Posts by J. Cook 2113 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2007
I can more or less guarantee that they do not, can not, and will not update the infotainment on anything older than 10 years. Hell, you are lucky to find the user manual for the infotainment on such an old relic on their web site, let along any sort of update. (which means that the people who bought the vehicles with the in-dash GPS were the original "pay to keep what you bought running" victims.)
Once I get a couple days free, I'm going to start work on getting a proxmox cluster built in a sandbox.
One of the problems with the entire VMware debacle, though, is that Cisco will not support any of their virtual appliances if they are not running on a supported hypervisor, and Proxmox is not one of those; This means that we'll be stuck with a couple ESX boxes just to run those for a while. :(
one of the many hats I wear at [RedactedCo] is email admin. Which means that when I'm not having prolonged, pitched battles with the support team about Why We Keep Office and Outlook especially Up To Date, I'm occasionally assisting the InfoSec team with their phishing tests, so I (usually) have advanced notice of tests.
Some of the ones that we've done.... are pretty clever, and have nearly caught me. Some of the other emails we've gotten (actual phishes!) are.... not so clever.
While I'm not officially part of the InfoSec team there, I work pretty closely with them (one of my other hats is the web filter admin) and before we had a dedicated InfoSec team, a lot of the incidents landed on both my desk, and the desks of the other admins, so I have at least half a clue as how to go about things properly. :)
All of that. ALL. OF. THAT.
Back when we were still running physical boxes, we had to move them to a new data center, and we decided to give them a good cleaning out before we racked them in their new home.
This was always done outside, because no one wanted to deal with the cloud of dust, ash, and other smoking byproducts that managed to get sucked in. 'gross' doesn't begin to describe it.
So... previously, it was a 'per socket' pricing. Let's half the pricing, but move to a 'per core' pricing, which would indicate that if you have a 2 core processor in a single socket, your pricing will remain the same. If you have, oh, a 16 core processor in a single socket, your pricing is going to go up by a factor of 8.
Did they hire someone from Oracle for their pricing scheme rework? /sarcasm
Same here; one of my multi-year projects, starting this year, is to find a workable replacement for VMware in our environment; I figure I have until our support contract expires to find a workable replacement that will also allow a migration across platforms without having to rebuild some 400 plus VMs. Thankfully, I also have a lab for this, and I can probably poke our VARs to see if anyone has some expertise for hire.
Part of the problem is collecting on the debts, even on a court judgement- hiring someone to collect a debt can get expensive, especially if it involves travel, and Anon may have decided that it was just not worth the cost of collecting. In the US at least, bankruptcy will trash your credit score for 7-10 years, and is a punishment in and of itself. It's not this magic 'get out of debt free card'- there are consequences for doing it.
My relationship with iTunes is... a love/hate one, mostly for the reasons Master Campbell as stated. :)
While I do like the ability to buy the album or song that's running through my head on a whine (and if I have enough credit loaded into the account), I utterly despise how it handles playlists, syncing multiple devices, and randomly going "sure, the bits are on your device, but you aren't authorized to play that audio file that you bought a month ago because reasons.
However, there's a way around that: a) I make sure the music purchased is DRM free in one way or other; and b) I mirror it to other drives that house my media collection. If needed, I have a program that will cheerfully transcode the apple codec(s) to mp3. Said program is free (Foobar 2000), but getting a windows compiled port of LAME can be a bit of a bother at times, so I have the installers for both stored with the other installers I common use for my system builds.
With AppleTV producing an adaptation of the (excellent) Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, I'll have to figure out some way of capturing it for offline viewing, which may just end up with me going the same route as getting Nimona on off-line media- hoist the colors and fire up the ol' bit-torrent client and download a pirate copy.
On a related tangent, I've found that MakeMKV will rip UHD*, Blu-ray, and DVD media, and was worth the purchase price, although I'd recommend using a pre-paid or 'disposable' payment method for it. (I had some unauthorized purchases on my card about a month or two after purchasing that program, but I'm writing it off as coincidence, because the card information could have been gotten from a skimmer in the same time period.)
* UHD - aka the 4K discs. MakeMKV will read those as long as the drive supports it; I've gone a step further and gotten a drive that can use the LibreDrive firmware, which makes life a touch easier.
Thankfully, I only saw a couple things, but the shop I used to work for had a few machines come in that were non-repairable; one of them was absolutely covered inside and out with cigarette smoke and tar- apparently, the house it was in had several adults who all had a 2-carton/data habit and no fresh air exchange. (and/or the ashtray was directly in front of the poor computer's air intake). The bench tech absolutely refused to touch it, and the extended warranty company that used us for service calls agreed with us and refused to cover any work done on it.
My direct "that's gross" stories are as such:
1. Performing preventive maintenance on base model workstations on the 'dirty intake" line of a garment/uniforms management company- the machines were all on wooden blocks to keep them from rusting to the floor, as they power-washed the floor on a weekly basis. the outsides of the machines had a fair amount of splash dirt on them.
2. The server that had a mouse nest in it. thankfully, by the time I got there to haul it in for work, the occupants had all been evicted, but it took a couple days for the smell to leave the bed of the truck I used.
3. The OfficeJet all-in-one that got enough use that the holding area from where the nozzles dumped during the cleaning/priming cycles had overflowed. IIRC, they ended up replacing that unit straight up, presumably with a unit that had a higher duty cycle.
4. No actual dirt, but I decommisoned a dial-up point of presence when I worked for [ISP] in a rural part of the state that was literally located in a former bathroom- the equipment was perched on the capped and sealed floor ring where the toilet used to be. It was a nice little day trip for me, at least.
5. after the [ISP] job, I worked for a mental health organization that had a site that literally had their office's switch gear and internet connection sitting in a boxed in area constructed out of ceiling tiles and grid... in an active bathroom.
6. When I was in the support team at my current employer, there were a few times were I had to clean out equipment that was placed next to coffee machines, or located in the bars. one had a network jack next to where one of the bar soda guns was holstered, and as expected, the patch cable was a sticky, stinky mess along with the jack which had also failed. (the coffee machine one was a thermal printer that had gotten a cup of joe spilled onto/into it. Thankfully, we have spares, so a spare was chucked into service and I spent a couple hours with a bottle of isopropyl, q-tips, and paper towels refurbishing the poor thing.)
I know them as Rightpath, but Yup. It's the same rotten apple. I'm a current customer, only because my mortgage was offloaded to them without my consent or knowledge until after it happened.
As far as the connection to actor Gary Cooper, that's... tenuous at best. It was a branding exercise, nothing more, and if anything, has made me like the company even less.
And finally, "Nationwide" is an insurance company, not a mortgage company. the old name for it was/is "Nationstar". I wouldn't be surprised if Nationwide had some investments in Nationstar, though...
Yeah.
There's two other names that this company has gone by:
Rightpath Servicing (which it still uses for mortgage servicing) and Nationstar Mortgage Holdings.
It changed from Nationstar to Mr Cooper back in 2017. "The company stated that the name change was meant to "personalize the mortgage experience". (WIkipedia)
My response to that was "I wasn't given a choice in the matter- If I wanted a mortgage company as a friendly entity, I would have tried to get on with my credit union for the mortgage.
The complaints I've seen online about this company are absolutely in-line with my experience with them- piss-poor communications, getting the run around with getting them to respond to assistance requests, etc. And that's just the six months I've been with them. It took them twelve days to call me up to tell me that they had my mortgage, and could I please pay them because I'm now 12 days late in payment. (My response: "And who's fault is THAT?! Tell me where to send the money, DAMMIT.") and then the shenanigans with their web site's payment system not telling me that I had put in the account information wrong from my bank. (we had three go arounds on that, and the third time I bluntly said "Look, I'd like to file a bug report with whoever does your web site's programming, because I never got any sort of indication that I had put the wrong information in for payment, that it was rejected, or anything- it just said "payment reversed". it took me near fifteen minutes on the phone to get that information out of them, too.)
You know it's bad when I praise the service I've gotten from JPBankMorganChaseOneWho_did_we_acquire_this_week, and they were... not all that timely in some things. (mostly in the part were I tried to have them take my money in under 5 business days from when I submitted the payment to when it was actually pulled from my account...)
:: gets dragged away from the keyboard and thrown out on the lawn to touch grass ::
Oh, you could still shoot yourself in the foot; I remember running the computer out of memory doing stuff with linked lists back in high school with TP.
If you wanted basic, you got one of the macs and whatever version of BASIC it had. However, most people tended to just screw around with making goofy icons in Resedit and breaking things (or playing Nettrek with other classmates...)
Heh; that's pretty much how Cisco does the USB 'console' port on their current line of switches- you plug in your baby-blue USB A to USB mini(!) cable into the switch, and it enumerates as a serial port.
I still have a SeaLevel USB to serial converter with an old school baby-blue Cisco Serial to RJ45 console cable in my connector kit, though...
Ah, yes. the Packet of Death. Fun times. We ran into that with a pen test where the company we had paid to run the test decided to use the "not safe" tests against our production network, forgot to tell us, and took down a few things before we called them up and screamed at them.
as far as USB crashes? I have a bit of an issue with my home workstation forgetting to process USB insert/removals in a timely manner, but then, there might be a grounding issue in the room somewhere...
Yup. to (mis)quote a famous song that typically gets played here in the US this time of year, the best documentation has "color glossy pictures with circles and arrows, and a paragraph explaining what each picture does" [sic] and can be followed by a fifth grader (Year 6 for UK) with little or no assistance.
Mines the one with the "Alice's Restaurant" logo on the back- I hear they made a thanksgiving dinner that can't be beat.
Indeed.
We have a dedicated team that manages and curates the end-user documentation. Their documentation is quite excellent, and generally anything we write up gets reviewed (and/or rewritten) by them for consumption by the masses.
Then there was the time I had written the procedure for handling the tape backups for one of our LOB applications, so that our support team could perform tape rotations for us. I had written it at the level that someone who was brand new to the support team should be able to run through it with little to no assistance.
About three months later, we had some issues here people where not following the procedure, and in my frustration, asked my elderly mother (a former Kindergarten teacher) to read through it. After she did, I asked that if she had access to the relevant systems, would she feel confident in performing that procedure. She told me yes.
Turns out, the tech responsible for performing that simple process did their own thing and didn't bother to read the procedure. That was one of the few data loss events we had, because the idiot didn't bother to rotate the tapes out correctly (which was part of the procedure). The tapes we needed (which had the monthly backups) had never been sent off site, and were overwritten a week later. We didn't catch it, because we had placed trust in this tech (who had been there longer than I had and really should have known better!) to do the job correctly. I don't know what happened after that incident, but I do know that he left the company a few months later for greener pastures.
When we upgraded that LOB app, we included it into our centralized backup system, which had an automated tape rotation schedule built into it, and a multi-drive library that the tapes lived in.
(and people ask why I have trust issues....)
Or worse, when you are on character 11 of a 15+ character password that resemble line noise when you realize that the password field was not the focus. (even worse when you accidently dump that into the text entry field of one's IM program, and get to perform an emergency password change while your coworker is laughing their bum off...)
... sort of?
If it's three months out of date, windows will try and install all the updates in one go, when really some of them need to have restarts, or (in the case of the cumulative updates) just the latest one applied. I know that Windows does allow for superceded updates and whatnot, but sometimes the machine just does'nt obey it.
If there's a "servicing stack" update, that one almost always needs the "ME FIRST!!!" treatment and a reboot after that before anything else, because Microsoft.
:: attempts to crash through the wall, Kool-Aid Man Style, but nearly gets garroted by the 16/3 romex line run at neck-height in the wall ::
Been there, done that. In this house, I've run across (and fixed!):
* A home office room that had a pair of 48 inch, quad tube commercial fluorescent fixtures from the 70's with one having a cable that was dropped through a hold in the ceiling (no junction box!) and the other with the lines just tapes together with no twisting or wire nuts (that was still not code compliant in the 70's!) AND had a three switch gang that totaled up for 4 code violations in a single go (all switches shall be contained IN the box, wires shall be run IN the box, switches shall be screwed TO the box, and power must originate FROM the box, not the light fixture!)
* No less than three different flavors of romex types in a single room (copper, full aluminum, and copper-clad aluminum)
* Leaving live wires disconnected and hanging in a ceiling space with no junction box whatsoever with no wire caps
* A 240 volt, two phase pool filter pump motor on a pair of single 120 volt phases (physics let's it work, but it's a gods thrice damned fire hazard. AND NOT CODE AT ANY POINT IN HISTORY.)
The work I've done on this place has been done by licensed elec-chickens, or myself, and I'm a pirate electrician- I KEEP TO THE CODE. (the National Electric Code, that is...) :D
I'm skilled enough to swap outlets and switches and do some other minor work, but I call in a professional for work in the circuit breaker panel or for bigger jobs- that's what they have insurance for.
(the pool line was disconnected, trimmed back to where it exited the house, capped at both ends, and re-done entirely to be compliant with current code, which involved running a sub-panel to the new pump when I had the pool re-built two years ago.)
only 15 minutes? the last time I had to track my time, I did it in 6 minute increments, and spent 30-45 minutes at the end of the day totaling everything up, because the boss was a micromanaging [ULTRA-CENSORED] git who was forcing salaried people to track their time like we were hourly. (and even the hourly people didn't track their time that closely, I did it to be a pain in the bosses posterior. )
... and by "really beefy", meaning a three phase model of UPS that can run a data center.
I have a UPS unit plugged into the same circuit as my laser printer and when the laser printer spools up to print, the UPS sees a short brownout, and it's a standard US 15 amp duplex outlet.)
Same, but with a drive shelf. Thankfully, we caught it early because the shelf wouldn't full seat right and it because bloody obvious what was wrong. :)
Other good rules to note:
Never let the apprentice use a power drill (even with a clutch cranked down almost all the way) to help rack stuff, unless you want to strip the absolute hell out of the screw heads.
Same, but especially on two post racks where the holes are pre-threaded, but all you have are the 'self-tapping' screws.
For that matter, just don't use a power drill on those unless you know what you are doing and can start the screws right- Cross threading rack holes is a Cardinal Sin to the God of Electrons.
On the same vein: NEVER EVER EVER EVER!! use self-tapping screws on a 2 post telco rack unless they came with the rack. And maybe not even then. (And the installers who abscond with the screw packs that come with the racks deserve a special place in the Bad Place.)
Follow those rules, and you won't get called every phrase in the Book of the Profane by the poor schlub that has to work on the thing afterwards. Maybe.
Yup.
I have a 48 ounce (1.3 Kg) dead blow hammer that's also soft faced. (It's fire engine red, can't miss it) I have the words "drive adjuster" scrawled on the handle in marker. It's been used to seat reluctant rack rails on their drive shelves during installation.
We also have in the team's shared toolkit a Stanley FUBAR Forcible Entry Tool that the boss bought because 'we needed a crowbar to unpack some of the gear that gets shipped to us'. I can't remember if I used the label maker to put "Maxim 37" (There is no overkill; there is only 'open fire' and 'reload') on it or not.
Heh- We had a vendor have that happen to them as well, but in the opposite direction (trying to make a call). they were a little cranky because they were trying to get a hold of the guy who programmed the control board he was working on.
And TBH, There were other shenanigans with that phone, but I'm pretty sure a lot of it was also that my account on the telco side was either corrupted, or FUBAR in some way, because I also never got voicemail alerts until El Turkey berated me in front of the rest of the team about why I didn't have access to Verizon's back end to fix it myself. (that's a longer story, though.)
Apparently, there's no love for the crackblackberry devices around here...
(Cute devices, paws down the best physical keyboard on a mobile device.)
Then there was Danger with their Sidekick and SIdekick II, marketed in the US under T-mobile. Also a cute device, with an interesting flip-out screen hiding the keyboard, and a pretty decent UI and UX. Bog help you if you wanted to develop anything for it, or do things like custom ringtones or syncing music on the device. (There was a USB port on it, but only for developers to use, IIRC.)
(I had a SIdekick II from 2002-ish to 2008 when I migrated from T-mobile to AT&T and the crackberry, and then in 2010/2011 ish went android and got work to pay for my phone; Around 2014 I went iphone and never looked back, because IT COULD MAKE AND RECEIVE PHONE CALLS, something the android phone I moved from had difficulty doing some days. /sarcasm
Thankfully, these are the worst things I've ever had to deal with:
The computers sitting on wood pedestals for a uniform company's soiled linen intake line- wooden because they would powerwash the floor when it got too nasty and the computer cases would rust-weld themselves to the floor.
Installing Code Red / NIMDA patches on windows 2000 machines in a factory that made APUs for aircraft- "$250,000 CNC mill that carves up blocks of titanium costing more than a caddillac, brought down into non-functioning because the $50 dollar CD-ROM drive on the $700 desktop machine driving the machine was crammed full of titanium dust." the company's in-house IT department got to deal with those, I was just part of the hoard brought in to clean the place up.
performing an overhaul on an old LaserJet 4si with 2 million on the counter, and replacing the failed main drive train on it on site because the client didn't want it hauled back to our shop for some reason.
I ended up buying my own toner-safe 'datavac' after borrowing one of the units that my employer had, which ended up spewing cyan toner all over the place because the last person who borrowed it didn't bother cleaning it out or telling anyone that the bag had exploded inside the unit. (the client was annoyed, but I managed to at least clean the mess up using a spray bottle and an entire roll of paper towels. I, however, was PISSED.)
The server that had a literal rat's nest in it- that got put into the back of my truck and hauled back to the shop for the bench techs to deal with.
So, something to note here:
This new rule kicks in January 1st.
Unity, if it's like most other companies, ends their fiscal year on the last day of February.
Last November, two investment companies (Silver Lake and Sequioa Capital) agreed to invest around one billion dollars into the company.
This is a play to make it look like the company is making increased revenue before the end of their fiscal year; and while it will, in the long term it will cost the company dearly, not including the mountain of bad PR it's already generating.
I expect that after the new fiscal year starts, the executive team of Unity will jump ship before the effects of this horrible decision (and the inevitable lawsuits) come home to roost.
... and Windows 9x*. And Windows XP. I fondly remember spending a couple hours of the client's money painstakingly removing the HP print software and drivers the hard way from a machine that would BSOD on bootup due to the wrong iteration of the print driver being referenced, causing the kernal to shit the bed.
For corporate devices and for 90% of the tasks, the HP universal driver really was universal- If the printer groked PCL of 'some form', or post script, it was a solid, basic driver that offered duplex and limited collation functionality. (But not staple and print, because Mopiers and MFPs were their own damned beasts.)
I'll be honest, the current desktop uses a MS supplied driver for the brother MFP that I have; I don't scan from it to a computer (I'll scan to a USB stick, though), and doing color correction on it is kind of pointless for that class printer (It's.. OK for photos; lineart and some images work out OK, but I have a photo printer for a reason.)
* To be fair, it didn't take a whole lot to cause windows 95, 98, and ME to BSOD.
I will admit that the Office troubleshooter was actually useful when I was using it back in 2015-16; It told me exactly what service packs and patches I was missing, and after installing those on my test system that was having the issue (issues connecting to the on-prem Exchange server) that magically fixed the problem.
Getting our in-house support team to realize this took MUCH longer.
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