10 LET X=0
20 PRINT "LOOP";
30 LET X=X+1
40 IF X=20 THEN END
50 GOTO 10
60 REM ...CIRDAN...
… in a loop. Cisco warns Nexus 3000 upgrade could get you stuck ...
Cisco has popped out a curious Field Notice warning owners of Nexus 3000 devices to be careful when they upgrade the devices' operating software, lest they enter a boot loop. “Nexus 3000 Series platforms that run Release 6.0(2)U6(x) show an MD5 mismatch when you upgrade to Release 7.0x or later,” Cisco warns. “As a result, the …
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Monday 19th December 2016 22:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: IF X .assign. 20
Learn to read code. If you ever hear 'equal', you have got it wrong. Practise saying 'assign' and 'compare' instead.
My memory could be rusty, but I recall = was the equality operator in BASIC. C and others have ==, dynamically typed languages like PHP and JavaScript have ===, but with BASIC I seem to recall it being just =.
Wikipedia has some examples that demonstrate this.
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Monday 19th December 2016 10:00 GMT Paul IT
Re: Meanwhile I've been waiting 18 Hours for WIndows Update to start updating
An early Christmas present for you...
Stop WU service
Download and install the following KB updates for Windows 7 in this order
3020369
3125574
3172605
(May need to reboot after each one and then stop WU service again)
This fix has been around a few months.
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Monday 19th December 2016 07:30 GMT Flocke Kroes
MD5 is error detection, not the fault
The fault is incorrect assumptions about geometry. Back in the stone age, hard disks did not know the number of tracks per disk, heads per drive or sectors per track. This information was stored in a tiny battery backed ram in the _computer_. There was a copy on the disk that might have the right values, but could not be accessed until the BIOS knew the geometry.
Before bolting in your new disk, you had to copy the geometry onto a post-it note so you could select the correct menu item in the BIOS. Eventually new hard disks appeared that did not match any of the available menu items. Later, disks had more than 1023 cylinders or more than 63 sectors per track, but no worries. All you had to do was lie about the number of heads (up to 255) and a chip in the disk would decrypt the lies to handle disks up to 8GB. As disks got bigger the lies became more and more contrived and incompatible.
I would like to think that now 8GB is becoming the minimum size for a µSDHC card, we should be shaking out the final geometry related bugs. The pessimist in me says that geometry will still be causing problems in 2038.
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Monday 19th December 2016 09:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: MD5 is error detection, not the fault
I expect it will be for some years even if not 2038, backward compatibility trumps development of, then adoption of, new standards most of the time.
By that time of course, you wont be able to read any of your current media and if you haven't spent the last two decades moving your data between technologies, survived a few cloud storage company failures, hacks, and arbitrary termination of services the problem of geometry free media may be academic.
Make sure you leave all the decryption keys/passwords etc with your solicitor/attorney in future proof media with your stored last will and testament too, or that will result in all your data turning into scrap metal and plastic...
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Monday 19th December 2016 12:15 GMT Flocke Kroes
Re: MD5 is error detection, not the fault
I am not sure we have geometry free media. Try: hdparm -g /dev/some_modern_block_device
CHS numbers have been completely meaningless for at least a decade, but they are still a part of block devices just in case you have something dumb enough to look at them. Even GUID partitions includes a protective MBR with fields for CHS.
Future proof media? Going back 21 years means floppy disks, zip disks (daisy-chained printer port!), DDS-(2or3) tape, Parallel SCSI, PATA, USB ports (without OS support) and expensive CD-R. USB flash was not available commercially until about 2000. It is possible that I could get my dusty zip drive to work with a USB/printer bridge. Nothing else I had in 1996 stands a chance of working today. (My DVD writers claim to be able to write CD-R, but are lying. I can still read CDs, but could not write them in 1996).
At a guess, by the time the 2038 bug hits, USB will be radio or optical to avoid damage from fake USB devices destroying computers by sending 200V pulses on the data lines. It is possible that some of my current devices might work with an optical to USB3 bridge at that time. 10 years of future proofing has been practical. 20 years worth is not a good bet even with access to hardware from a museum. Me surviving another 20 years is not a good bet either.
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Monday 19th December 2016 14:40 GMT Lennart Sorensen
Re: MD5 is error detection, not the fault
It is trivial to get USB adapters for IDE, parallel, serial and other things, so at least any hard disk from the last 25 years is easy to connect to a modern machine and access. If your DVD drive can't write CD-R, then it is junk. All mine can, as can my BD writer. SCSI adapters still exist (including USB to scsi, although pretty expensive), so scsi devices can be accessed too, although with a bit more effort.
Things are actually surprisingly good when it comes to dealing with old stuff.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
