Posts by batfastad

"Is this any way to run a supposedly cloud-grade hypervisor?"

>"Is this any way to run a supposedly cloud-grade hypervisor?"

Pretty shoddy, sure. I suppose you get what you pay for.

Or maybe not... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/14/vmware_re_issues_patch/

Not dissin' just sayin'.

Puppet

I like Puppet. Massively prefer it to Chef, having found Chef Server to be so incredibly flaky on RHEL. Puppet just works. Throw in Passenger and it's quick enough in a 400 node environment. Start getting into loads of exported resources though and it starts bogging.

Most of the time I find using Puppet modules to be a complete PITA, making something as simple as an Apache configuration across 50 web servers turn into 10 separate layers of Puppet/Ruby manifests and inheritance. An haproxy configuration, ~700 lines using the Puppet module with the config structure almost unreadable, or a simple config file of half the size that you can read and compare against the haproxy docs. I hate abstracting this stuff into Puppet/Ruby and moving it away from the project's docs. Most of the time I find it easier to just dump some config files and have a service subscription on that, still conditional on facts etc.

Also there's so much snobbery in the Puppet community, "IT SHOULD BE DONE THIS WAY AND I REFUSE TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION UNTIL..."

ICRs

But we can keep your Internet Connection Records (whatever the fsck they are) super-safe and private... Truth!

Or maybe we'll just flog 'em.

Hmm

From what I've seen of VDI, I'm not sure there's much of a cost saving at all. A team of engineers wrestling with app packaging, registry keys to remove features and customisation, UCS chassis costs, virt host licensing etc. And then Wyse thin client terminals that cost nearly the same as a mid-range PC.

The whole lot comes crashing down, quickly, if there's even a minor blip in AD, DNS, network, storage etc. More hassle than it's worth?

Get elected and do what you want

At least all legislation is fully announced in parties' manifestos, with the exact diffs to existing legislation presented BEFORE the election. So the people affected by changes in legislation can make an informed choice between the red or blue Oxbridge blazer-eunuchs.

Or just get elected and do what you want for 5 years.

Uranus

snigger.

Exchange IMAP outage?

7 day outage? More like 13 year outage!

I don't know about anyone else but I have found IMAP under Exchange to be pretty much non-functional from at least 2003 when I first did a bit of Exchange wrangling.

In fact it was the reason we canned M$ altogether at the time being a publishing company with a load of Macs and the Exchange connectivity options were Entourage if it worked, IMAP or the basic webmail.

Mind you I don't begrudge anyone moving their Exchange into O365. The last thing I want to see these days is on-premise Exchange.

Hello darkness my old friend!

An article about modern storage tech with a bonanza of default HTML table styling from 1996.

Lovely juxtaposition of old and new. Great stuff El Reg.

WTF

Regardless of the presence of a deliberate or accidental backdoor, do they actually think this would catch on? But... it's an RFC!

I mean really, what a complete and utter waste of our money and a group of poor tossers' time.

In my experience black cabbies definitely know what they're doing! Aiming straight for the busiest effing roads and batches of road works, just to keep that meter ticking over... 20p... 40p... 60p...

Thank the Lord there is now someone challenging this cartel!

The other night a perfect example. From Fleet St to Westminster, I suggested Blackfriars Rd, St George's Circus, Westminster Bridge Rd, done. "Oh no mate, it'll be quicker this way". No it wasn't, not even close. 20 sets of traffic lights costing about 60p each on the meter.

He even started going off on one about Uber, citing the following grievances:

- "They don't speak English." Good, the last thing I want is my driver speaking to me.

- "Congestion. All these new minicabs causing traffic jams." Well I'd rather 50,000 Toyota Priae dripping water onto the road than diesel Black cabs belching out black soot!

- "They don't know London, they just drive by GPS." Another great thing. I'm fed-up of a bloke who did the knowledge 20 years ago roughly knowing the location of a where a place used to be, gets to the nearest big road then just drives around in concentric circles until they bisect the road you asked for.

Black cab drivers do not deserve every single pound they are no longer getting.

Good

This is good news. The frequency of Fedora releases has actually always put me off using it. I tend to use Fedora Server RawHide (bleading edge) on the VMs in my home lab because it tends to be a bit more of a rolling release. I don't really see many things break but switching to a stable Fedora would probably be better.

On my laptop, I still find *ubuntu (I use Xubuntu) or Mint has better hardware support, with less mucking around required to get MTP or Bluetooth etc working on my crazy hardware.

Jurisdiction

This is a genuine question. The Feds might think they have jurisdiction over AMZN. But knowing how sensitive people are to where their stuff is stored, would having Amazon regions owned by Amazon GBP 2016 Eire Ltd, Amazon 2016 GmbH or Amazon Cayman Holdings etc make any difference? Surely Amazon are doing something similar to that anyway for tax reasons, or some other more beneficial-but-still-legal financial juggling! I sure as hell would.

Or do the Feds/US Govt just assume that because they originated in the US and listed in New York that all international subsidiaries, even if legally non-connected, are part of the parent?

Docker

I see so many DevOps (urrg, horrible word) articles talking about containers like it's the best thing and everything should be containerised because it's, like, so hot right now, yaa.

If it's not got your application code in, then in my view, it shouldn't be a container. For me the benefit of containers is being able to spin up identical worker instances of an application, rapidly, that can sit behind a load balancer and buzz away and die as quickly as they were born. The idea of enforcing a maximum container age of X hours/days is quite appealing too, frequently recycling. Granted many applications would not fit this architecture, then in which case don't Contain it.

Smart?

I saw the headline and thought, I'm not going to read this as it will get me all annoyed and I'll end up ranting into the comments. Well, here we are.

How exactly are these meters smart? Sending usage data back directly to the provider? Sounds like a smart way to cut the salary bills of the private utility companies, for the benefit of their shareholders.

It's not like these will have fine-grained control over every plug socket and light switch in the house to tune usage. It's an on or off remote control of the electricity stopcock... about as dumb as you can possibly get!

If you want to monitor usage why not just buy one of those gadgets that count the flashing light on most meters. Then ask people to hook it up to their wifi to submit readings over the web to the provider. Ok so not everyone has wifi but enough to ease the meter reading aggro on the provider.

Or a better idea, why not just stck with the current system of asking people to submit their own meter readings online? Gives you exactly the same information as to power usage as a smart meter.

Does anyone know the actual power usage of these smart meters? Presume the provider will pick up the bill? Or whichever Baroness Sir Something Wotsit decided to spend our money on them?

Better off just rectifying the under investment in critical infrastructure over the last 40 years and buying some nice new nuke stations instead. I know there are some in the pipeline but however many that is, double it.

How much?

I see a use for these Windows sticks as always-on family kiosk PC things. Or thin clients for connecting to Citrix Receiver. But this is far too expensive.

I've had a Zotac Zbox Pico for a year or so which sits in the study if any of my users need to do a bit of browsing/cat videos/word processing/skypeing etc. And at £150 that was much more reasonable and has decent enough specs for the job. Zotac have just released a bunch of updated models as well so might be worth a look... http://liliputing.com/2016/01/zotac-launches-mini-pcs-with-high-performance-graphics-up-to-6-displays.html

This is too expensive for media playback as well. I have local media handled by a Pi running OpenElec, streaming and on-demand using an Android TV box (a Minix something, supports Sky Go output over HDMI).

Made a right old hash...

... probably MD5 or SHA-1.

N00bs.

Really?

Presume the self-styled City of London police have solved all the financial crimes that occur on a daily basis on their patch?

I don't know about anyone else but I've not paid the film/music cartels a penny for over a decade. How? 2nd hand purchases, thanks to everyones least favourite but monopolistic auction site. And Amazon. Oh and Google. Though I will probably have to start accessing those sites through a proxy soon. Surely they'll be blocked by ISPs soon since they facilitate and monetise piracy on a massive scale.

Drown them...

There's only one thing to do... drown them.

A bit of JS hosted on a CDN that willing website operators can embed into their sites. The JS then makes random(ish) background requests to all those lovely dodgy Islamo-Paedo-Money-Laundering-Terrierist-Torrent websites. Stick that up your ICRs GCHQ!

NetNames

... Are rubbish.

Anyone ever had the displeasure of using their Platinum Manager?

And their pricing? Wow.

camels

googleCloudBittenByCamelCaseSnafu?