Posts by Nate Amsden

Re: One box to server them all - To stop phishing attacks

Oh my that sounds absolutely terrible. The likes of facebook are already trying to get people walled into their gardens, don't need yet another garden.

Just because you know the source doesn't mean that source wasn't compromised and sending out bad messages, or hijacked DNS to send requests for a site to another location or taking over BGP routes to redirect traffic, or a legit message sending a user to a legit website that just happened to be compromised.

Phishing has never been an issue in my life. I find it amusing that so many people still seem to fall for it. But as long as people can be convinced they are sending $10,000 via wire transfer to a Nigerian prince who will then send back $1 million, so convinced that they get angry when the wire transfer service refuses to process the transaction -- there will be 1000x more that will fall for other social engineering attacks.

(I have been running email servers since 1996 -- though I haven't had to support corporate email since 2001, only personal email and data center applications since)

Didn't need to stop if it had stayed in the lane. No crossing solid lines. Should be pretty simple.

Re: where's the innovation?

I wasn't expecting myself, I was commenting on the article:

"[..]what matters is that someone is putting pressure on monopoly giant Intel, forcing it to innovate in the desktop "

Re: hot chips

The way you type makes me think you have absolutely no idea how much a 8 socket single system costs, not to mention there are very few such systems on the market anymore (as far as I can tell neither HP (Proliant anyway) nor Dell sell them anymore). Though HP may have 8 socket superdome for HPUX still and of course SGI systems(owned by HP now). HP's last Proliant 8 socket as far as I can tell was 980 which was 7-8 years ago.

Re: "remove the bureaucracy inherent in acquiring Oracle’s database"

The bureaucracy inherent in acquiring Oracle's database is almost nothing. You can download any version you wanted from their website(checked again now just to be sure - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/index.html) without anything.

They purposely make it easy to lure people into using it so then they can come back with audits.

Last time I seriously dealt with Oracle DB licensing was about 10 years ago, and at the time it was pretty easy. As a new hire I tried to advice the company how to deploy Oracle properly when they were undergoing an audit. My manager decided to ignore me, they paid their fines to get back to a normal stance and kept going. Until the 2nd audit came around when I once again told them what they needed to do, and they did it(I guess I did it as I did most of the work) that time, still had to pay fines but they were legit fines they were terrible/lazy about managing their licenses. I found it ironic I knew more about Oracle licensing than the Oracle reps did at the time (specifically around leveraging Oracle standard edition on multi core processors). I also did things like install single socket(quad core) vmware hosts(which vmware did not "support" at the time), to get more Oracle instances up (even though Oracle did not "support" vmware, I think they still may not). For production it was all bare metal and optimized with fast dual core cpus or quad core depending on EE or SE licensing.

That particular company when they started had Oracle SE "One", the tiny DB. Then they hired an Oracle DB consulting firm to help them manage the systems(this was before I was hired), the first thing the consulting firm did was to install Oracle EE everywhere. Company was hit hard for that filing support cases against EE when they were not licensed for it. Later on the 2nd audit got hit again because that DB consulting firm had monitoring that used partitions in oracle, another expensive add on. No other apps or anything was using partitioning but company got hit with the bill for using an unlicensed feature. The monitoring software was then updated to not require partitioning.

Previous to that company was a place that had massive abuse of Oracle licensing we had probably a dozen or more hosts, and were only paying for a couple(everything on EE). For some reason either Oracle didn't bother to audit, or when they did audit we got by somehow (I wasn't responsible for those systems). Eventually the company got correct in their licensing but took a few years.

I think Microsoft is similar, though at least with MS you can't(as far as I know) download their biggest products for free and be able to use them without a license key/file etc.

I have used Oracle DB for the past several years just as a back end database for VMware vCenter, very low utilization. Plan to move to vSphere 6 this year and to the vCenter appliance clustering along with it (Postgres I guess), so won't have Oracle anymore after that. They ping me every so often to try to get more sales but that doesn't go anywhere, and they haven't expressed any interest in an audit(for what I licensed I know I am way over licensed vs what is actually used). Oracle actually sent me an email recently reminding me my support is expiring on Feb 8 2020 (so why email now??) and the renewal fee is $3.15 (no idea where that number came from). They have been emailing me for a year saying my support is expiring in 2020 and I should renew. I mean I can understand emailing a few months before expiration but more than a year? Never seen that before.

It really would be nice if Oracle Enterprise Manager's features were available in Standard edition. I loved OEM at least the performance management stuff being able to see what queries are doing. I recall 10 years ago again it was possible (not "legally") to enable those features in Standard edition, then when the audit came I could just wipe out the data stores for OEM and replace them with regular ones, then reverse it again later(didn't care about data retention). Though with 11G that doesn't seem to be possible anymore(at least not in the same way it was then). My Oracle is really rusty these days though(I have never been a DBA).

Re: Mapping plan

1.4 million routes doesn't really sound like much to me for 2022. Other than the big service providers who really needs to carry the full bgp table anyway? Most folks that use BGP will probably only need a tiny fraction of it, or for the rest of us just uplink to a good service provider(in my case Internap) and let them do the routing.

I have a document here for a high end core switch from May 2004 where a vendor was using a IXIA traffic test tool against a couple of different products, once of which was capable of 1.2 million routes, though on a per port basis it was 230k. But still that was 14 years ago, and it was a switch, not even a "router"(which typically have a lot more memory).

Most companies have had to upgrade their hardware anyway just for increases in throughput.

Today I see routers at least claiming over 2M IPv4 routes and 2M IPv6 routes in hardware(vs 230k on that switch from 14 years ago) on modern equipment just on a quick search I'm sure there are others that can scale higher.

Most of the junk calls i get are bots. They all seem to reply with the same response to my questioning whether they are a computer or not. They claim they are a person with a computer helping them. I hangup at that point.

Re: Technology marches forward

Customers have been able to migrate from vmax to 3par non disruptively for years as well.

I am very curious to know the architectural change that requires data migration.

Re: Having come up against Kaspersky's DRM...

"Kaspersky could have taken the decision to finally put their customers first and stop ignoring state malware"

Maybe I mis remember but I thought the whole thing that kicked this all off was Kaspersky catching NSA malware that some contractor wasn't supposed to bring home and automatically uploaded it to their cloud for analysis like they claim they do for pretty much all malware?

At the same time I do find it interesting that while Kaspersky is planning on opening up to outside audits and stuff the exact opposite has been happening in the U.S. security companies I recall an el reg article or two mentioning several companies at least say they will no longer allow other governments to inspect their code(which makes sense as those countries certainly can use the opportunity to find security issues with the code).

To me at the end of the day code inspection doesn't matter unless you're able to make sure the code you inspected is actually the code that is being installed(along with any updates). Also makes sense for any country that is highly concerned about security to use only locally sourced equipment/code which they can better maintain oversight of. Smaller countries are certainly at a disadvantage.

On my own systems anyway anti virus(currently kaspersky on my home windows systems and Sophos on my windows work VM and nothing on my linux systems(linux is my main system)) hasn't picked up anything new since the 90s(that I recall anyway). Obviously I am careful about what I download.

I believe Kaspersky is honest in they are not co-operating with the government, but also find it quite easily likely that there are government agents as employees(that the company isn't aware are agents) at the company that do stuff (I think the same is true for many/most/all big U.S. security companies too).

Re: Nvidia still sucks...

As someone who has used nvidia on pretty much every desktop and laptop with linux for about 17 or 18 years I can't really agree with that statement myself. Of course per the other poster I'll caveat my statement by saying I've always used the proprietary drivers. Also will say I don't run bleeding edge linux either I'm sure that stuff is more likely to break if you wish to track the latest and greatest kernels.

Before Nvidia I was using Number Nine cards if anyone remembers them, with AcceleratedX if I recall right. That combined with the commercial OSS drivers, those were interesting days for me anyway. Originally got #9 for the Windows stuff but then switched to linux for my desktops in 1998.

My first nivida cards were a used(?) Riva TNT, not sure what brand(maybe Riva was a brand back then), maybe it was OEM, got a pair of them from Fry's Electronics they came in unmarked boxes in anti static bags if I recall right. Ran them for many years..

Have had Nvidia in every laptop since 2006(which is just 3, I keep my laptops around for a while).

Re: fscking BINARY LOGS.

WRT grep and logs I'm the same way which is why I hate json so much. My saying has been along the lines of "if it's not friends with grep/sed then it's not friends with me". I have whipped some some whacky sed stuff to generate a tiny bit of json to read into chef for provisioning systems though.

XML is similar though I like XML a lot more at least the closing tags are a lot easier to follow then trying to count the nested braces in json.

I haven't had the displeasure much of dealing with the systemd binary logs yet myself.

Re: so far so good

still getting updates on debian 7 myself on my main personal servers, devuan looking like a good upgrade.

Re: C# vSphere client was - how shall we put this? – bad. Just bad

As a linux user I remember my early days with esx 3.5 (before that I used GSX). I hated the .net client. But I grew to like it over time. Obviously much better than the flash version. I access it over xenapp from a windows VM(on top of linux). The linux xenapp client has trouble accessing remote console on my system at least(keyboard gets trapped in console). Xenapp allows me to run just the app remotely from the datacenter(3-7,000mi away) with very low latency to vcenter itself (yes still 5.5). I see a huge perf difference from running the client locally. I have even used the .Net client via xenapp over vpn on android on my note 3 on several occasions . Works best with the stylus to have greater precision on the cursor.

I have never used the flash client for more than a few minutes and have never seen the html client aside from a screen shot here and there.

Most of my co workers use mac and use xenapp on mac to get to it.

My only complaint though minor is when I got my new laptop 2 years ago with 4k screen. Vsphere was pne of two apps (other was remote desktop ) that were unusable at 4k on win7 anyway. (No not using win10). So just went back to 1080 resolution and that works fine. 4k was just smaller i had to increase the size on everything to get it usable. I see little difference to 1080 otherwise at least on my thinpkad p50.

It's not the only thing that windows vm does. I do a bunch of work related things in it including vpn(and outlook and rdp). I ssh to my servers from linux first by bouncing through the windows vm ssh server(cygwin). The linux SSL vpn clients just don't work well enough for me.

Re: 3PAR losing data

Neither of those events were the fault of 3PAR technology. The 2nd was the fault of humans working with the hardware, that were managed by HP, so HP was at fault(and owned up to it). The first was also the fault of humans but not those working with the hardware.

I have suffered 2 largish scale SAN outages since I have been working with them (though the first one I wasn't responsible for the storage). First was EMC, well our websites were down for a good 35 hours or so while we recovered(lots of corrupted data). The cause was a double controller failure(software fault I believe), as to what caused the double controller failure I am not sure but the storage admin blamed himself after the fact, apparently a configuration setting "allowed" the 2nd controller to fail(nobody was working on the system at the time of the failure it was a Sunday afternoon, I recall the Oracle DBA told me he was driving to lunch and almost got into a car accident when I sent the alarm showing I/O errors on the Oracle servers), I don't know specifics. The hardware did not have to be replaced from what I recall (this was 2004).

Second failure was a 3PAR failure(2010), downtime was about 4-5 hrs, root cause was a Seagate SATA hard disk (in an array of ~200 disks) began silently corrupting data (it would acknowledge disk writes but then mess up the data on the reads). Took several hours for the situation to become critical, given the nature of the system to distribute data over all disks by default one disk doing bad things can wreck havok. Had a few cases of data being corrupted and then later that night the controller responsible for that disk panic'd, and then the 2nd controller took over and saw the same problem and panic'd(4 controller array but 3PAR architecture has disks being managed by pairs of controllers). That particular array wasn't responsible for front end operations (front end servers were all self contained, no external dependencies of any kind), but it did take out back end data processing. It was the best support experience I have ever had myself (this outage was before HP acquired 3PAR, support not as good since). From the incident report(2010):

"After PD94 was returned, 3PAR’s drive failure analysis team re-read the data in the special area where ‘pd diag’ wrote specific data, and again verified that what was written to the media is what 3PAR expected (was written by 3PAR tool) confirming the failure analysis that the data inconsistency developed during READ operations. In addition, 3PAR extracted the ‘internal HDD’ log from this drive and had Seagate review it for anomalies. Seagate could not find any issues with this drive based on log analysis. "

I learned a LOT during that outage both the outage itself and recovering after the fact.

That particular scenario I believe was addressed in the 3PAR Gen4 systems (~2011 ?) when they started having end to end check sums on everything internal to the array, and extended it even further on Gen5 having check sums all the way from the host to the disk.

In both outages, neither company had any sort of backup system to take over load, the array itself was a single point of failure(even though they are generally highly redundant internally). I'd bet 80% of the time companies deploying these do it like this just for budget reasons alone.

I had a controller fail(technically just the hard disk in the controller that has the OS on it) mid software upgrade on an 3PAR F200 system(2 controllers only, end of life now for 2 years), system never went completely down but write performance really goes down on two controller arrays that use disk drives when a controller is out. The situation was annoying in that it took HP about 26 hours to resolve the issue because the replacement controller didn't have the same OS version(and refused to join the cluster) and the on site tech had problems with his laptop crashing every 30 minutes from the USB serial connector.

But really all you need to do is look at the change logs for these systems(or any other complex system) and many times you'll find some really scary bugs being fixed.

Having been a customer for 12 years you may guess that I know MANY stories good and bad about 3PAR stuff over the years. All things considered, I am still a very satisfied customer, most of that(90%) is because of the core technology. Less satisfied with the level of support HP gives out these days, but the support aspect wasn't unexpected after being acquired by a big company.

I have a few 3PAR arrays today, all of the company's critical data are on them, though I don't have as much time to work with them as I used to(I am the only one in the company that does work with them though). They just sit back and run and run, like the rest of the infrastructure. The oldest 3PAR is also part of our first infrastructure and it has been online since 12/19/2011. Hoping to retire it soon and replace it with something current, but don't see it happening this year.

Though I have learned to be MUCH more conservative on what I do with storage, obviously LONG gone are the days where I thought "hey this disk array has two controllers and does RAID it's the same as this other one that has two controllers and does RAID".

Re: It's the software.

I assume you are referring to Windows software? Since Linux has run on ARM for well over a decade I believe, looks like there is Java for ARM as well which covers a huge selection of software that run on servers.

Though I'd wager in many cases the code isn't as optimized for performance as on x86.

Re: Just trying to ruffle feathers?

Poking at Xfinity's site I see there is an offer for 400Mbps for $75/mo (first 12 months - internet only), they also have a special page for gigabit offerings(up to 2Gbps) though looks like they want an address to check first.

As another user noted the data cap is still 1TB, and as you noted there isn't much use of having such a fast connection anyway for most people. I have a 250mbps plan and the ONLY reason I'm on that plan is it was the one(at the time anyway) that gave me the fastest upload (20Mbit). I'd be perfectly fine with a 50Mbps or even less (less than two years ago I was on another cable provider in another city with a 30Mbps plan, though upload was only 2 or 3Mbps).

I saw flyers around recently advertising 400Mbit(that it was available, no mention of free upgrades) so I have no idea if I will get upgraded, I really don't care since I won't use that speed anyway.

Re: Azure vs AWS

Microservices is a bullshit buzzword bingo with regards to "seeing benefits from cloud applications". What you need to see benefits is higher ability to handle failures at every level (both at an ops as well as dev level), as well as intense ongoing performance evaluation of the product to know how it scales and when to scale. All of these things are incredibly complex to get right for many applications. With intelligent infrastructure the first two are often quite easy to achieve with off the shelf hardware and software(that is typically agnostic to any application stack). The performance testing aspect is complex regardless (depending on application complexity of course).

That has absolutely nothing to do with micro services. If anything micro services dramatically increases the complexity because now you are having to scale many more individual components and watch what kind of impact of scaling those components has in the other components in the system.

That obviously doesn't stop people from trying just look how many companies go down when amazon has an outage (or even service degradation) in their U.S. East facilities.

Re: S.M.A.R.T. We know what that really stands for, don't we!

With the way some software is developed these days possible the developers don't even know what 3rd party services they are talking to ("Oh I just included this library/module because it did X for me, had no idea it was doing this other stuff too")