* Posts by Down not across

1987 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2013

Microsoft has made SQL Server for Linux. Repeat, Microsoft has made SQL Server 2016 for Linux

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Re: Obviously...

What about the ecosystem of 3rd party tools and add-ons? are those going to be 100% compatible? I bet not, all MS stuff is intrinsically tied to a myriad of windows components.

Why wouldn't they be? They all speak Transact SQL over TDS. I've used Sybase Open Client (and more recently FreeTDS) to talk to MS SQL Server as well as Sybase. Granted, version of TDS does matter to some extent.

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Re: Nice to see.

I suspect that this offering from Microsoft has something to do with cloud pricing, virtualisation, or micro-services in containers (e.g. Docker) rather than them thinking they can get business running it on servers in traditional enterprise Linux markets.

I suspect you're right. All comes down to pricing thought. If MS price it right (for traditional standalone RDBMS), they might be onto something (as there are many corporate customers who would still rather buy vendor product with support rather than use open source with paid support, most likely to ensure litigation is an option should they want to take that avenue to resolve issues).

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For Oracle - RAC server. If you need it there isn't an alternative. I assume Oracle must have some good patents or something...

You'd be surprised. Oracle isn't the only game in town when it comes to clustering databases.

What Oracle has is good marketing.

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SAP went around saying "Wall St runs on Sybase" when they acquired it. Well, it doesn't (it runs on DB2 or IMS on z for the important stuff), but what large banks run on has nothing to do with what is best technologically. Banks, probably more than any other industry, are hesitant to pull, or even touch, working prod systems. Sybase was yanked in every other industry but some of it hangs around in banks for that reason.

Sybase certainly has history with good performance, and doing that on half the hardware needed to run Oracle. Two major reasons why Oracle trumped Sybase in many industries were Oracle being better at marketing (and decisions being made my management rather than people who actually worked with the products) and Sybase licensing where they were trying to imitate Oracle in both complexity and cost (and effectively pricing themselves out of the market).

Oracle is only now starting to get close to what Sybase has with its Replication Server, when it comes to replication.

MAME goes fully FOSS

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@Blue Pumpkin

xyzzy

E-borders will be eight years late and cost more than £1bn

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Re: Soon!

Based on those pictures in the news lately of the jungle in France thought you all had already done that. Herr Trump on the other hand.

If UK chooses to exit, French will probably just let them through so they will all be setting up camp in Dover instead.

Schneider Electric building manager bug allows security bypass

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Re: Super User

So RBAC with separation of duties.

Just as an example Solaris has had that available since Solaris 8.

ICO fined cold-call firm £350k – so directors put it into liquidation

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Re: Seize their assets

I am tired of the rich never going to prison.

In this case chain them up (to the style of Clockwork Orange), pipe sounds of ringing phone into their cell ...occasionally interspersed with AVR menu. Why, yes of course 24 hours/day.

Raspberry Pi celebrates fourth birthday with fruity version 3

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Re: highest-selling single computer model of all time

but then i was spoiled by having a psion organiser in 90s which allowed me to write apps in opl on the device.

Very much so. And I loved how long Psion 3a lasted on its batteries. I did prefer the 5mx that I upgraded to. The keyboard was so much better.

Gopher server revived after 15 years of downtime

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Re: Gopher vs FTP

"Just think of Gopher as the web without embedded images or self-launching widgets"

sounds like heaven doesn't it!

It is.

I used to store lot of docs in the 90s in my gopher server. Need to dust off that old Ultrix box and see if it still boots. If it doesn't thump on its side should cure it anu of the disks have jammed (some of you lot may remember some disks had a habit of not spinning back up after being off for a while due to non-ideal lubricant in the bearings).

Raspberry Pi 3 to sport Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE – first photos emerge

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Re: Missing the point

Prepared for the downvotes here, but calls for SATA / extra USB / network boot etc. are sort of missing the point.

I agree. Don't get me wrong those would be nice to have. But there are other small (albeit bit more expensive) boards out there if you need additional features.

I quite commend Pi staying true to its roots and and cost.

Standing desks have no effect on productivity, boffins find

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I guess all the people going on about having to have raise the hight of cubical walls to block the noise of people standing on other calls have never worked in a call centre, and are probably american.

Granted not a call centre, but definitely not american. And over the years the partitions between desks have gotten lower and lower.

Obviously very personal thing, but open plan office does not suit me at all. Way too noisy, too many people talking on telephones or near someone's desk.

It would be horrible to have to work in a 2 x 2 x 2 meter cube, open plan may not be perfect but its got to be better than cube farm.

Again, depends on person. Having visited offices across the pond, I'd take the cube any day over this horrible open plan office.

All you need is the Dilbert blow-up cubicle door (not sure if they still sell those mind) and you almost have an old fashioned office again. :-)

Who hit you, HP Inc? 'Windows 10! It's all Windows 10's fault'

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Re: Win-10-nic lowering new PC sales (as expected)

Well, maybe you're right. But why aren't the hundreds of millions of Linux and other non-Windows operating systems users not purchasing printers? The sales of printers fell even further than that of PCs in percentage terms. Are Linux, etc., users not buying printers either?

Can only speak for myself of course, but my reason is that my old LJ4,5 and 4700 are still running fine.

Don't take a Leaf out of this book: Nissan electric car app has ZERO authentication

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Re: Dear Reg,

Even if the API would support starting the electric car (which it doesn't), the car would sit there with its dash lights on and nothing else -- pulling less than 400W of power. It would take days to run the car's battery out.

400W dash lights. Wow. That's nearly 4 times the headlights on most normal cars...

Verizon <3 XO xoxo: $1.8bn network gobbled

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A cynical person might think they've bought XO for the spectrum, and once secured will flog the fibre.

Go hyperconverged. Or cloud. Or whatever. You won't save on hardware

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Re: one throat to choke

Only thing that is not HP is ethernet networking(switches/load balancers/firewalls all from different vendors, none of them being Cisco or Juniper if you were curious).

Only curious that with all that HP (or HP supported) kit, you don't have any of their switches as I've found HP's ProCurve to be quite good.

Feds spank Asus with 20-year audit probe for router security blunder

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Re: Harsh but fair ...

Yes they're fairly decent considering they're from non-network kit vendor (especially ones that are supported by Merlin). Quite reliable and have decent performance. To get similar features and performance from another vendor would probably cost fair bit more.

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AsusWRT-Merlin

So it is technically not an Asus router anymore, the Asus firmware on Asus routers was at fault here.

AsusWRT-Merlin is actually based on the Asus code, but with few tweaks/fixes and additional features.

Having said that, technically you are correct (even if majority of the code is same as shipped by Asus including default admin username/password).

Confused by crazy crashes? Check your Linux kernel virtual Ethernet code

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Pint

Re: Why do we accept flaky network hardware?

10Base2 wasn't that bad. I guess you never had to try to find a fault in 10Base5. One bad vampire tap either badly cored or not at 2.5 meter interval could do interesting things to your network.

Icon. Well because just remembering 10Base5 means I need a few, or something stronger.

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Re: Why do we accept flaky network hardware?

Unfortunately money talks and unshielded twisted pair was cheaper and less hassle for lazy network engineers to install and so became the standard. So the error rate went up and instead of a few cables for a room full of computers you have one cheap cable per computer and network switches with more cables coming out of them than a small telephone exchange and ducting thicker than someones arm.

It's not all bad though. You get full speed to the switch rather share it with every other workstation on the segment. Also one bad NIC/cable don't take the whole segment and everything on it down.

Wee little ARM Cortex-A32 core design tugs at engineers' sleeves, wants IoT love too

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Crypto

Nice to see the the performance improvement in crypto with a very low power part.

IBM UK puts 1,352 Global Tech Services heads 'at risk'

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Annual improvement on price and service

Sizable reduction in force (and effect on morale from involuntary redundancy) is really likely to improve on service then?

Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge: Betting on VR with a dash of Vulkan

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S7 or Note 6

Guess that depends how long you want to wait. Especially if they repeat the "No you're not getting Note 5 in UK ...ok maybe now that we need to dump them to make way for new S7" again.

Good thing this dev quit. I'd have fired him. Out of a cannon. Into the sun

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Re: I have just been tasked to reverse engineer some shell scripts

Only last week I was on another customer site trying to determine on a redhat system why the rotated compressed messages logs only had 15 or so lines in them. Turns out one of the sysadmins decided to write a script to cycle, compress and archive the messages files at 1:45 in the morning. I send him a curt email with "man logrotate" and "cat /etc/cron.daily/logrotate" and a reminder to let the OS do it's own maintenance rather than re-inventing the wheel.

Whilst I do agree with your comment, I'd like to point out that on a site with heterogenous environment with many vendors' UNIX variants, it would be quite understandable there to be a common logrotation script that works on all environments instead of relying vendor specific solution(s). And no, your post did not indicate that site to be one, just wanted to point out potential exception.

The paperless office? Don’t talk sheet

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Laser printers can be picky about the paper

I remember them. Worked great on the DEC paper, but our office went on a 'green' kick and bought boxes of made-from-recycled paper. The LN03s all started to jam within a few weeks, leading to new rollers & a warning from DEC not to use anything but their paper. Always seemed like clever design to me, and a trick that HP obviously missed.

Well, the printer is not going to know what brand paper there is.

However laser printers can be picky about the paper. Some less smooth paper may have issues with toner affixing properly and it does not all always collect nicely in the waste reservoir. Likewise some paper leave more paper dust behind than others which then affects rollers and paper guides

Given that I have mostly used old second hand printers at home, I've long ago learnt that trying to skimp on paper does not pay off, but results in pain having to clean the printer, clean the rollers (and eventually get new rollers).

Brits unveil 'revolutionary' hydrogen-powered car

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Re: Nuclear power

Still, I want my nuke powered car, just for bragging rights ;)

You might need to wait for Mr Fusion. And that could be a long wait.

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Although a Stirling-engined car might be interesting..

Yes although getting sufficient output from small enough form factor could be tricky. Having said that

woodgas systems aren't exactly small either.

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Re: Ugly, no.

This is just the Brits' new Reliant Robin.

Funny you should say that. That is exactly the first thing that I came to mind.

Strange, it looks nothing like it but my brain insisted "That's a bloody Reliant Robin!".

Except its truly disgusting looking. At least Robin had some charm (or amusement factor) and you could fit some luggage/cargo in it.

Performance is on par with Robin as well. Ok Robin didn't quite make 3 digit mpg I don't think.

Comodo's 'security' kit installed a lame VNC server on PCs on the sly

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Re: Already Fixed And Adressed

Recently, it was reported by Google Security that there might be a small local vulnerability in Comodo GeekBuddy that allowed a local attacker to gain another locally logged-on user’s privilege.

The minor potential vulnerability was fixed and addressed back on February 10, prior to it being made public by Google Security.

Small? Local? Logged-on user's privilege?

From the article:

GeekBuddy allows this by installing a VNC server that has admin-level privileges, is enabled by default, and is open to the local network.

Looks more like anyone on local network can get admin (not just logged-on user) privileges and depending on their router configuration the vulnerability could be open to the internet.

Bit more than "minor potential vulnerability".

Dan Kaminsky is an expert on DNS security – and he's saying: Patch right God damn now

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Re: Lingering in the cache

Unless you're a Virgin Media customer with their Superhub. In which case you're probably used to rebooting the wretched thing on an almost daily basis.

I can't remember when I last had to reboot the SuperHub. Then again it has been in modem-mode since it arrived, with a router (which only routes and doesn't do DNS) behind it.

Triple-murderer prisoner keeps mobile phone in his butt for a week

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Re: Phone model suggestions?

I would've thought 8800 or the old 8850 would be be bit easier to accomodate.

I had 8110, and the actual model that was being sold did not have spring loading slider. The later (and larger) 7110 did however have a spring loaded slider. Why, yes I did have that too and the navi-roller was rather nice feature.

519070 or blank: The PINs that can pwn 80k online security cams

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Re: I wonder how many purchase orders for their products have been cancelled

As for me, I'm done even thinking about buying security cameras until an official rating has been created, implemented and can be verified stating that the hardware is secure and as tamper-proof as possible without any backdoors or root access or hardware-coded passwords.

Mine are on a VLAN all by themselves with no route to the internet and only have firewalled, inbound access from select IP addresses and a box running zoneminder.

Not perfect, but they're not phoning home nor have access to probe the network.

Shopping for PCs? This is what you'll be offered in 2016

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Re: @TeacherMARK

What I would quite like to buy right now is what we used to call a netbook - small, cheap, light basic laptop. 10.1 or 11.6 screen, enough processor/memory for the basics but no more, non-touch screen to keep the price down. Loooong battery life (10hrs+). Somewhere around the £200 mark or below.

There seem to be bunch of Bay Trail ones cropping up (especially in the "convertible" tablet+keyboard format). Only 2GB of RAM and 1366x768 (or threabouts) resolution, although on 10-11" screen it is not utterly unbearable (still bit unpleasant). The most annoying thing is they all seem to have horribly broken UEFI. On some it appears to be possible to boot non-Windows OS using bootia32.

If only they had proper UEFI to just boot 64-bit BSD or Linux they'd be great.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Valentine's Day means DDoS for you

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Tseng ET4000

This is why I can't leave this place. All these blasts to the past. I had a Diamond Stealth32 and it rocked.

How to build a plane that never needs to land

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Re: 2000 hour inspection cycle

Even having a day's downtime a week would allow one spare plane to provide cover for or six operational planes, allowing continuous uptime (weather and acts of dog, allowing).

I wouldn't be expecting dogs to be a particular issue at 20km.

IT's Holy Grail, but is DevOps a Poisoned Chalice for sysadmins?

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Re: DevOps = Fire lots of needed people....

As for the uptime bit of this article, I call BS. One big downtime per year is much preferred to many small outages. Just look at SLA's, most companies are hit with punitive damages based on the total number of outages not their length.

I'd have to call [citation needed] here. I believe it tends to be outage minutes rather than number of outages. Having said that, that doesn't really matter.

Even assuming the SLA is just case of percentage yielding acceptable downtime in minutes for a year, the problem is perception.

I would hazard a guess that most people will perceive 3 10-minute outages as more unreliable than one 30-minute outage even if technically they're the same with regards to uptime.

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Re: Dear Mr. cantor

Furthermore, given that developers are functionally allergic to testing, QA, UAT or any form of resiliancy, redundancy or stability, why should I, as a business owner, want to undertake a DevOps transition that seems to be aimed at eliminating the positions of the people who actually keep things running?

Apart from few exceptions, that is unfortunately all too true. I've lost count how many times I've had to perform small miracles to make things work (especially if old legacy systems are involved) when outsourced developers are just too clueless. And no, of course they did no testing. You'll be lucky if they even bother to implement any error handlers (beyond one that just ignores any errors).

Reminds me of the old motto "With willing hearts and skillful hands, the difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a bit longer."

Argos offers 'buy now pay in 3 months' deal

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Re: Meh!

Dunno. In my, perhaps limited, experience they've never quibbled on anything I wanted to return regardless of the reason. And that has been stuffed picked up from the store rather than delivered.

Send tortuous stand-up ‘nine-thirty’ meetings back to the dark ages

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Re: "TL: You weren't at the town hall this morning."

Calling meetings "town halls" is utterly ridiculous I agree. Although El Reg could re-enact them using Playmobil....

Ah. Townhalls. All-hands. All the things management sets up and insists on everyone attending, so they can bolster their own view how important they are.

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Re: a meeting to discuss the number of meetings

They're call "Retrospectives" where you bring up the things that went badly (an ever growing list because none of the previous things are ever addressed) and things that went well (a perpetually empty list).

Like coming up with fancy names for the meetings change anything.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

When asked 'What's a .CNT file?' there's a polite way to answer

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Re: ALT

Matter of opinion. I think there is much more wrong if Chrome DID appear than if it didn't, but that is just my opinion. Browser of choice is not universal by any means.

Building automation systems are so bad IBM hacked one for free

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Re: The systems and the service companies...

Not surprising. Just like anything relying on database expects to have 'sa' on the database (SQL Server). When you tell them "It ain't happening" and insist on them to come up with list of what permissions they actually need you get some mumbling and its clear nobody has any idea.

So much of that stuff (on software side) is so badly cobbled together by utterly clueless people that it is wonder there aren't more disasters.

That stuff needs to be severly firewalled both ways.

How one of the poorest districts in the US pipes Wi-Fi to families – using school buses

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@Cynic_999

I know the idea of actually reading the article before commenting is shocking....

To address the issue, the district looked at a valuable resource it already had: school buses equipped with LTE antennas and Wi-Fi hotspots were already able to provide access to students on their daily commutes.

Is tech monitoring software still worth talking about?

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I concur on the GUI of Zabbix. In the interest of fairness I should probably mention I only ran it briefly as I was evaluating various options and probably didn't spend enough time with it.

I kinda liked nxmc, but it had its own niggles.

I've always ended up falling back to cacti for some reason probably because its graphing just works and graphs are useful for trends/history.

For me the ideal solution would be fully modular. Both for collecting/monitoring and for GUI/alerting.

I prefer to be able to store at least few months worth of statistics online (for pro-active monitoring/trending).

Alerting should be very flexible. Ideally it would also have some idea of topology so that of a switch goes down you don't necessarily (unless you want to) get alerts for every device connected to it. Alerts should also have the ability to auto-escalate (for example, mail->sms->sms-to-alt-number->sms-to-group-of-numbers).

Obviously it needs to do SNMP (both collecting and act as trap receiver.

Ideally it should work with or without an agent on target host (and if it does agent it should be possible to either push or pull).

Oh and don't want it to be written in Java either.

Then you start getting to niceties/fluff like maybe an Android app for lightweight dashboard/alarm panel.

To be fair there are quite a few open source solutions that come close for most parts.

Microsoft quits giving us the silent treatment on Windows 10 updates

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Re: I loath what Microsoft are doing

*The Lumia talks to my car's handsfree really well, which my Wife's Ithingy doesn't. It also talks to my Outlook calendar, something which Google stopped a few years ago, to my enormous resentment.

Given how fickle car handsfrees can be, if you're otherwise happy with the Lumia and it does its job well, I'd say keep it (especially since you already stated it won't get W10 downgrade either).

Intel's Wind River preps server to deliver VMs into home routers

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Re: What's the supposed benefit?

It being x86 architecture doesn't have to mean poiwer hungry.

Just to pick a random one, Z3735F, which seems to feature in recent tablets/netbooks, consumes 2.2W and is quad-core 1.33GHz (1.83GHz burst) 64-bit device supporting 2GB of DDR3L RAM and VT-x.

Virgin Media spoof email mystery: Customers take to Facebook

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Re: facebook group numbers

Some also wouldn't touch FB with bargepole.

Private clouds kinda suck, you know?

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incompetence

Are internal IT departments simply incompetent?

I think you often find the issue is bit higher up.

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Re: Also Confused

That's precisely the point of buzzwords - they're supposed to be nebulous. As soon as time and use pins them down to actually meaning something the snake oil pedlars just slither off to invent a fresh one.

What, like hyperconverged?

(initially I missed out the 'r' ...which actually would've been quite appropriate)

Dell PowerEdge R730: Reg rack monkeys crack smiles over kindness of engineers

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replacing disks

I replace about 5 to 6 Dell 900GB drives every night.

But we do have 7,500 R720's !.

They are a pain in the rear, as dell don't ship the Carrier anymore, just the bare drive. So you have to swap the drive into the old carrier. Dropping the screws through the vented floor in the process... Ughhhh

If it was me, I'd acquire half a dozen carriers and pre-install the disks into carriers at my desk. After the round in DC, remove the dead ones from carriers, send them back. Rinse and repeat.