Tech

Bikejacket

Chill Evil, Tech

It is a terrible loss. I’ve said and written this before and I will probably do so again, but Steve Jobs envisioned computers as “bicycles for the mind.” Instead, we’ve made them into manacles and straitjackets that serve the rich and the authoritarian.

I’m old enough to remember when I could easily make my computer do anything that I could think of or had time to figure out. Now, you’re lucky if you can get a machine to run something “unauthorized” at all. Mozilla and Google clowns et al. will tell you nothing else is possible because of “security.” Why, they are protecting you from yourself “for your own good!1 But remember: the only security they actually care about is keeping the computer secure from you, the user.

  1. Anytime someone trots this line out, check your wallet, your data, and the location of your kids.

Genie-al

Chill Prediction, Tech

The next phase of putting the information genie back in the bottle is increasing (US) state-level tech regulation that de facto bans services like Mastodon and anything else similar to it.

This will be done under the cover of protecting “privacy” and “for the children” but will really be for the purpose of making sure nothing that’s not large-scale and easily-controllable can exist.

It’s already starting. And many so-called liberals will be right on board with this.

Graphic Disturbance

Chill Clowns, Tech

Microsoft retiring yet another useful tool for one that’s pants 🙁 .

That Microsoft Graph stuff deeply sucks. All of the things I could do in PowerShell in 2 lines of code now takes dozens to hundreds of lines in the terrible Graph way of doing things.

All to make it more “developer friendly,” for whatever reason. And developers love complexity. Sysadmin types do not — and I think that’s a fundamental split between us. Devs dominate now, though, so they get what they want.

So now I can waste two hours doing what I used to be able to achieve in 10 minutes. Fuckin’ great.

Tiny NAS Big $$

Chill Tech

This tiny NAS device fits in the palm of your hand and can take up to 32TB of sweet SSD storage.

Cool, but those 8TB SSD drives are $600 each, you have to put your own OS on this puppy as well as know how to configure it (easy for me, hard for most), it only has 2.5Gb Ethernet (10Gb would be better) and those drives are gonna get hot in something so small.

Also, 32TB is a notional capacity. You’d want this in a least something like RAID 5 or ZFS RAID-Z1 single parity, so you’re talking around 24TB or 21TB actual capacity, depending.

On the other hand, you could buy two 20TB spinning rust drives, slap them in a cheapo NAS in RAID-1 and then you’d have 20TB of storage with roughly the same speed (due to network limitations) for less than a Cleveland1.

In the SSD variant you’d pay $2,600 for the same speed and storage amount with no significant increase in data safety

So, bad deal. Very bad deal. But it would be quiet at least.

  1. That’s a thousand dollars for you proles.

Deci Word

Chill Clowns, Tech

I miss AbiWord.

It was small, got out of your way, and just did the stuff I needed. There should be a lot more software like that, but instead we have the absolute garbage there is now.

I want to decimate villages every time Microsoft fucking Word tries to force me to save something to the cloud.

Hellcorp

Chill Annoying, Tech

I always think they’re talking about “appetizers.”

And no, largely, Gen Z cannot read and has very poor social skills. It’s like they got the worst of both worlds in a corporate hellscape. Bad deal, man.

Working Good

Chill Tech

Just made a big mistake that affects system operations. Tell me your past mistakes to help me feel less bad…

I’ve been lucky as I haven’t made any really huge mistakes, but if you don’t bring at least part of production down sometimes, you’re not a real sysadmin doing anything consequential.

In my career, I’ve:

1) Rebooted the wrong server (at least twice, prod instead of dev/test).

2) Locked myself out of a firewall, had to drive on site (luckily only 20 minutes and it was after hours) and connect to the console to fix it.

3) Nuked a DHCP scope that was still valid, meaning those computers had nowhere to renew their leases when it came time, keeping them from accessing the network.

Those are just screw-ups I can remember. I am sure there have been others. But as a sysadmin, ultimately even if you test something you’re making the actual change in prod. And for us, prod is never exactly like the test environment as that’s just not possible. And no one is perfect. These things will happen. Having quality backups and a plan to revert to a working known good config is key.

Loop

Chill Tech

That is correct. Modern data centers are closed-loop and “use up” very little water.

Older data centers were open loop or flow-through, but those are not built any longer and nearly all have been phased out.

Vast Waste

Chill Annoying, Tech

It’s so odd that our software and applications used to have more features, be faster, and work better 20 years ago than they do now.

What an enormous waste of vast resources. And all the while shit-for-brains assclowns claim it couldn’t be any other way.

Even though it used to be another way.