Posts by Altrux 184 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2020
A lot more IPv6, a bit less IPv4, unless you count the explosion of things like CGNAT. Which exists due to the slowness or transitioning to the former. And now the growth of new and exciting transport protocols like QUIC. And yes, the fact that in 1995, probably 90% of the internet's traffic was "useful" stuff, and 10% was e-mail spam. Now, 90% of a vastly higher torrent of traffic is junk / nonsense / malware / attacks / slop, and only 10% is actually useful. But that's a whole different story!
Ah yes, this is the same Google that proclaims "no monopoly here!" because Android is free and open and people can install apps from anywhere, not just from us, right?! Google is both the home and away team, and referee, in its great game to take control of almost the entire web and all of its on-ramps.
Wow, there's a lot in there. Interesting stuff - I actually wondered why RISC-V is getting so much attention, and lots of the software world is devoting serious effort to it, if it's not even half-cooked yet. There must be something else in it? A burning desire to get away from proprietary ARM as well as getting away from cranky but ubiquitous x86? An underlying sense that it will one day still take over the world, just like Itanic was going to, back in 1999?! Whereas Linux was never going to take over the world, but accidentally did. Funny how things turn out...
Honestly, how does Gnome keep up the bloatfest so effectively? They take out more and more, strip down the interface more and more, but it just keeps getting bigger and fatter all the same. Linux fundamentally suffers the same bloat as any other platform, though at least lightweight distros still exist.
I'm responsible for platforming engineering and maintaining clouds of Linux machines. But of course, I still have to do it from a Windows 11 Enterprise laptop. Because enterprise, or something. To be fair, the Linux and open source world hasn't yet come up with a reliable or familiar way of centrally managing almost 100,000 machines in a vast global directory. Or has it? I once had a go at trying to do some user management / directory stuff with FreeIPA/389DS (in a much smaller company), but it was a hopeless cause and we got absolutely nowhere.
But it was (and is) just so ugly - that horrible, flat, dead-looking interface with incredibly wasteful space usage. At least Win11 is slightly nicer to look at. But yes, what the world actually wants is Win7 with updated drivers and tools, all the data-harvesting telemetry ripped out, and nothing more. But the world, of course, won't ever get that.
A brilliant summary - I did 4 days (80% pay) for years and it was brilliant. I'm temporarily back on 5 days, in a new job, as I need to get up to speed. But it's brutal and you can really feel the difference. No time to do anything, and the weeks go by in a blur. I hope to revert to 4 days next year...
A great little tool, and always a permanent member of my 'ISO collection', kept on my media partition, ready to be burned to a stick at any time. I've used it for lots of machine-upgrading and disk-shuffling games. I'm curious how many people are really working on it - there's a few on the 'Contact' page, but a couple are already noted to be inactive. I think this project is worthy of a donation...
Oooh, are they actually aligning with the rest of the universe and using an LTS kernel, this time around? If this kernel is based on the real upstream v6.12, that appears to signify a change in policy. Or is it actually 6.12 with half of 6.13 grafted in and vast stack of other random patches on top? Anyway, looking forward to Rocky 10 for work purposes, and about to give Fedora 42 a proper work-out for non-work purposes, as it were...
I've used LUKS for many years, on my /home partition, and never had an issue. It's generally setup post-install, certainly on Ubuntu, but I use a 'stub' /home in the root partition to do the OS installation, then map in the encrypted home partition later on. This means if you ever lose/break the encrypted /home, you can at least still boot and login to the machine without it complaining about a missing /home dir.
I've used Linux (various flavours) as my daily home driver since as far back as 2002. It was slightly more painful in those days, but still a superior experience to Windows. I've used Linux as a daily driver in some jobs too, though not my previous one, where I suddenly had to re-acquaint myself with the ways of the borg. In a new role starting today, which is entirely focused on Linux / infrastructure / cloud stuff, I'm slightly disappointed to be handed a fully corporatised, ultra locked-down Win11 laptop. It's like being in a digital straitjacket. I'm hoping I can eventually install a real OS on it, as 90% of the corporate stuff is web-based and should work anywhere. We shall see - otherwise I'll probably just be living in WSL, or maybe even a nice VM if I'm lucky...
I'm here in Malaysia, rocking on IPv6, as confirmed by a number of ping tests and ipify.org.
I'm also on fast fibre, which appears to be everywhere here: in fact, my in-laws home in northern Malaysia had full fibre many years ago. Back in SW England though, in a city of 130,000, no such luck. It looks like I'll still be on copper until well into 2026....
The UK firmware site (and wider Draytek UK site) has been intermittently available for the last few days. International sites seem to offer different variants, and different latest versions, for a range of common router models. When presented with a list of alternatives for a given version (e.g. _std, _MDM1, MDM2, .... MDM7), which are we supposed to go for? I'm not going to upgrade until I'm sure, as I don't want to mess up the 'modem code'...
Well, there have been a few slightly embarrassing breakages in the 'stable' series recently. I know Greg K-H has a very challenging job juggling lots of kernel series at once, but you wonder if the whole process is a little too ragged, in terms of accepting things that really aren't just small, obvious fixes. The stable series kernels, especially LTS ones, should /never/ break!
The fibre rollout continues to be a mad free-for-all, with some areas having 2, 3 or even more separate FTTP networks. While other areas, including in major cities, still have zero. We're still waiting, waiting, waiting, nearly 5 years after CityFibre announced their arrival in town. When it finally, finally happens, my broadband will get cheaper (even with OR) as well as much faster...
Microsoft used to be known as geniuses at marketing - if not software development. But how silly is this? No more Remote Desktop app, but you still have to use Remote Desktop to use remote desktop (RDP) connections? And for everything else you use "Windows App"? Coming soon: Office (sorry, MS 365) will now be renamed as "Info Fiddling App". Flight Sim 2024 will be "Boundary Layer App"...
I've had it running on a Pi4 for a few years now - never a blip. Some minor wobbles with the upgrade to v6, but easily fixed (I waited for the first few point releases to come out). It's really nicely designed and so easy to setup. Now, where's that allowlist the El Reg? Happy to add that in if someone can provide pointers. Or I suppose I can just load a few pages on here, watch the block logs and build it up that way?
I've been seeing pictures very similar to this BWB since I started my aerospace degree. That was in 1995 - it feels like we're gone nowhere much in a very long time. I know everything's got more efficient and more automated, but the really radical changes in aircraft configuration and energy source still remain well into the future...
I got a new Pixel phone today, but I've not fully committed to switching over yet. It's interesting to see what you can actually do on a pristine Android phone with a) no SIM and b) no Google account logged in. The answer, of course, is very little. The Google News app thing works, and you can open YouTube and Photos, but that's about it. You can't even open other apps like Messages, without the login prompt, and of course you can't install anything else. It does let you install system software updates and fiddle with settings, but it's fundamentally highly crippled. No great surprise, just an interesting experiment that I hadn't tried for many years.
Malaysia really is the world capital of phone shops - all the malls are jammed with them! What you don't see so much is endless pre-owned phone stores that litter our UK high streets, although doubtless they're out there in the backstreet areas. I once even bought a retail Huawei phone in Malaysian mall, some years back, before deciding to switch to non-Chinese made Samsungs later.
But yes, on this device, I cannot see many people shelling out over $3,500, even in wealthy nations - quite insane! That would buy you a high end Macbook...
Still on Firefox here, even though it's getting harder, as we slowly encounter ever more sites that only work with Chrome engines. Anyway, regarding uBlock, it's another big potential boost for Pi-Hole, which fixes this problem at your network level. Buy a cheap RPi, spin it up, and off you go. The shiny new v6 has just been released, and is better than ever!
It nearly happened to us, during the previous Barclays IT glitch in 2016. Our house completion failed at 6pm on a Friday before a bank holiday festival weekend - there were no hotel rooms for miles. Our solicitor, thank goodness, was also a personal friend with a big house. So the 4 of us (including toddler and elderly m-i-l in tow) moved into their house for a few days, then a hotel later in the week, until we finally got our keys 6 days later. Thanks, Barclays - it cost them around £3k but we only ever got £500 in compensation out of them.
My previous place decided that a new 24/7 trading team (never part of our original plan) would need, you guessed it, 24/7 IT support. From a team of just 3 or 4 geeks. And no, we won't pay you anything extra, unless you actually deal with the problem, then we might give you £100 or something. So yeah, just spend every third weekend on call, within mobile coverage, and not too far away, out of the goodness of your hearts, OK? Sure, no problem! Funnily enough, lots of people left within the next year or so - including me.
I'm still trying to understand why I'm meant to hate it so much. I know it rather breaks the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy, and I know it forces certain ways of interacting; but it does solve some problems and brings the whole service management game up to date. I have no particular attachment to the ancient ways, even though I "should" as an old skool Unix bod (cut my teeth on Solaris in the 90s before Linux took over). Let's hear it for the positive aspects of systemd.
Out here in the west, in a city of 130,000, we're still waiting, waiting, waiting. Apparently there are places with 4 or 5 separate FTTP networks available to them, while we still have none. The rollout has seemed incredibly chaotic and not remotely joined-up. Apparently, Openreach and CityFibre are now both at work here, so the race is on (finally) to see who gets to us first. Goodbye, 19th century copper!
Another step towards abandoning the FB mind virus after too many years. Only about 2% of my feed is actual updates from actual friends anyway, so I really should have stopped bothering long ago. Looking at BlueSky and Mastodon as one possible future, otherwise just Linkedin (unfortunately necessary for professional purposes).
Maybe more extreme than our scenario, but I was doing similar with a fairly large 50-page report and a lot of changesets, working with collaborators both local and remote. It handled it better than I expected, but I'm not sure what would handle it better. Google Docs? Anyway, LibreOffice obviously cannot do anything like that, but for home users that's irrelevant.
I've used Linux in various flavours as my daily desktop since 2002, which almost qualifies me as a 'veteran'. I learned my Unix skills on SunOS 4.x during gap year work placements, and started playing with Linux in the late 90s. It was harder work back in 2002 (the same year we first got 0.5Mbps "broadband"), but still fun. Now, it's as easy as anything else, or easier, and prettier.
But all that incredible power and flexibility is right there, a click away. I could never go back now. Working in Windows feels like trying to do gymnastics in a straitjacket, although I will accept that if you really need the super advanced productivity stuff, MS Office is leagues ahead of LibreOffice. But 98% of people outside a corporate environment simply don't need that.
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