Unlocking the hardware
An “emphatic proposition” eh? Letting us use the hardware we paid for fully? I feel like that’s not going to be quite the shocker to your customers that you think it is.
Posts by TheWeetabix
283 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020
Lenovo has a hunch you’re about to try quitting VMware
Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem
HackerOne 'ghosted' me for months over $8,500 bug bounty, says researcher
Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble
Monday 5th January 2026 19:27 GMT
Re: Neat trick
Exactly… I’ve been making “lime and carpet roll” jokes since I was in my 20s and I’m in my 40s now… Heck,
Death of BOFH was so long ago Ive spent part of my career making “how do you turn a riser into a faller?” jokes onsite.
Funny thing, I’ve never met somebody else in my industry that reads Simon’s writing, unless I’ve introduced them to it first. It’s a bit sad.
BOFH: All through the house, not a creature was stirring except the homicidal vacuum cleaner
Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move
After deleting a web server, I started checking what I typed before hitting 'Enter'
Saturday 20th September 2025 17:08 GMT
Re: Never delete the old web site, only rename it
Fortunately she is in good company. The only reason any of us are able to give that advice is because *every single one of us* has committed this exact mistake at least once if not more.
She’s now off to commit some other fun like accidentally putting a space after the first slash in
’rm -rf /tmp/foo’
BOFH: These office thefts really take the biscuit
UK unveils plans to 'transform' the consumer smart meter experience
‘I nearly died after flying thousands of miles to install a power cord for the NSA’
Cisco president says dredging coding syntax from wetware memory wastes engineers' expensive synapses
Regulator sues product comparison site alleged to only compare products on which it earned commission
IBM Watson zombie brand shuffles forward with new AI lab in NYC
Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor
AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics
BOFH: The Boss meets the unbearable weight of innovation
Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos
BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts
Elon Musk’s xAI to pull about half of its smog-belching turbines powering Colossus
Swiss boffins admit to secretly posting AI-penned posts to Reddit in the name of science
Microsoft tries to knife passwords once and for all – at least for consumers
Monday 5th May 2025 03:49 GMT
Someone sat
Presumably with glee, on something for 6 years, in plain sight, and no one noticed.
Makes me wonder what it’s going to look like after the next version of Windows ends security patching.
If I recall this isn’t the first time (https://www.securityweek.com/critical-flaw-magento-ecommerce-platform-exposes-online-shops/amp/) a problem was caused by caused by poor upstream controls. IIRC the lead dev handled his publicity poorly too.
Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air
Devs sound alarm after Microsoft subtracts C/C++ extension from VS Code forks
Sunday 27th April 2025 19:19 GMT
Re: Sceptic
Just to be a pedant, there are several legal precepts that more-or-less state “if you fail to use or enforce these provisions for years, you can lose the right to suddenly enforce them to the detriment of someone else.” Domain squatting comes to mind, as well as patent troll legislation.
VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor in an utterly obscure way
Monday 14th April 2025 19:07 GMT
Once bitten…
I moved everything I touched that was ESXi + SAN/NAS and moved to proxmox + ceph and have t looked back. Proxmox support might seem a little steep, but when you consider that the software is free (and quality) and that their support team is *utterly* top notch (with a huge, healthy community support family) it’s a huge savings. Terraform works so well with it that its heartwarming. It runs on plain Debian, which makes things like administration (or kludges) much more familiar. (For instance, using nut to manage a clean shutdown).
Are there downsides? Sure.
Pmox runs on Debian, but you can’t lump them with other Debian machines. Since we have root access to the hostboxes, we may be tempted to install monitoring software, sometimes this can cause problems. (Vector, im looking at you).
Ceph! (the distributed storage “subsystem” requires some self-education. Its an entire application suite on its own.) Ceph is *worth it* even at home, but it’s quite a thicket.
The gui and cli usually-but-not-always have analogues of the other’s commands, particularly with ceph.
Occasionally, Support can be a bit stroppy. In classic German fashion, they won’t answer a stupid question, but they will let you know. Still worth it.
Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney
Sunday 13th April 2025 21:47 GMT
Just the math
So…. ~30TB of tape vs a ~30GB disc alternative. Since most of us can do basic powers, you will realize you need ~1000 discs to fill that tape.
If we assume our worst case outcome, we have one long linear “tarchive” for a back up, now if I have two full back ups, am I more likely to have two dead tapes or more than two dead discs?
If we assume our best case outcome, I stick the tape in the drive, and if there’s some damage, it uses proper parity/EC and incremental math to fix the problem, or I use the second back up. With the discs, I am stuck swapping one every few minutes, and if one of them is damaged, we may have to go hunting for the parity data.
If we stretch that parity data out, I might wind up having to split my back up across two tapes whereas you would end up having to split that back up across 1100 discs if we had 10% more parity.
Incidentally, a disc mini loader that handles far less than 1100 or 2200 CD sized media units cost the same as a pair of singles or a dual-slot tape drive that can do the entire back up in one swing, requiring one change of tapes if we do a double back up (Which is the only way to do a backup).
Then, of course, everyone does a hash/crc check of their backup the next morning, right? Slap the tape in the drive let it check a handful of files and compare everything. Now, how the fuck do I do that with 1100 discs and get anything else done in my day?
The pint is for after I swap tapes.
Sunday 13th April 2025 21:31 GMT
Re: Optical media stable?
The fact that it’s a proprietary process owned by a company that’s already gone bankrupt once makes me question a few things. I see some of the competitors in the space have also done bankrupt. At the very least the media would need to be readable in commodity hardware, but LTO is an open standard from top to bottom, and this is both proprietary and appears to have competing standards. If they end up, settling on a standard for both chemistry and technology, yeah I suppose the larger discs would be a good contender for smaller back ups like home or small office. You still need some kind of disc flipper if you want to take more than a couple hundred gig of back up whereas nowadays you might need to swap tapes once for a 30Tib array.
Tuesday 8th April 2025 23:53 GMT
Re: Optical media stable?
I think even that that’s pushing it, I mean we’re still using tape after 70 years, when was the last time we used a CD? 20 years ago? or a DVD? 10 years ago? I have 15 year-old LTO tapes and written DVDs, and I’ll bet my ass the tapes have a higher recovery ratio.
Nevermind the whole “R+W R-W” nonsense that never birthed an actual archival format.
Nevermind twice that modern CFS/incremental/rotating tape backups. Most of that is inaccessible to any current optical storage, and the portions that do work would go through an absolutely incredible amount of media, with their attendant higher error ratio just through sheer units of media.
Nevermind-on-the-gripping-hand pretesting media, I can test and read back a tape, but there is a reason DVD and CD media (both R and RW) had a “write test area“.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
