data by canny Canadian research crew

Re: Snooping

Thanks for the judgement. As it happens, a "dead" machine was brought in and my colleague determined it just need a Windows reinstallation, there was no actual hardware fault. To go the extra mile he ran a quick scan for lost files thinking how pleased the customer would be that we had saved their data, and immediately saw a bunch of filenames that left no doubt that it was child porn. We locked the machine in the safe and rang the police. I can sleep at night over that one.

Snooping

Tricky one, of course it's morally wrong to snoop, but we did catch a few criminals back when I worked in a PC shop.

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

Damn you, I definitely need to sneak out for a lunchtime pint now...

Indeed, as a callow youth (more years ago than I care to remember) I worked as a technician at a large high street beige-box slinger, and 90% of my workload was backing up users data (pr0n) and running the factory reset disk. The most difficult bit was convincing punters that their machine wasn't actually broken, it was just crufty software.

Re: Security

The problem I have with Chrome OS (apart from it being Google) is the same problem I have with Android; perfectly good hardware becomes worthless because of deliberate software obsolescence. I have a 2013 LG phone that would be WEEE if it weren't for LineageOS. Even that isn't a total solution because various "important" packages such as mobile banking or MFA authenticators won't work on non-standard operating systems, so I am OK to log in to the bank on a Samsung tablet that hasn't had a patch in 5 years but not a nightly build of Lineage...

Security

No security updates after a few years, and Google watching you? Sounds super.

Microsoft's Lennart Poettering proposes tightening up Linux boot process

Re: Going out on a limb here…

"...standardising the init process..."

I would respectfully disagree that standardising the init process is a good idea; I personally like having the freedom to choose which init system I want to use.

Re: Glad I'm a hoarder...

Now that I can drink to, even though it's not quite Friday yet!

Re: Glad I'm a hoarder...

"But on such old hardware, you won't be able to mine crypto! Or trade NFTs in the exciting new world of Web3! Or take part in the cyber future of the Metaverse!"

I shall just have to bear it manfully!

Glad I'm a hoarder...

My stack of pre-TPM, IME / PSP-free motherboards and laptops should see me out...

PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver

Leekspin was the safer alternative...

That was a bit more wholesome than one place I worked, where we would "meatspin" carelessly neglected machines... if you don't know what that is, please don't look it up at work. In fact, I'd advise not looking it up at all.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

I work in HPC (for astronomy) and we use tons of tape, it'll be LTO or something. When you have to store PB of data for years it's still a good option.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: Desktops

"I thought XFCE is the default on MX Linux ?"

It is, but there's a Fluxbox option. You can select it from the login screen on the XFCE version, or there's a separate Fluxbox spin.

Re: Desktops

I did briefly play with the Fluxbox version of MX Linux on a rather low-spec spare machine I had, and it was pretty good. After 10 years on XFCE though I'm just too lazy to learn something new...

Desktops

When I first decided to flee the worsening mess of MS UI, like many others I went to Ubuntu. I tried the various desktop editions, found Xubuntu and said "this is the one for me". I've long since moved on through many different versions of Linux (and indeed BSD) but I always stick with good old XFCE, because it's the closest thing to the Win9x / XP interface I grew up with. Much respect to those who want the whole "minimal window manager" thing with a million keybindings, whatever works for you, but I want a start menu and shortcuts!

You can move everything around on it, MX defaults to the XFCE desktop which is very customisable.

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

Re: Non-VOIP, POTS payphones

Agreed, less than a decade ago I worked on the telecoms provision for a new-build hospital, the main connectivity was (new to the organisation at the time) SIP but I still had to install a surprising number of POTS lines. These were needed for emergency links to blood transfusion service, ambulance centre, lift alarm panel etc. I left that field now but whenever I hear about the death of POTS I wonder what they are going to replace these critical things with...

Garuda Linux 'Talon': Arch, but different. Dare we say it? Better

Good for gamers

This is a decent choice for those of us who like to play the odd modern game. I always had to keep a Windows partition for such activities but this works pretty well with Proton and Nvidia straight out of the box. (Before anyone feels the urge to tell me, yes I know that in theory you can run Steam and Nvidia firmware on just about any distro but after a working day fighting with Centos the last thing I want to do is fiddle about with my home machine to relax). The only gripe would be you do end up downloading a lot of updates, so it's not so good if you have a poor internet connection - but if you're a Steam user you probably have decent bandwidth anyway.

x86 Raspberry Pi Desktop is a great way to revive an old PC

Thanks for the information, I was wrong about Chromium then - must be because I don't really use it at all. You're right though, it does run surprisingly well on the old 1st Gen Core Duo.

I was recently testing OpenBSD on my X60 and I don't believe Firefox or Chromium were available in the 32-bit edition - did you build them manually?

Getting that syncing feeling after an Exchange restore

Exchange

2000 was OK, 2003 was pretty decent, everything was downhill from there.

Don't know how many SBS 2003 machines I put in then ripped out again a few years later, but it was a lot...

Iceotope: No need to switch servers to swap air-cooled for liquid-cooled

Re: And how much extra effort

You don't work in HPC then, I'm forever dealing with failed memory and mainboards.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Email backups

I was sole admin for a sizeable manufacturer back in the early 00s, and one day I was "invited" to the boardroom to confirm to the directors that I couldn't read their email. "Of course I can," I said, "I'm the network admin". They were horrified. "But you don't have permission!" Who sets the permissions? I rejoined. After much huffing and puffing on their part I simply said "Mike, your best defence is that I don't think your email will be very interesting. But I'm starting to wonder if that's true..."

How CXL may change the datacenter as we know it

Re: CXL == slower /tmp

I work in HPC, we have an on-premises cluster used for large-scale numerical simulations. Composable memory fabric for our compute nodes is something we are interested in, since at any time we have jobs running with varying memory requirements.

Supercomputer lab swaps lead-acid UPS batteries for alkaline gear

Re: li-ion

I briefly worked a contract job rejigging the network in an EV battery plant. Starting with individual electrodes the entire packs were built up on site. The individual modules were loaded into huge conditioning chargers, rows and rows of them like the aisles in a supermarket but 20 feet high, and along each row there were dozens of nitrogen cylinders ready to dump their loads - there must have been hundreds or thousands of those cylinders in the plant. We were told that if an alarm went off, sprint for the exit or you'll asphyxiate.

Given that, as others have pointed out, lithium fires make their own oxygen, I can only assume they were there to stop any fires in the electrical systems from setting off the batteries? Or maybe just for show. With that and the emergency showers everywhere in case of an electrolyte spill (get naked and get in there in a hurry or the acid will eat into your bones and kill you) it was a jolly fun old place.

OpenBSD 7.1 is out, including Apple M1 support

Re: OpenBSD is Faaast!

Blazingly fast? It's noticeably slower than Linux. I have it on a 2nd-gen i5 and it's usable as a desktop running xfce, thunderbird, firefox etc, but it works a lot harder than it did under Debian. Not criticising, it's not the focus of the project.

Plans for Dutch datacenter to warm thousands of homes

Re: Using waste heat

Some years ago I installed a network for a startup company that was using waste heat from the cooling system of a power plant to run heated pools for aquaculture. The plant fed the Lynemouth aluminium smelter, which was mothballed about a year later so I guess that project was dead in the water...

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

If you haven't spent four hours waiting for zmodem are you even a BOFH?

Re: rule 1

My office bin has a "Windows 8" sticker on it. Much more useful than the installation it came from.

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

Re: Read canaries ... How I became Director of the Secret Police

A company I worked for instituted a fabulous (*) system of internal self-study training. For each level you passed you got a pay increment, but the levels got increasingly more convoluted and impractical to pass - you had to print out the material as hard copy and fill it in, then get a manager to authorise it. By the time you hit level 5 or something it was about 100 A4 sheets. We had one manager who had somehow been promoted up from the warehouse, he was a big burly chap with hands like coal shovels but not, shall we say, one of life's great thinkers. I printed out the relevant bumpf, filled in the first and last few pages and waited til this lad was duty manager. Sure enough, he flicked through the first and last few pages, signed it and filed it, and I got my few extra shekels a month.

* not really fabulous

LG promises to make home appliance software upgradeable to take on new tasks

Re: The cynic in me

"Gripping hand"? Insert obligatory "I understood that reference" gif, must dig those books out. Cheers!

Running Windows 10? Microsoft is preparing to fire up the update engines

Re: Old hardware though...?

Indeed it does, it's dual-booted; I only go into Windows when absolutely necessary (Wine lets me down).