* Posts by batfastad

894 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2009

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Ditching VMware over the Broadcom buy? Here are some of your options

batfastad

Worth mentioning...

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation is based on the RH-incubated oVirt project - an open-source management layer around multi-host KVM. In my experience though it had many rough edges and is very opinionated on how you setup your cluster, not reacting well to mixtures of hardware types and storage back-ends.

Also there's the re-incarnation of XenServer... XCP-ng with Xen Orchestra. Never used it, looks promising. I was a fan of proper original Xen many years ago.

I have not looked at what's happening in the OpenStack world for some time. Last I looked it was mostly bare-bones platform-as-a-service type projects rather than a fully integrated virtualisation platform.

Proxmox is worth looking at for smaller clusters and is more polished and flexible than oVirt/RHEV. If I was looking for a budget homelab or other cheap setup I would go with it.

Thanks for the tip on OpenNebula ^ I'd never heard of it and will have to check it out.

Honestly though when you compare the flexibility of cluster hardware support, mixture of storage types, live storage and compute migration... and vSAN... you have to be mad to look at anything other than VMware vSphere for small biz and larger org non-cloud/on-prem. I don't even particularly like vSphere but for the most part it "just works™" moreso than any competitors. I have been paying for VMUG EvalExpress license for some years for my homelab tinkering.

Cloud darling Hashicorp's IPO raises $1.22bn amid modest gains from a $80 start

batfastad

Mostly works, might be good when finished

The stuff from HashiCorp Inc mostly works for very specific use-cases. Perhaps it will all be good when its finished. I have no idea how their valuation translates to their actual products generating equivalent levels of revenue though. I get the feeling that most of their stack will be cast into irrelevence in a few years with whatever new devops tooling is excreted by some other tech bros.

Terraform is the de-facto cross-cloud management tool at the moment but in our experience you spend far more time on the abstraction from vendor to HCL and you're much better off admitting you're unlikely ever to be managing multiple vendors. Also the abstraction becomes unwieldy very quickly, with even just the management of a few VMs, networks and IPs quickly becoming a 10,000 line web of HCL structures (a broken-looking JSON). For most cases using the vendor's supported domain-specific language and tooling is a much better plan than a single repo of thousands of lines IMO.

Some FOSS gems: Franz, RamBox, Pidgin and more

batfastad

Sucks

Internet comms since 2008 fscking sucks. A random waffling after a few pints will now follow.

E-mail often wrapped in proprietary gubbins under the assumption that everyone uses a specific vendor's interpretation, grouped by subject header under the assumption of pertaining to a single conversation. Chat mostly stuck in a walled-garden of JS or a handset-based app.

I remember setting up an XMPP/SIP bridge which would display XMPP presence updates from staff on our intrnaet... an early internal twitter I suppose. It worked perfectly in the brief moment of 2005-2010 before UX and functionality became prescribed by the development teams of 5 global corporations.

IRC and NNTP? I still use IRC alot for work comms and open source stuff... though new-fangled open source projects (the type that won't exist in 3 years' time) tend to use slack, gitter or discord instead. NNTP just a simple, open, distributed version of reddit. Gmane.org kept me using NNTP for a long-time for interacting on open source e-mail lists but gmane.org is long gone last I checked.

Comms better in the old days, probably not, but absolutely not worse.

UK Treasury and Bank of England starting to sound serious about 'Britcoin'

batfastad

Re: Just exactly why is this needed?

Noone who is seriously _in_ to cryptocurrencies thinks CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) are a good idea at all. It's mostly the usual circus of consultants looking to liberate some tax-payer funding and legacy financial institutions pretending to do something about their under-performing asset class.

batfastad

Exactly this ^.

Also let me guess, all these Central Bank Digital Currency projects will be backed by the Central Bank/Government money printer, so you'd be no better off compared to the current system of your bank balance being just some numbers stored on a mainframe.

Chip shortage forces temporary Raspberry Pi 4 price rise for the first time

batfastad

Re: Only temporary

And actually... good on them. Those lower-spec Pis are ridiculously cheap and I imagine commercial users take up a decent chunk of that production.

For the nth time, China bans cryptocurrencies

batfastad

Re: Trading

> You'd still be stuck using the very same bank transfers you compain about.

Trade BTC into USD/EUR/GBP immediately on the exchange then transfer to bank account.

True, the transfer part still relies on traditional banking system but a faster payments in GBP back from the exchange takes a couple of hours subject to fraud checks. Still much faster than the 24+ hours of a wire transfer from the US into a legacy UK bank.

batfastad

Trading

I'd be interested to see mining, transport and storage cost of traditional commodities compared to BTC. Everyone in this debate assumes that extraction and processing of traditional commodities is completely free of environmental cost. Though I appreciate energy use by crypto, even renewable, takes energy resources away from other things while crypto utility is still to be broadly developed.

Crypto is a breath of fresh air compared to legacy financial markets though when it comes to trading. I have a stock plan from a US company I worked for several years ago and every time I sell some stock it often takes a full 5 working days to go through executed->settled->wire transfer initiated->wire transfer complete. Trades in crypto are completed in less than a second and funds can be moved around within less than a minute if you use a modern chain and protocol.

What I will say is that every time China bans crypto is just a consistently excellent moment to place a massive short order for some quick profit on a dump... so thanks again!

batfastad

Re: If only I hadn’t seen through the 2009 con

You're still early!

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

batfastad

H4xx

Could M$ not just have added to their statement to ask the miscreants using/accessing all these VMs to update the agent on their way out once they are done? I mean that's not far away from the zero-fscks that M$ clearly give.

System76 releases Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS 21.04 with auto-tiling COSMIC desktop

batfastad

XFCE

Been using XFCE for years. Will probably continue using XFCE for years. It has a task bar, a "start menu" and a normal usable desktop area. Throw in xbindkeys and my collection of shortcut scripts, there is nothing else I need.

Thankfully there are all those other desktops to keep UI/UX people distracted in 5 year circles of pointless improvement and career-driven-development... stay away from XFCE.

Marmite of scripting languages PHP emits version 8.0, complete with named arguments and other goodies

batfastad

Re: Old documentation

This is true and very typical of PHP pre-2008/2010 era. People scratching around forums, finding a function someone wrote in 2004 and re-using it. It's all a nightmare.

In the last 10 years or so there has been such a good choice of PHP frameworks that you shouldn't ever need be involved in the security/plumbing at all. Codeigniter and cakephp were probably the first popular ones, allowing any hideous complexities to be abstracted away behind single functions/classes.

Googled-copied-pasted snippets of code of *any* language with permission to read/write to file systems and databases while being exposed to the internet will always end in tears. It was the same with Perl in cgi-bin directories all over the web in the late 90s.

batfastad

Re: Keep it up!

And I wonder how many projects driven by tech lead bros with an anti-PHP agenda are now on their 3rd rewrite in 10 years due to old shiny no longer being supported, maintainable or recruitable.

batfastad

Re: Unashamed PHP fan

Same. It's great.

I still have many web APIs going, modernised to PHP 7, and absolutely fly along with APC/OpCache.

batfastad

Keep it up!

To be honest I still think you need a good reason to choose something other than PHP for server-side web and HTTP API stuff.

Python, Ruby, Scala even Go, all have web frameworks. PHP and any of the many modern frameworks is still hard to beat.

People download Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress, install a bunch of plugins for whatever business requirements, then blame PHP for the fact they can't get more than a couple of hundred rps... ignoring the fact that their CMS is probably making 1000+ database queries to render each page.

Or the other side are the PHP apps developed 8+ years ago by an opinionated dev who thought they were better than using a modern framework, completely sacrificing the project's modularity and maintainability in the process. Yes Laravel might not work exactly the way you want but seriously, for the sake of future developers/employees working on your project, just use a community-developed framework. Any framework will be better than your hand-crafted gubbins.

Oh also a shout out to the PHP docs. The most accessible language documentation I've ever used. Individual pages per function/class with version history and curated examples. Compare that to the nightmare single page wall-of-text with different URLs for each language versions that you often see.

HTTPS-only mode arrives in Firefox 83 as Mozilla finds new home for Rust-y Servo engine

batfastad

Re: "it's about ensuring that what the client receives is what they were supposed to receive"

> decisions like this should be left to the user

This is literally an option the user can choose to enable. Eventually it will likely be default because most people will be fine with it and when that happens the user can disable it.

> four week update cycle

I think for most users (and web developers/engineers) frequent updates to browsers are a good thing. If that's not acceptable then there's an LTS version of Firefox available.

123 Bork? Six-day DNS record-edit outage at domain name flinger 123 Reg enrages users

batfastad

123-reg

123-reg still exists is probably the bigger story here.

Red Hat tips its Fedora 33: Beta release introduces Btrfs as default file system, .NET on ARM64, plus an IoT variant

batfastad

Re: Beautiful Desktop

I tend to stick to XFCE to keep things rapid but the Fedora cadence and in-place upgrades every 6 months makes it mostly pleasant to run a Linux desktop these days. Though of course it's not for everyone - keep the family on Windows.

batfastad

Maybe you just ran out of inodes and deleted all ur shit for no reason :/

Even with a 49% uplift in sales and a 46% drop in expenses, Slack still can't turn a profit

batfastad

Clients

All of these modern messaging apps are missing the killer feature... a choice of client. Offering bloated web and mobile apps is fine for initial/occassional use but one of the strengths of something like XMPP or IRC is that there are hundreds of clients to choose from.

One of the vaguely useful features of Slack for technical teams was the IRC bridge... then they killed it off. So you're stuck with the terrible UX of a bloated web app which is no good at messaging and before long some idiot attempts to turn it into a control plane/CLI for your infrastructure.

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

batfastad

Exactly. What I type in the address bar is what I want to visit... or probably my history will match after the first few letters. Sadly Firefox copied this omnibar-shambles.

In Firefox if I want to search then I simply ctrl+? (formerly ctrl+k, or whatever search provider and shortcut combo I had created before the search box customisation was borged to become like Chromium).

Aw, Snap! But you should see the other guy – they're in dire need of a good file system consistency check

batfastad

Chiltern line rider here and to be fair there are far worse train cartels operating around London.

Drupal drops first big upgrade in five years and looks forward by looking backwards

batfastad

DrupLOL

With the level of caching infrastructure required to get anywhere near acceptable performance Drupal may as well just be considered a really poor static site generator.

Does Drupal's built-in caching still pre-build the template/addon PHP into the database then eval() it back out on page load? Truly dreadful.

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

batfastad

Bluurrrb blaarrrp kkiciccikkk bbrrfzzzpaa

Shame to see DAB struggle. I happen to enjoy the sound quality of a potato... underwater.

In all seriousness though if someone can find me a DAB radio that can get through a full 5 match cricket test series on a pair of AAA batteries and is no larger in size or mass than a Roberts 984, then I'd consider DAB to have feature parity and technological progress to have been made.

DVB solved an actual problem. All of the advantages of DAB have been handled by internet devices for almost the entire duration of DAB's existence, so I think we all know which one should be switched off!

When you bork... through a storm: Liverpool do all they can to take advantage of summer transfer, er, Windows

batfastad

Re: Sounds like a night out in this hack's often less than fair city of Brighton

> No, nothing compares to a night out in Liverpool for the sheer quantity of alcohol, vomit and threats of violence. Except possibly Glasgow.

Disappointed Newcastle has been missed here. Efforts must be doubled.

ZFS co-creator boots 'slave' out of OpenZFS codebase, says 'casual use' of term is 'unnecessary reference to a painful experience'

batfastad

^ Says everyone who has _never_ experienced any discrimination, hardship or oppression in their personal or professional lives.

"mere words" to some are not to others. It is absolutely worth reflecting on the fact that so many words and phrases we might take as simple technical terms or have entered common parlance, have done so when the historical and oppressive origins were commonly known and widely accepted. Times have changed - we should reflect on usage of such phrases.

25 years of PHP: The personal web tools that ended up everywhere

batfastad
FAIL

Oh don't - I still shudder at the thought of Drupal. 2k+ DB queries per page load... enable Drupal caching which then just eval()s a bunch of pre-generated PHP code straight out of the database instead :(((

batfastad

Re: Too many vulns in years past

I'd wager the vulns were not in PHP itself but whatever framework was being used.

batfastad
Pint

PHP

There's alot of hate out there for PHP but for the job of bringing up a website or webservice I would still choose it. In fact I often use it in the terminal for general text-wrangling, connecting to web services and basic DB processing. Granted there was plenty of terrible copy-pasted code out there in the 00s. And people would always be quick blame PHP for the dreadful performance of their Drupal/Joomla/whatever site, ignoring the 2k DB queries they made it do on every page load with the hundreds of plugins. But with such a wide choice of very high quality frameworks being available over the last 15 years I'd say those days of shoddy code are long in the past. IMO a huge amount of credit for PHP's wide adoption must go to the sensible layout of the official documentation on php.net - accessible, clear, easy to follow.

I went from mangled combinations of Perl and SSI to PHP in about 2004ish and I'd say even now there's no reason to completely rule PHP out of the running for new webapp-style projects.

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

batfastad

Re: @batfastad - 30% in the UK

Upvoted because I completely realise there are legacy networks. My point is that there is no need or rush to migrate those dreadful Citrix/Exchange/whatever to dual-stack. Leave it as v4-only if you have the IPs and infrastructure already in-place.

Adding up all those enterprise/business applications and legacy networks across the UK will not contribute to a country's IPv6 deployment percentage to any meaningful degree. IPv6 exists and is completely workable for new deployments if there is the knowledge and expertise in an organisation. The real increase in IPv6 adoption will be driven by end-user/home/mobile networks and deployment by sites in the Alexa top 500/500k etc. Little Bobby SMB SysAdmins likely do not need to worry about IPv6 - it will happen regardless.

batfastad

Re: AWS Elastic IPv6

> And in any case, Elastic IP doesn't even support IPv6

EC2 doesn't offer Elastic IPv6 addresses because there is no need to... there's plenty of IPv6 addresses to go around!

You add a /56 to a VPC then a /64 from that into each subnet. Easy. It's been like that for some years now.

batfastad

30% in the UK

So depressing that this is a tech website and the forum section on any IPv6 articles are full of comments about how different, wrong, funny-looking, new, scary etc IPv6 is.

Often people say something like "IPv6 is 25 years old and still crap" then no follow-up or technical justification of their opinion. Probably voted for Brexit.

Sometimes people reel off one of these:

- "IPv4 had better features" (then claim NAT is a feature)

- "But my IoT will be publicly addressable" (noone cares what random address your TV got out of the grains-of-sand-on-earth's worth that your ISP delegated to you. Your ISP gave you a box which does the same job with IPv6 as it did with IPv4)

- "But they can track my pr0n" (lol as if your v4 address in a residential ISP pool and browser user-agent isn't all up in pr0n trackers already)

- "But Android doesn't support DHCPv6" (ok, sure, you need to push out vendor-class options or PXE boot your Android device)

However people waffling away in forums and tech websites dissing some technology they don't want to learn are not the point.

IPv6 will keep being deployed to end-user networks regardless of whether `COBOLSL4Y3R` in some forum thinks it's crap for... reasons.

If you're a recent fixed-line subscriber to BT/PussNet or Sky in the UK in the last couple of years, you likely already have IPv6 enabled and it just works.

Mobile networks in the UK are a long way behind US, Europe, Asia, but I've been roaming, tethering, all of it, with IPv6 on mobile and it just works.

I'd be extremely surprised if there's an end-user ISP or mobile provider in the UK that isn't piloting or actively deploying IPv6, if not deployed already. In fact I'd welcome anyone naming any UK ISPs that are categorically saying they will never deploy IPv6.

If you're running servers in an enterprise, small biz, hosting provider, public cloud or your own shite-cloud and happy with v4 NAT to RFC 1918... then fine. Leave it. Noone will care about your dreadful Citrix/Exchange/whatever being v4-only anyway.

Is IPv6 perfect? No. It's different. Read about it. Learn all of it. Deploy it.

IPv6 will keep rolling out to end-user networks over time regardless of whether you like it or not.

Crying in a forum and waiting for IPv4-ng is just pointless my friends.

Watchdog slams Pentagon for failing – for a third time – to migrate US military to IPv6

batfastad

`IPv6 is missing features that IPv4 enjoys` please list. Or is NAT a feature now?

batfastad

IPv6 in the UK...

... is getting there. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption

30% IPv6 penetration in the UK is not too bad when you consider that of the 4-5 main UK fixed-line providers only BT and Sky have mostly complete end-user deployments for new customers.

Are there any mobile providers in the UK that are offering it yet? Mobile IPv6 deployment is fairly advanced already in Europe, the US and Asia. Once mobile providers in the UK start rolling out IPv6 I'd expect UK stats to jump quite nicely to the 40-50% range.

Obviously if you're an enterprise you may as well continue using RFC1918 space - noone cares about your enterprise citrix or whatever connections being IPv4. And since you're an enterprise then enabling IPv6 for customer-facing services should just be a toggle with your edge vendor, with backhaul to origin over IPv4 if you want.

Don't be scared of IPv6, people! It's fine when you get to know it!

batfastad
Trollface

IPv6

It is always worthwhile visiting these comment pages on IPv6 articles. When I return in several hours I expect to see a deluge of predictable "IPv6 is rubbish" comments by people who give absolutely no justification for their opinion and who don't or refuse to understand it.

I suspect a high level of overlap with people who voted for Brexit :p

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

batfastad

Better

Nice. And a fuck-load better than any UI innovations from the last 10+ years. More usable than burger menus in unexpected positions, whirly date/time pickers, huge font sizes etc.

How generous of GitHub to slash prices and make all its core features free. So what gives? Oh right, GitLab

batfastad

If looking for something self-hosted then I'd recommend taking a look at Gitea (newer fork of Gogs). I have found it much easier to deploy and manage than GitLab.

You. Drop and give me 20... per cent IPv6 by 2023, 80% by 2025, Uncle Sam tells its IT admins after years of slacking

batfastad

> It's crap, it always has been and always will be.

Care to justify this opinion?

'Tens of millions' of Cisco devices vulnerable to CDPwn flaws: Network segmentation blown apart by security bugs

batfastad

But... Huawei!

see ^

Get ready for a literal waiting list for European IPv4 addresses. And no jumping the line

batfastad

Re: Meanwhile...

> dig -6 www.theregister.co.uk still hangs

Works for me...

$ dig -6 www.theregister.co.uk +short | wc -l

2

Maybe you should use a resolver that is reachable over IPv6 transport? :)

I guess the point you wanted to make was this though...

$ dig www.theregister.co.uk AAAA +short | wc -l

0

Unexpected MySQL database meltdown fingered in GitHub's 24-hour website wobble

batfastad

To be fair they have a very talented and well-respected MySQL team at Github.

I would reckon the issue possibly with their Orchestrator open source tool https://githubengineering.com/mysql-high-availability-at-github/ https://github.com/github/orchestrator

Ericsson's very good bad quarter, Mozilla encrypts SNI, new TIP projects, and more

batfastad

The public key (frequently rotated) which is used to encrypt the ESNI message in the TLS ClientHello is published in a DNS TXT record. More info in the RFC draft https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rescorla-tls-esni-00

Virgin Media? More like Virgin Meltdown: Brit broadband ISP falls over amid power drama

batfastad

This.

Someone quoted complaining about lost clients... Well they actually lost them the moment they made the cost decision to use residential broadband with no failover.

Even if you don't want an additional fixed circuit then tethering off a 4G connection is perfectly acceptable to get things done these days.

Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

batfastad

tt-rss.org

Like everyone else, RSS brought me here!

Since Google killed off Reader I've been running my own ttrss instance and it's great. Does exactly what I need. Might be a good option if you're one of those people who likes spending their spare time running their own sh1t and work time running other peoples'.

In the two years since Dyn went dark, what have we learned? Not much, it appears

batfastad

Re: Workstation, Server, and Router Options

You probably want to look at dnsdist for DNS load balancing. It's a great solution. I use it in a few different application environments, in front of small cluster of active-passive Stubby instances which provide DNS-over-HTTPS (multiplexed HTTP/2 connections if your upstream DoH resolver supports it).

DNSdist - https://dnsdist.org

Stubby - https://getdnsapi.net/blog/dns-privacy-daemon-stubby

'Fibre broadband' should mean glass wires poking into your router, reckons Brit survey

batfastad

Re: Fibre broadband should mean FTTP

IIRC G.fast is still FTTC and only contains perhaps 2-3 miles more fibre than ADSL.

A quick turd is still a turd. Especially when given money to provide infrastructure by advertising "fibre".

batfastad

Fibre broadband should mean FTTP

... I agree.

In terms of miles from browser to, say, google, the difference in total fibre length between FTTC and ADSL is probably a couple of miles - likely less than 5% of the total.

But who wouldn't expect BT to polish a turd when there's an opportunity to grab tax payers' dosh.

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

batfastad

I like DAB

No wait, I got that wrong, I meant I like the sound quality of a potato. Underwater.

IPv6 growth is slowing and no one knows why. Let's see if El Reg can address what's going on

batfastad
Big Brother

Especially when Reg is behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare make it as simple as ticking a box to enable IPv6.

More likely is that Reg needs to get its user tracking, ad punting and data logging systems fixed to handle IPv6 addresses.

Cloudflare promises to tend not two, but 65,535 ports in a storm

batfastad

Re: Why only IPv4?

Watch the vid... https://blog.cloudflare.com/spectrum/

You get an IPv6 by default and a v4 address on request.

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