Posts by Alan Brown

"I think it's more of a case that ICANN isn't as important as it thinks itself to be."

As much as I'd like this to be the case, I'm pretty sure there's an agenda going on.

ICANN seems in far too much of a hurry to lose this case.

Re: Mind you I'm more than a bit uncomfortable

"about the sale of domain names without a legit contact. Admittedly that horse has largely bolted,"

That horse bolted long before 1998. ICANN didn't even _start_ taking an interest in whois accuracy until it was threatened with legal action over all the faked addresses and collateral damage ensuing (one kiddy porn domain was registered to a residential address in Guildford inhabited by a very confused and upset little old lady, as one example) and then when it realised it could be a money earner things started going cha-ching.

Re: Why SAP?

"Even now, the endless focus on "Minimum Viable Product" solutions mean..."

...that whatever's used, you're putting glitter on a turd.

And it will stay that way until a board of directors with a clue comes into existence, or the company goes bust.

"Say what you will about Oracle, way easier to implement."

Perhaps, but a bloody disaster to actually use.

Re: Until the price...

"For those of us who still use desktops (or NAS) HDDs are still the best way to go."

If you want to make best use of large HDDs, then you need to front them with SSD caching (read caching and write intent cache) to mitigate the seek penalties.

The size of that cache depends on the kinds of loads you're generating. The way you do it depends on what you have available. I prefer ZFS for large arrays as it's got zero downtime for fsck(*), but you can cache bsd/linux LVM and Windows servers have their own implementations.

"In the enterprise, ideally you want frequently accessed data somewhere quick and infrequently accessed data somewhere cheap and well-protected. The ability to sort data and place it properly keeps the industry going."

In the enterprise old style, that was the case. When you have large scale automatic tiering/caching then this kind of balancing act becomes much easier. That's why ZFS is a godsend when the "infrequently accessed data" suddenly becomes "hot" for whatever reason.

(*) Some of my older installations have 3-400TB of storage onboard. If they decide they need fsck at startup, that makes for a long delay.

"When that happens, that manufacturer will probably just ditch all of the R&D (no point in future development after a certain point) and just churn out cheap drives on their existing equipment."

Which is what happened a few years ago at both Seagate and WD. HAMR was the last development to come out of the R&D labs before they closed. It's been in the engineering labs trying to be turned into a commercial product ever since.

"Which could be on a single hybrid drive."

Um..... no.

If you've used Seagate's hybrid drives you'll understand why you want to keep the makers as far away from that part of the equation as possible.

The Momentus XTs managed to be SLOWER than their non-hybrid equivalents.

Re: Ah, but

(#) And that was still hugely better than loading via the excruciatingly slow cassette drive...

Which failed to load 2/3 of the time.

Re: Ah, but

"So If Samsung think their new SSD is going to compete on capacity with hard drives, they're going to have to sell it for about 8-10 times less than their current generation of SSDs. "

If they sell for 4 times the price of HDDs, most buyers will bite their arms off. That 3 year warranty is a good indicator of expected lifespan for starters.

Then there's the vastly reduced seek times, power consumption, size and massively increased bandwidth (mechanical drives top out at about 105-120MB/s sequential and drop as low as 5MB/s at 120-180IOPS random - and at that rate of sustained random IOPs large enterprise drives shake themselves to death in 6 months, let alone consumer ones.)

The introductory price of the 4TB QLC drives in "evo" format is unlikely to be above £600 inc vat - which puts them about 4-6 times that of NAS drives such as WDreds and I'd happily drop them into my 32TB ZFS NAS rig knowing that they'd save me about £75/year apiece in power bills alone.

Bear in mind that 2TB SM863s have come down from £2k to £1k, whilst you can get old stock 860evo 2TB for £435(M2)/535(2.5") and 970evo 2Tb M2 for £630 and the 860Evo 4TB sata being £880 (those are all inc vat) - these are all about to face runout discounts.

Re: QLC? It's not the one for me

> The hardware in an SSD however is fixed

More or less, but it changes areas dynamically from QLC to SLC or somewhere in between as the drive decides it needs caching or not - and it's constantly moving things around to keep everything healthy, plus the level of error correction being applied is mind-blowing and adjacently addressed bits aren't necessarily stored physically adjacently.

> and so maximum voltage levels in the cells will decline as they age

These aren't electrolytic capacitors with leaky insulators. They're silicon electron wells - about the best insulated form of FET you can devise. It's about coulombs, not volts.

> but more to the point - not uniformly between them.

They already do.

> So the firmware can't simply adjust its voltage level parameters to account for it.

The firmware already does and is already dynamically recalibrating itself over areas of the die to account for ion drift, else large chunks would become unusable very quickly. That's the point of having all that processing power onboard to actively keep track of and manage the health of the NAND.

Samsung wouldn't be shipping QLC without a large level of confidence in their product - and whilst they put a 3 year warranty on their _consumer_ drives, WD and Seagate have so much confidence in their consumer devices that they best they'll offer is 2 years(*), but more usually 12 months - and I've had to replace far too many drives under warranty in that 2 year period for purchases made since 2011.

(*) One of their fabulous weasel antics is to refuse to honour warranties on anything sold via an OEM and point the customer back to that supplier - meaning if they gave you a 6 month warranty or went toes up, that's what you got. Samsung have zero quibbles about directly honouring warranties.

Re: was it the red wire or the blue one to disarm the bomb?

Usually it's a matter of separating the detonator from the rest of the device - at that point the wires don't matter and trying to decode them is frequently overthinking the problem.

"Must take an age... scanning all 65,535 of them"

About 1 second, give or take.

Re: Heard that one before

"The fact of the matter is that Halifax isn't technically scanning you."

No, Halifax is exploiting a security vulnerability of web browsers to induce your computer to run network scanning code - ie, without bothering to get explicit permission first.

The fact that it's scanning 127.0.0.1 instead of 192.168.0.1-255 or 195.130.217.2[014]1 and 91.220.42.2[014]1(*) isn't relevant. The factor of permission and unauthorised operation _IS_. It would take a couple of tiny tweaks to move this from something apparently benign to something extremely nasty and the fact that its existence has been disclosed means the webserver holding that javascript is now a target for every script kiddie on the planet looking for a DDoS attack engine. As we all know, banking webservers are some of the most secure on the planet.....

(*) Extra points if anyone recognises those IPs and what the likely reaction would be if they were prodded.

Re: iptables -j TARPIT

"I had no fucking idea that iptables had an addon tarpit function."

Yeah, but in this case you're tarpitting yourself.

" this (invasive, I agree) action is triggered by your browser downloading some asset on a system you are using voluntarily."

Um no. It's no different to surreptitiously kicking off a coinminer in the background when I visit your website.

_Other_ sites such as IRC networks and suchlike are looking at what ports you have open from the outside (mainly to ensure you're not an open proxy) they're not stealing cycles to run a scanner on the victim box and then using that victim box to report details of the internal network which would be shielded from the attacker even on a well-firewalled installation.

Shit like this is why I use scriptblockers.

Re: Long ago.

"dell idrac has saved my arse"

Until you work for $BOSSAGE who deeply distrusts all forms of ipmi and insists they be disabled. *Sigh*

Re: Long ago.

A _very_ long time ago I added code to a PC router to toggle the speaker output for every packet passed.

The speaker output was piped to a timer circuit (555 monostable) which in turn was piped to the reset switch.

If nothing passed for 5 minutes, the OS got a crowbar dropped on it (This was long enough ago that the whole thing booted off a 360k floppy). That $5 mod saved a number of callouts.

Re: Not the entirity of China...

"Is this why the Brits have built themselves a couple super(ish) carriers?"

What are they going to do with those carriers? Sail them into Kowloon harbour and launch paper aircraft off the bow?

Re: Tibet

"The Dalai Lama may be a progressive guy but his predecessors were not."

And neither are many of his contemporaries in a certain other "Buddhist" country to the southeast, which has experienced what can only be described as "religious clensing" since 1962 (which is at the root of the refugee crisis going on there at the moment)

Re: Negative influence

"the American Trans-Pacific trade agreemnt was offering the southeast Asian countries".. much the same, only on much worse terms.

There, FTFY.

China's flexing its muscles and stepping back up to the plate as a major power - something that it's been absent from over the last 300 years due to colonialism, civil wars and the rise in sea trade overtaking the importance of the Silk Route.

Unlike other countries I could mention it's managing its economic expansion and growth in international trade WITHOUT planting its gunboats in other countries' harbours and threatening to blow the local government sky high(**) unless the people on the pointy end of the barrels decided to trade on the terms of the people with the matches.

(**) Some didn't even bother with the threats and just blew african coastal civilizations to bits without any warning, then called them primitive barbarians deserving to be conquered and enslaved.

Re: Travesty...

"Disney's representation of Pooh is an utter travesty"

The man himself is reputed to have said something along the lines of "Corn sells, so that's what we make"

It's worth noting that Disney only became nastycorp after Eisner got control.

Re: what the fuck does PC LOAD LETTER mean?

"A few weeks ago I had to print an address onto an envelope"

Why not just use window envelopes?

Re: what the fuck does PC LOAD LETTER mean?

PC LOAD LETTER means you sent it a US Letter job,

Which is understandable. The default paper size for _every_ variant of Engliish (not just US and Filipino) in Postscript AND PCL is US Letter.

It's A4 for every other language - which is annoying for US Spanish speakers, Tagalog users and Puerto Ricans.

It's bad enough that I wrote a wee sed filter for CUPS and tucked it away inside tea4cups that exists simply and soley to convert "JobPageSize: Letter" to "JobPageSize: A4"

The fact that I edited the CUPS ppds to remove letter/legal/executive is a mere bagatelle, half the lusers don't use those PPDs.

Oh, and make sure they DON'T have direct access to the printers or they'll fuck up your careful fixes.

Re: Sometimes violence is the only answer

"a standard “fix” for our standard original IBM XT and AT PCs - Any that misbehaved were switched off and carefully raised ~2cm above the desk by lifting them with a hand on each side, then dropped"

XT's were notorious for dry joints, so that explains that one.

ATs and others with that horrible ceramic 286 had problems with the socket fingers losing spring tension over time due to the heat of the processor (I left a burned on fingerprnt on one as a momento once) and there was a reasonable amount of thermal creep due to heating/cooling cycles. Shocking them was the best was of making sure you had a good electro-mechanical contact.

The best mod you could do to an AT was a heatsink and fan.

Re: Sometimes violence is the only answer

" It became the one printer in the building which required a service desk visit to change the cartridge."

It should have become the one printer in the building to become a doorstop.

Honestly, life is too short to deal with a single misbehaving printer. if you can't fix it, then junk it.

"People come and bitch at me if the email doesn't arrive instantly now,"

I go into old fart mode when they do that, telling them about the time when I got a reply THE SAME DAY and then when I got a reply in THE SAME DIALUP UUCP SESSION

Then I tell them that email has explicitly zero SLA and it's a best-effort system with no guarantee of delivery OR being read. If it's that urgent or delivery-critical, they should use a motorcycle courier.

"It took several goes before I realised they were looking for the La Plata club behind me."

I had similar problems in Los Angeles getting directions from a friend. I wasn't until I saw the saw the signs that I realised he was saying Van Nuys and not Vanyes

Coming from a country where the local language was transliterated by glaswegian missionaries and things are written as they sound (or vice versa), it's amazing to hear how people can _still_ mess up the pronunciation.

Unsurprisingly the best rendition I ever heard was occasioned by giving a glaswegian colleague a page of such text (he couldn't understand a word of it) and telling him to "just read it as it's written". To this day he still has no idea what he read out, but it was word perfect.

Re: Reminds me of ...

"Scunthorp would probably trigger the same reaction."

As did several of my customers:

Messrs Haycock, Cocks and Cockeram

yes, really. *sigh*

"As this was in 2000 quite a few people were still using Yahoo Mail"

On the other hand, one of the larger IRC networks banned IBM.net due to persistent spam and ddos problems, telling complainers to take it up with IBM. By all accounts the IBM helpdesk was getting upwards of 9000 complaints per hour with IBM lasting about a week before they broke down and agreed to start policing their abusers.

I think that was one of the first real victories against the "we can't take responsibility for policing what our users are doing" (spam and DDoS attacks) mentality that large ISPs had at the time, that was turning them into abuse havens.

What all the large companies seemed to forget is that noone's being paid to _accept_ mail, so if you blow your goodwill, you can be left high and dry. Most of them seemed to just count on being 9000 pound gorillas.

Re: Root cause, perhaps?

"Without going into the details it ended up with the sysadmins installing extra locks on their doors."

All that would achieve is allowing the lumber to be piled higher and more kerosene poured over it.

One of my friends offed himself after losing his thesis in a head crash about 25 years ago (no backups). This is one of those areas where fucking around with people's lives can and rightfully should be a career ending decision.

That event is one of the things that guides my attitudes to backups in an academic environment and makes me quite resistant to attempts to reduce what's done.

"I've never done an accidental send-to-all, even dealing with mass-mailing,"

I specifically nail in a hardlimit of about 20 recipients in systems I admin. More than that is usually a cockup on the part of the sender or an indication they need to setup a list. It's saved more than a few people's bacon.

Re: Net send

"Microsoft Mail"

This was probably what convinced MS that "email is really hard" and then had them turn it into a self-fullfilling prohecy.

The sheer amount of faff you'd go through to make MS boxen talk to the Internet and the mega-breakage they'd inflict in both directions was enough to drive a (wo)man to drink. It hasn't improved over time and Outhouse365 has all the charm and flexibility of a busy military latrine in the best tradition of the scene in Platoon.

Mind you there were worse mail systems, some of which wouldn't just spin themselves into the ground if you looked at them funny, but dig themselves a large corkscrew-shaped hole too. (Novell systems really didn't like mail from postmaster to postmaster, for example) Even worse were the ones which would barf all over neighbouring systems in the days of $20/MB mail charges (AT&T mail was notorious for this if people weren't careful)

"sent a letter to their animal therapy company addressed to 'Horse Rapist'....."

Otherwise known as "No NO NO - fix that sign, psychotherapist is ONE word, NOT three"

"How can they fix faults when they refuse to put in Fibre?"

And in areas where there is no competition, they can still rape and pillage as they see fit.

Why does a 10GB/s circuit cost 10 times as much as a 1Gb/s circuit?