* Posts by Zola

317 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Nov 2012

Page:

Kaby Lake-G chip back from the grave, now on modest firewall-router-NAS mobo

Zola
Stop

NAS?

Nah!

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

Zola

Re: Doesn't TrueNAS Scale work just as well on the HP Microservers?

> I did. It didn't work.

Sorry to hear that, but no idea. I did, and it worked. Ran Memtest86+ for a couple of days, all tests passed and has been working flawlessly ever since.

I bought the Kingston KVR1333D3E9S/8G listed on this page (which I'm sure you know about). There's probably cheaper options, I just couldn't be arsed hunting them down.

> Now there is the thing. For a decade-old server that cost me £90, I consider that 50% of the computer's price for more memory is excessive. Your mileage clearly varies substantially.

Mine cost me £200, then I claimed the £100 cashback. That was about 13 years ago. Spending £40 on something that has served me so well in 13 years and still had more life left in it didn't seem like a bad deal.

I also considered the alternatives, which would have meant a complete replacement (none of which would match the form factor) and there either were none or prohibitively expensive, so given all of that, £40 was an absolute bargain and no-brainer.

Zola

Re: Doesn't TrueNAS Scale work just as well on the HP Microservers?

I recently upgraded an N54L to 16GB (2x 8GB) ECC RAM - just buy the known/recommended ECC RAM sticks (mine is Kingston, that I picked up for £40 the pair).

I mostly us it for storing movies and documents/git repos in a home environment (SMB & NFS).

It all runs great with TrueNAS Core and about 40TB of storage across 3x pools (2x RAIDZ-1, 1x mirrored & encrypted).

I have the 4x internal HDD plus 4x SSD drives (in a 5.25" cage in the CD slot) all hanging off an LSI-9211-8i, and a 2x drive JBOD connected to the external SATA. Boots off an SSD connected to the optical motherboard SATA (and I still have the 4x SFF-8087 motherboard SATA ports available!)

To be honest, changing the RAM was no big deal - it takes about 5-10 minutes to get the motherboard out and back (closer to 5 once you've done it a few times) and it's not really something you need to do often.

I ran FreeNAS 9 on this for years, and made several customisations (MySQL jails etc.) which bit me in the arse as it massively complicates OS upgrades, so now I keep it simple and stick to the plain TrueNAS system and upgrades are a breeze. The MySQL etc. runs on an RPi4 instead (and is actually better for it).

I'll probably stick with TrueNAS Core 13.x from here on out, but maybe keep an eye on any fork.

Nginx web server forked as Freenginx to escape corporate overlords

Zola

Re: important stuff like freennginx should be registered in a country like Switzerland

Switzerland is only a neutral country in a world of myths, while in reality it's as bad as any western nation, and always has been.

Amen. Just ask Christoph Meili.

Nikola founder faces ranch forfeiture following fraud conviction

Zola

Re: Milton / Musk

When's the full Tesla self driving (that actually works) going to be released? How many people have died because of Musk's outright lies regarding the capabilities of Tesla vehicles?

Or the self driving robo taxis that will earn their owners $30,000 a year?

How many years has he been promising the semi? Is that in production yet?

Milton may have told some porkies, but it appears his truck is now in production. And yet he went down.

On the other hand, Musk continues to tell some absolute whoppers, and people have died as a result, yet he skates.

If you can't see the disparity in the way they are being treated, I can only assume you're a total Musk fan-boi. And I'm not a fan of Milton - I just don't understand why Musk is getting away scot-free with all his bullshit.

Zola
WTF?

Milton / Musk

All the charges Milton has been found guilty of must surely apply to Musk, but on an even larger scale.

How is it that Musk gets away with all his BS and lies, while Milton is sent down?

That home router botnet the Feds took down? Moscow's probably going to try again

Zola

Affected internet-facing devices were running with default credentials

Ubiquiti *did* release an update to address this type of user incompetence (ie. running with default credentials) but unfortunately, and entirely predictably (as it's Ubiquiti), it too showed a spectacular level of incompetence this time on behalf of the development team, which made the protection entirely useless.

Not only could the first boot "change password" dialog be dismissed with a press of the Escape button, never to be seen again allowing the default password to remain, but users could actually enter the DEFAULT password as the new password without any complaint.

Needless to say, the change should not have accepted the original default password, nor should it have been possible to dismiss and carry on. It should also not just have been a "first boot" password change, but retrospective.

Either this was incompetence from the development team (although any developer with half a brain cell would have realised the change they implemented was total nonsense), or the changes were specified by a lawyer who was only interested in doing the absolute minimum to cover the companies arse.

Japan's lander wakes up, takes blurry snap of Moon

Zola

Should have installed a Srimech - every 9 year old on Robot Wars knows their value in situations like this.

A ship carrying 800 tonnes of Li-Ion batteries caught fire. What could possibly go wrong?

Zola

Re: I assume they discharge batteries before shipping them?

Do you have any idea what your are ranting about? Based on normalised sales numbers, ICE vehicles are up to 20x more likely to spontaneously catch fire than pure electric vehicles (avoid hybrids, they're death traps - probably because they're the worst of both worlds).

Up to 300 petrol & diesel vehicles are the cause of fires in the UK every DAY but yeah, EVs are the problem. Got it.

Zola

Re: I assume they discharge batteries before shipping them?

No. Just, no.

Luton (and Liverpool and Stavanger) car park fires happened because a petrol/diesel vehicle set fire to more petrol/diesel vehicles thanks to them all having plastic fuel tanks. Read the conclusions on the Liverpool and Stavanger fires, it's going to be the same with Luton - the fire spread rapidly due to plastic fuel tanks, and nothing to do with EVs.

Not sure which transport ship you are referring to, but if it's the Fremantle Highway then the EVs were all stowed on the lower decks and did not burn - it was only the petrol/diesel vehicles on the upper decks that burned. The empty loading deck between the EVs and ICE vehicles prevented the spread of fire from the upper decks to the EVs. Again, read the reports (rather than dealing with conspiracy theories).

Zola

Re: I assume they discharge batteries before shipping them?

Most shipping companies have rules when transporting Li-Ion-based cargo, especially EVs.

For example, the batteries in the EVs must only have enough juice for a quick spin around the dock and loading on/off the ship - maybe 10%-20%. They will be topped up once they are unloaded, and they will have been sat outside the ship for at least 48 hours prior to loading.

I would expect similar when a ship is fully loaded with Li-ion batteries - the individual cells should be at a fairly low state of charge, and should have been stable for several days prior to loading.

Obviously poorly packed cells could be damaged during transport (rough seas etc.) which could lead to puncturing, which might be the case here - none of the above precautions is likely to prevent such an outcome.

However if the cells were being shipped at a high state of charge and/or without adequate safety checks prior to loading then the shipping company has learned a lesson the rest of the shipping industry already knows about.

A year on, CISA realizes debunked vuln actually a dud and removes it from must-patch list

Zola
WTF?

Re: Test with all the layers

Yeah, right. Absolutely none of this sounds plausible, assuming the security firm engaged by the bank is legit.

I've worked for investment banks, had client-facing systems I'm responsible for PEN tested multiple times, and none of what you described ever happens (and if anyone did ask for that kind of access they would be run out of business).

Also, the fact you call it "PIN" testing only adds to my suspicion that you don't know what you're talking about.

Downfall fallout: Intel knew AVX chips were insecure and did nothing, lawsuit claims

Zola
Flame

"Why bother with security checks", said Intel

The fundamental issue is that Intel decided to skip all privilege/permission checks when executing instructions speculatively, in order to save time. The privilege/permission checks were applied only once the path of the speculatively executed instructions was actually taken. This meant that inaccessible memory would be physically accessed by the speculatively executed instructions, and subsequently leaked, even if the CPU eventually threw a privilege exception.

This was a major design cockup that Intel *chose* to make. They must have know of the potential risk, but still considered it worthwhile. Conversely, AMD did not cut this corner in their own speculative execution design (it's why their CPU designs were not hit anywhere near as hard by Spectre etc.) as all necessary checks were applied during speculative execution, as one would expect.

The sad thing is that Intel has effectively gotten away with it all, and their customers have paid for it in terms of weakened security, loss of performance etc., while OS and compiler developers have had to apply increasingly shit workarounds.

This court case is a long time coming, but it's unlikely it will significantly impact Intels bottom line.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

Zola

With those words, Elon Musk could certainly learn a thing or two from Sataya the Wise One.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Zola

Re: Expensive

> but they now seem to fall into the standard business habit of having to release a new version regularly

Regularly? This is the first new RPi SBC in 4 years... LOL.

Zola

> since lost focus and is pricing itself out of the low power market

You know the Pi5 supports suspend mode with power consumption of 4mW?

And when fully powered and active it's using single digit Watts.

If there's more efficient hardware available then you were probably never the target market.

Zola

Re: Lost the plot

2GB and 16GB "sometime early next year once we've got past the initial launch pain!"

No mention of anything more than 16GB, which to be honest is probably not going to sell in significant numbers (4GB and 8GB being the "sweet spot").

Zola

> does the Pi5 default to booting when power is applied out of the box like all previous PI? Can it be bypassed?

Yes, and yes. Power button behaviour is configurable - it is just standard Debian power button handling.

Zola

Re: Lost the plot

It seems there's a Pi to suit every level of performance, and/or wallet. It's easy (and cheap) enough to start with a Pi3 and go up or down to find the level of performance that your project requires.

For £5 more than a Pi4, the Pi5 offers significantly more performance and expansion potential, but if that's not required then the Pi4 may still be the better option. I run a headless Pi4/8GB booting from nvme and that's perfectly fine for my needs, maybe I'll take a look at Pi5 once the software and hardware (HATs) has matured.

I personally find the Pico support to be exemplary.

FCC plans to restore net neutrality rules tossed out under Trump

Zola
Facepalm

Ted Cruz

What a total fuckwit.

Do SSD failures follow the bathtub curve? Ask Backblaze

Zola

Makes me think the Backblaze figures would be more meaningful with the "drive lifetime write" figures - how can we tell if a drive failed after being absolutely thrashed to death (which would be expected) or if it failed while being mostly idle (or mostly read only), which would be highly unusual?

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Zola

I wouldn't pay 1 penny (total, never mind as a recurring fee) to use Twitter:

A) there are (or will be) free alternatives (Threads isn't that bad, and improving, and also much less toxic than Twitter)

B) I don't trust Elmo with my credit card details. Period.

Seeing Twitter go behind a paywall would be the best thing to happen to it so that the mainstream media can forget about it, and it will die a slow death.

Those that are stupid enough to pay for it will continue to enjoy their toxic echo chamber, with even dodgier advertisers than there are now (all the big name brands appear to have left the platform based on the absolute junk I'm being shown).

God knows how he expects to attract new users to his pay-to-use platform when everyone has forgotten about it - I guess he'll need to advertise it (ironic).

Or maybe it will be free to Tesla owners, LOL.

Zola

I need to make posts on Twitter confirming this is a genius idea, to help ensure it happens - don't fight it people, this will guarantee the collapse of the entire platform!

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Zola

Re: Three

Three are the same joke in my location which is a densely populated South London borough (postcode CR0), so their garbage network is by no means limited to "oop North".

4G data download speed on Three is measured in tens of kbps, sometimes single digit kbps, while the upload speed cannot be measured at all - it errors out. 3G is the same.

I put up with it for years (complained, but they refused to acknowledge they even had a problem - neighbours with different phones had the same issues with Three) as I had contracts on Three that used their femtocell in a location that no network covered at the time, but when Three turned off their femtocells a month after I had renewed for another 12 months I was left to count down the days until I could bin all the Three contracts, particularly as O2 coverage recently appeared in the location of the now ex-femtocell.

I'm now with Sky, which runs on top of O2, and it's night and day. And cheaper.

Avoid Three like the plague.

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

Zola
Mushroom

Shame - I'd just started warming to the idea

I must admit, at first I thought the idea of two CEOs fighting in a cage was incredibly unseemly and totally unnecessary. And in many ways, it still is.

However, everytime Musk opens his mouth to spout yet more BS it's made me realise that watching someone (anyone) BATTER THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF HIM until he begs for it to end, live on TV/internet and recorded for posterity, would actually be quite wonderful.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

Zola

Re: As expected

Starting to get a distinct Hwang Woo-suk fraud vibe from all of this, unfortunately.

If this turns out to be another fraud then the Korean science community could find itself in a very unfavourable situation.

Fool me once, and all that.

Linus Torvalds calls for calm as bcachefs filesystem doesn't make Linux 6.5

Zola

Re: Rights and Wrongs

> P.S. as well as RAID5/6, don't use quotas either...

Graham... you're really not selling it!

BTRFS has been a "nearly there" filesystem for as long as I can remember... and it's usually the same issues that come up every time it is discussed. Why not focus on fixing them and stabilising the codebase before adding more fancy functionality?

Personally, I use ZFS. It works. Has done for more than a decade. No caveats required.

It's a massive shame that Linux hasn't been able to adopt it without the licensing issues.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Zola
Holmes

Re: Unique keys

GP != NHS

GPs are private and always have been as GPs refused to allow the formation of the NHS back in the 1940s until the Bevan government of the time cut them a deal that allowed GPs to remain private and outside of the NHS. This is why the GPs can sell their partnerships and their patients off to the highest bidders (Virgin Health Group, American health groups etc.).

So that kack computer system your dads GP surgery uses? Almost certainly not the fault of the NHS (for once).

Microsoft Windows edges closer to SMB security signing fully required by default

Zola

SAMBA Performance

SAMBA file transfer performance on low powered ARM devices is going to end up in the toilet once server signing is required - not so easy to add another core, or replace with a more powerful CPU.

I can see this being disabled by users on the Microsoft end. Hopefully it can be disabled on a per-share basis.

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Zola

Re: A Bit Late Now

> Though if all that people want is a media player, pi-hole or other purely software solution then the Pi people may well find that those potential customers have already found other boards that satisfy their needs.

Pretty sure that's not really the target market for the RPi people - sales to such customers are a nice little earner, yes, but those customers are not the Foundations focus.

Zola

> "I don't even understand why you're making them rather than a newer model."

> "... which disappear in seconds"

I think you answered your own question.

And when there's strong demand for existing products that are in short supply, why introduce a new product (that may be in short supply) knowing it will experience even stronger demand? Clear the backlog first... no need to make life harder for yourself than it already is.

Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts

Zola
Flame

Three appears to have opted out of the UK EAS test

without informing anybody.

A very significant number of Three users (including those on Three-based MVNOs) did not receive the alert.

I look forward to the publication of the Three post-mortem into this incident (yeah, right).

I've got 2 contracts on Three and I'll be switching both once they come to an end later this year (not solely because of this EAS fiasco - that's really just the cherry on top of this shit network cake).

Zola

Re: Wot no alert?

Android 10 supports Emergency Alerts (BBC source is wrong, but no surprise there) - I received the alert on my Android 10 device from O2, but had another phone on the Three network which didn't receive anything. Three ballsed this up good and proper.

GlobalFoundries sues IBM for flogging 'chip secrets to Intel, Rapidus'

Zola
Alien

Re: IBM great damage to GFS ??

I got halfway through and started thinking "has amanfrommars got a new handle..."

Fancy trying the granddaddy of Windows NT for free? Now's your chance

Zola
Go

Debugging was a joy on VMS, regardless of language - single stepping a COBOL programme that called a module written in C which then calls a MACRO32 library, you could debug them all in a really easy to use and comfortable environment, switching seemlessly from one language to another as you step into/step out.

DEC were years ahead when it came to their common language environment.

Linux still doesn't come close, as gdb is horrible.

Zola
Happy

Re: VMS 1.0...

We were a COBOL shop, and in the very early 90s we needed to write a small amount of functionality (asynchronous multi-threaded terminal IO handling using QIO syscalls) where COBOL - surprise, surprise - just wouldn't cut it, and at the time DEC charged for their C-compiler (very expensive) so it was decided the only option was to write it in MACRO32.

Fortunately I already knew 68K assembler and the MACRO32 differences were pretty minimal, so it all worked out great (and I only crashed the dev VAX twice while testing, successfully getting VMS on one occasion to allocate a negative amount of virtual memory which was apparently something DEC had never seen before!)

But then about 2 years later the official C-compiler became available for free from DEC, and in hindsight it would have made more sense to convert the MACRO32 to C code but that never happened, so the MACRO32 code ran until the VAX systems were decommissioned in about 2010-2015 I think. I'm pretty sure they got their money's worth out of that code!

Zola

Re: The modern museum

I used to know that documentation, and the preceding blue wall, so well that I could have told you what book, and probably roughly what page, from memory.

Is that you, "Raymond"? :-)

Zola
Boffin

Re: The modern museum

it eventually took 4 of use a half day going through numerous manuals to eventually find the syscall he wanted.

Half a day?! What you needed is a system admin with Rain Man-like "Grey wall" powers!

One day, many many years ago, I was writing in MACRO32 on a VAX, and needed the documentation for the QIO syscall.

I walked into tech support, custodians of the Grey Wall, and spoke to the senior system admin - a man of very few words - and our "conversation" went something like this:

Me: "Hi Raymond <not his real name> I'm looking for the QIO documentation, any idea where the manual is?"

Raymond thinks for a second or 2, then says: "4th rack from the left, 3rd row down, 2nd manual from the right. Section 8."

And he was spot on! I was in and out of there in less than 2 minutes. :-)

Elon Musk actually sits down and talks to 'government-funded media' the BBC

Zola
Facepalm

Re: "Yes. Yes, that is the reason."

He's lying, as a court ruling was absolutely NOT the reason - he could have walked away from the entire deal as it included a $1Bn breakup fee (plus unquantifiable amount of lost face). But he didn't, presumably as the loss of face is worth more to him than any amount of money.

A truly smart person would have run away from the Twitter deal thinking they'd got off lightly with "only" a $1Bn loss, but not Elmo who will likely lose every penny and more of the $44Bn (not all his money).

And dumb people will still claim he's a "genius".

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

Zola

Or alternatively, he's about to flood the Twitter experience with adverts in an effort to balance the books, and he needed to ban the Twitter-like alternatives in order to prevent users abandoning the soon-to-be advert-laden official Twitter app overnight.

And, with no engineers left at the company to support the API, it's a potential win/win for Elmo.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Zola
Unhappy

Re: MongoDB next?

Makes me wonder when will they be coming for Devo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZDl_R8Zp2E

Virgin Orbit doesn't

Zola

Re: On the positive side

Wrong. 61 in 2022. 31 in 2021.

Prime suspect: Amazon to loosen logistics and delivery from EU retail

Zola

Going further, I'd like to hide sellers that use specific delivery companies, ie. Evri, as that would be perfect.

I'd simply specify in my profile the delivery companies that I DON'T trust to deliver my purchases and that I don't want to have to deal with, and bingo - sellers using the cheapest and crappiest delivery companies would disappear from my listings and those sellers will most likely see a dramatic loss of business until they start paying a fair price to have their stuff delivered by reputable delivery companies.

Evri would be put out of business overnight. Hopefully.

Mythic bet big on analog AI but has run out of cash

Zola

Re: 10 years old?

They did make it, and apparently it worked.

The problem is there was nobody that wanted to buy it, or not in big enough numbers to keep them afloat.

Zola

10 years old?

When is a startup no longer a startup?

Is IBM still a startup? Or HP?

But 10 years is a lot of runway... maybe they were trying to make something nobody wanted to buy.

ZX Spectrum: Q&A with some of the folks who worked on legendary PC

Zola

QDOS ahead of its time

The QL was also my first machine with a floppy (twin 3.5" in my case)! I upgraded to the QL after a Spectrum 48K.

What many don't appreciate about the QL is that it had a fully pre-emptive multi-tasking operating system with job prioritisation/scheduling, IO channels with redirection (windows, files, pipes), and possibly the most advanced version of (Super)BASIC.

All in a 48KB ROM.

Tony Tebby (QDOS) and Jan Jones (SuperBASIC) did an outstanding job designing and fitting all of that into such a small ROM.

And credit too to Laurence Reeves for squeezing even more functionality (and many bug fixes!) into the same ROM space with his "Minerva" reimplementation of QDOS after Sinclair Research went belly up.

I learned BCPL, Pascal, C and MC68000 Assembler (not necessarily in that order) on the QL and the latter set me up nicely when asked to programme DEC VAXen in MACRO32 in my first IT job - that was a LOT of fun!

There were far too many corners cut on the QL hardware which was in truth a bit of a disaster, but the effort that went into QDOS is so often overlooked.

Alert: Let's Encrypt to revoke about 2 million HTTPS certificates in two days

Zola

Re: Would be really nice

Exactly. With automated cert renewal (certbot) the 90 day limit really isn't an issue - in fact it could be reduced further and I wouldn't give a toss as my LE certs reliably auto renew just fine (HTTP-01 challenge, so unaffected by this revoke issue).

Throw away your Ethernet cables* because MediaTek says Wi-Fi 7 will replace them

Zola

40Gbps sounds amazing, but...

I hope it uplinks to the network router or switch over something faster than 1Gbps Ethernet. Eventually there's going to be a wired Ethernet connecting the wireless access point to the backend, and 2.5Gbps/5Gbps/10Gbps ports are still not exactly commonplace (getting better, but still classed - and priced - as "premium" for some reason), even less so 40Gbps ports (maybe link aggregating multiple 10Gbps ports will work/be required).

Feeding the 40Gbps WiFi7 beast sounds like it may be the more difficult nut to crack, in a world of predominantly 1Gbps wired connections.

Thales launches payment card with onboard fingerprint scanner

Zola
Stop

All good until cards are stolen in the mail

If the cards are supplied blank to customers who then programme them with a fingerprint, this will likely increase the theft of cards sent through the post because the first person to receive the blank card will have access to unlimited transactions until the card is cancelled.

I've been the victim of "new card postal theft" and can only see this ending badly unless there are additional checks to prevent the wrong people programming stolen cards but I don't see any mention of that in the article.

I'd also be very concerned if banks (or credit card companies) then refused to cancel the fraudulent transactions because of their belief that it's not possible to fake my fingerprint etc. (even though I didn't receive the new card which is now down to me to prove etc.)

Perhaps cards should only be programmed by placing them into an ATM which would mean they can't be programmed without the PIN. But this would mean fitting fingerprint readers to ATMs although that isn't necessarily a bad idea. Or the cards can read and store a fingerprint but it's only "activated" by an ATM.

Cards being issued "preprogrammed" from a stored and verified fingerprint would be an obvious (and almost total) solution to postal card theft, but then the privacy issues are huge.

Another successful flight for SpaceX's Starship apart from the landing-in-one-piece thing

Zola
Mushroom

SpaceX have turned rocket science into Spaghetti Engineering

"Throw it at the wall and see what sticks."

Literally. Or until the money runs (handy then that the owner has a bottom pit of cash).

And they really think they're going to to put people inside this. I can't wait for the Corporate Manslaughter charges. Or will the idiot millionaire/billionaire space tourists sign away all their rights because they believe in the Cult of Musk? Most probably.

"I'm a con-man, or maybe I'm a God..."

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