* Posts by Stoneshop

5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009

Ship stranded in Suez Canal shifts, but not before spawning some choice tech memes

Stoneshop

Re: Hold my beer moment?

This comment in a thread elsewhere has, IMO, a solid analysis of the mishap. A large part of it is the strong tailwind, requiring the Ever Given to go through the canal ar a speed well in excess of R17 nearly double of the allowed maximum, to keep steerage way. Another part is that the helmsman was clearly not a PID controller.

The long and short of it is that they shouldn't have entered the canal under these conditions, or if they absolutely had to, only with a tug attached to the stern which allows control of the vessel somewhat like an outboard motor instead of relying on forward speed to create the required amount of flow past the rudder.

Global tat supply line clogged as Suez Canal authorities come to aid of wedged 18-brontosaurus container ship

Stoneshop

Re: Old fashioned Egyptian way...

And if done right, parting the waters of the Red Sea should make the level in the canal rise. Probably even with a bit of a wave, carrying the Ever Given with it, northwards into a wider section of the canal.

John Cleese ‘has a bridge to sell you’, suggests $69,346,250.50 price to top Beeple's virtual art record

Stoneshop
Trollface

Re: "...but what has he done for you lately?"

Splitter! (of hairs)

Stoneshop

It is what the EEC morphed into

At that point you, as the UK, were party to the direction it took, so you could have influenced it (and most likely did).

Stoneshop

In a few years

the expression will likely have morphed into "selling the Blockchain Bridge".

And it's known on this side of the Atlantic, a fact that has been helped by a close colleague of the aforementioned Mr.Cleese, Esq., who wrote the following ditty:

I've got... 90,000 pounds in my pyjamas

I've got 40,000 French francs in my fridge

I've got lots of lovely lira

Now the Deutsche Mark's getting dearer

And my dollar bills would buy the Brooklyn Bridge

Stoneshop
FAIL

deluded Brexiteers?

From the other side of the North Sea I have to say, so long and thanks for all the fishnancial institutions.

What could be worse than killing a golden goose? Killing someone else's golden goose

Stoneshop

Re: Saved the customer millions - which pissed off my company

Not an amount as big as that, but still.

At Digital, we FS techs were told not to discuss details of a customer's planned upgrades with them; that was Sales territory. And of course customers would definitely want to hear a FS tech's opinion, because, call-out hours or not, I and most of my colleagues would rather be fixing a customer's stuff that's truly broken instead of endlessly chasing the difference between what he was told he'd get and what the gear actually could deliver.

Stoneshop

Deep desk drawers

"The nightly backup keeps taking longer and longer, and as long as the backup is running user logins are disabled. When they come in early in the morning they often can't login for an hour or more. Do Something About That."

Trying to get an initial understanding of the backup process I already find that it's a nearly intractable tangle of VMS command files. Files whose names are 3-digit numbers. So in the logging you see something like 618.com calling 237.com and 491.com, then 762.com to ready the lot for writing to tape. Which is done by yet another command file, started at a time when the previous steps must really surely definitely totally have finished, plus an hour extra for good measure. This delay could easily be eliminated by several methods, one of which is the standard VMS function 'sync', which starts a batch job on completion of another (which can be on another queue or even on another cluster member; a single job queue isn't always the right solution).

This I propose.

"Our script maintainer will evaluate this."

Weeks pass. Weeks in which calls are logged by users who can't start working because the backup is still running. Calls which end up on my desk. Requesting a status of the evaluation I get some non-committal "Still evaluating"

Weeks pass. Same shit, same inaction. I start thinking the solution is too straightforward to get his tangled brain around.

Weeks become months, and after some more rounds of the above finally there's a verdict. "We're afraid we can't maintain your solution after you've left."

Balderdash. It's a standard VMS function, documented as those functions all are and widely used at just about every site using batch queues in more than utterly trivial ways. So this was someone who had used his script-writing skills to build an impenetrable fortress around his job.

Well, good bye and good riddance.

Move aside, Technoking: All hail the Sweat Master and his many inspirational job titles

Stoneshop
Pirate

Re: Mock tech-knocking as much as you like ...

Nope, just compost them. Which precludes the use of quicklime, and carpets only if those are fully biodegradable.

Boffins revisit the Antikythera Mechanism and assert it’s no longer Greek to them

Stoneshop

Vikings

Ah, and we're not to joke about that, else they will come and plunder, rape and/or pillage that naughty commentard.

Stoneshop
Pirate

Re: Must look at this

the Greeks could have reached the moon by about 300AD

Followed by the Vikings half a millennium later, if those had had reason to think there would have been stuff to plunder, rape and/or pillage there.

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: Where are the others?

After all they had also invented a kind of steam engine and didn't try to put it to any use either: Too soon, both were solutions to problems which hadn't yet cropped up (precise clocks were required for ocean navigation, steam for mines and large scale industry).

ISTR there was a Greek temple that had a pair of doors opening by way of water being boiled in underfloor cylinders, and closing when it cooled again. Which was probably done for the magikxz, not because it somehow was easier. Might have been just a construction drawing though, by one of the contemporary επιστήμονες (boffins).

'No' does not mean 'yes'... unless you are a scriptwriter for software user interfaces

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Re: Well - spare?

Surely Monarch, heir and Harry would be more correct?

Richard, Harry and Edna Edward Enid Edwin Osmund Egbert Edgar Edmund

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Well

Unfortunately the manufacturer decided to replace "slave" with "spare", which caused endless confusion.

There's still three distinct names, so not much cause for confusion. Unless the one you identified as "backup" in the second sentence was actually called "spare" (in your third sentence), which would then cause a name clash indeed.

We had, for a while, a similar configuration. It started as a master/slave pair (actual nomenclature, hailing from the late 1980's), in the end running on a pair of Alphaserver DS10s. One of them keeling over didn't matter much; if the master went the slave would notice and take over, and if the slave failed it would just need replacement. But as we started encountering more and more problems with service calls taking days, not hours, it was decided to add a spare which could take the place of either machine: same name and IP addresses as the one that karked, after which redundancy was back and a new (or fixed) machine would be spooled in as spare some time during the next couple of days.

Had we had to ditch the master/slave naming it would probably have been changed to active/passive as the spare was totally a spare, not taking part in any traffic destined tor the other two.

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

Stoneshop

Re: Who knew data centres were tinder boxes?

I then told him that if he's not fit enough to use the emergency exit in an emergency then he is not fit enough to be at work.

Depends on the location of the nearest emergency exit in relation to the desk he's usually at. At the office I would be 5 meters away from the door to the emergency stairs, and it's just one floor down to the street level exit. Even with an uncooperative leg I can manage that in less time than a fully fit person starting from the most unfavourable location on the third floor; we timed it. For disabled people on higher floors in another part of the building there are stair-chairs (and cow-orkers).

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: it isn't just fires that need oxygen

so anyone who cannot smell still has a sporting chance of surviving.

Though they may find their eardrums having collided in the centre of their skull.

Stoneshop

Re: all bets off

I'd rate tape as more robust, especially compared against the data density of those high-capacity disks.

And for specific applications there are WORM tapes.

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: "Yes sir, I'm downloading the DR plan as we speak..."

I expect lockdown has enhanced many companies ability to carry on working whilst the office is unavailable.

Depends on how much of their infra is inside that office, starting with LDAP/AD servers, VPN endpoints etcetera ...

Stoneshop
Pirate

the knife sharpeners,

Someone I know answered the door to a pair of Jehova's Witlesses, while in the process of turning a pig into freezable chunks, so, bloodied apron, bare chest and still holding the knife.

They didn't bother him ever again.

No need for knife sharpeners' services either.

Stoneshop
Boffin

hopefully Digital Ocean, will be next.

"Oceans don't burn."

"Oh really?" <ponders the amount of sodium required>

Stoneshop
Flame

Re: What is the most frightening sound in a server room?

Or just a little less.

Mid 1980's, and your data centre was just your computer room, although it would have a fire suppressant system, an UPS and offsite tape storage, but no backup DC elsewhere. So I happened to be inside when I notice the soundscape changing, but it wasn't immediately obvious what the cause was. Took a couple of seconds before it clicked that the low rumble emitted by the aircon was gone, immediately followed by the sense of urgency caused by realizing that the systems were still belching close to 100kW total into the hall, but none of that was taken out. Storming into the sysadmin pen I had no problem at all conveying that urgency to the ones present, half of which were dispatched to round up any air moving device from the office areas, and the others shutting down and switching off any system not utterly extremely necessary; I think they left three area routers and their routers for Northwestern Europe.

It was the only time I saw a thermograph pen move: Ten deg C in as many minutes. Luckily there was very little loss of hardware; three RA81 HDAs out of over a hundred, and two systems started throwing memory errors a couple of days after.

Stoneshop
Trollface

The little nametag under the doorbell simply says "private morgue".

Where hardware goes to die.

Stoneshop
Mushroom

"push everything into the Cloud"

The usual: specify type of cloud.

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Loss of expertise

We don't have anyone who even /knows/ how to do it. We're doomed'.

Do they even have someone who knows how to spell 'backup'? And 'restore'?

The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread

Stoneshop

Re: Bluto - mysaterious expansion card

08-00-1B-E0-00-01. I still have our company prefix memorised after 40 years.

08-00-2B-xx-xx-xx was DEC, and I remember being told they had a nifty way of manufacturing the MAC address PROMs for the DEUNA ethernet interfaces (and some of the ones that followed) so that they all were unique. Later boards had the address in EEPROM. Swapping a DEUNA link board usually meant moving the MAC address PROM over to the new board; some 3rd party programs used it as a licensing identifier, although DEC warned against this.

Running DECnet IV the host MAC address changes from the hardware address in that PROM to AA-00-04 plus the inverted binary value of the DECnet address. Could cause a bit of fun with multiple network interfaces and switches that block that.

AdGuard names 6,000+ web trackers that use CNAME chicanery: Feel free to feed them into your browser's filter

Stoneshop
Holmes

Wheres [sic] the law enforcers?

Yours, or those of the jurisdiction the adslingers are in?

The wrong guy: Backup outfit Spanning deleted my personal data, claims Cohesity field CTO

Stoneshop
Big Brother

using the service to *archive* his data,

That's how you get to 36TB.

Anyway, he may not have lost any current data, but if he was using Spanning for archival purposes he's and he wanted to access some historical stuff he's got a problem now.

Say, the IRS wants to have a closer look at some large tax deductions he'd claimed for a previous declaration ...

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

Stoneshop

Re: Haven't had the site burn down but...

At one job, about two decades back, a small safe was nicked. Not a lot of value to plain thieving scrotes, but there were source code tapes in it, kept in escrow. To the tune of nearly seven digits, in Euros.

The safe and its contents were found, more or less straight down from an open window on the fourth floor, sufficiently deformed from the impact with the concrete platform at ground level to bust open the door; it was more like a hardened box than a real fire- and pilferage-resistant safe, and after taking inventory of the content the burglar(s) clearly had a disappoint.

That building suffered several break-ins during the two years I worked there; usually a bunch of laptops went missing, although one time security nabbed one of the perps as he was rather hampered by the large duffel bag full of them. Maybe he should have kept to the Elfin Saftey limit of 25 kilos instead of trying to hoof it with about double that.

Stoneshop
Flame

Well

With new hardware you do burn-in testing.

So why not with new software?

NASA sends nuclear tank 293 million miles to Mars, misses landing spot by just five metres. Now watch its video

Stoneshop

Re: ...two miles of cables that miraculously remained untangled.

You say that, but I'm eternally in awe of anyone who can pack two miles of cable and somehow not have them immediately tied into physically impossible 5-dimensional knots the moment they turn their back.

Well, the secret is that they don't have RJ45 connectors each end, so their propensity to tangle (with themselves, and all the others) is greatly reduced.

NurseryCam hacked, company shuts down IoT camera service

Stoneshop
Headmaster

... wants to see NurseryCam raise the overall standards of our security measures.

Raise.

That would imply there's any in the first place.

"Wide open" kind of disproves that.

Planespotters’ weekends turn traumatic as engine pieces fall from the sky in the Netherlands and the US

Stoneshop
Coat

Re: Quick turnaround for the 777?

The NTSB finding was that P&W needed to develop a better fan blade inspection. Maybe they need a better better inspection procedure?

The 747 Cargo that had one of its engines go boom the same day was _also_ powered by Pratt & Whitney.

The replacement that evening that took the passengers to Hawaii was line number 4, ...

And yeah, LN4 (N773UA) was the aircraft that lost an engine en route to Honolulu back in 2018...

"The probability that an aircraft will lose two engines is the probability of losing one engine, squared, so it's utterly improbable that such an incident will occur with N773UA a second time."

(The jacket with "How to lie with statistics" in the pocket, thx)

Citibank accidentally wired $500m back to lenders in user-interface super-gaffe – and judge says it can't be undone

Stoneshop

Re: Ha ha ha

One I have not, is copying a bank account number.

IBAN has some rudimentary correctness verification as one of the digits is a checksum. My banking software also prefers a holder name to match the account number, though you can override that.

You want me to do WHAT in that prepaid envelope?

Stoneshop
Angel

Trackballs the size of grapefruit, keyboards that broke in two,

The first time i got to experience (briefly) working with a trackball, it was indeed about grapefruit-sized. It was part of one of the control desks for the gas distribution network here in the Netherlands. This was the era of Ball Mice Without Any Concern For Ergonomics; some were even utterly anti-ergonomic like a square block of plastic with only microscopically bevelled edges and creaky switches that you'd need a hydraulic press on to activate them. So anything else would already be tremendously better, and this trackball was glorious. Good thing it was let into the desk or I'd have tried to take it. Soon after, Logitech started offering the TrackMan Marble FX, not as big as a grapefruit, more like a billiard ball, and so I got one. And after finding it near-perfect, another one as spare.

I now have six; three in use (although one is at work and 'in use' is a bit of a stretch), three spares. That should do.

And keyboards that break in two: some do with only little encouragement, and they deserve it fully. Usually they end as many more parts; the key matrix foil can make nice lampshades.

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Re: It's important, really importan

an incision running from sternum to groin held together with 36 stables

They're definitely not horsing around there.

Hero to Jezero: Perseverance, NASA's most advanced geologist rover, lands on Mars, beams back first pics

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: Been there, Done that

Yes, but cruise missiles already have a detailed map to follow. This has to interpret what it sees because there are not always good reliable maps with sufficient detail.

That Ordnance Survey map of Mars not good enough?

Nurserycam horror show: 'Secure' daycare video monitoring product beamed DVR admin creds to all users

Stoneshop
Holmes

Oh hello, Melissa

Downvoting every single comment (save the one on Brexit) fits your modus operandi perfectly, but kindof gives your account identity away.

Voyager 2 receives and executes first command in 11 months as sole antenna that reaches it returns to work

Stoneshop

Re: It's a different world

a rather large tin box soldered onto the PCB, I assume filled with wire based on the schematics - acting as "memory". Didn't hold the data for very long and it was serial in bits, run around the wire for a while, and then serial out bits, but it took long enough to be useful.

Indeed. In our collection of Antediluvial Tech there's an Olivetti 101, the world's first programmable desktop calculator. Its memory is such a delay line.

Stoneshop

Pan Am

I recently watched Blade Runner. Never gotten around to that category of movies, but pandemic.

Some Sci-Fi movies have aged badly. Blade Runner not so much.

Until the first Pan Am (and Atari) neons appear.

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Stoneshop
Holmes

Piggyback

If the server has legitimate outgoing connections, a bit of steganography can piggyback the data to be exfiltrated onto them. It would the target (proxy) server(s) in a less-restricted area to also be compromised in some way, to be able to split off the steganographic load and forward it to Outer Elbonia.

This Brit biz's seven-screen laptop is something to behold

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: I used to require 2 screens, believing nobody could be efficient with 1

Depends on the kind of job you have. Very much.

Just now I have two 21" screens attached, one with a VMware session running a couple of putty terminals (just four today, well over a dozen yesterday). the other with a manual and a checklist open plus a few other windows I need to check occasionally behind them, and Teams on the laptop screen itself.

Stoneshop
Boffin

" Would you want to try and unfold that on a train [...]?"

A lot of power sockets on trains are labelled "MAX $smallnum Watts". So it'd need an octopus power cord to stay under that per-socket limit.

Stoneshop
Mushroom

military command types

I can see them requiring armour plating on the back of the screens so they can just keep working while under fire.

Stoneshop
WTF?

Required accessories

A carrying frame with castor wheels.

50Ah Li-ion extended runtime battery

Further options (not yet available):

A porter.

A small forklift

Ring, Ring, why don't you give me a call? Amazon-owned doorbells aren’t answering after large-scale outage

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: Smart home?

Devices that allow you to do what you describe, without relying on Stuff Somewhere On The Internet, are available. You just have to look past the Amazon and Google offerings.

Stoneshop

Who's there?

Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend.

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

Stoneshop

Re: very unfortunate move,

With DAS you still need a OS, but yes, I'm thinking of going this way for home "media" usage myself. Crazy thing is though, there really isn't any dedicate DAS chassis.

I'm thinking of sticking a Pi4 in some 4/5/6 bay expansion box, or initially just on top for testing. Sure, you won't get blistering speeds, but I reckon it'd be fast enough for serving as central storage.

The replacement for that DS620slim is a SuperMicro X10SBA Mini-ITX in a Silverstone CS01S-HS case (6 extenally accessible hotswap trays, plus two more internal (which I'm not using as there are just six SATA ports on the X10SBA)). I've also built a rackmount server to fit in a 40cm deep wallmount network 19" rack, same mainboard and a disk bay holding 6 2.5" drives in a single 5.25" HH chassis. That one has been running fine for several years now.

Stoneshop

Re: very unfortunate move,

I don't see this as being any different to having physical access to a PC/server

I do, as this can affect files in other's accounts during normal operation and without having physical access to the unit and its disks. Just bog-standard ssh/rsync remote access,

And encryption doesn't help there; it's up and running, and the filesystem is unlocked at that point.

Stoneshop
Mushroom

Re: very unfortunate move,

Are you making this up?

No.

I enabled ssh login to the DS620 for two accounts that had files stored via NFS. Those NFS shares worked correctly; account A could not read or write files belonging to account B. Going in via ssh (a prerequisite for rsync access with key authorization) B's directories were wide open and A could change, move and delete files. And vice versa, of course. All the steps to get there were done by the manual, so it wasn't a case that I somehow mangled all kinds of settings allowing this. I even zapped the install, redid setting up two NFS shares only, copied some bog-standard user dirs for them, and found exactly the same lack of protection at the FS level

Maybe this could have been solved by setting ACLs, but when a bog-standard Linux install already disallows even browsing other's directories unless explicitly changed to be permitted, applying ACLs would be like plugging a leak that shouldn't be there in the first place. Additionally those ACLs should be set so that any file or dir added via ssh/scp/rsync would inherit them, as well as making sure they don't get wiped accidentally when some directory is overwritten. Or propagated to other systems when files are copied back, interfering with security settings there.

Tl,dr: Too much faff to deal with Synology's idiosyncracies.

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

Stoneshop

Re: Itanic industrial mistake

It's ironic that HP went on to release OpenVMS on Itanium, after the Compaq merger (Compaq I think had initiated that port) and continued selling that combination, bearing in mind that VMS had been a major competitor for MPE.

But even when you have IA64 VMS running your environment there would be little incentive to port things to HP-UX (or MPE) once you saw HPE loading a gun and opening the barn back door. When you're forced into porting or rewriting anyway, selecting a target environment that's not as tied to a single vendor is probably one of the items on your shopping list. Rather near the top, even. And that's not just because of that single vendor for the hardware and OS, it's also the small pool of ISVs writing software.

Although VMS is therefore relevant to the lingering on of Itanium,

To some extent, yes. But HPE had already decided against updating VMS to run on the newer Itanics, so that writing had been on the wall for several years already.