Posts by gerdesj
56 posts • joined Saturday 15th August 2009 00:08 GMT
Re: Ummm...
>If they don't have menus, and your setup is about mapping menu systems, wtf are you doing listing them?
You must be aware that zero is a number as well?
Logging the fact that there are zero options in a menu (ie no menu) is valid data to record for the website's stated aims.
Cheers
Jon
Posted in France demands Skype register as telco
Re: Follow the money?
>Paying twice over is a bit like the post office making you put a stamp on the envelope and then asking you to pay extra to put a letter in the envelope.
Charging your postman to use the roads via road tax might be another analogy instead ...
Re: Classic Shell?
Thanks for the heads up on Classic Shell. Personally I use KDE on Gentoo or SSH to BASH for most things but the new laptop I bought my wife came with WIn 8. This should make it rather more usable for her.
Cheers
Jon
Posted in Router crash downs CloudFlare services
Honesty is the best policy
Nice to see someone confess to a cockup.
Perhaps the routers were in effect subject to the same or similar flaw as that which was being "mitigated" against. I'd have thought a router OS would be pretty keen on bounds checking.
Cheers
Jon
Posted in Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m
Re: Free Is Good
I think you might miss a point.
{LO|AOO} !== MSO.
IT is odd in the modern world in that there is a ridiculous near monopoly maintained world wide.
Imagine if your car had to be a Ford and painted black, unless you were one of those identical rugged individualists who run their white coloured Fords on very expensive hot air or your were a beardie who distils their own fuel for their ...
Well you get the idea. It is insane that we as members of a global society allow such restrictions to flourish and even encourage them through ignorance, laziness or whatever excuse we don't even bother to conceive of because that is the status quo.
With your answer you indicate - to me at least - that you are the kind of person who can't be arsed to think for yourself and are happy to live in this sad state of affairs.
Nice use of sarcasm though.
Cheers
Jon
Posted in WTF is... IEEE 1905.1?
Re: Erm?
>I have a Smart TV that did this. It decided it was going to use the WiFi and ignore my nice fast wired network.
Why on earth did you configure the WiFi as well unless it was perhaps just to see what happens?
Assuming your WiFi is bridged to the same IP subnet as your GbE then it is only the metric for the two resulting default routes that will determine the path that packets take. Again I am assuming that your TV firmware can support multiple default routes - perhaps it can't and the WiFi coming up second overwrites the default route that the GbE interface wrote.
It is very unlikely that the OS it runs can reach for the ip and iptables commands or pfctl (I'm not too familiar with *BSD) or similar along with a route connectivity monitoring daemon to maintain load balancing over two links.
A telly is not usually quite as fully featured in the IP stack department as a desktop OS and should be treated as such. Just because it's called "smart" doesn't mean you should treat it as such.
Did you report the bug to their support? Whinging on the Reg isn't going to get this fixed.
Just noticed your post's penguin tag: please hand in your geek card on the way out 8)
Cheers
Jon
Re: Solution: Block dropbox at the proxy.
I run proxies (lots of them) and I can drill OpenVPN straight through them to a home system unless the internal systems are locked down as well.
It can be amusing to demo to people who think a firewall and proxy == data security ...
PlusNet and IPv6
Two years ago I asked my ISP (PlusNet) what their plans were for IPv6. I was told "we have no plans for IPv6" so I switched to AAISP.
I now have a single IPv4 address for WAN and a /29 for LAN and a /48 for IPv6 which I call off in /64 chunks for each subnet I need (!)
The real issues I see remaining with IPv6 are multi link routing without some form of NAT (my office has six ADSL lines) and the mayhem caused by a switch of ISP without your own PI and BGP (prohibitively expensive for home and small business)
Err perhaps I should clarify. There is a maximum RAM usage, then you get to pay
Doesn't have the vRAM tax
Don't you do any research? The suite IS priced based on RAM usage.
Click on the FB "Like" button
... at the top of the article. It seems somehow fitting.
Posted in Lollipop Chainsaw
mmm chainsaws
Bugger games, I'm getting the four star n oil out and chopping stuff down for real tomorrow.
You kids muck about with your consoles, the real thing is much more fun and strangely cheaper in the long run. There's nothing like the feel of sap mixed with chippings dripping down your legs and the taste of petrol fumes in your nostrils to get the blood boiling.
You might get a callous on your trigger finger, I might chop off my hand if I make a mistake.
Each to their own, I suppose.
Cheers
Jon
PS If I impress the wife enough, she might get the cheerleader kit out 8)
Where is that folder?
I can't find a folder with a name like that on any of my PCs.
I have something called /var/spool though ...
Cheers
Jon
Posted in Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer
Windows server 8 - broken before launch.
I've lost track of how many features of a modern OS I'd have to lose to use this nonsense.
It's not even released and yet it's still behind.
The last effort called itself 2008, after that was 2008 (R2) and going back was 2003 et al. Shit marketing.
Why on earth would anyone get excited by this?
Cheers
Jon
Posted in Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer
Re: Server - Ha!
Sorry, you're absolutely correct - why should I refer to that nonsense as I have for the last n {n:n?=15} years, when a far better nomenclature existed - silly me.
Server Message Block is clearly a better name than Common Internet File System any day.
I'm sure that I'll mend my ways for using Samba for the last 15+ years and getting my pronunciation and/or abbreviations wrong.
Cheers
Jon
Posted in Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer
Re: Server - Ha!
I forgot to mention that this horrifically inexpensive thing has a rather good NFS implementation and it speaks CIFS*.
Oh and is Kerberized (http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kerberos_Windows_Interoperability) to the point that I can deal with nearly all MS offerings and a lot more - mmmm Single Sign On.
* This article speaks of SMB (from memory - I can't be arsed to hit the back button) v 2.2. Now IIRC SMB == CIFS, ie CIFS is a marketing change of name for Server Messaging Block - a good thing too, possibly, CIFS ?= Common Internet File System. I *think* Samba supports the latest protocols. I also seem to recall that Samba is nowadays the de facto reference implementation for CIFS (MS use it for testing *their* efforts)
Sorry for the ramble ...
Posted in Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer
Server - Ha!
Why should there be a difference between "server" and "workstation" (desktop, phone whatever)? Sometimes I want my computer to be a server and sometimes a desktop and usually both. Why should we have to bother with the arbitrary difference?
The answer is nearly as old as IT - it's a marketing thing. You pay more for a server OS than you do a workstation OS.
I don't exactly run the "usual" stuff on my systems - (Gentoo) Linux everywhere but I do get to decide what constitutes each system.
Some are "servers" eg my rather popular mail n web proxies which have no GUI at all apart from a few web apps or my home MythTV backend (with added PBX n fileserver goodness and no GUI apart from web apps).
My laptop has Squid and Dans Guardian on it - handy for hotel WiFi or tethered surfing. Oh and it has Samba for those times when I have to shuffle multi GB ISOs to my customer systems and Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL and a lot more for demos, playing and other stuff.
Is it a "server"??
Who gives a shit - I've got wobbly windows! and your OS looks crap - and so will Windows 8 "server"
Cheers
Jon
Re: Standards are falling at t'Reg
Sorry, committed comment before I also added that I enjoyed the article.
I've just come off a major /. session and as you may know readers there aren't noted for holding back. Perhaps I should puff on my pipe a few more times before ranting on a far more genteel site 8)
Cheers
Jon
Standards are falling at t'Reg
What the hell does RFP mean? Surely its not too hard to proof read an article before posting it.
If you look at the article, it's littered with the usual IT related TLAs. The author spelt out the NTIA's name in full and kindly explained what IANA means (but not ICANN). This RFP thing is the whole point of the article so please tell what it means.
Could I suggest you follow the time honoured method of using an abbreviation and then following its first occurrence with a parenthesized expansion?
** Google ** RFP: Request For Proposal.
Cheers
Jon
>>So their best result is 1 hit in 3 days on average and they aren't going to be monitoring some dirt track in the middle of nowhere they are most likely monitoring our busiest motorways.
So 1 jammer travels along the M1 every 3 days and there's no reason to think isn't the same one each time.. Oh yes, this is a huge problem.
>>I think Mr Cockshott is nothing but a scaremongering media whore.
Spot on Sir.
M1, 6, 25, 42 or whatever (A303 eg) - they all see rather a lot of vehicles passing through in three days.
Frankly I'm surprised that the incidence is so low. We are obviously a pretty law abiding country. A good argument to bin some of the more intrusive anti terrorist surveillance stuff.
Cheers
Jon
Re: Is Apache today really still that good?
Yes it is. It is pretty feature complete. For example, and I'll admit this example is pretty esoteric, can it (NGINX) reverse proxy an Activsync thingie.
Imagine my surprise when I tested out a (Novell/Attachmate) GroupWise system with Datasync and an Apache reverse proxy on the front and found it "fooling" MS's Exchange connectivity tester into thinking it was talking to an Exchange server's OWA n Activsync. My company 'droid's and iThangs are quite happy with it as well.
Oh and the Kerberos support through mod_kerb means that IIS just doesn't have a place in my world. Unless my customer really insists, and then I get to charge for the extra faffing around - I win in £££s and they get what they want.
Apache is the web server that just keeps on serving. No its not perfect, that's why development continues but its very, very good.
Cheers
Jon
It would be nice to know whether the survey was voluntary to complete and what checks were performed as to the accuracy of the data by the NAO.
If the survey was voluntary and no checks were performed then the true story could be much worse.
Investigative journalism or copy n paste?
Cheers
File systems are proper hard
Wonder how long its been in development? The blog says they've given it loads of thrashing with their test cases but that is a far cry from the real world.
No matter how hard you play in the lab, users will find another "corner case" that you missed.
My favourite example of this is an image (say from dd) of a ReiserFS3 lies on a RFS. One day you run fsck (chkdsk for the uninitiated) and find the image and the FS intertwined because the checker had a hard time telling the difference between them. Don't know if this feature is confined to RFS either.
Read the online discussions from FS developers and you'll wonder why you use anything that isn't at least five years old in the real world ...
Finally, no matter how fancy it is, you'd better back it up properly and give it a UPS and a good hardware RAID or SAN if you care about your data.
Cheers
Jon
Re: My Android sucks
@Craiggy ... well use it as a vacuum cleaner then.
Mmm Latin!
Well my school boy Latin is getting a good kicking.
It's certainly written in a rather different style to modern works. A lot more interesting to read but very heavy going. I suspect even the mighty Google Goggles will choke on this.
Top stuff.
Bollocks to that
I am the MD of a small IT consultancy - Blueloop Ltd. We are throwing the usual annual Xmas dinner with all you can drink thrown in for good measure for all staff plus 1 this year.
@TonyHoyle - we usually get 100% turn out.
Strangely enough we value our staff and they seem to appreciate it.
I may even bring back my "state of the firm whilst stood on the dinner table" speech. I'm fairly sure this pub's tables will take my weight ...
Cheers
Jon
@Webslicer
Unfortunately you appear to be in the minority judging by 18 down to 1 thumbs up.
Boffin it is.
I'm one too (and a nerd)
Linux:
cat /etc/resolv.conf.
My laptop says I use 127.0.0.1 8)
Just read some of the tweets on the website - crap. Just like all other tweets really
Simples (ish!)
Define an initial retention policy:
What are the legal requirements?
What are the corporate requirements?
Now look at what you already have and analyze its usage:
Online in mailboxes
Near-line - perhaps tier n or eg PST archives scattered around
Off-line on punched cards or CDs perhaps.
Analyze its distribution by age and size/number of items
Look at what resources you have available:
Disc, tape, optical etc etc
Consider DR/BC and restore from backup times from each tier of the store
Can your resources accommodate your policy?
If yes - great
If not - change your policy, increase resources, transmute the data: can you make use of dedup or compression or change how you store data - ie move more of it offline.
If what you have will not do what you need and you are not allowed to change what you need then there is a conflict that no amount of hand waving will make go away.
Its a simple engineering problem, not rocket science.
re: Don't read this
Well, I run a small business (20 staff) and I tend to work for the bottom line.
Am I doing wrong, should I work for the whole of humanity? Or should I work for my salary and my staff's salaries?
Apple is a bit bigger but they appear to have staff etc.
... Get a grip ...
Cheers
Jon
PS I have a GT-I9100 and love it
PPS It's an IT Consultancy
The whole point of DNSSEC is that it *can't* be hijacked (for a given value of can't!)
I suggest you have a read up here: http://www.dnssec.net/ In theory your DNS resolver would stop your browser from going to an invalid site.
Basically the root servers tells you that .uk is signed, .uk tells you that .co.uk is signed, .co.uk tells you that example.co.uk is signed. example.co.uk's DNS is thus verifiable The trust bit starts at the top and provided your resolver has a copy of the public keys for root, the chain runs down to the bottom - ie the DNS record that your browser is presented with. A failure in the chain would cause your browser to fail to connect to anything.
However this assumes that your resolver supports DNSSEC records and that you can do your own recursive look ups and that zones are signed.
I personally run a BIND daemon on my laptop but that's a bit excessive for most people as is the OpenVPN tunnel back to the office down which the daemon gets its forwarders. If its fast enough I use the office web proxy as well.
So if you can trust your DNS queries and an SSL cert fails to compare with a DNS record then you could use that to put up a warning that most people will click through anyway 8(
So what the hell do Autonomy do?
Surely a little detail wouldn't hurt.
Posted in Apple embraces 'n' extends messaging
re Curious lack of apple bashing! → #
The article is reporting on a new Apple development, so it starts off discussing it. Whether you can call it an "anti-apple rant" or not is a personal judgement call.
Reread the first para. Is it really a rant or simply a statement?
As to the title - are you new here? That is written in the classic Reg style.
Why do you whitter on about Flash? What has that got to do with the article?
For what its worth, Google are actually pushing WebM over Flash, whilst still supporting it (Flash) because it is pretty popular.
Every time you think that open standards are failing have a look at this list of a few examples that probably make your online life worth living:
xDSL, IPv{4,6}, PPPoA, PPPoE, CHAP, UDP, TCP, RIP, BGP, (M)OSPF, SMTP, POP(S), IMAP(S), DNS, HTTP(S), IPSEC.
Sure you may not have even heard of most of them, but then you probably don't know how to build a road or bridge but use them every day without a thought. I do - I have a degree in Civ Eng and now own an IT company, so I think I'm qualified for naff car related IT analogies!
Cheers
Jon
re: And looking at the site...
If you follow the links you will discover that the Ubuntu box is UNSUBSIDIZED.
The Windows box headline price is for disabled people or people on low income. Wonder where the subsidy is coming from - MS discount or UK tax payer??
Rubbish
Its a new storage media - so that means new methods will have to be found to analyse it forensically. So what?
That's what forensics is for.
Oh and the legal system will have to play catch up as well.
Imagine how it must have been when an investigative reporter discovered that people could store files on one of these new hard disc things and then delete them without having to use a shredder or fire to seemingly destroy them.
Get a grip and start reporting news, not this rubbish
Tricky one
I think that the Press (et al) use App Store as a generic moniker for these systems.
Many people use the trademarked names Hoover or Biro to refer to devices that are not actually manufactured under those names.
Cheers
Jon
Posted in Ptable: It’s all about the interface
Re: Really
The author asked for your suggestions - where are they?
Shock stats
Could anyone explain what those shock statistics actually mean. The units are all over the place.
400G/2ms means what exactly?
OK let's start with 400G/2ms == 200G/ms. Why is it listed in a non normal form?
What is a G? I learned that as being the universal unit of gravity at skool - 6.67 x 10^-something.
I hope they make it
I actually hope Win 7 mobile does get a reasonable share of the market.
MS have demonstrated rather nicely on the desktop what happens when there is a single vendor monopoly.
I'd much rather see a world with Android, WIn7 mob n iThingie competing and therefore having to actually innovate.
If Android takes over the world it will be a poor place to live in.
Posted in Symantec knits VMware safety net
Never heard of Fault Tolerance?
VMware offer FT when HA is not enough. Basically, you have a permanently running read only "shadow" of the live VM running with a constant streaming of the live VMs RAM being copied over to the shadow to keep it upto date.
If the live VM's host dies then the shadow becomes the live VM.
Of course if the live machine corrupts itself in some way then that will copy over live - mmm simultaneous blue screens!
Now you can also use application level clustering to guard against a single bad instance.
So what exactly are Symantec bringing to the party apart that is not already provided either by VMWare out of the box, or should be provided by the application/sysadmin?
I'll be worried
... when one day I get a call and when informed that I don't have a Windows Event Viewer, the caller asks me to view /var/log/messages.
Then they tell me to emerge some random rubbish!
Mythbuntu?
I tried it, binned it and replaced it with Gentoo.
I also get to use my telly (err home PC) for a hell of a lot more than just a PVR.
"emerge mythtv" after reviewing a few USE flags was not exactly the most tricky install of Myth. Setting up Myth for FreeSAT consisted of following some Howtos.
It looks bloody lovely though with a KDE 4.4 desktop with full 3D effects ...
Oh and it has an Asterisk PBX in it as well for the rather infrequent times someone actually calls my landline. Its handy for faxing though and blocking anon calls.
And its my home ADSL PPPoA router and WiFi gateway.
Well, I got this quad core Medion thing from Tescos for £500 about two years ago and it needed to do something useful. I even toyed with Vista and then Win7 on it but it really did not do it justice and nor did Mythbuntu.
I'm even tempted to put up a TV arial, pop in a tuner and then I get FreeView as well.
Patch or die?
It must be a bit of pain for MS - they passed by XP many years ago but to maintain their corporate image they have to be seen to care about it even though it long ceased to generate revenue.
Is there a culpabilty issue? XP's security snags are responsible for a huge amount of spam and identity theft.
MS made a huge amount of money off it but where does their responsibility end? Where is the point that they can say it is too old to maintain security patches for and gracefully suggest you run their current thing?
They have a rather large share of the market and should that be allowed to bias the answer to the previous questions?
Posted in Confessions of a sysadmin
@Trevor
I was offered as many IPv4 addresses (within reason) as I wanted and a /48 IPv6 address when I ported my home ADSL over to AAISP. That /48 is rather more than one or two addresses - it's about 1.2 x 10^24 which is enough for my home usage.
I took 7 IPv4s to start with a /32 for my router and a /29 for other devices. I probably wont have to ask for more but I think I'd get them.
I'll grant you, I do take firewalls somewhat more seriously now at home. I probably wont give an external address to my WII.
I also get to see the latency of my link from the ISPs perspective and a button to restart it from BT or the ISP end.
Now I quite like the convenience of NAT but it is a menace when it comes to say SIP. IPv6 has certain safeties built in to address security (IPSEC for example) and lots of other things that I am still learning.
Just because your router does NAT does not make your LAN secure. Most routers are pretty sophisticated embedded devices:
Do you keep yours patched?
Does your vendor even bother with security patches?
Do you even know?
These last questions are not directed at you personally but at any admin who thinks WSUS is the end to patching and a NAT gateway will sort out the rest of their security.
IT'S NOT A BLOODY FORK!
It's not a fork. Sadly the article submitter does not understand this. The OS running on the 'phone really is Linux but one driver (AFAICR) has been removed from the current "for public consumption" source code tree.
That driver is now maintained directly by Google.
However, I'm not sure why anyone should care about Mr Torvalds' current 'phone choice. He is a Finn though and this is not a Nokia ...
Posted in Google moves to extend DNS protocol
2 choices for DNS provision
Another choice is - run your own, without a forwarder. A bit excessive for most home users perhaps.
Oh dear - I bit!
There is a good reason why the "Linux fanbois" say that - because it is pretty much true!
Allow me to explain, there are rather a lot of differences between Linux and Windows:
I have deleted the long diatribe that I started to write. Bugger that. Search for "unetbootin". Grab a >1Gb USB stick and try out a few distros without touching your installed OS.
If you end up installing Ubuntu then you have my sympathy ...
(Ubuntu - an African word meaning Gentoo is too hard for me)
Posted in FreeBSD bug gives untrusted root access
RE: What ever I'm replying to
Bollocks mate.
I'm a Linux stalwart and have always had the highest respect for *BSD. I have several pfSense boxes deployed because I can't do the same function easily via Linux (reliable multi link internet routing with a wizzo firewall).
However, I'm not a *BSD desktop/general purpose user/developer/deployer because I prefer the Linux pace of development.
There's a level of flinching ... some BSD users 8)
Personally, I rejoice in the choice that is available via the open source route. I have the highest regard for the demonstrable stability and security of those varieties of *BSD I have come into contact with (OpenBSD and pfSense mainly)
I call foul on the bird brains who announced a "flaw" without going through the established route of declare to "vendor", wait, announce.
Their method was clearly karma whoring.
