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Sunday, September 24, 2006

... and now for something completely different!
(posted at 06:48PM BST)

"Due to a failed system at the Weelsby Campus important maintenance is required which will affect access to the internet making it temporary unavailable for a short period of time, an e-mail will be sent out as soon as the service is once again restored. The department apologises for the short notice but this is important maintenance."

So how is the 100% Microsoft-based network working for the college in general, lads ?

Sunday, September 17, 2006

'Highly trained technicians ?' - YEAH RIGHT!
(posted at 11:50AM BST)

I spent most of last night trying to figure out why my UK-based servers kept dropping connections from their US-based counterparts.

As you can imagine, having a working failover in the US requires that they keep in contact with their UK cousins by rsync/drbd in order to ensure that data is as recent as possible to minimize disruption to customers.

It turned out that some dipshit router admin over at Level 3 decided that ICMP should be blocked (albeit allowing ICMP echos and ICMP replies ensuring traceroute works) - this had the knock-on effect of breaking path MTU discovery so that neither of my networks were aware anything was wrong.

The really galling thing about this is that IP has so many wonderful safeguards in place so that an Internet-connected network can automatically adapt to changes made by other Internet-connected networks without so much as breaking existing connections between those networks.

Naturally, this depends on the admins at each end to know what they are doing - for example, the admins at my 'former employer' are blocking all ICMP to their Microsoft ISA Servers and as those boxes are on the end of ADSL lines with a non-standard MTU, I can guarantee that will break connectivity to a large number of Internet-connected networks.

Same goes for another former employer - who defaulted to drop ICMP at the border firewalls they managed for clients which used to break things like Cisco PIX boxes and other IPsec-capable devices which require a working default MTU and for intermediate hosts to respect the 'Do Not Fragment' bits set in the packet headers.

So, I'm stuck with dropping the MTU on my border routers in the US and in the UK to ensure that the chances of connectivity being affected is reduced - the perfect solution would be to require these admins to actually *understand* TCP/IP rather than simply being happy to just assign an IP address and be done with it.

Wednesday, September 6, 2006

How much online storage does one need ?
(posted at 11:40PM BST)

I currently have around 800Gb of personal storage at home - spread over a 335Gb RAID-5 array on my SMP box, a 120Gb RAID-1 array on my Linksys NSLU-2, 160Gb on my Biostar iDEQ 300-MCE, 160Gb on my 17" iMac G5 and the 60Gb on my laptop.

Do I really need it all though ?

I have a complete local mirror of the Fedora Core development tree, dedicated build environments for at least four different Linux distros, my entire CD collection ripped to FLAC and more besides.

I ask the question as I'm currently spec'ing online storage for some new projects that are scheduled to go live in 2007.

First and foremost, redundancy - storage must have dual power supplies that can be fed from my dual rackmount 2200VA UPS units, plus, I must also have two of them - and, the array configuration must be at least RAID-5.

That covers me against UPS failure, storage unit failure and data loss through the failure of any individual disk... so far, I'm doing great on the redundancy front, multiple transit providers, two border routers, two switches, etc, etc.

The benefit of going with disk arrays is that I can buy shitloads of low-capacity drives and via RAID-5 make them into a much larger volume - with reads being striped across multiple drives, the average seek and transfer times go through the floor!

The eventual goal is to have around 500Gb of RAID-5 storage on each disk array but the pair being synchronized using DRBD - therefore, each array will be an exact clone of the other - technically RAID-1, albeit in software but guaranteeing a redundancy equivalent to RAID-10.

I figure I can do it all for less than a grand as well ;-)

Saturday, September 2, 2006

I had a premonition something was going to go wrong...
(posted at 07:38PM BST)

After 20 years or so, I finally married my sister off to the sole member of the local Liverpool F.C. fan club.

Everything went without a hitch except for the following:

      A small bit of rain.
      The limousine turning up at the wrong house.
      The limousine driver asking my uncle if he had any jump leads.
      The speeches of the two best men which involved repeated usage of the f**k and c**t words and will undoubtedly get 'bleeped' on the home version of the DVD - hehe, we might even get it put back in as an 'Easter Egg'
      Undisciplined little kids throwing wedding cake around.

Absolute fun and games all round but overall, a brilliant day for all involved!

Friday, September 1, 2006

Breaking news!
(posted at 05:46PM BST)

(NOTE: Although the following information has been received from a well-trusted source, it is currently UNCONFIRMED)

I have just been informed by one of my reliable sources at my 'former employer' that the Finance Director has been dismissed... for what reason, it is not yet known but as soon as I find out why, I'll be making another post and removing the disclaimer at the top of this one.

It would appear from talking with several other former colleagues that this information is not widely known and therefore, in keeping with my 'former employer's extreme lack of consideration for privacy and adherence to their own ICT Acceptable Use Policy, I am disclosing this currently unconfirmed information on my journal.

 
slashdot

Google Buys 200 Megawatts of Fusion Energy That Doesn't Even Exist Yet

NASA To Stream Rocket Launches and Spacewalks On Netflix

Norwegian Lotto Mistakenly Told Thousands They Were Filthy Rich After Math Error

Windows User Base Shrinks By 400 Million In Three Years

Oracle Inks Cloud Deal Worth $30 Billion a Year

Tumblr's Move To WordPress and Fediverse Integration Is 'On Hold'

CarFax For Used PCs: Hewlett Packard Wants To Give Laptops New Life

Freelancers Using AI Tools Earn 40% More Per Hour Than Peers, Study Says

Apple Loses Bid To Dismiss US Smartphone Monopoly Case

Senate GOP Budget Bill Has Little-Noticed Provision That Could Hurt Your Wi-Fi

Apple Weighs Using Anthropic or OpenAI To Power Siri in Major Reversal

VP.net Promises "Cryptographically Verifiable Privacy"

WordPress CEO Regrets 'Belongs to Me' Comment Amid Ongoing WP Engine Legal Battle

In China, Coins and Banknotes Have All But Disappeared

Microsoft's New AI Tool Outperforms Doctors 4-to-1 in Diagnostic Accuracy

the register

Oracle just signed one mystery customer that will double its cloud revenue in 2028

US shuts down a string of North Korean IT worker scams

Want a job? Just put 'AI skills' on your resume

AIs have a favorite number, and it's not 42

Google to buy power from fusion energy startup Commonwealth - if they can ever make it work

British IT worker sentenced to seven months after trashing company network

Norwegian lotto mistakenly told thousands they were filthy rich after math error

Scattered Spider crime spree takes flight as focus turns to aviation sector

Northrop Grumman shows SpaceX doesn't have a monopoly on explosions

Mitch Kapor finally completes MIT master's degree after 45-year detour

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

Sinaloa drug cartel hired a cybersnoop to identify and kill FBI informants

Microsoft's next Windows 11 update is more 'enablement' than upgrade

Arm muscles into server market – but can't wrestle control from x86 just yet

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Cloud lobby warns EU: Clamp down on water rules and we'll evaporate

Your browser has ad tech's fingerprints all over it, but there's a clean-up squad in town

Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

Don't pay for AI support failures, says Gradient Labs CEO

DoJ clears HPE to buy Juniper if it sells Instant On Wi-Fi and licenses some code

China claims breakthroughs in classical and quantum computers

Canada orders Chinese CCTV biz Hikvision to quit the country ASAP

It's 2025 and almost half of you are still paying ransomware operators

AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of the time, and a lot of them aren't AI at all

Ex-NATO hacker: 'In the cyber world, there's no such thing as a ceasefire'

How to get free software from yesteryear's IT crowd – trick code into thinking it's running on a rival PC

Anthropic chucks chump change at studies on job-killing tech

Crims are posing as insurance companies to steal health records and payment info

Supremes uphold Texas law that forces age-check before viewing adult material

How Broadcom is quietly plotting a takeover of the AI infrastructure market

Uncle Sam wants you – to use memory-safe programming languages

Fed chair Powell says AI is coming for your job

Palantir jumps aboard tech-nuclear bandwagon with software deal

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter learns new trick at the age of 19: ‘very large rolls’

Cisco punts network-security integration as key for agentic AI

Aloha, you’ve been pwned: Hawaiian Airlines discloses ‘cybersecurity event’

US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data

So you CAN turn an entire car into a video game controller

Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Data spill in aisle 5: Grocery giant Ahold Delhaize says 2.2M affected after cyberattack

There's no international protocol on what to do if an asteroid strikes Earth

The network is indeed trying to become the computer

The year of the European Union Linux desktop may finally arrive

Fresh UK postcode tool points out best mobile network in your area

Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!

HPE customers on agentic AI: No, you go first

Starlink helps eight more nations pass 50 percent IPv6 adoption

Australia not banning kids from YouTube – they’ll just have to use mum and dad’s logins

More trouble for authors as Meta wins Llama drama AI scraping case

Back in black: Microsoft Blue Screen of Death is going dark

 

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