Posts by Xalran

Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support

Re: Well done

There was spam in 1990...

but it was restricted to some Usenet forums and was just a nuisance that lowered the signal iver noise ratio of those forums.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: Y2K

Ah, Y2K... the 2 days when you earned a month salary just to hang in the office and play computer games (that's what I did on the 31st and on the 1st during the day, a colleague had the night shift for the products we both were supporting and did the same)

Obviously I went straight from the office to partying with friends doe the new year to back to the office... It was the time when sleep deprival was not an issue and I could keep going for days with just a few naps here and there.

Re: Ah, the tax man

Here (Land of the Frogs) as a retiree you can work as long as you don't earn more than 160% of what we call the SMIC (Salaire Minimum de Croissance, minimum growth salary) each month.

Any money earned over that is deducted from your pension.

And obviously you get to pay revenue taxes on them (but you have to pay them on your pension too anyway)

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Ever tried to send an email through GSM-Data at 2G Time ?

Trust me, even for the small one liner one I had to send, it was painful and took forever... 1200 bauds would have been high speed connection.

EU telcos ask: Huawei going to afford to replace Chinese equipment?

Re: Whatever happened to Huawei's "Cyber Security Transparency Centre" (Brussels)?

Cisco & Juniper don't exist at the radio level which is where the HRV ripping order is happening.

The Alternatives are Ericsson and Nokia... And if you manage to coax them to sell outside of their home market a Korean and a Japanese telecom equipment maker... (coaxing them is not going to be easy, they seem to be perfectly happy to limit themselves to their home countries)

Even if Cisco has some Private Mobile Network (5GSA) solution it uses alternate radio... and the a private Mobile Network can't be scaled up to a full fledged network.

BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

Re: Beware of BOFHs bearing "gifts"

Anything carried by the BOFH or the PFY should be considered and treated as nuclear weapon about to explode when they relinquish it.

But unless you're yourself a BOFH or a n educated PFY, there's no way to know that.

Now when you're an upcoming Security Type that probably knows more about guard dogs than computer and networks it's easy to hook you... On stuff.

(for reference, been there, got called to fix a broken Active Directory because the upcoming security type had no clue and played with backup restore as if they were windows update checkpoints... It made a mess in Kerberos and in the end they had to rebuild one of the two AD server from scratch... and yes they were Security Types that thought they had a clue... and as an added bonus it got my employer back in that contract [we had been put on the side... because Corporate Politics])

Techie expensed a bag of oranges and then juiced up a stupid security incident

Fear the Dreaded Indian Expense Checking Outpost.

In my previous life in $TELCO, after the internet bubble they brought in the Dreaded Indian Expense Checking Outpost...and SAP

What it meant for us, local frog Engineers was the following :

instead of filling a basic excel sheet with our expenses, stapling the receipt to it and giving it to the secretary (about 10 minutes of our time), we now had to create the expense in SAP, fill each and every single expense, per type, scan all the receipts (one trip to the printer), attach each scanned receipt to the revelant entry, then print the barcode that appeared in a PDF file after finishing the expense claim (another trip to the printer), stapling all the receipt, in front of the printed sheet, but not covering the barcode, and then putting it in the mailbox in the office lobby... if the mailbox was not already full. (about an hour of work coaxing SAP and going back and forth to the printer, just for a simple one day trip expenses)

As for the weirded expense I had to make... 5 meters of 400V 3 Phase+Ground cable, along with 5m of Single+Ground phase 240v with several IP64 63Amps (3Phase+Ground) and 63Amps (Single Phase+ Ground) male and female plugs. (honestly a few IP64 16Amps Caravan Plugs would have done the trick quite well, it's not as if the stuff to be connected was ever going to draw 60amps... At worst it was going to pull 10 to 12 amps)

BOFH: Vibe-coded solutions arrive for problems nobody has

Re: No BOFH on the front page.

It if was just the BOFH...

The new Mangled Enshitified Vulture Central made it extremely difficult to find the On Call, Who, Me?, Borkborkbork! and a few more that used to be easy to find when a new post appeared...

I won't even talk of the way articles are shown from the latest to the oldest (top down, and not left to right) because I would end up saying bad things ( there's a few languages that are written that way... English is not one of them.)

Re: Faulty window latches?

Did you mean a project mangler with an MBA

Re: Another boss defenestrated

I would have gone for the room with the massively reinforced door at the lowest level of the underground carpark (under the office building) that contains all the failed (rampaging) robotic experiments built over the years. I think there's also a pit with some nasty stuff in it in the same area, it could have also been an option.

But a window sill jumping boss is a classic.

Iran hints it could interfere with submarine cables in the Strait of Hormuz

Re: Time to lay some fiber in the desert.

The distance I gave was roughtly taken with Google Earth between submarine cable endings at each side, following the existing road.

If you go by vulture flight it's shorter.

I could have taken a shorter path... But the point was to actually bypass the straight for most cables that are there.

Time to lay some fiber in the desert.

While it's a massive project to dig a canal large enough to bypass the straight of Hormuz while accommodating the ships size.

Laying a few fiber cable through the United Arab Emirates from one coast to the other (about 100Km) along the road that sits there shouldn't be too hard, nor take too long to do...

AT&T sues to ditch Cali copper phone lines to save billions

Re: The Big One

albeit possibly slower, I doubt the microwave links have the same capacity as the fiber line. But that depends on how much traffic is on the site of course.)

You'd be surprised at modern microwave link capacity... In lots of places it's the only way to get out the communications from a cell tower.

Now consider 5G capability on the phone side and the fact that a cell tower can have a large number of phones located there...

The microwave link has to be able to handle the full backhaul traffic when there's no other option for backhauling.

When done right it's impressive.

Just look at all the webcams that poped up on YT and streamed live when there's been an eruption in Iceland the last few years... now consider that they are basically a 5G phone with an attached webcam, add all the people that come and go to watch the eruptions some of them probably streaming on some social network or another at the same time... All that was conducted through 3 to 5 cell towers, at least one of them being backhauled through a microwave link.

In the land of Regulations.

Also known as France...

POTS/PSTN is going the way of the Dodo at speed. First announced 16 years doe 2025, it is now set to 2030. My local copper line is to be scrapped next year. But I don't care I got FTTH now.

The whole thing has been planne/regulated/ordered by the French Government when they sold the Fiber/Internet licences decades ago, as for ISPs, $TELCO OPERATORS to be candidate for a licence they had to provide a investment plan to cover 70% of the French population within 5 years, 90% in 10 years, AND 80% of surface in 7 years, 100% of the surface in 15 years.

( or similar constraints )

So nowadays FTTH is ubiquitous ands copper can be turned off without any fuss.

Since it's something that has long been planned through regulation all the home equipments providers (alarms, elderly rescue buttons, monitoring stuff, ... ) has been adapted to either use the Internet link provided by the FTTH box and/or to use the VoIP channel.

Since similar regulations/laws/rules were set for the Mobile network licences we don't have many locations without coverage. Those locations are usually not where people live and/or are in protected areas that preclude the installation of mobile relays ( say the center of the Ecrin National Park, on the glaciers, several hours away walking from the nearest road. )

UK reloads artillery plans with £1B remote-control howitzer order

Re: Nice

It's somewhat an Acronym : CAmion Equipé d’un Système d’ARtillerie.

The French Army loves that kind of naming scheme. To the point that in some case they probably come up with the name/acronym and then try to create a relevant phrase.

Re: Nice

It's not an opinion, Ukraine proved it.

Shoot and Scoot is the new moto... and tracked artillery, even of the fastest tank chassis won't cut it.

Here, in France the Caesar was born as a way to give cheap heavy artillery to mountain troops and expeditionary forces... It overperformed, many countries noticed it, and started to develop their own version. Ukraine proved it was an extremely important concept.

By ditching the tracks you loose the all terrain capability, but you get a 1 or 2 minutes setup time, a 1 minute time between the last shot and the the truck moving, and truck speed (90/110Kmh) on paved road and decent unpaved ones.

Re: Nice

And we can hit UK from our shores with our CAESAR. ;)

I think we could hit each other from one side to the other of the Straight of Hormuz too.

Re: Nice

France also has something similar called CAESAR.... Ukraine loves it...

On-call techie decided job was done and hit the bottle – just before his pager went off

That's when officially being on call comes handy.

You know which weeks you can drink and which weeks you can't... If the company is good you know that months ahead, and you get *On Call* fees (even if nobody calls you)

I made a lot of money that way (being on call when I left $TELCO was 60 Euro a day in week, 150 Euro for Saturdays, 250 Euros for Sundays... just to carry the On Call phone. Being called was like playing scrabble : automatic overtime, at night multiplier (when called at night), Saturday multiplier (on Saturdays), sunday multipliers... Lets just say that one hour on a sunday evening, after after areally bad week where several calls had to bne handled (up to the point that you worked for more than 51 hours) was *hour count triple* (and yes hours were counted from the tiime the phone/pager ringed up to the time my head hit the pillow again.)

Re: Words that strike terror in the heart of anyone oncall

Not terrorrized, not even frightened... just annoyed or puzzled

Because I know, they haven't really tried, most of the time.

If you know your customers, you know which ones will have tried everything and pulled a blank before calling you and which ones are just bullshitting it because they have no clue and/or don't give a FSCK.

BOFH: Nothing says 'business continuity' like a dry wooden broom

Re: Outages

I (ab)used a pair of DG834 and DG834g (the difference is easy : no wifi when there's no g) for as long as I had an ADSL connection.

And every time I had to call the *customer support drones* the first question they were asking was :

what lights are on on your box ?

My answer was :

I don't have a triple play box... I have a router.

This inevitably led to a minute of blank while the *customer support drone* performed a hard reset, shrugged off and asked me the next question in his list.

It was always fun, since everytime I was telling them exactly what was not working in the network (in technical terms that sadly the *customer support drone* hasn't been trained to parse as : this require a person more competent then me )...

After some time the *customer support drone* finally blanked out completely and just handed me off to a techincal guy that took a few seconds to concur with my analysis of the issue and told me they were going to work on it.

Re: Outages

That reminds me of a story I heard (I know it happened and was not embelished, as I spent some time on that site later and saw the telltales) in my previous $ORK.

One of the main public exchange building in a well known wine area got stuck by lightning....

Public exchange ( especially the ones that were PSTN... but since mobile was in it's infancy they were the most ubquitous ones. ) at that time were beating when it came to floor space occupancy.

So basically one exchange that served 60K+ landlines got a on target hit by lighting... Obviously it stopped delivering calls... especially since the massive amount of (acid/lead) batteries in the basement just boiled (which should have been good for a few hours of uptime), the backup generator fried before even starting to show a sign of life... It took almost a day for another generator to be hooked on a brand new power line (because that fried too) so that the process of assessing the damage (curiously only a few non critical board had fried) and starting the hour long process to bring back the exchange to life.

(at that time such an endeavour was betweek 6 and 10 hours from the time power was restored to the time a call could be handled... not counting the time to replace all the fried boards in the cabinets.)

Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving

First rule

First rule I learned once out of all the training courses my first employer saw fit to do (there was a good reason, you don't learn how a public exchange work and how to configure it from scratch) the first day I was sent on a live site for job training...

The senior integrator (which had barely 2 years of seniority over me) told me the first rule when working with live public exchanges :

Fridays are for paperwork.

Absolutely NO WORK on the exchangge will be performed.

And that's twice true for the Friday Afternoons... Bring a book in case there's not ennough paperwork, but hands off the TTY, the PC, and anything interracting with the exchange.

( summarized, in French as : le Vendredi, c'est touche pas p'tit con)

Thunderbird in hand worth 2 Outlooks as fresh FOSS fave and Firefox arrive

Re: Very good software

I concur...

Up until recently, I had to make do with Outlook in my new $ORK as I couldn't install anything on the laptop (among other things).

But things changed a while ago... And for a completely different reason (creating emails that actually can be edited both in content and header, to simulate a very specific sender with a very specific content, so that they can be used in another software) I installed Thunderbird.

After looking at it for two days (and working on those tinkered with emails) I went beyond frustration with Outlook and just tried to see if Thunderbird was willing to talk with $COMPANY mail server.

Since then I've been quite happy at getting back threads that make sense, mails showing on a single line, labels that covers the whole line (and not just a tiny flag), easy toggling from full to compact header, and more...

Outlook has been relagated to Calendar duty (Until such day I grow frustrated enough by it to work on the configuration needed to have the calendar in Thunderbird)

Cops hand Motorola £25M no-bid deal to keep 2000-era radios alive

Re: Frogs already did it.

This one is a 5G SA, not a 5G NSA (SA : Stand Alone or full 5G; NSA : Not Stand Alone or 5G radio with 4G backend.)

You can still do some kind of network slicing in 5G NSA, but it's not a real separate network part with it's own QOS and latency, it's a trick with the APNs and shares the QOS and latency of everybody. Only 5G SA can provide a fully separate slice.

As a MVNO you just need to have a 5G Core and an agreement with the other operators to bujild the slices in their RAN... But you can guess that no operator is going to say no to the government of the country they operates in to provide a network slice when required ( AFAK the slice is not active all the time, it's only activated in the area where it is required at the time it's required)

Frogs already did it.

Frogs have stared to move away from Tetra several years ago...

Our new emergency services system is integrated (parse : all the emergency services use the same network) and is basically using one of the perk of 5G : Network Slicing. the system acts like a MVNO (Mobile network Virtual Operator) and when required by an emergency can preempt a network slice (basically a reserved bandwidth with very specific capabilities like ultra low latency) from all the mobile phone operators that have antennas in the wild in the area where the emergency occurs.

I don't know how far the deployment is, but it doesn't takes long to deploy a MVNO core and one was becoming available at the time $TELCO equipment builder won the bid.... so they might have reused it. (I left $TELCO equipment builder around that time for more interesting things like ISO 27001)

France’s digital directorate dumping Windows desktops, adopting Linux instead

Re: probably nitpicking.

Looking at Livekit.com

It seems they are just offering COTS pieces of software (dubbed as frameworks) to be used to build your own application.

And the code seems to be somewhat Open Source. So all in all, even if the are US based, it gives lots of wiggle room.

But yes, if they really wanted to dig hard on the US dependency, they should have gone for another option (Tixeo comes to mind, as it's developed by a French Company and is already in widespread use in many administrations

Re: probably nitpicking.

Not that Visio, the French one.

Visio as a short for Visioconférence (videoconférence) as in the article...

But I saw what you were doing ;) So have one ->

Re: Walking the hard path

There's a certification for Cloud based stuff. It's called SecNumCloud...

I let you dig the details but one of the most important point, beside French/European based hosting, the compnay has to have more than 50% of it's shareholders European, and has it's headquarters in France.

If the French government starts to require the SecNumCloud certification for all the cloud products it uses, it's going to beextremely painful for Microsoft and friends.

As for the OS & computers, once upon a time we had a company called Bull that produced UNIX flavored servers (Bull flavor of Unix)... and Thomson that was making PC Clones. (among other things). Both still exists even if they are both far from what they used to be.

For switches & routers Ericsson & Nokia is the way to go. For Firewalls we have Stormshield.

For mail clients, Thunderbird is fine... But there's other options. For the mail server... It's going to be painful as most admins got used/trained on Windows servers, but it can be done. They just will have to learn good old mail server stuff.

All in all the most difficult is going to get people used to whatever office suite they end up choosing (LibreOffice, OpenOffice, ....) and it's going to be painful for the IT helpdesks as there's a massive amount of computer illiterate in the French administration. (and we can't get rid of them (parse:fire) to hire a PFY that knows his way around a computer, because France)

probably nitpicking.

I'm probably nitpicking...

But "Visio" is already operational and used...

I've been using it for a few months now.

The developer who came in from the cold and melted a mainframe

How about wet from sweat ?

I'll probably send it to On Call at some point since it was more a on call than anything else...

Lets picture a container filled with 3G telecom equipment [parse that as a few racks of SUN Servers], an home grade air cond unit, in summer, under the sun... And a $TELCO that lost contact with everything in that container. I literally melted when I opened the door of the container (instant massive amount of sweat caused by the wall of heat that hit me despite the 35°C+ temperature outside), it was impossible to enter it, and the reason why all the servers in it were down was obvious : thermal protection.

I went to the nearest bar (we don't have pubs here) and got a pint while waiting for the temperature to lower to a semi livable level, then after a cursory check, I went back to the office to tell my boss that they had to call the aircond maintenance.

When a billboard survives the wind, but not the boot

LILO

Until a few years ago I was still stuck in the world of LILO (the acronym is obvious for the old hands)... then I saw the Light and it was called GRUB.

( ok, I hadn't dealt with Linux installs since the (linux level) Epoch... which should explain)

Forking frenzy ensues after Euro-Office launch sparks OnlyOffice backlash

Don't worry

We Frogs will find a way to design yet another office suite that we will call Bureau.

The company's biggest security hole lived in the breakroom

Re: Internet of Crap

To be fair, it was announced on French TV, no less, the general area where our CVN was headed. (as in Eastern Mederranean, near Cyprus)

Every country that matters probably had space assets pointed towards that area even before it got there. They had precise coordinates (and proably still have), so even if it's a clear breach of OPSEC, it's not as Iran (and others) didn't know where the CVN was. They probably still know where it is and where it's headed.

There even was a news team from France.tv aboard last week and they were brought by an helicopter from Cyprus. Knowing the range of the helicopter and the airport/air base they left from and you can get a fairly precise location just through OSINT

EU broadcasters say smart TVs and voice assistants are the next gatekeepers

Just don't connect it to Internet....

I know some Smart TV will refuse to be a TV if they are not connected to internet... which is dumb, it's a fscking TV, it does not need an Internet connection, just a connection to an appropriate antenna a some power.

Now what needs to be really done iis a list of all the smart TV brands and how each TV in theiir stable behaves when it's brought out of the box and cannot phone home. ...

Once the worst culprits are known, people will start avoiding theiir products. So they will have to make changes if they want to stay relevant in that market. Name and Shame is the only way.

Country that put backdoors into Cisco routers to spy on world bans foreign routers

Both Cisco and Juniper (HPE) build their equipment... outside of MAGAstan.

It's too expensive to build them there, it's way cheaper to do that in... say... China. (Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan or Brazil will work too... it doesn't matter it's outside of MAGAstan)

no need to go that far, just add a TAG on the router and the PACKET that contains the router.

I'm already seeing ISPs and such rerouting the equipment flow to a country that managed to stay inther the $FLAG just to put a TAG on them "Made in<insert somewhere appropriate>" so that they can expedite the equipment PACKETS to the 'Murican households that need them...

After all, even telco grade Ciisco Routers are made in China nowadays. And I don't see them moving the production anywhere any time soon.

Microsoft publishes a workaround for Samsung's C:\ drive woes

Semi-relevant...

Long ago when I started working in the telecom industry the software (proprietary high and low level code, proprietary language, proprietary hardware, proprietary chips) was tested for months (basically 6 months at least for a new software versiion that didn't involve new hardware). The test plans were thorough, every branch of the code was tested (in some cases you had to tinker [for lack of better word] with the memory and the code to actually test some branches of said code). that was for the public exchanges that dealt with 2G... or fixed lines...

This was mostly done through automated scripts... but having the 50+ public exchanges needed to perform the tests in less than 6 months (some time was built in to fix the faults found), even with the smallest configuration possible, meant you had a massive amount of metal and silicon tucked in your basement and a massive amount of money blocked in those test beds.

And even then bugs were found on a regular basis.

Nowadays, the same equipment is a bunch of COTS X86 servers, usually with some kind of Linux flavor on it, lots of Java, and eventually a bit of CORBA... The software has been coded by Indians fresh out of school, and tested for about a month (give or take a few weeks) before being sent to the first customer... which will be the one doing the real testing.

So it's not surprising that we end up with FUBARs like that (or the Crowdstrike one), since the Telecom Industry took it's cue from the Computer one when it came to cut the testing costs.

Western governments seek to lock down 6G before it even exists

Re: The conceit of it

And Samsung is not really present abroad, especially beyond Asia.

So it all boil down to the two Nordic companies and the Chinese ones...If you don't want to buy Chinese kits, you end up buying Finnish or Swedish kits.

(That is unless you are a Korean operator or a Japanese Operator, then you'll buy local kits)

Re: Its political, isn't it?

Come to Europe, despite having to tear down all those Huawei radios, we have multiple (more or less) reliable 5G networks in each country... to the point that even in very remote areas you have 5G coverage if you're subscribed on the operator that covers that area.

for example in France : map of French coverage per operator

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: HSE calculations were correct to within a few meters

At least the calculations weren't performed by some vaporware.

since we are sleaving southern England.

He could have been sent to Coventry.

Europe's 5G Standalone stall risks falling behind US, Asia

Re: Trump 1 - Europe 0…

OTOH... Coverage outside cities in Magastan sucks.

While we were removing Huawei kits, Magastan only deployed 5G in cities and suburbs and there's massive areas with bad or even no 5G coverage.

in Europe, in most countries, a caveat came with the licences : You need to cover X% of the country people in Y years AND you need to cover A% of the country in B number of years. (for France X and A = 90, Y=5, B=10)

This link shows that right now there's between 4 and 8%% of the territory that's not covered by the French operators :

https://monreseaumobile.arcep.fr/?page=couverture-theorique&lang=fr&theme=default&territory=perimetreMetro&operators=20820%2C20801&techno=4g&service=internet

Can we get a similar coverage map for Magastan ?

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative

They can try.... But there's about 0 chances it goes beyond the draft.

We have the following French term : Visioconférence.

Even Microsoft uses it on the French pages about Teams : https://www.microsoft.com/fr-fr/microsoft-teams/video-conferencing

And "Visio" is clearly a shortening of the long word.

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

There's also the Air France one at CDG ( Roissy Airport ) sitting on a stand. It was basically lifted the from the nearest tarmac after it's last flight.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: "a large US-based aircraft company"

Well, High level Manglement is the only location where this kind of person are ggoiiing to do the least damage.

The people below will just work around him, and those above will ignore him.

BOFH: If another meeting is scheduled, someone is going to have a scheduled accident

Re: Talk about flash·backs…

And according to former colleagues, it's fun & messy when the exchange building gets hit by thunder, beside bringing down the echange (which is a PITA in itself to bring back up), it generates fun stuff with the batteries... some will explode, others with just become... not batteries, and a few will survive unscathed.

Re: Talk about flash·backs…

In the telecom 10*2cm copper bars were a common way to distribute power in exchanges until not long ago ( it's common enough that all PSTN exchanges still use them. at some level)

Obviously those copper bars are not insulated and are near enough each other that dropping a spanner in that space will result in a blue flash, a massive KZZZZZEEEERRRRTTTT and with luck a oh merde that tells you the colleague that dropped the spanner survived the event unscathed. (obviously been, there lived that, the spanner didn't survive and the copper bars required a week end maintenance window to be replaced... at least the batteries didn't get any copper projection, the colleague had chosen to work around the bar protections instead of removing them [which is also why he was unharmed] )

US Navy scuttles Constellation frigate program for being too slow for tomorrow's threats

They wanted cheap and fast...

... At least that's what they said...

But to have cheap and fast, they should have kept the FREMM hull the way it was, just replacing the European military equipment by it's 'Murican counterpart.

Noooo, they completely changed the ship to the point that it was basically a brand new ship bigger than the FREMM.

(removing the sonar dome, because the shipwyards are on the lakes and the dome would hit the bottom before even reaching the sea was just the smallest change)

It's a bit like the carmakers that keeps spewing supposedly updated versions of their best cars (Fiat 500 & Panda, VW Bettle, Mini, Renault R4 & R5, ...).

Except that they have nothing in common with the originals, and they are all way larger, more expensive (and heavier) than the originals...

Which defeat why the originals were hits. (small but big enough, cheap, and light)