Posts by Rainer 376 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2008
First of all, modern version of Vsphere only really support a limited number of old OS versions (with maybe the exception of Windows).
Take the case of FreeBSD. Only the most recent versions support VMware's vmx network interface. Previously, you needed the emulated intel NIC. But older versions of FreeBSD didn't even have a driver for that.
(Though, in the case of FreeBSD one could just install 10.1 and the compat5 package and just use all the old binaries - but how many people actually know that?)
Then, the p2v-tools don't support anything but Windows and Linux (with a couple of restrictions, like that you can't virtualize a Linux software-raid. Or couldn't last time we tried a couple of years ago).
And who wants to virtualize old software anyway?
Of course, there's also the customer.
We've recently tried to persuade a customer (who's really a department of a much larger customer with _very_ deep pockets) to virtualize his stack of DL380G5 servers (purchased in early 2008).
But due to some overlapping plans with his software-refreshment cycle for the 3rd-party app they're actually running, they've now renewed their lease of these old machines. But at least, I'm re-installing them with FreeBSD 10.1 (I think I previously upgraded them from 6 to 7 and now 8). And at least, they can run 64bit software.
And we've only got to make them last for two more years.
Hoarding spares....
Then, there's the slew of customers with PHP5.3 apps (and some PHP 5.2 and some PHP 4, incredibly) where migrating the app to PHP5.5 would mean a complete rewrite (usually typo3-based websites with custom extensions). Because the customer often can't do the rewrite himself, he has to pay an agency. Obviously, the money for that is sort-of not coming forward. Sometimes, the customer is the web-agency, sometimes the actual customer.
A while ago, I migrated the data off a Solaris10 file and mysql-server to a FreeBSD10 system. That Solaris 10 box hat close to 2000 days uptime. 2000 days without patches.
But patches with Solaris were always a bit of a hit-and-miss and after Oracle bought Sun, you couldn't download them for free anymore anyway...
Software doesn't age, but hardware does.
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.jamieoliver.com
That usually doesn't end well.
People install too many useless plugins that usually come with security-holes right out-of-the-box and the site is almost impossible to clean - you have to start from scratch.
Yep, got one of these, too.
With firewire and ethernet, too. But I don't remember if it's FE or GBE.
Unfortunately, it's 32bit only and isn't good at running anything in vmware at all.
Also thunderbird indexing my mail brings it to its knees quickly.
And is on its 3rd PATA-disk, which I can probably no longer source once it breaks.
As such, the product this article heaps so much scorn on looks like a perfect successor.
I just need to find a way to connect the new MacBook via serial port to my Alix board...
It's slower than the current Air.
But the lack of ports? - It's a laptop.
I do have USB and even a FW800 device on my MacMini and I'm thankful that it has four USB3 ports.
But for a portable system, I actually want it to be as portable as possible.
It's weak enough so you don't want to do serious work on it anyway (I don't think it will shine as a VMWare Fusion host).
If you need that, better get a CTO Air or Pro. That also comes with ports galore.
It looks like it might be a great machine for when you're on-call but yet want to venture outside.
The base version isn't even too expensive.
Of course, these days no article can go online without bashing Apple over the expensive Watch - mostly by people who wouldn't buy one anyway and are jealous of the people who can afford one.
I don't need one - but I can't judge the needs of other people.
Apple now has a line-up of half a dozen different laptop form-factors.
You can't have all features in all of them.
They are popular in China - even more so for high-end customers (who often pay a driver).
All the nay-sayers remind me of the Blackberry "Amateur-hour is over"-guys.
Or the Motorola CEO who called the iPhone "the west coast phone", because he didn't even want to use the name.
Or the "600 Dollars and it doesn't even have a keyboard"-CEO we all love to laugh about.
The reason why Apple is still alive and at the top is that even though they believe (probably almost in a religious sense) that their product is the best, they don't deny the fact that a better one can come around and they better be the one bringing it to market - even if it kills a product of their own in the long run.
In this case, Apple can go were no one else can go because they have nothing to lose (except a couple of billion dollars maybe), no product to cannibalize, no important partner they could alienate.
Just a lot of (rather loyal) users like me who think that it's high time that someone look at the "car-problem" with a pair of fresh eyes, without a vested interest and without a "we've always done it that way"-line of thinking. Because that "horseless carriage"-type of problem is what seems to plague current e-cars from "traditional" manufacturers.
If Apple can come-up with something new, I'll at least have a look at it when it can be bought.
And if you hate Apple products, you don't have to buy them. But don't transfer that hate to the buyers either. That's just not classy.
We had this at work, this weekend, to power us through a long mail-system migration.
It's ideal because it's hot and spicy and doesn't contain much carbs (which are a sedative, which you might know if you ever had spaghetti carbonara for lunch and subsequently had your head hit your keyboard while digesting them).
The smell of the garam masala keeps sticking around the kitchen and any room it is allowed to waft to. If that is a problem at your place of work: bad luck ;-)
we had a receptionist who was from South Africa.
She's mixed black/white and she said that after Apartheid was over, security went down and corruption went up.
I'm not sure I could live there for a prolonged time and not get shot.
Currently living near Zurich, where shops leave heavy stuff like flower soil out during the night because it's too burdensome and apparently nobody steals it anyway.
Copper gets stolen though and of course the cash and jewelry that people who don't trust the banks keep at home...
With reports like the one in the article, is it a fair assumption that South-Africa is basically a failed state where the government has lost control over at least some parts of the country?
I assume that in the above case, the police wasn't called to apprehend the two groups with AK47s.
But then, all mobiles wouldn't work anymore.
Including the ones of the guards.
If they only disable the "unauthorized" ones, then a helpful guard can still sell err... lease...I mean lend an inmate his personal phone so that the poor guy can call his daughter and sing "Happy Birthday", while telling her he'll be back from his business trip soon.
Personally, I'd say that the Open-Source, Google-free Android is as good as dead.
No commercial vendor will touch it.
They'll rather build Windows Phones.
Or rather, get out of the phone business all together.
Because while it gets cheaper and cheaper to build a phone (hardware-wise), it gets more and more expensive to build a good phone that lots of people are willing to spend more money on than a cheap Chinese Android phone costs.
Top Tier: Apple
Middle Tier: Windows Phone
Low-End: anything Android
In three years, nobody will build high-end Android phones anymore - simply by virtue of the fact that almost nobody wants to buy them!
It's not that I couldn't afford a 6 or 6 Plus.
(As my employer pays the contract and almost all associated costs, it's just the cost of the phone itself for me)
I just don't feel that I *really* want a bigger phone than the 4S I have.
I could live with a 5S/5C size phone.
If a new 4" phone from Apple emerges, it will indeed be interesting to see the price point.
However, I'd say that Apple-customers aren't that price-sensitive.
Not to say that Apple could charge anything.
It's to weed out broke idiots. You still have idiots, of course. They're just not broke.
Similar to clubs that charge ridiculous entry fees.
I've had a subscription with an equally expensive site (which turned out to be useless nevertheless) for what must have been a year and a half or so.
But they had a nice forum (which was free).
And I got a nice psychological evaluation or myself.
Hopefully, they'll find somebody @SPE who is responsible for the gross neglect of data-security standards and IT best practises. Some laws were probably broken, too, the way all that (sometimes highly confidential) data has been handled.
If they desperately want to send someone to prison, they should start there.
That would send a message to CEOs and CIOs to take this stuff more serious.
As for the GOP - it might be true that they sit in a country that doesn't do extradictions...
Or not.
Said IT-bods are now probably back at using paper and (blunt) pencil while Mandiant/FireEye staff together with a veritable train-load full of consulting-overspill from every "name" in the phonebook is running the show there.
The only reason they still have their jobs is probably because you need to have someone to blame at the end.
I would certainly *never* want to work in an outfit that gets hacked, doxxed and shutdown like this.
Even worse if I had "predicted" such an outcome.
Nobody likes to hear "But I told you so".
I really don't see how someone would use a cloud backup service for anything close to 1 TB - or even more data.
If the drive fails and the data isn't worthless anyway, you normally want to have access to the data ASAP. Usually a day later. Not a week. Or two.
If you have that much data and it's worth something, you need an enterprise solution.
If the data is not worth that much, then you need to segregate the important from the unimportant until you can pay for a sensible backup strategy that allows a restore in reasonable time.
A backup that can't be restored in reasonable time is almost as bad as no backup at all.
His motto has always been: "Earn big, spend even bigger". He's been doing that for 20-odd years or so. When I started working, he had just sold his IT-security startup for a ridiculous sum (immediately before the Dot Com bubble bust). Then came a couple of other stunts, including the insider-trading gig that is the reason for his criminal record, which is AFAIK the reason he couldn't get citizenship in NZ...
Most "celebrities" are completely useless in every aspect of life except for maybe showing otherwise covered parts of their body in front of camera-lenses.
So, I actually have to give him the benefit of doubt here in that he has actually made something of his life....
Productivity at Sony has skyrocketed, as people can no longer check Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, WhatsApp, three different private email-accounts, Tinder and the corporate email stream between typing three words of a work-related email that is sent to pretend they are actually working.
I got a Fujitsu Lifebook E8010. It has a 1440x1050 display.
I got it via eBay (was as new) and it only cost about 1200-something DM (which in todays money would be about 500 UKP). One reason it was so cheap was probably because it doesn't have a DVD-burner and just a lame Intel GPU.
I think it even came with a docking-station and a 2nd PSU and loads of other stuff.
It still works today (one of the PSUs died after a couple of years), though I don't use it very often anymore (and it's on it's 3rd HD, at least - as it's still got PATA, once that HD dies, I will have to see where I get a replacement). It only has 1 GB of RAM - but works great with OpenSUSE and LXDE. Just avoid Java, Flash and the full-text-indexing of Thunderbird...
The relatively high resolution is also nice for keeping a few x-terms open in parallel.
I was shocked when recently I tried to locate a decent 13" laptop not actually made by Apple - most that are cheaper than MBAs also have a crappier 1366x768 or so display.
Those with better displays are even more expensive than mid-level 13" MBPs or come in "strange" form-factors like the Yoga.
It's no wonder Apple are sucking in almost all the profit in that sector.
I haven't really looked for success stories with Oracle's - but I see they have showcase video with Specialized (the bike company). So it must be good, right? ;-)
I do zfs sends from one machine to another, hourly. In case of a failure, I'd need to switch the NFS mounts manually.
For our customer, that's good enough. Also, because the delta is usually small (though the data-set is 3+ TB)
I use FreeBSD and I was thinking about HAST - but I'm not sure it's really a solution or if it doesn't create more problems than it seems to solve.
Every two-headed HA-"Solution" lacks the "arbitrator" that can decide if a failure has actually occurred.
GlusterFS will officially support FreeBSD, soon - but it remains to be seen how well it actually works. We do use it on Linux, but we don't really have a tough use-case, yet.
From what I have read, lots of small files just kill GlusterFS and thus the traditional "home-directory" use-case is still only really served by NFS - which is why all kinds of HA-solutions come into play in the first place.
In the cloud world, high-availability is moving into the application-stack anyway (like with RIAK, where you have stuff distributed between multiple servers anyway, so you don't need to cluster the individual servers).
But for now, there are way too many "legacy" applications out there that require a file-system - and assume it's local and "always there".
I though, there was no way to repair a ZFS filesystem anyway - either it repairs itself or you (indeed) restore from backup.
ZFS certainly doesn't have a "fsck".
I'm not sure if there's a bullet-proof way to do HA with ZFS (maybe Oracle has one by now?).
The filesystem was clearly never built with such a design-goal.
I knew that the old version of the Nexenta-software wasn't really very good (have never used it) - but given that all vendors in that space nowadays use nearly the same code (OpenZFS, with a few patches here and there), the basis should be much more stable.
I'd give than a try again, if I were you ;-)
So you also believe that the competition between the various TV channels has made the content better, more educational?
Wake up, it's a race to the bottom - in two years, you can only buy crap Android phones and iPhones - because no company will want to be in a market losing money year after year.
The only reason not more Companies have signed up with Microsoft is that they know MSFT will knife them in the back rather earlier than later. Most remember "Plays 4 Sure".
They are not authoritative.
8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are resolvers.
Only because - unfortunately - Microsoft chose to (wrongly) call the tab in the network-configuration dialog "DNS-Servers" doesn't make it right.
Please, El Reg (an IT publication, although self-proclaimed), actually read a book some time, or read wikipedia or at least listen to the "Ask Mr DNS" podcast http://www.ask-mrdns.com from Matt Larson and Cricket Liu.
ISIS didn't just appear out of nothing.
Whenever there is a power-vaccuum in the Middle-East, it gets filled with either a war-lord or a couple of religious nuts.
You don't need to tap phones or bug computers for seeing the rise of ISIS.
Reading and understanding Sunni blogs would probably have been enough.
Blaming Snowden on the rise of ISIS is absolutely inane.
We (the West) brought them on ourselves.
The Turks still think they can have them "solve" the Kurds-"problem" and then defeat them.
I wish I could share that optimism.
> As we've seen from commoditization in the laptop market
> it's a tough task and it's one that the
> Chinese will be very confident of doing well in.
> Android is their weapon of choice and it's here to stay.
People line up to buy Apple laptops. too. At two or three times the prices of other manufacturers' products.
They own almost all the profit in that market - and they have done so since a very long time.
Moves of Intel et.al to get out of that situation have only further cemented that lead (Netbooks -> MacBookAir -> UltraBooks -> ?)
Android may well be winning the market-share crown - and the "preferred by geeks and people who don't buy Apps"-title.
But even Google is finding out that this is not a large enough niche of the market to make targeting for it a successful long-term business strategy....
And what did that matter?
Answer: nothing, apparently. Because Google is not a product company - and apparently neither are its licensees.
While your Android phone might have had an NFC reader for years, did it combine it with a finger-print reader to essentially generate one-time credit card transaction numbers to eliminate credit card fraud and maybe even beat manipulated terminals that SMS your card-details to Pakistan?
I don't think so.
Instead, you can use it to send pictures and vcards to other people.
Great. That's surely going to revolutionize the industry.
Doesn't anyone pay cash anymore?
Glad I'm living in a country that still honors cash (no practical limit on cash payments here, be it cars, food, even houses) ;-)
Though, I witnessed a man being turned down for trying to pay a coffee with the equivalent of 650 GBP in one banknote. He was advised to have it changed downstairs ;-)
like the Acorn RISC PC600 (upgraded with StrongARM, the "Clan" priority reservation certificate must also be somewhere...). I don't think I've had it booted for a decade or even more.
I think he also threw out all my expensive (well, then) Iyama CRTs in the same run to the recycling center.
Other stuff, like the slightly functioning SGI Octane had to go in a move about nine years ago (yet, my parents' VW Passat was full just with my computer-stuff, the rest fit into my Lupo...)
I've still got an old DLT40/80 external tape drive that will probably be very difficult to get to work (which modern PC are my SCSI-controllers going to work in?) and also lots of cables.
And that old 24" CRT monitor that came with the HP Kayak, almost 14 years ago - still in the basement - you can't throw away such stuff, can you?
But I've dumped a lot of DVD-Rs recently. And the cases. In fact, even more cases than DVD-Rs...
Starting with the solution and then look for a problem - that really got SUN off the ground ;-)
That said, I'm really a bit puzzled as to what one can use these servers for.
The CPU doesn't look very fast, internal HD space is limited - what would one use this thing for?
Maybe an array for caching proxies with NGINX and Varnish?
May sound harsh - but at 73, you don't need to be a genius to assume that any major injury at sea could end up fatal.
Having been hospitalized next to people slowly dying of old-age, I have a feeling it wasn't the worst choice.
I have to say, though, on the photo she looks a lot healthier and fitter than a lot of sysadmins I know that are halve her age. She seemed to have known about "work-life balance" long before the word was actually coined.
Hey, I actually like launchpad. Even without a touchpad and a simple non-Apple mouse.
But then, I never really clicked with the Windows Start-Menu anyway.
I started to use spotlight a lot to start applications, recently.
I think I read an article on slashdot that mentioned that all the people in charge for shooting down the engineers who saw the accident coming had either left NASA or had been transferred to other departments.
It was simply to big a scandal to just bury it in a committee.
The headline is a bit misleading as the hardware alone is much cheaper.
I'd love to see how several different on-premise cloud solutions perform on this kind of setup, notably:
- openstack
- proxmox
- SmartOS with the "cloud" GUI from this guy: http://blog.smartcore.net.au
Certainly not a #FAIL article. True, I'm not the least interested in how well HyperV runs on that - but that does not diminish the value of the article or the information contained within it.
The Swiss taxpayer does not like to allocate huge resources to the government. As such, government operates on a small budget and under a no-debt mandate (so it can't just borrow the money from your children, like the rest of the world does).
Infrastructure projects do get special funding, once they pass public vote.
But the budget of a spy-agency in a small country with a part-time government is very limited....
What really is amazing is the fact that he kept hitting her for two years.
Perhaps he read somewhere that "women like persistence" or he has his knowledge about women from telenovelas and hollywood-movies, where the women also say "yes", eventually, and marries the hero.
At least, the FAIL icon is thoroughly deserved here.
Would be interesting to know who had the idea to hire her in the first place...
If he continues to deliver results like in the past, that bonus is not gross.
Wall-Street has paid much more to people who destroyed more value than he helped create.
It's probably better to let Scott and Phil do the presentations, though ;-)
Even Phil has gotten better at it over the last key-notes - and I though he was hopeless.
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