* Posts by Chris King

1153 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2009

You love Systemd – you just don't know it yet, wink Red Hat bods

Chris King

Re: Not UNIX-like? SNU!

It's not clever, but it's the future. From now on, all major distributions will be called SNU Linux. You can still freely choose to use a non-SNU linux distro, but if you want to use any of the "normal" ones, you will have to call it "SNU" whether you like it or not. It's for your own good. You'll thank me later.

And if you have a pair of machines go belly-up at the same time because of SystemD, is that Death by Snu-Snu ?

Chris King

I'm guessing that the one person who downvoted you wanted Lennart nailed to the tree first ?

Chris King

Re: MCP?

If systemd is the MCP, does that make Poettering Sark ?

"Greetings. The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the Game Grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the Users will receive the standard substandard training which will result in your eventual elimination. Those of you who renounce this superstitious and hysterical belief will be eligible to join the warrior elite of the MCP. You will each receive an identity disc. Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disc. If you lose your disc, or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate de-resolution. That will be all".

Hmm, this explains a lot...

My PC is on fire! Can you back it up really, really fast?

Chris King

"It was the noisiest, hottest hard drive I've ever used!"

Micropolis, by any chance ? Their stuff always ran hot and loud.

Chris King
Flame

"Leap out and let it burn"

If I can tackle a small fire properly, then I'll tackle it, otherwise I'm out of the building with everyone else.

One time, I heard fire alarms in other parts of the building, but not nearby - and out of the window I could see thick, black plumes of smoke rising.

Okay, that looks like we have a genuine fire on site and the alarms aren't working properly - Out ! Out !! OUT !!!

Apparently, there was an alarm fault, and a power failure caused our ancient second-hand generator to kick in, hence the smoke - only three people headed to the emergency assembly point, while everyone else dashed to the machine room to check that their kit was still working.

I've also seen people start backups or wait for a clean PC shutdown when the fire alarms alarms go off.

One person even went to the tea room to make themselves a cuppa before evacuating, because they thought it was just a fire drill.

BOFH: But I did log in to the portal, Dave

Chris King

Re: You can't make this stuff up

I thought it centered around an Excuse Calendar.

Today's excuse is "radiation from solar debris..."

Chris King

'Your computer has a virus' cold call con artists on the rise – Microsoft

Chris King
Mushroom

Re: Re "putting the phone down is almost always the right thing to do."

"My wife regards this as an excellent sport, and she will happily spend 20 minutes playing along".

I prefer a sprint to a marathon - the faster I can stress them out and get them screaming obscenities, the better.

The other week, I had one screaming that his $DEITY would smite me.

I just told him I would be way down the queue, as $DEITY is probably too busy smiting all the criminal scumbags taking his name in vain.

Icon, because it's going to take an awful lot of Gaviscon to cool down that ulcer.

Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed

Chris King

Re: its like the leads at the back of my desk at work.

"I have a theory -- a theory which is mine -- that the resident house spiders keep themselves amused during the long winter evenings by weaving all the cables together. Let's face it, they're big enough and have enough legs free to do the job",

That's fine, until one of them calls for a human sacrifice.

BOFH: We know where the bodies are buried

Chris King

It's been a while since someone tried a takeover...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/23/bofh_episode_8/

"Do you know if we're Mummy or Daddy?"

Bloke fruit flies enjoy ejaculating, turn to booze when starved of sexy times

Chris King

So how did the scientists work out the alcohol thing ?

Did they build the flies a little singles bar or something ?

Gang way! Compsci geeks coming through! AI engine can finger fakes on social networks

Chris King

Re: But what if ...

You get told "Nothing to see here, CItizen. Move along now... if you know what's good for you".

'I crashed AOL for 19 hours and messed up global email for a week'

Chris King

Re: Hmm

I worked at one of the last JANET X25 sites before the service closed in 1997 - the internal network was TCP/IP but one Unix host had Coloured Book Protocol support for JANET access to the Uni over the road.

Getting mail from SMTP (internal) to X25 (JANET) to X400 hosts was... interesting.

Sometimes, someone even managed to get a reply to me.

Just not very often.

(Hmm, maybe El Reg needs a "What did YOU do in the War, Grandad ?" icon...)

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

Chris King

Don't tell my mother I work with computers...

...she thinks I play the piano in a brothel.

Who else has to lie about their job to avoid being "free unlimited tech support forever ?"

Chris King

Okay, which one's wearing the dark glasses and sporting a goatee (or a "Hulk Hogan") ?

THAT's the evil twin.

Rudd-y hell, dark web! Amber alert! UK Home Sec is on the war path for stealthy cyber-crims

Chris King

Hashtag DropInTheOcean

"They find £50m down the back of the sofa for 'cyber crime".

£50m ? Well, that's the ad campaign sorted then, drinks all round !

The muffled laughter and running water you can hear is the collective response of #cybercriminals #wetting #themselves #laughing.

The Register Opera Company presents: The Pirates of Penzance, Sysadmin edition

Chris King

From an earlier On-Call...

I'm reminded of a time when our former CTO wanted everything in VMware, and there were various factions doing distributed computing in different ways...

To the tune of "Every Sperm iIs Sacred", from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life"... TAke it away, Eric the Orchestra Leader !

Every Hertz is sacred

Every Hertz is great

If a Hertz is wasted

God gets quite irate

Let the Griddies spill theirs

On the dusty ground

God shall make them pay

For every Hertz that can't be found

Every Hertz is wanted

Every Hertz is good

Every Hertz is needed

In your neighbourhood

Windows, Linux, MacOS

Spill theirs just anywhere

But God loves those who share their

Hertz on VMware

Every Hertz is sacred

Every Hertz is great

If a Hertz is wasted

God gets quite irate

Every Hertz is sacred

Every Hertz is good

Every Hertz is needed

In your neighbourhood

Every Hertz is useful

Every Hertz is fine

God needs everybody's

Mine And mine And mine

Let the Griddies spill theirs

O'er mountain, hill and plain

God shall strike them down for

Every Hertz that's spilt in vain

Every Hertz is sacred

Every Hertz is good

Every Hertz is needed

In your neighbourhood

Every Hertz is sacred

Every Hertz is great

If a Hertz is wasted

God gets quite irate

User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps

Chris King

Re: Feeling Old...

"I remember that, on a 12MHz 286 - it took all night to install! And you're right it was slow - in the battles it could take quite a few seconds to update the scene from one frame to the next - and in between frames you'd probably have been shot or crashed or something!"

Then you had the exact opposite with Privateer, where asteroids would seemingly loom out of nowhere and kill you if you blinked at the wrong moment. Gothris + Asteroids = mucho dying and reloading.

Chris King

Re: Feeling Old...

"And admit it, how many late night network crashes were triggered by DOOM and those two immortal codes - IDDQD and IDKFA".

Who remembers Hexen, which had some of the same codes but they did the exact opposite of what they did in DOOM ?

IDDQD = instant death, IDKFA = lose all weapons except your staff.

Chris King

Re: 7th Guest

For those of you who haven't had the "pleasure" of playing Privateer 2, save yourself the grief and check out Spoony's review.

The FMV movie stuff can all be found here

.

Chris King

Re: Feeling Old...

"The hassle the tears getting that set up, and that was before we attached a CD rom to one of the (3?) interface options. Panasonic, Soundbalster and.....? Not IDE but can't recall the third one. Any one remember?"

Some had ATAPI or SCSI as a 3rd option.

Panasonic also got referred to as "MKE" (Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics ?)

Chris King

Re: Feeling Old...

"What I really hated was Origin and their stupid own memory managers starting with Ultima 7 which refused to work with QEMM, HIMEM.SYS and others".

Origin always liked to push the hardware harder than everyone else - I still remember my local computer shop forcing anyone who wanted to buy Wing Commander II to rattle off their system specs before he would sell it to them, because so many folks returned it complaining it wouldn't run at any decent speed on a 286.

"Yeah, you can have it - Man, I'd kill for a 386DX-33 and 2Mb of RAM !"

Ah, how times change...

Mozilla's opt-out Firefox DNS privacy test sparks, er, privacy outcry

Chris King

Re: Broken assumptions

Well put - some of us have lots of stuff sitting on private IP's and only accessible from internal private networks. TRR will break a lot of things for my users if it is turned on by default, because they won't be able to see the internal view of our DNS servers.

Also, "one giant cache for all" means a lot of potential victims if someone manages to poison that cache - say, if another Kaminsky-type bug comes along.

Sysadmin held a rack of servers off the ground for 15 mins, crashed ISP when he put them down

Chris King

Re: 3Com kitsmashed flat.

"I think I remember those bloody things; Am I right in thinking they were configured via 3.5" floppy and every once and a while they would spontaneously reboot and wipe the floppy disk?"

Yep, that's the bast^H^Hdger.

The "core" of that network was a Linkbulider MSH when I arrived. I thought the thing was a total piece of junk, but I got decent trade-in on it a couple of years later because the NHS couldn't get enough ot them.

Chris King

"I had pretty much the same with a Cisco Catalyst 5509 rack (shipped from the US as a spare as we were doing a major building move)".

The Cat 5000's were built like tanks. I herded a 5500 in my last job (almost fully populated apart from the dedicated LightStream 1010 slot), and had homicidal dreams of dropping it from a great height on to our remaining 3Com kit. (If you've ever had to manage NetBulider II's, you'll understand)

Sadly, this never came to pass. I'd never get a trade-in on the 3Com kit if I smashed it flat.

Chris King

"And one couldn't quite say that the director's car cushioned its impact with terra firma very much".

I once got to dispose of a dead MicroVAX I (one of the desk-side pedestal jobs) by helping a colleague heave it out of a first floor window into a skip (This was well before RoHS, let alone WEEE).

The MD's Jag was parked next to the skip, and my partner-in-crime helping me teach the MicroVAX to fly [1] asked "Do you think he'd give it a lift back to head office if we could drop it on to the back seat ?"

"Nah. We can't get the right angle from here - front passenger seat, maybe".

[1] Make it fly? That's easy - even pigs fly, given sufficient thrust - but we knew it would never nail the landing.

Chris King

I once found myself up a stepladder in a disabled toilet, because some bright spark had decided that the best place to put the cabinet was just above the door, on the inside of said toilet.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten to lock the door, and someone in a wheelchair flung in open.

I grabbed the cabinet to steady myself, and fortunately the steps stayed in place- but I did have visions of them falling to one side, and me holding on to the cab for dear life like a modern-day Frank Spencer.

Bettyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !!!!

Facebook suspends account of Cambridge Analytica whistleblower

Chris King

Re: “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do"

It's the 21st-century version of "Your cheque is in the post".

Cyborg fined for riding train without valid ticket

Chris King

I don't know of anyone trying that over here in the UK, the nearest we've got to that is the "Croydon Wizard" who embedded the chip in his Oyster card into a wand.

Chris King

"Nah, you can have at most two cards that way - assuming you want them in your hand"

Left hand for travel pass, right hard for building access control, left buttock for Tesco Clubcard ? That gives a whole new meaning to "unexpected item in the bagging area".

Bots don't spread fake news on Twitter, people do, say MIT eggheads

Chris King

Re: facebook and idiots....

"My wife is on FB. She's given up telling people they are passing shit by proving them wrong. They either ignore, as you said, or block her. Some people really, really do not want their personal little bubbles to be burst by a pin prick of reality".

I gave up trying to explain things to some folks years ago. I got into so many flame wars that I deleted my original FB account and even had to "play dead" for a while to make some people go away.

What really annoyed me was people spreading fake AMBER alerts - and these were friends in the UK. I tried to warn them that the alerts they were passing were fake, not even asking "How would you feel if someone took a picture of YOUR daughter and slapped it on one of these alerts ?" got the point across.

Even if you point people to an original source, they still won't believe you - I've had to explain the "Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" hoax to several people over the years, and they still refuse to accept that they've been hoodwinked. Lesson NOT learned.

Who needs bots and AI when there's so much natural stupidity around ?

Facebook Onavo Protect doesn't protect against Facebook

Chris King

Re: Mystery solved

Try sharing a link to FB Purity and this pops up...

This Post Can't Be Edited

Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can't be edited.

Yes sir, Facebook has some interesting definitions of "harmful" and "spam"...

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Chris King

Re: Types 'Halt' where ... ?

I was on the receiving end of that once.

An acdemic had moved to another uni, and my opposite number at the new uni was helping him transfer his files from our OpenVMS machine to theirs.

In another telnet window, the IT bod was logged into his test OpenVMS machine, preparing to test a patch for a nasty little crash bug that anyone with telnet/SSH access could trigger - no extra privileges required.

Yes, he got the two windows mixed up, and our box dropped dead.

Boom, crash dump and P00>>> prompt at the system console.

Fortunately, it happened in the middle of a change window, ironically to install and test the very same patch. Still, it's not really the sort of thing you want to see when logged into SYSTEM at the console and installing patches.

The other guy phoned me a couple of minutes later and 'fessed up to his mistake.

OK, who is shooting at Apple staff buses in California? Knock it off

Chris King

Voice assistants are always listening. So why won't they call police if they hear a crime?

Chris King

False positives

So how are they going to prevent false positives ?

Do we want our phones to go all Clippy on us, shouting "Hey ! It sounds like you're committing a murder !"

Google would only go and commercialise that, telling you where you can buy shovels, bags of lime and old carpet.

BOFH: Turn your server rack hotspot to a server rack notspot

Chris King

"The BOFH and PFY would wake up in the middle of a giant warehouse full of the most craptastic and outdated kit this side of the galaxy..."

"What the hell ? We're back in the office !"

Chris King

But doesn't that reduce the amount of space to store a body, a shovel, a roll of carpet and a bag of lime ?

Chris King

Re: Daves

I had one that tried to sell me all sorts of tat, but never succeeded because I could see it was all tat.

That never stopped him trying, and soon as I left that gig, someone made the mistake of buying something off him.

Yes, it was complete tat, and that was the very last time they ever dealt with him.

Chris King

Re: Thumbscrews too?

"Captive nuts?"

You can get an ointment for that, you know.

Chris King

Re: We have one of these!

The second description could also describe some of the reps I've had to deal with over the years.

One such rep annoyed me (and two layers of management above me) so badly, that when he saw me at InfoSecurity Europe, he hid in the toilets for nearly two hours.

Two hours in the bogs at Olympia, during a busy event, on a warm spring day. I'm trying to work out if that's dedication or desperation.

Chris King

Re: new keyboard alert !

"bringing people their just deserts"

As I once said to a mouthy kid who asked me who I was:

"Oh, me ? I'm just a BAD thing that happens to BAD people"

Strangely enough, he decided not to pursue that line of questioning any further. Funny, that. Not sure if it was the Stare or the deadpan delivery that shut him up.

You're decorating it wrong: Apple HomePod gives wood ring of death

Chris King

Re: Roses are red.............

I was going to give up sarcasm... Yeah, right !

Rogue IT admin goes off the rails, shuts down Canadian train switches

Chris King

"This is _why_ you need documented procedures for these kinds of things".

I've ended up writing such procedures on the way out in previous jobs - which is not ideal. Thankfully, these were positions where my departure was on amicable terms - but this isn't the sort of thing you want to do when the person is annoyed and would like to see their (now ex-)employer go up in flames like a Bond baddie's secret volcano hide-out.

Chris King

Re: Put pressure on him

Maybe they should have revoked his accounts and ID, then rode him out of town on a rail ?

OpenSSL alpha adds TLS 1.3 support

Chris King

"Shambling corpse of ancient, shoddy, buggy, crypto shoved towards the grave"

For a moment there, I thought you were talking about OpenSSL itself !

Ruskie boffins blasted for using nuke bomb lab's supercomputer to mine crypto-rubles

Chris King

Dosvedanya, nerdskis !

I've seen people use cryptocurrency mining to stress-test HPC clusters before they go into service, but it's usually declared a no-no once the machine is live.

Attempting to connect up a machine of that scale to the internet would make it a big target for rogue cryptocurrency miners, secret-squirrel nuke simulation data aside. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes right now.

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

Chris King

Re: Frozen

I had a similar experience, but on a smaller scale. Nowhere near a 300lb block, but enough to seriously injure someone standing under it if it gave way.

The aircon engineers were called in, took a look at the kit on the roof, and handed me a report which consisted of five words...

"SEAGULLS HAVE EATEN THE PIPES !!!"

Well, that explained the lack of coolant.

The unit in the machine room was defrosted, emergency portable aircon brought in, and non-essential systems powered down to reduce the load on the portable kit until the pipework could be renewed.

Chris King

Re: Near death experience ?

When you need Batman to enforce your Health & Safety regs, maybe you need to look at your recruitment procedures...

Chris King

Re: It's actually not _that_ dangerous

BTW There's a great German short movie called "Staplerfahrer Klaus" (availiable on Youtube even with english subtitles) However that's perhaps not really SFW.

I've posted it here a couple of times, and nobody has whinged before - but if you're squeamish, there's a lot of fake blood and fake severed appendages towards the end.

Chris King

Re: Live Steam

"And in those days, it came to pass that incompetent staff were summarily fired. And low, there was much rejoicing throughout the land, for they were difficult to work with and made everybody's life a living hell whenever possible".

These days, they'd be more likely to sack the IT guy for insisting that the machine room be located where it was. THEN give the other guy a raise for re-routing the pipe. THEN give themselves a raise for solving the problem of an inconveniently-placed machine room.