* Posts by Jim Willsher

171 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2008

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VMware urges emergency action to blunt hypervisor flaws

Jim Willsher

Updated my two ESXi hosts this morning. They are standalone, so I normally do esxcli software profile update etc. However this resulted in MemoryError.

Found a blog by the legendary William Lam:

https://williamlam.com/2024/03/quick-tip-using-esxcli-to-upgrade-esxi-8-x-throws-memoryerror-or-got-no-data-from-process.html

Solution is to download the offlne bundle and store in repo, then update from there

esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-8.0U2b-23305546-standard -d /vmfs/volumes/NUC3Primary/ISO/VMware-ESXi-8.0U2b-23305546-depot.zip

Posting ths just in case this helps anyone else.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Jim Willsher

Agreed. Free DElivery was the only thing keeping me there, because Prime Video was rubbish. When the price jumped from £79 to £95 last year, that was the time I bailed and re-evaluated my purchases. After all, there's as much Chinese crap on Amazon as there is on ebay now, so I only buy from Amazon when I'm looking for reputable branded stuff, rather than quirky hard-to-find stuff that I could only ever find on Amazon.

Broadcom terminates VMware's free ESXi hypervisor

Jim Willsher

Re: Bye bye ESXi

Me too. I have a NUC at home running ESXi Free and it has been great. When the time comes to buy a new NUC I will look at options, as I doubt my ESXi USB will cater for newer harware when I get it.

Europe's largest caravan club admits wide array of personal data potentially accessed

Jim Willsher

"I'm not one of the El Reg readers affected by this"

I am, and the CAMC has been shambolic at handling this. The first we knew was the website going down (500), then they put up a holding page. It was ~6 days before they issued their first statement. They claimed they were told not to go public with an announcement, presumably in the hope that their 1M+ members (including myself) simply wouldn't notice.

In January. When most people have a new holiday year. And are starting to book holidays. Like we were trying to.

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

Jim Willsher

The hardware requirements are the only thing stopping us upgrading. Our fleet is W10 and W11 has a few beneficial features, but we're not about to replace good hardware to do it.

Microsoft says VBScript will be ripped from Windows in future release

Jim Willsher

I suspect classic .ASP will be on death row now too, and there's still a surprising number of sites ouit there still using it.

Azure SQL Database takes Saturday off on US east coast following network power failure

Jim Willsher

" Subsequently, the remaining SQL DB instances was brought back online got bring survives to full functionality.""

Either Microsoft or El Reg needs to employ a proof-reader. There's also "power power" further up, and another typo.

Intel pulls plug on mini-PC NUCs

Jim Willsher

Shame. I run a couple of NUC8i5BEH units in the house, both running ESXi 8 and serving up a mixture of Windows DCs, Windows servers, Linux servers etc. All fun hobby stuff, nothing critical. But they just work, consume only 9 watts each, are silent, and have been bombproof. ANd thye take 64GB RAM, even though the spec says 32GB max. Whilst they are serving me well, at some point I'll need to renew them.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Jim Willsher

I have an XS Max. Screen, buttons, mic, speaker, they are all as good as the day I bought it, four years ago. Battery is shite, lasting no more than 6 hours. There is nothing wrong with my phone except the battery, so being able to easily change that would be fantastic.

Jim Willsher

A good thing. Apple has had this insane obsession with making iPhones as thin as possible, and that has always led to rubbish daily battery life. Given the thickness of an iPhone battery, adding 2mm to the thickness of an iPhone would allow double battery life. If this new EU rule provides the push for Apple to completely rethink the battery approach, I am all for it.

HCL proves Lotus Notes will never die by showing off beta of lucky Domino 14.0

Jim Willsher

ACID would be the best way to kill it.

Jim Willsher

Notes was horrid then and it's probably horrid now. We had it enforced on us around 1999 or so, and a staff revolt saw it replaced with Exchange/Outlook sometime around 2004 I think. I'm genuinely amazed t's even still alive, it should be flogged to the software-graveyard company Infor or simply buried and forgotten forever.

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

Jim Willsher

And BT still are a bunch of the same body part, whichever arm of “what we think of as BT” is involved.

Parts of UK booted offline as Virgin Media suffers massive broadband outage

Jim Willsher

Re: We have multiple redundant gigabit fibre connections...

Where I live I only* have 4G, via EE. It's pretty good, I can get 250Mb/s overnight, and 100Mb/s daytime.

*technically I could also have ADSL, but I'd need a land line and I'd get a whopping 8Mb/s.

Intel pours Raptor Lake chips into latest NUC Mini PC line

Jim Willsher

I have a couple of NUC8ieBEH units running in the house, both running VMWare and 8 or 9 VMs. They have been rock solid, set it and forget it hardware.

But they are NUC8, and they can handle 64GB RAM, which is what I have. Shame the new units announced here can also only handle 64GB. I get that they are positioned as smal desktop PCs, but they are great for home servers.

Riding in Sidecar: How to get a Psion online in 2023

Jim Willsher

Someone with clearly too much time on their hands.

Apple aims to replace Broadcom, Qualcomm wireless chips with its own

Jim Willsher

and so Qualcomm is expected to continue to supply all the 5G chipsets for iPhones in 2022.

2023?

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Jim Willsher

As a child at high school, I fell for the long weight thing. I still haven't forgiven my CDT teacher and I think he's dead now.

Vodafone to move SAP S/4HANA ERP system to Google Cloud

Jim Willsher

Re: They’re HUUUUUGE.

I was going to say the same. Yeah huge! All 300!

Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2: $599 for 11th gen Intel CPU

Jim Willsher

MS still quotes 4GB as being the minimum required for Win 10/11. We all know that's bollocks but I guess if they launched the lowest spec machine with 8GB or 16GB it would blow a hole in their story.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Jim Willsher

I'm willing to bet my house that I'll not see it overtake IPv4 during my lifetime, and I'm only aged 49.999999.

Jim Willsher

Re: Party Line

And it works, but it's impossibly to host anything. Great for Joe Public, but probably not for most of the readers of this website.

Jim Willsher

Most carriers support it; backbone providers etc. But most ISPs - in the UK at least - who provide the last mile. BT, Virgin and EE are three, and they probably cover 80% of the domestic endpoints. I know you asked about non-domestic but the reality is that most users and probably most SMEs use domestic-class connections.

China again signals desire to shape IPv6 standards

Jim Willsher

We can pontificate all we like. The fact that IPv6 adoption is hovering around 37% a full ten years since IPv6 Day tells us that it has been a fundamental flop. We can all speculate on the reasons - firewalls, ability to memorise addresses etc. But TEN YEARS? Really?

Fail.

Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

Jim Willsher

Never in a million years would I trust that much data to mechanical hard drive. Impressive feat, but no thank you.

James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at its new home – an orbit almost a million miles from Earth

Jim Willsher

Re: thank you

Yeah but Guardian and quality aren't normally used in the same sentence.

Jim Willsher

It doesn't matter how you look at this, it's a pretty damned good bit of work by some very clever people.

Spend 10 years building something that's several metres tall, sit it on top of a "bomb waiting to happen", sling it into space, let it hurtle along at ~10 KM/s (gradually slowing) for around a million miles, and it arrives on time and is exactly where it's supposed to be. No options to retry it or "have another go", and no-one forgot to remove that last cable-tie.

Good design and proper planning really is worth the effort.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

Jim Willsher

Re: Won't happen in my lifetime

I'm also 49, I've worked in IT for 27 years (developer, networking, now a global CTO) and I agree. The IETF needs to fall on its sword and accept that it has failed.

Look at the failings of IPv4, look at the barriers to adoption of IPv6, and find some middle ground. IPv6 throws the baby out wit the bathwater.

Take NAT for example. Yes, people see it as a challenge. But it's great for having simple firewall rules, where the default is to disallow all inbound traffic.

Take addressing. Anyone in IT can easily remember IP addresses as they walk from one end of the office to the other; IPv6 address blocks are longer, with hex, and are just less memorable.

Take the concept of all devices having a public IP address. Maybe I don't want that?

I'm not posting this as an AC, and I'm happy to be shot down. But I don't think I'm wrong. If IPv6 brought enough advantages, the challenges would be overcome, people would find a way. But there are very few advantages at the "IT department level" and the "end user level", so there's simply no appetite for the effort.

VMware recalls full vSphere update over driver dramas

Jim Willsher

The update to Workstation last month shipped with the VM Compatibility dropdown displaying "Beta" instead of the actual version. So yes, VMWare's QA department seem to have gone AWOL.

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Jim Willsher

Re: Opted out

We watch a few things on iplayer, but that's about it. We do have a TV in the house, a 2016 or 2015 23" Bravia, which does Freeview.

Relics from the early days of the Sinclair software scene rediscovered at museum during lockdown sort-out

Jim Willsher

And I didn't even know this place existed :)

I've been to a similar museum in Seattle, which is fantastic. But now that I know about this, I feel a visit to Swindon is due.....

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Jim Willsher

Re: Rest in peace

POKE 23609, 255 still sits in my memory. 30+ years on. I have no idea what it did but bizarrely I can still remember it. I must google it and see if anyone else can weirdly remember what it did.

Jim Willsher

Re: Part of wished I had met him...

I was fortunate to do so. Every now again there used to be computer fairs in London - Earls Court I think. My dad took me down there (from Cheshire) for the day and we visited, bought some stuff, toured the stands etc. Sir Clive was there (I don't think he was a Sir back then) and we had a brief chat and shook hands etc. Probably well over 35 years ago now but I still remember it vividly.

Jim Willsher

Sad. I was born in 1972 and learned programming on a ZX81; my dad had a QL. Yes, the microdrives were horrific and yes, it was annoying loading games from cassettes. I still have a copy of a program listing (in BASIC of course) I wrote for the Disciple, a third party storage system for the Spectrum.

But it's where I cut my teeth. Fast forward to now and I've been a tech lead in software services companies and I am now a CTO, so in retrospect he was responsible for mapping out much of my career.

Those ZX and X keys really took a hammering on Daley Thompson's Decathlon though. And I didn't buy a C5.

Microsoft's Cloud PCs debut – priced between $20 and $158 a month

Jim Willsher

As others have eluded to....I really don't see the point.

- If you have a low-end PC and you want a high-end experience, the money you spend on subscription would be better spent on your own tin

- If you have a high-end PC then you achieve nothing, you already have what you are striving for.

- If you have an phone/tablet and you want a PC you'll go demented without a keyboard and mouse, and after a year's subscription you could buy a low end PC anyway.

Absolutely pointless.

The PrintNightmare continues: Microsoft confirms presence of vulnerable code in all versions of Windows

Jim Willsher

Re: As much as I like to dump on microsoft a pile...

Company size doesn't and shouldn't matter. Think of all those small companies, charities/not-for-profit that probably only have one server, and who probably also have a userbase that could fall victim to malware. Remember that any authenticated user can now own the domain....or put differently, Mary in Accounts just needs to run some code from an email or URL and she just potentially created a new domain admin account.

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

Jim Willsher

Re: Obvs

This. And a likely trickle-feed (daily) of updates, same as O365, which we know breaks things….

Copper load of this: Openreach outlines 77 new locations where it'll stop selling legacy phone and broadband products

Jim Willsher

So 2025 is Openreach's target stop-sell for coper.

2025 is also the UK Government's target date for 85% of the country to be able to get gigabit broadband.

Assuming both are using fibre as the medium, what happens to the 15% if they want a new phone line? Think rural here.

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

Jim Willsher

I did something worse.

Remote Desktop onto a server, happily working away editing code in Notepad++. Cue 5PM and I suddenly remember I’m late and will be slaughter by SWMBO.

Ctrl+S, exit, start, shutdown, confirm, grab coat, run.

I’m now sitting in the car on my way home whilst rest of office is wondering why they can’t access stuff.

Broadband plumber Openreach yanks legacy copper phone lines in Suffolk town of Mildenhall en route to getting the UK on VoIP

Jim Willsher

Yep that was what prompted me. I’m connected to ESESS which has precisely zero cabinets….

Jim Willsher

Honest question: what does it mean for rural exchanges (like the one near me) where everything is copper and nothing is fibre. Will it still be copper to the house, and it's just VoIP from the exchange side of things?

We were 'blindsided' by Epic's cheek, claims Apple exec on 4th day of antitrust wrangling

Jim Willsher

I think the IE vs Netscape as about MS promoting its own browser and making it the default. They never actually prevented people using Netscape, they just made it harder for the people who thing browser == computer == internet == www etc. Whereas Apple flatly block it. You can't install apps without going via App Store, and you can't pay for them (or in-app purchases) without also going through same store.

Highways England seeks vendor to replace Windows 2003-based pavement management systems

Jim Willsher

Re: pavement == road

Sounds like they maintain their IT landscape with as much love as they maintain the roads/pavements, e.g. ignore it.

Openreach out and hike prices on legacy fixed-line products: Broadband plumber pulls trigger after Ofcom gives the nod

Jim Willsher

And for those of us who can't even get FTTC, we must be on the legacy legacy legacy kit. And who has responsibility for that? Yep, Openreach.

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

Jim Willsher

The data centre used, until 3-4 years ago, is housed in a very tatty part of Milton Keynes, on an industrial estate (yeah, industrial estate in MK doesn't exactly narrow it down). To gain access it's a side door, like you'd have to get into your garage, with a letterbox and a doorbell. The little nametag under the doorbell simply says "private morgue".

Apple iOS 14.5 will hide Safari users' IP addresses from Google's Safe Browsing

Jim Willsher

Does anyone still use Safari on an i-device? Chrome all the way.

The Fat iPhone, 11 years on: The iPad's over a decade old and we're still not sure what it's for

Jim Willsher

I use my iPad for one thing, and one thing only, and that's for watching downloaded Amazon Prime films when I am criss-crossing the Atlantic on a plane, and there's nothing I like the sound of on the IFE.

So clearly it's sat on a shelf since last March, unused.

When it dies, it won't be replaced.

Apple suffers setback in epic Epic Games games fight: Federal judge zaps damages counterclaim

Jim Willsher

Despite not being a game player, and owning several I devices, I am firmly in support of Epic here. 30% is greedy, I am sure if that were cut to 15% Epic would be satisfied.

I can subscribe to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, Office365 etc outside of the App store, yet download apps from the App store for free, and Apply is happy with this. So the precedent is already set, for Apple to be happy for apps to reside in the store and have those apps serve content an functionality which are paid for outside of the App store.

Microsoft? More like: My software goes off... Azure AD, Outlook, Office.com, Teams, Authenticator, etc block unlucky folks from logging in

Jim Willsher

I was in the middle of reconfiguring my home LAN and thought it must be something I had screwed up. I wasted a good hour before giving up and going to bed. Sigh.....

Halloween approaches and the veil between worlds wears thin – the Windows 10 October 2020 Release walks among us

Jim Willsher

20H2 build showed up on our WSuS at the weekend, and we are not in any beta or early release channels. I went ahead and installed it anyway on laptop, and it is indeed now running 19042.508.

Can't say I can notice any differences to 2004 release.

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