It was a bad day. A lot of bad stuff happened. And I'd love to forget it all. But I don't. Not ever. Because this is what I do. Every time, every day, every second, this: On five, we're bringing down the government.

Wednesday, April 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 April 2021

All The Servers Edition

Top Story

  • I have two brand new development servers.  Well, virtual servers, but big ones: 12 cores, 48GB RAM, 720GB of SSD.  I already had a development server, but it was smaller - only 6 cores and 24 GB of RAM - but more importantly it was in Los Angeles.

    These are right here in Sydney, so they're a 7ms ping away rather than 180ms.  If you've never spent your days maintaining servers on the other side of the planet I can just say, you haven't missed much.

    These are really going to make my life easier.  They're big enough that I can drop a complete copy of this site on there to try things out in isolation.

    If these work out well I won't need to keep a Linux server at home anymore.  At $20 per month for the pair (prepaid for a year) it makes little economic sense to run my own, plus they have faster internet connections than I can get where I live.

    (In theory Australia's NBN has offered gigabit speeds for years.  In practice, you simply can't get it.  I remember one mid-sized ISP here saying that they had a total of four customers on the gigabit plan.  I could get 5G, but I barely rate one bar even on 4G.)

Slayers Next, the second of four - or five, depending on how you count - Slayers TV seasons.  Song by Megumi Hayashibara, of course.

Kind of annoying trying to find clean clips of these songs, but I got banned from YouTube for nearly ten years for uploading exactly this kind of clip so I'm going with what's available.


Tech News

  • Arm has announced their V1 and N2 server cores.  (AnandTech)

    With the existing N1 core, an 80 core CPU can more-or-less match AMD's 64 core Epyc Rome parts from last year.  But you can get an 80 core Arm CPU and AMD currently maxes out at 64 cores, so it's a fair comparison.

    N2 and the even faster V1 will ship in products next year, though by then AMD will be shipping their fourth-generation Genoa server CPUs with 96 cores.

    Intel meanwhile voted present.


  • Speaking of AMD, they just posted another record quarter, though it was last quarter that was the real standout.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Revenues were up 96% over Q1 2020, but only 6% over Q4, when sales of the new consoles kicked in.

    These numbers prove that AMD really is shipping a lot of chips.  The fact that you can't buy any of them anywhere proves that demand is even higher than supply.

    (I could get a Ryzen 5950X server right now, but it costs as much per month as the two dev servers I just got cost per year.  Nice as it would be, we have enough capacity for now and I just need to get it all organised.)

    It's a huge turnaround given that as recently as 2016, AMD was teetering on the edge of simply evaporating and never being seen or heard from again.

    Microsoft also posted strong quarterly results bolstered by the new Xbox lineup which is - hang on - oh, okay, at least the cheaper Xbox Series S is actually in stock.


  • Never run Google ads.  (Dan Fabulich)

    The headline is never run Google ads on your site if you're an Android app developer, because if Google decides to remove you from AdSense they might also delete your app from the Play Store, just because.  They won't tell you why, and any appeal is automatically rejected the moment you submit it.

    What if you don't run Google ads?  What if you have carefully separated your business account from your personal account, but your personal account is tenuously connected to the personal account of a different developer who runs Google ads?

    Fuck you, account terminated.  (Medium)

    Google offers a one-stop shop where your email address is your blog login is your video account is your spreadsheet and word processor and web hosting and mobile phone and your fucking doorbell and if you say the wrong thing or speak to the wrong person - or even if you don't - they will burn you to the ground and you will have no recourse.

    Amazon, same.

    Apple, same.

    Microsoft, if you know what you're doing, you can still use a local Windows login and avoid all that bullshit.  Yes, they want you to use their online login service, but enterprise customers would riot so there has to be a workaround. 

    This is why my development servers are with a different provider to my two main servers, which are with different providers at different locations, and my backup server is with yet another provider.  Though it turns out after doing a bit of digging that the backup server is probably in the same building as one of the two main servers, so if the whole place burns down we'd be down to just one server and I'd have to restore backups from here in Australia.

  • GitHub - owned by Microsoft - has blocked Google's FLoC IOP project.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Where IOP of course means invasion of privacy, because that is the sole function of FloC.

    Of course, we did that first.  Actually, I need to apply the same change over on the main server now that it's alive again.


  • Mangadex got hacked and their database was indeed leaked.  (Bleeping Computer)

    The site hosts about a billion pages of fan-translated Japanese, Korean, and Chinese comics, or at least it did.  After the hack - possibly an inside job by a disgruntled contributor - they shut down to do critical code rewrites, and have now been off the air for four weeks.

    This update confirms that hashed passwords were indeed exfiltrated, so if you are still sharing passwords between sites, that's bad news.


  • Apple's new privacy settings will protect you from other companies' data collection.  (ZDNet)

    Apple, of course, will continue to watch everything you do, and will go so far as to tunnel through your firewall if  you try to block them in MacOS.  We saw this recently when for several hours users on the latest version of MacOS - everywhere in the world - were unable to open apps due to a single misconfigured server at Apple.

    Oh, and if you were confused about why your computer was suddenly playing up and rebooted in an attempt to fix it, it wouldn't reboot either.


  • Another one bites the dust.  (CNBC)

    A second cryptocurrency exchange has collapsed in Turkey, though in this case everyone was arrested before they could flee to Albania.  Or very possibly, Erdogan being what he is, they were arrested for no very good reason and the company collapsed because all its executives were in a Turkish jail.


  • Speaking of Turkish jails, one conspiracy-minded commenter on another site made a very good point about the University of Minnesota Linux kernel patch debacle.  

    While on the surface it looks like your standard everyday wildly unethical pointless sociology experiment - there's hardly a shortage of those - it should be investigated as espionage.  In particular as Chinese espionage, but other suspects are also plausible.

    There's nothing they'd like better than a list of known and controlled defects in the operating system that runs the internet.


  • Google meanwhile is definitely not engaging in witness tampering.  (CNBC)

    Google legitimately thought that the witness had a nice business and it would be a shame if anything happened to it.

    No, not Roku.  Another witness.


  • Startup Mighty wants to make Chrome faster by sending you a video stream rather than running it locally.  (9to5Google)

    These people are retards.  The people funding them are retards.  The people putting money into the people funding them are retards.  I don't know what city they're based in but the sooner it falls into a volcano the better it will be for all of us.


  • There's a new update for MacOS that fixes half the bugs introduced by the previous version while adding hundreds of new bugs for you to enjoy.  (Me Macintosh)

    Yeah, no.  

    Another reason to avoid the new Arm-based Macs.  Whatever their putative virtues, they can't run an of the older versions of MacOS, or for that matter Windows or Linux.  My 2015 iMac can.


Akai Haato Video of the Day


The first of my two new development servers is named Akai, after Akai Haato, or Haachama, Hololive's resident spider-eating crazy Ausssie.  As part of Hololive's Generation One she's one of the earliest members, and at 19 she's also the youngest.

She is, um, quite creative.


Atsuko Kagari Video of the Day



The second server - one is for experiments and the other for stable stuff like my GitLab server - is named Akko after the star of Little Witch Academia.  LWA, consisting of two movies and a subsequent TV series that isn't quite in the same continuity, is one of the best anime series of recent years.  If you have kids or just like anime yourself you really can't go wrong with this one.


Megumi Hayashibara Theme Song Video of the Day



This one is even harder to find; last time I looked it wasn't on YouTube at all; even a recent live performance by Ms. Hayashibara got hit by a copyright strike and removed.

This six-part OAV is a minor classic; watch it if you can find it.  The subsequent TV series was a remake and not a sequel, and wasn't nearly as good.


Disclaimer: Okay, bad.  It was bad.

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Geek

Akai And Akko

So Aoi will continue to be named Aoi, and the new main server in Dallas will be Mikan, and I'll just leave the ZFS storage pool with a weird name.

Because Akko and Akai are up and running here in Sydney.

Each is (in theory, at least) a 12 core server with 48GB of RAM and 720GB of RAID-10 SSD.

Since they're virtual servers, how much CPU I get is variable, and RAM is potentially variable too.  I'm not sure if they deliberately oversell or just allow idle VMs to gradually swap out.  If I don't log in to my existing server for a day or two it's noticeably slow at first when I eventually do log in, before coming back up to full speed in 15 seconds or so, which looks exactly like a VM that's swapped out to SSD.  (A VM that's swapped out to spinning disk might take 15 minutes to recover, or not recover at all.)

In any case, one of these is cheaper than my existing 2 core 4GB virtual server, which of course also delivers variable levels of resources.

Ping time is 7ms.  I can't really complain about that; before I upgraded to fiber last year, nothing, not even my own ISP, had a ping time less than 15ms.

After I signed up the servers got stuck at Creating for an hour.  Opened a support ticket and they were fixed in seven minutes.

Apart from that I'm pretty happy so far.  With the servers I can now replace, these two will pay for themselves in four months, while providing much more CPU, RAM, storage, and bandwidth.

Update: These Xeon Silver cores may be a little slow by modern standards, peaking at 3.2GHz where Mikan can manage 5.3GHz, but they're not slow slow.  Single-threaded performance is almost exactly the same as this server, but on a 12 core CPU rather than a 4 core.  And multi-threaded performance actually is about three times as fast as this server.

I'm getting 1GB/sec reads and 1.4GB/sec writes to disk on both servers.  Which are probably on the same hardware node, so no surprise that the numbers are the same.

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Tuesday, April 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 April 2021

Get Woke Go Broke Who Knew What Now Edition

Top Story

  • Basecamp, long a thought leader in woke bullshit in the tech industry, has woken up and smelled the brokeness.  (Hey)

    They've announced just a few small changes:

    • Political discussions on work accounts are banned.
    • No more woke benefits. You get paid. It's your money, spend it however you want.
    • No more committees.
    • No worrying about the past.
    • No more peer reviews. Your manager is expected to manage.
    • The world is big enough to look after itself. Or not. We're a business, we're here to make money.

    The usual suspects are up in arms. Sane people are cautiously pessimistic.

We'll get to Cowboy Bebop - and Yoko Kanno's music generally - soon enough, but first a detour through Megumi Hayashibara's ouvre.



Tech News

  • Is AMD selling defective Xbox CPUs as desktop systems?  (WCCFTech)

    Looks like it.  With the ongoing chip shortage it makes no sense to throw out an Xbox CPU just because the graphics core isn't up to scratch; just disable the graphics and you have a solid (if previous generation) eight core processor.

    The system in question appears to use GDDR6 memory, which means that it's not a mainstream Ryzen part, but a custom chip from either the recent Xbox or PlayStation lineups.


  • TSMC is on track to deliver 4nm and 3nm chips next year.  (AnandTech)

    Compared to current 7nm parts (Apple is shipping 5nm parts from TSMC, but no-one else is yet) these will use half the power and be as little as one-third the size.  They'll also be faster - up to 30% - but that's a bit more complicated; it's measured at optimum power usage, rather than maximum performance.

    So it's meaningful for mobile phones at the low end, and servers with hundreds of cores at the high end, but not so much for desktop systems, which focus on a different part of the performance-per-watt curve.

    While shortages are expected to continue into next year, TSMC is planning to pump $30 billion a year over the next three years for updates and expansion.


  • All your Mac are belong to us.  (Objective-See)

    A bug introduced in MacOS 10.15 lets hackers slide malware right past all of Apple's multi-layered protection schemes and simply take over your Mac.

    Your Mac.  My Mac is still running 10.14, because every release - both major releases and point releases - since then has been a bug-ridden pile of crap.

    It's a long article.  If you have the time and you want to see how security guys earn their keep, it's worth reading through it, and just imagine that any words you don't understand are witchcraft.  You won't be far wrong.


  • A laser-toting robot can zap 100,000 weeds per hour.  (Freethink)

    Downside: It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.  To get that speed it uses high-powered carbon-dioxide lasers, not cheap solid-state ones.

    I for one welcome our new weed-zapping overlords.


  • Canada is offline after a beaver gnawed through the phone cord/  (Gizmodo)

    Or maybe only part of Canada.  I'm hazy on the details.  It's Canada.


Megumi Hayashibara Theme Song Video of the Day


Megumi Hayashibara has had any number of major roles - Lina Inverse in Slayers, female Ranma in Ranma Â½, Rei in Evangelion, Jessie of Team Rocket in Pokemon, and Faye Valentine in Cowboy Bebop to name just a few.

In the mid to late 90s though she was simply omnipresent, often starring in and singing the theme songs for multiple shows airing simultaneously.

This - Saber Marionette J - is definitely one of them.  Actually it wasn't at all bad, it's just not a classic.


Disclaimer: I can see that on my tombstone. Not at all bad, just not a classic.

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Monday, April 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 April 2021

Lovely Angels Encore Edition

Top Story


Reposting this one, because I included it on the day I moved Ace back to the main server, and readers over there missed out.


Tech News

  • Hackers breached Apple contract manufacturer Quanta and pilfered schematics of existing and new devices.  (Ars Technica)

    They are demanding $50 million in ransom or they will release the documents, which would potentially allow people to repair Apple devices rather than replace them.


  • Apple is also being sued over misleading claims of water-resistance ratings on iPhones.  (WCCFTech)

    Apple, it seems, rates water resistance with regards to distilled water.  Unless you have some very specific living or working conditions, it is unlikely that this is what your phone will encounter.


  • The Asus ROG Strix G15 has the four essential keys.

    I know this because a colleague's work laptop died this morning, and our boss being sensible about this stuff told her to go to the local electronics store, buy whatever she preferred, within reason, and expense it.

    She needed 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD to handle our development environment, and the ROG Strix is what they had in stock.  It also happens to have a 144Hz screen, a six-core i7-10750H CPU, and an RTX 2060, so it's probably better for gaming than anything I own.


  • Twitter is blocking tweets that criticise the Indian government.  (The Wire)

    In India, yes, but that is where they are most relevant.

    India still has a tendentious relationship with free speech.  They're not blatantly totalitarian like China, but they certainly tend towards the authoritarian.


  • This is why we can't have nice things.  (LayerCI)

    Many providers of CI - continuous integration testing tools - offered free tiers useful for individual programmers and baby startups.  That's fast disappearing because people are abusing these facilities to mine cryptocurrencies.

    This is spectacularly inefficient - one commenter noted it cost them $50 for a user to mine $1 worth of Monero - but that doesn't matter because they are not personally bearing the cost.

    If that reminds you of anything - or indeed everything - in politics, that just means you're paying attention.


  • Note to self: Look into Envoy.  (Better Programming)

    Envoy is an application router - similar to a reverse proxy like Caddy or Nginx, but smarter and more automated at directing requests for pages to the right endpoint.  I ran into some issues trying to load-balance servers last week when we came under some sort of weird garbage-HTTP-request attack, because Caddy's routing isn't flexible enough.

    It also offers caching, what they call "circuit breaking", where you'll automatically get the cached content if the back-end server is overloaded, and fault injection, which basically acts as the Handicapper General from Harrison Bergeron to make sure that when things actually do go wrong, your configuration will handle it.


  • Linux Foundation to UMN: Bite me.  (Kernel.Org)

    Apology not accepted.


Space Fantasy Video of the Day



Had to stop and find one that didn't have the music muted due to a copyright strike.


Bonus: The complete TV series soundtrack.


Disclaimer: Watame did nothing wrong.

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Geek

The Naming Of Servers Is A Serious Matter

Ignoring for the moment that I screwed up and currently have two servers called Aoi.

Given my supernatural anime schoolgirl colour name theme, I have to note how many of the Hololive talents' names relate to colours:
  • Sora via sora-iro, sky blue
  • Sakura via sakura-iro, cherry blossom pink
  • Haachama's official name is Akai Haato, and aka there means red
  • Fubuki's family name is Shirakami, where shira means white
  • Matsuri's family name is Natsuiro, summer-coloured
  • Shion's family name is Murasaki, purple
  • Noel's family name, Shirogane, where shiro is also white
  • Botan's family name, Shishiro - white again
  • Nene's family name, Momosuzu, via momoiro, pink
  • And Aqua is, well, aqua
I'm considering names for possibly two servers here in Sydney, because they give you a discount on the second one, so two big servers prepaid for a year works out about the same as my current smaller server paid hourly.  After cancelling a couple of things elsewhere I'll end up saving money - and have 96GB of RAM and 24 cores on tap locally.

One would be for stable stuff - my personal email and GitLab servers, Minecraft, that kind of thing, and the other for dev and test environments.

Quick inventory:
  • Akane, Utah: Ryzen 3700X, 64GB RAM, 3.2TB NVMe
  • Mikan (probably), Dallas: Xeon W-1290P, 64GB RAM, 3TB NVMe
  • Aoi (original), Dallas, Xeon E-1240, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD
  • Aoi2, Dallas, VM, 12 cores, 48GB RAM, 720GB SSD
  • Kurumi, Dallas,  VM, 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD
  • Midori, Los Angeles, VM 6 cores, 24GB RAM, 240GB SSD - just cancelled, will replace with a Sydney server
  • Sakura, Singapore, VM, 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 480GB SSD - will probably cancel and replace with a Sydney server
  • Chiriri, Sydney, 2 cores, 4GB RAM, 125GB SSD - seems tiny now
  • Mew, Dallas, 48TB backup server
  • Lurulu, Dallas, 16GB RAM, 768GB RAID-5 SSD, CPanel 

(That's really more than we need.)

I was going to call Aoi2 Akko, and Mikan Akai, but I'm probably going to steal those names for the two Sydney servers.  Name the Dallas server Mikan, move everything off Aoi and Lurulu onto Mikan and cancel those two, leave new Aoi named as-is, add two new servers in Sydney named Akai and Akko for dev and prodution respectively, and move everything off Chiriri, Midori, and Sakura onto those and then cancel the three older servers.  There are also a couple of tiny DNS servers, and those can go too.

Which actually leaves (new) Aoi and Kurumi sitting doing nothing.  I'll likely set up new Aoi as an internal CDN, since I already did that while Ace's server was down.

Update: Wait, I already installed LXD on the new Dallas server, and that has the server name bound into it because of how I chose to set up the storage pools.  So I'd need to completely uninstall and reinstall that first.

The containers on the dev servers would be named for individual projects and services anyway - caddy, nginx, minx, minecraft - rather than abstract names for a collection of services, so probably not worth the fuss.

Update Two: Fine print - the new server in Dallas comes with less bandwidth than the other main server, and it counts inbound bandwidth, which is usually free.  So dumping the daily backups onto it from Utah is convenient, but it actually uses an appreciable percentage of the monthly allowance.

Sigh.  The route from Utah to Mew, the main backup server, is still flaky, but is averaging 5 to 10 MB/sec now instead of 1, so it's at least usable.

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Sunday, April 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 April 2021

Turkeys All The Way Down Edition

Top Story


I mentioned that Dirty Pair could get trippy at times.  That peaked in two of the movies, Affair on Nolandia, and the one you see here, Project Eden.



Tech News

  • SSDNodes has announced availability in Sydney starting Tuesday.  Which presumably means Wednesday Sydney time.  They like to send out these announcements at 4AM with  super special deals that only last an hour, so the only time I'm awake to catch them is when I'm dealing with a server fire.

    SSDNodes is a smaller cloud provider that specialises in long-term requirements.  Instead of paying Amazon or Digital Ocean ten cents an hour for a server, you pay SSDNodes $99 per year for three years up front.  Which means - if you do the maths - and if you end up using that server for three years - that you save about 90%.

    I've had a development server with them for about a year, but I really wanted one in Sydney rather than Los Angeles, because the ping times are about 30x faster.  On Wednesday I'll finally get that.


  • A new dedicated Ethereum mining chip can run as fast as 32 Nvidia RTX 3080s.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Good.  Maybe we can get video cards on the shelves again at some point.

    It should be better for the environment too, as it draws only...  Oh.  Only 2500W.


  • Intel's 35W Rocket Lake CPUs are shipping.  (Tom's Hardware)

    These are aimed at small form-factor and all-in-one desktops; you still get eight cores but they use a lot less power than the standard 125W chips, which use 250W, truth in advertising having died long ago.


  • Don't click on this in Chrome, it will crash the browser tab.  (GitHub)

    I warned you, and you still clicked on it, didn't you?


  • The update server for password manager Passwordstate got hacked.  (Ars Technica)

    The hackers installed malware that got installed automatically in the next update, and then stole your passwords.

    Which means that 29,000 additional companies got hacked, and everything they do is now suspect as well.

    Trust no-one.


  • The University of Minnesota idiots have published an open letter apologising for getting caught.  (Phoronix)

    The letter insists that other patches from UMN are legitimate, but that is precisely what they said when they tried to submit additional buggy patches after getting caught the first time.

    Ban them for life, again, twice as hard.


  • Is Hirsute Hippo an enterprise play?  (ZDNet)

    On the one hand, Ubuntu release names increment the letter of the alphabet each time; on the other hand, this is their second time through.  Hirsute Hippo is 21.04, though.  8.04 was called Hardy Heron.

    It integrates directly with Microsoft's Active Directory services, which are pretty much universal in the enterprise world and which I have the good fortune to have never come within a mile of personally.

    Also, it's free.  Enterprise customers will pay for support contracts, but normal humans can just download it.

    On the other hand, it's not a long-term support (LTS) release; you'll need to upgrade first to 21.10 and then 22.04 to get that.


  • An Oklahoma woman has had a felony embezzlement charge on her police record for 21 years and no-one bothered to tell her - though you bet they told her employers - because her boyfriend forgot to return a rental tape of Sabrina the Teenage Witch in 1999.  (Yahoo)

    These are the people who want you to trust them with, basically, everything.


  • SpaceX's Crew 2 module has arrived safely at the ISS.



    Next stop, Andromeda.


  • YouTube is refusing to let a DMCA troll dismiss its own lawsuit.  (TorrentFreak)

    This is a fun case where YouTube caught the complainant red-handed: They filed the complaint from the same IP address as one of the supposedly infringing users.

    Actually, I'm not sure what the end goal was here.  These people look like idiots.

    I'd like to see both parties lose somehow, but I'm happy for today to see the DMCA trolls ground into the dirt and forced to pay all of YouTube's legal fees.


Check the Fine Print Video of the Day



Dell is automatically opting customers in to a $10 monthly warranty plan.  It's not a bad plan in itself - it provides indefinite on-site repairs, tech support, and accidental damage insurance - but it's complete garbage that it's selected by default somewhere in the details of a page that takes several minutes to read.

You can at least cancel, and that leaves you with a standard 1 year on-site warranty, but it still sucks.


Disclaimer: You could build your own system, of course, except that you can't.

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Geek

Shut Up And Take My Money

SSDNodes is launching a Sydney location on Tuesday.

I'm pretty sure they oversell RAM (and CPU, but everyone oversells CPU).

And setting up LXD on their servers is a bit fiddly since you can't define custom partitions; you need to create a large file and build a ZFS volume on top of it so LXD can use it.*  (lxd init will do that for you, but if you're talking about hundreds of GB of space you're much better off doing it manually.)

And you have to pay for a year in advance to get a reasonable deal, instead of hourly like the major cloud providers.

But if you do all that, it comes out at a fraction of the cost of Digital Ocean or Linode or Vultr.  A pretty small fraction.  I can replace my 4GB local dev server with a 32GB or maybe 48GB one, depending on what deal they offer - at about the same price.

Which is good, because the Minecraft server is really bogging it down.  Maybe I should turn off the chicken cannon.

Nah.


* This is a bad idea if you're running directly on hardware because ZFS has excellent handling of hardware errors and you want it to talk to the drives as directly as possible.  On a virtual server, if hardware errors are getting through to you you're already in deep shit.  So worst case you restore your entire server from the SSDNodes backup, or your containers from offsite backup.  If there's an unexpected reboot you should just need to wait for the ext4 journal to recover first, before you can mount ZFS and let that recover its journal.  And on NVMe storage that's pretty quick.

Still worth it; ZFS snapshots, deduping, and compression all work fine this way.

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Saturday, April 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 April 2021

And You Get A Pad Sieuw Edition

Tech News

Sure, Dirty Pair is your classic sci-fi action adventure comedy, but it can also get seriously trippy.



Tech News

  • Dear Windows notifications: FUCK THE HELL OFF!

    A YouTube livestream starts, and I want to comment on it.  It's on the computer to the left...  Yes, I do have five computers on my desk, do you not?  Anyway, on the right half of the computer to the left, and I go to leave a comment in chat.

    POP!  Notification that the livestream has started, blocking the chat window.

    Yes, thanks, go away so I can -

    POP!  Notification that a different livestream started eleven hours ago.

    I don't nee -

    POP!  Notification that a different livestream starts tomorrow at 4PM.

    FUUUUUUUU -

    POP!  POP!  POP!

    Calling it useless would be an offense to uselessness.


  • Mac is Mac and Pad is Pad and never the twain shall meet, except in the landfill.  (Tom's Hardware)

    In fact the two systems are rapidly converging into a single hermetically sealed hardware and software platform that only permits you do do what Apple currently deems socially beneficial.

    Still, there is the point that Apple refuses to support MacOS on the iPad, despite the hardware being identical, or to support touchscreens on the Mac.


  • Intel's Q1 earnings are essentially even with Q4 despite ongoing industry-wide component shortages.  (WCCFTech)

    And well above analyst expectations.  So the stock is down by 5% because none of this is even supposed to make sense.


  • Speaking of component shortages, you can't by a Land Rover.  (BBC)

    I mean, if you were planning to.  You can't.  Their two factories, employing 6000 people to make Land Rovers, Range Rovers, and Jaguars, are closed temporarily because they can't get the chips.


  • Courts have overturned the fraud and embezzlement conventions of dozens of British postmasters after it was proven that the accounting software was full of shit.  (BBC)

    And bugs.

    Hundreds of people were prosecuted in this farce and some have spent years in jail, and now - after more than a decade of legal battles - the entire thing has been thrown out.


  • If you have a QNAP NAS connected to the internet, patch it right now.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Or better yet, unplug that sucker.


  • Cascading containment failure.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Codecov - a continuous integration tool - got hacked, and didn't notice for weeks.

    That's okay, I don't use Codecov.

    But other people do, and the fact that Codecov got hacked means that they got hacked.

    Case in point: HashiCorp, creators of Terraform, a tool for managing multi-cloud operations.  At my day job we use AWS, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud, as well as our own servers.

    We don't use Terraform, because I don't trust anyone.  If I can't look inside the files and see what it's doing, it doesn't get deployed.

    But sooner or later I'm going to find that there was someone we did use to provide a key service and somewhere down the chain they did get hacked.  And then I'll have to consider our own servers hacked.


Macross Just Because Video of the Day



Disclaimer: Don't squeeze the.... Cucumber with legs mobile phone thingy.

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Friday, April 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 April 2021

Return To PixyTown Edition

Top Story

  • Three weeks ago it was the Easter long weekend, I was kicking back, playing some Minecraft, configuring the brand new 128-core Epyc server we got at work...  Then the Fire Nation attacked.

    This is the first night I've had off since then.  Tomorrow I'm even planning to go outside.  That will be exciting.

The opening credits for the 10-episode Dirty Pair OVA series.  This was the 80s, when Japan had the money to do things like this, and also apparently the drugs.


Tech News


Disclaimer: LOVELY ANGELS!

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Geek

A Plague On Both Your Datacenters

So I now have two main servers - a Ryzen 3700X at WebNX in Utah, and a Xeon W-1290P at TMS in Dallas, each with 64GB RAM and ~3TB of SSD.

I'd like a 5900X, but they are nowhere to be found.  I would have settled for a 3900X, but it was out of stock right when I needed it.  It's back now - a bit more expensive, but with 128GB RAM and 4TB SSD, so probably worth the extra if I hadn't already got the Xeon.

Anyway.

I also have a central backup server with a RAID-Z pool.  It's at the same big datacenter complex in Dallas as the Xeon, but with a different hosting company.

Backing up from Utah to the main server in Dallas runs at around 40MB/sec.
Backing up from the main server in Dallas to the backup server runs at over 100MB/sec, since they're so close to each other.  Basically saturates 1GbE.
Backing up from Utah to the backup server runs at around 1MB/sec.

It uses the exact same route over Cogent as between the two main servers, but is 40x slower.

What?

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