rachelbythebay

I was handed a Linux laptop and wasn’t put into sudoers or group wheel.

I had to point out that I already had root on all of production and this made no sense. They eventually fixed it.

Nobody else had this happen to them when they got a Linux laptop. Curious.

I’m cackling at how great this is. This is what happens when you trust the internet forever and just scarf down any old thing at build time. Of course it’ll get exploited! That’s what evil people do.

What? Are you calling the context of a HHVM request a container just to confuse people?

Also, there's way more than just the web tier out there.

Tape those suckers off when you store them somewhere or you may have a nasty fire on your hands. Both terminals so close together makes for an easy short if it finds the right bit of metal somewhere.

Damn good pizza, too.

IPv6. Push for it.

Yep. Do it right once, or see it done right, and you'll never be the same. We need more people getting down to the fundamentals like this to keep everyone honest.

(Consider the Rick and Morty "true level" bit... and realize it's not that much of an exaggeration when it comes to stuff like this...)

There's a lot of cruft on /new which I'm sure either has no humans behind it... or has someone doing nothing BUT spamming their domain's links every day. They don't care and they don't engage.

Flag, flag, flag...

New one gets you promotions. Old one is boring and does not. Guess what people want to work on.

Seen it happen too many times.

Your nines or their nines?

I bet if you personally can't use it, but their overall reliability meets the bar, then they're within SLA.

Don't ask why I know this.

Not a coincidence! I read this and wanted to share my two cents. Having recently mentioned the upper end of the old TV band didn't hurt, either.

You can buy the DVSI codec wrapped up in a USB stick from NW Digital Radio. They call it the "ThumbDV". It looks like a serial port to your machine, and you can just poke it with the right commands and it'll turn raw codec data into raw audio data (and vice-versa).

I used it for decoding the AMBE+2 stuff on newer P25 systems. It wasn't great but it did mean I didn't run afoul of any patent issues if I wanted to sell the system to someone else. OP25 is great but I didn't want to take the risk.

It’s not buy vs. build. It’s _rent_ vs. build.

Unless you are actually purchasing whatever it is you’re using... and I’m guessing they aren’t doing that.

You go through PSC as if you are the needed level.

So you're calibrated as if you are a 5. But if you're still a 4 because you're not delivering as a 5... then you'll fail to meet expectations, naturally. The rest sort of takes care of itself.

Pro tip: ask them for the severance instead of the PIP, and GTFO.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are then some of the quietest times in terms of outages. Of course, the interval right after then is usually worse, since all of the backlogged changes from the holidays land at once.

“Diff”, not PR.

Gonna say my usual thing every time this comes up: Rackspace, Indymedia, 2004.

I'll add some additional color this time, though: I was one of the people who went digging around the images of their drives, since I was working that night when they came in from the UK datacenter. They did their homework and logged "noip" in their Apache logs, so we were unable to provide the IP addresses associated with whatever activity it was they cared about.

This is very very old news. I guess it was less shocking when 9/11 was only 3 years old?

Can't speak for Uber... but yes. Just having an app does not make you a tech company. Tech companies tend to build stuff.

That doesn't track. By the time they pulled this crap (including the "you didn't sign it, would you sign it again?" and it turned out to be different), we had been given at least one Android phone (ADP1) and maybe the second as well (N1).

I'd say "name and shame", but I'm guessing they're not around any more. Am I right?

Automatically summons various first responders if you crash and it can dial out.

Lets you locate the car. That means an insurance discount.

Tells you if it gets boosted while you're away from it.

All of that... gone.

Look out, they're about to screw everyone with a 2017, 2016, or older. They installed 3G-only cell stuff for the "phone home when the air bags pop" infrastructure, and it's being sunset in 2022. There seems to be no way to upgrade the telematics stuff to anything newer.

All of these cars are going to have shit resale value very soon now.

Paging class action lawyers... there's a big juicy target out here just waiting to be seized. Selling cars when you know it has technology that's already dated and won't last long enough? Then not providing a way to remedy it? Gold!

I imagine some people aren't voting because they don't use an IDE.

Try Fastmail. Their mail service just works.

Well, okay, so, the problem is like this: let's say you wanted to schedule something to happen during that exact extra second in the end of June 2015 when we were all standing around watching UTC do its little extra dance. You pick 1435708800. Trouble is, that Unix time applies to both 23:59:59Z and 23:59:60Z on that particular day.

You can't target it beforehand or after. It's just... gone.

It's not a problem from the point of view of programs, since they just got whatever time_t value they got, and they don't know the bigger perspective. It's more of a mapping from outside->in problem.

Put it another way: try writing a program that'll call clock_gettime() and will say a message at a later time you select. You can't put in 23:59:60Z because there's no way to represent it, and indeed, you won't even be able to tell when the time comes unless you special-case it and notice _that particular second_ repeating itself... or reach into the kernel to look at the leap bit, or worse. It's a real time in meatspace, but you can't target it with the tools at hand. That's the problem.

Regarding the 17 second thing, that's because someone decided to switch off the thing which (correctly) applies the adjustment factor to GPS time to make it NTP time. There was a 17 second difference at the time (GPS to NTP), and with it off, we were shipping GPS time to hosts as if it was NTP time.

In theory, any regression of the clock long enough to not let the actual passing of time push it past the sanity check time point in the lock stuff would have caused this. The thing is, a small-scale time step (from ntpd, say) normally happens at boot up, not later, and it's on a system by system basis.

The 17 second excursion happened on hundreds of thousands of machines all at once, and, yeah, it was noticed.

A negative leap second (the appalling shitshow from the article) would make us skip a second, though.

Going back one second is what generally happens now when a Linux box does the "inserting leap second" thing. It goes from 23:59:59.999999 to 23:59:59.000000, then runs that whole second again. You get to 23:59:59.999999 again, and then you finally roll over to 00:00:00.000000.

From the perspective of the typical time_t rendering of Unix time, there is no way to uniquely represent that 61st second. It just "disappears".

Having lived through systems going backwards some 17 seconds due to a botched NTP-GPS appliance config, I can tell you that what died at that particular site was all of the locking code that used wall time clocks instead of monotonic clocks. They all CHECKed and died when their preconditions were no longer valid.

This didn't have to happen. They could have used monotonic from the get-go, and then they wouldn't have died when the clocks got yanked backwards 17 seconds to the proper time base.

Their 2020 laptops aren't even full machines. If you want to go from undocked to redocked, you have to shut everything down and reboot.

This has been going on for months. Do these people not use these machines? Do they not go between a couch and a desk with a Thunderbolt dock?

Yes. Everything is hosted now.

I ran my own mail servers for 30 years. I punted on this earlier this year.

Best to not take folks like me seriously, then.

Apple probably wants you to reboot any time you undock or redock it. The fact you can panic it trivially with those operations and sleep pretty much implies it.

Shameful.

"They’ve built cultures of cost-conscious engineering."

I'm sorry, that's a bad assumption to make from the presentations companies make. What they say and what they do are frequently vastly different.