--- HTTP/3 is coming! And it won't use TCP! ---

A recent announcement reveals that HTTP - the protocol used by browsers to communicate with web servers - will get a major change in version 3!

Before, the HTTP protocols (version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.2) were all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).
TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network.
It can handle hardware failures, timeouts, etc. and makes sure the data is received in the order it was transmitted in.
Also you can easily detect if any corruption during transmission has occurred.
All these features are necessary for a protocol such as HTTP, but TCP wasn't originally designed for HTTP!
It's a "one-size-fits-all" solution, suitable for *any* application that needs this kind of reliability.
TCP does a lot of round trips between the client and the server to make sure everybody receives their data. Especially if you're using SSL. This results in a high network latency.
So if we had a protocol which is basically designed for HTTP, it could help a lot at fixing all these problems.
This is the idea behind "QUIC", an experimental network protocol, originally created by Google, using UDP.

Now we all know how unreliable UDP is: You don't know if the data you sent was received nor does the receiver know if there is anything missing. Also, data is unordered, so if anything takes longer to send, it will most likely mix up with the other pieces of data. The only good part of UDP is its simplicity.
So why use this crappy thing for such an important protocol as HTTP?
Well, QUIC fixes all these problems UDP has, and provides the reliability of TCP but without introducing lots of round trips and a high latency! (How cool is that?)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working (or is still working) on a standardized version of QUIC, although it's very different from Google's original proposal.
The IETF also wants to create a version of HTTP that uses QUIC, previously referred to as HTTP-over-QUIC. HTTP-over-QUIC isn't, however, HTTP/2 over QUIC.
It's a new, updated version of HTTP built for QUIC.

Now, the chairman of both the HTTP working group and the QUIC working group for IETF, Mark Nottingham, wanted to rename HTTP-over-QUIC to HTTP/3, and it seems like his proposal got accepted!
So version 3 of HTTP will have QUIC as an essential, integral feature, and we can expect that it no longer uses TCP as its network protocol.

We will see how it turns out in the end, but I'm sure we will have to wait a couple more years for HTTP/3, when it has been thoroughly tested and integrated.

Thank you for reading!

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

Soms week ago a client came to me with the request to restructure the nameservers for his hosting company. Due to the requirements, I soon realised none of the existing DNS servers would be a perfect fit. Me, being a PHP programmer with some decent general linux/server skills decided to do what I do best: write a small nameservers which could execute the zone transfers... in PHP. I proposed the plan to the client and explained to him how this was going to solve all of his problems. He agreed and started worked.

After a few week of reading a dozen RFC documents on the DNS protocol I wrote a DNS library capable of reading/writing the master file format and reading/writing the binary wire format (we needed this anyway, we had some more projects where PHP did not provide is with enough control over the DNS queries). In short, I wrote a decent DNS resolver.

Another two weeks I was working on the actual DNS server which would handle the NOTIFY queries and execute the zone transfers (AXFR queries). I used the pthreads extension to make the server behave like an actual server which can handle multiple request at once. It took some time (in my opinion the pthreads extension is not extremely well documented and a lot of its behavior has to be detected through trail and error, or, reading the C source code. However, it still is a pretty decent extension.)

Yesterday, while debugging some last issues, the DNS server written in PHP received its first NOTIFY about a changed DNS zone. It executed the zone transfer and updated the real database of the actual primary DNS server. I was extremely euphoric and I began to realise what I wrote in the weeks before. I shared the good news the client and with some other people (a network engineer, a server administrator, a junior programmer, etc.). None of which really seemed to understand what I did. The most positive response was: "So, you can execute a zone transfer?", in a kind of condescending way.

This was one of those moments I realised again, most of the people, even those who are fairly technical, will never understand what we programmers do. My euphoric moment soon became a moment of loneliness...

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

Generic-IT
--------------
Client:"So we would like to found a new company and offer IT and network consulting. Would you be able to build our website?"

Me:"Absolutely. What will be the name of your company?"

Client:"The name is going to be 'Generic-IT'. The website is going to be 'generic-IT.com' . We checked that with google."

Me:"I am sorry to tell you that generic.com is already taken by another company. Incidentally that company offers the same services, that you intend to offer. They also seem to be quite big an have businesses in 5 different countries.
Because of this I advise you to pick a different name that does not get you into trouble and makes positioning your own brand easier."

Client:"We want to neglect that problem for now."

Me:"0.0 ..... -_-""""
"Well, listen. Apart from the possible branding and copyright problems imagine how people will find you on the web. ...What will happen if you google 'generic IT'?"

Client:"Yeah well, we want to neglect that. And with SEO you can do something about that."

Me:"..........Welllll, you that SEO is not a cure all, right? The older an bigger company will come up first. Why not avoid that missunderstanding and come up with a unique name?"

Client:"......"

Me:"Please tell me. Doesn't any part of my argument make sense to you?"

Client:"..."

Me:"Well, ok. I will send you the estimate on monday."

___________

Then over a back channel I hear that the client is ...bewildered, why I would not stick to my area of expertise.

There I was now. Left bewildered myself, being the one with the webagency that does frontend design and branding.

It were around 1997~1998, I was on middle school. It was a technical course, so we had programing languages classes, IT etc.

The IT guy of our computer lab had been replaced and the new one had blocked completely the access on the computers. We had to make everything on floppy disks, because he didn't trusted us to use the local hard disk. Our class asked him to remove some of the restrictions, but he just ignored us. Nobody liked that guy. Not us, not the teachers, not the trainees at the lab.

Someday a friend and me arrived a little bit early at the school. We gone to the lab and another friend that was a trainee on the lab (that is registered here, on DevRant) allowed us to come inside. We had already memorized all the commands. We crawled in the dark lab to the server. Put a ms dos 5.3 boot disk with a program to open ntfs partitions and without turn on the computer monitor, we booted the server.

At that time, Windows stored all passwords in an encrypted file. We knew the exact path and copied the file into the floppy disk.

To avoid any problems with the floppy disk, we asked the director of the school to get out just to get a homework we theorically forgot at our friends house that was on the same block at school. We were not lying at all. He really lived there and he had the best computer of us.

The decrypt program stayed running for one week until it finds the password we did want: the root.

We came back to the lab at the class. Logged in with the root account. We just created another account with a generic name but the same privileges as root. First, we looked for any hidden backup at network and deleted. Second, we were lucky: all the computers of the school were on the same network. If you were the admin, you could connect anywhere. So we connected to a "finance" computer that was really the finances and we could get lists of all the students with debits, who had any discount etc. We copied it to us case we were discovered and had to use anything to bargain.

Now the fun part: we removed the privileges of all accounts that were higher than the trainee accounts. They had no access to hard disks anymore. They had just the students privileges now.

After that, we changed the root password. Neither we knew it. And last, but not least, we changed the students login, giving them trainee privileges.

We just deleted our account with root powers, logged in as student and pretended everything was normal.

End of class, we went home. Next day, the lab was closed. The entire school (that was school, mid school and college at the same place) was frozen. Classes were normal, but nothing more worked. Library, finances, labs, nothing. They had no access anymore.

We celebrated it as it were new years eve. One of our teachers came to us saying congratulations, as he knew it had been us. We answered with a "I don't know what are you talking about". He laughed and gone to his class.

We really have fun remembering this "adventure". :)

PS: the admin formatted all the servers to fix the mess. They had plenty of servers.

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

Boy, this Monday mornig was crazy...
At 7 am, as I just left my flat, I received an ultra urgent email from the CEO of a company we exchanged the fileserver for, that the network shares are not available.

I instantly turned around, went back to my flat, fired up my HAL9000 supercomputer and connected remotely.
4 levels deep (PC => VPN => Remotedesktop => vSphere Client => VM) I felt like I was in the movie Inception and tried to figure out what happened.

I don't know why, but in the logs it said that the fileserver VM was down since 4am. Holy sithlord... why?

After restarting and the usual problems with Windows Network Names, everything was back online.

My special thanks go to Mr. Coffee, who is always a great companion during monday mornings, Mr. VPN, the great fellow who invented the VPN and last but not least "The Internet" for connecting me to a world of binary, where every idea finds a listener and where Ajit Pai can be memed without concequences.

FUCK YOU Ajit. Harlem Shake is so 2013.

--- UK Mobile carrier O2's data network vanishes like a fart in the wind ---
One of the largest mobile carriers in the UK; O2 has been having all manner of weird and wonderful problems this morning as bleary eyed susbcribers awoke to find their data services unavailable. What makes this particular outage interesting (more so than the annoyingly frequent wobblers some mobile masts have) is that the majority of the UK seems to be affected.

To further compound the hilarity/disaster (depending on which side of the fence you're on), Many smaller independent carriers such as GiffGaff and Tesco Mobile piggy-back off O2's network, meaning they're up the stinky creek without a paddle as well. Formal advice from the gaseous carrier is to reboot your device frequently to force a reconnect attempt, Which we're absolutely sure won't cause any issues at all with millions of devices screaming at the same network when it comes back up.

Issue reports began flooding DownDetector at around 5am (GMT), With PR minions formally acknowledging the issue 2 hours later at 7am (GMT) via the most official channel available - Twitter. After a few recent updates via the grapevine (companies involved seems to be keeping their heads down at the minute) Ericsson has been fingered for pushing out a wonky software update but there's been no official confirmation of this, so pitchforks away please folks.

If you're in need of a giggle while you wait for your 4G goodness to return, You can always hop on an open WiFi network and read the tales of distress the data-less masses are screaming into the void.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

I die, go to hell and my punishment is to write software for hell network that is having power problems due to light source disruptions and is running on Windows 95 on FAT32 without any service pack.

Network speed is trough 300bps dial up modem. Protocol is over IPX/SPX.

My task is to write interactive websites that are replacement of modern websites but in VBScript, ActiveX, IE 4.0.

I have 10 managers that tell me what to do and scream when I miss deadline that is set everyday without my knowledge at random times.

They send me an email and 5 minutes later they arrive at my desk to ask me about it.

I must work 16 hours a day before I can leave the place and if I won’t show up police beats me and escorts me to the office.
If I’m late a second I don’t get payment.
I can’t afford to rent a place so I sleep in the sleeping bag.

It doesn’t matter much cause as soon as I fall asleep phone rings until I wake up and my manager screams about the problems he have for about an hour.

Unaware that this had been occurring for while, DBA manager walks into our cube area:

DBAMgr-Scott: "DBA-Kelly told me you still having problems connecting to the new staging servers?"
Dev-Carl: "Yea, still getting access denied. Same problem we've been having for a couple of weeks"
DBAMgr-Scott: "Damn it, I hate you. I got to have Kelly working with data warehouse project. I guess I've got to start working on fixing this problem."
Dev-Carl: "Ha ha..sorry. I've checked everything. Its definitely something on the sql server side."
DBAMgr-Scott: "I guess my day is shot. I've got to talk to the network admin, when I get back, lets put our heads together and figure this out."
<Scott leaves>
Me: "A permissions issue on staging? All my stuff is working fine and been working fine for a long while."
Dev-Carl: "Yea, there is nothing different about any of the other environments."
Me: "That doesn't sound right. What's the error?"
Dev-Carl: "Permissions"
Me: "No, the actual exception, never mind, I'll look it up in Splunk."
<in about 30 seconds, I find the actual exception, Win32Exception: Access is denied in OpenSqlFileStream, a little google-fu and .. >
Me: "Is the service using Windows authentication or SQL authentication?"
Dev-Carl: "SQL authentication."
Me: "Switch it to windows authentication"
<Dev-Carl changes authentication...service works like a charm>
Dev-Carl: "OMG, it worked! We've been working on this problem for almost two weeks and it only took you 30 seconds."
Me: "Now that it works, and the service had been working, what changed?"
Dev-Carl: "Oh..look at that, Dev-Jake changed the connection string two weeks ago. Weird. Thanks for your help."
<My brain is screaming "YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO LOOK FOR WHAT CHANGED!!!"
Me: "I'm happy I could help."

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

"PLEASE COME QUICKLY OUR INTERNAL NETWORK IS FUCKED!
-Uh, mam', could you describe the problem?"
Spent an hour, trying to fix this "network issue". Basic level 1 and 2 support. Can't connect using RDP on the server. No teamviewer either. Unplug, replug everything. Restart the server, the router, the switches. I knew that it was something dumb. I spent 3h on the highway.
To find.
That the fucking.
Ethernet cable.
Was plugged oN THE MOTHER FUCKING ILO PORT! FUCK HP, FUCK THIS, FUCK ME BECAUSE I SHOULD'VE ASKED FOR A PHOTO.

"It's fixed, mam'. Did you touch something when it was working?
-Uh, no, I swear. Also, could you please take a look at our printer? It's not working. It was out of ink so I changed the cartridge yesterday, but today it's not working!"

The cartridge was not inserted correctly.

Then she nicely made me a coffee, thanking me for the fix and asking what the problems were.

Just kidding.

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”

Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.

I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.

I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.

After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”

A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.

Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.

I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.

Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.

My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.

Today the IT deparment update the firewall's configuration, they blocked almost every website except email and Google.
The problems:
- Blocked some systems outside the organization, there are in another building and also network
- I can search on Google but I can't see the results outside Google
- Forget about download depencies, libraries, deploy code to outside services, search at StackOverflow

I JUST WANNA SAY GOOD JOB, GUYS

PS: The firewall also block the SSH port, I had explained to my boss and he sent a request for allowing the port, so far no answer

Best code performance incr. I made?

Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)

Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.

Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.

Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.

With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."

After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.

At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.

VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>

A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"

I work as the entire I.T. department of a small business which products are web based, so naturally, I do tech support in said website directly to our clients.

It is normal that the first time a new client access our site they run into questions, but usually they never call again since it is an easy website.

There was an unlucky client which ran into unknown problems and blamed the server.
I couldn't determine the exact cause, but my assumption was a network error for a few seconds which made the site unavailable and the user tried to navigate the site through the navbar and exited the process he was doing. It goes without saying but he was very angry.

I assured him there was nothing wrong with the site, and told him that it would not be charged for this reason. Finally i told him that if he had the same problem, to let me know instead of trying to fix it himself.

The next time he used the site I received a WhatsApp message saying:
- there is something clearly wrong with the site... It has been doing this for so long!
And attached was a 10 second video which showed that he filled a form and never pressed send (my forms have small animations and text which indicates when the form is being send and error messages when an error occurs, usually not visible because the data they send is small and the whole process is quite fast)

To which I answer
- It seems that the form has not been send that's why it looks that way
- So... What an I supposed to do?
- click send
It took a while but the client replied
- ok

To this day I wonder how much time did the client stared at the form cursing the server.

Only touching the topic slightly:

In my school time we had a windows domain where everyone would login to on every computer. You also had a small private storage accessible as network share that would be mapped to a drive letter so everyone could find it. The whole folder containing the private subfolders of everyone was shared so you could see all names but they were only accessible to the owner.

At some point, though, I tried opening them again but this time I could see the contents. That was quite unexpected so I tried reading some generic file which also worked without problems. Even the write command went through successfully. Beginning to grasp the severity of the misconfiguration I verified with other userfolders and even borrowed the account of someone else.

Skipping the "report a problem" form, which would have been read at at least in the next couple hours but I figured this was too serious, I went straight to the admin and told him what I found. You can't believe how quickly he ran off to the admin room to have a look/fix the permissions.

Bloody Windows kept waking up after a few seconds of being suspended. Someone here mentioned it could be the mouse, so I disabled its function to wake the pc . And you know what? That piece of trash windows still kept waking up for no reason. Makes me angry.

So I found this magic command 'powercfg/lastwake', which shows the reason for the last wake. And look at that! The fucking realtek network shitcard is allowed to wake windows.

Why would windows enable that on its own? Why? Because I for sure did not make this change and suspend was working for me until a few months ago (yes, these kind of problems take me very long to fix, even though it would tske only two minutes).

Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).

1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.

I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.

Tldr: I just FAILED AN EXAM because of my uni's SHITTIEST SERVERS EVER. YEAR AFTER YEAR THE EXACT SAME SHIT HAPPENS, THEIR SERVERS OR NETWORK FAIL HARD AND STUDENTS FAIL EXAMS BECAUSE OF IT, AND THEY NEVER FIX IT.
FUCK

In the middle of a 3h exam at uni, using Matlab through virtualdesktop, when suddenly it stops working entirely. Trying to restart it, no go. A few other people are having the same issue as well.
After 20 minutes of waiting, one IT tech shows up saying people in other labs are having the same issue, big problems.
Ended up wasting nearly an hour waiting for shit to work again - which it did, but only when the extra time they had given us ran out.
Desperately tried to salvage what I could of my exam, but I don't think I did enough to pass.

This is not the first time it happens. Exam after exam, shit like this keeps happening over and over again, and every time some students get fucked in the ass and have to take the exam again - the next semester.

This is supposed to be one of the top universities in the country, and top 20 engineering schools in the world.
FUCK THIS SHIT

TL;DR - the doctor is a lazy cunt and I hope he steps on a lego.

We’ve got a user authentication portal for all the users in our network. Well, we have it set to where you can only have two active log ins on two different machines, anything else will give the error message “you need to log out elsewhere” or whatever it is...
This god damn doctor has been told to log out several times and still calls us to ask why it’s “not working”.

I just received a call because the lazy cock sucker didn’t want to walk from the clinic to the hospital to sign out, are you fucking kidding me you lazy fucking ass hole? It’s not my job to be your mother fucking slave dude, get the fuck up and do it yourself!

I’ll take a lot of shit from anyone but when you refuse to retain the information to preform your job and want someone else to do it because you’re too fucking lazy, that’s when we’ve got problems.

I hope you step on a fucking LEGO.

I’m heavily medicated so if this doesn’t make sense I... don’t care.

Aaaaaaaargh!! Fing ashole!!
I got a major blocker reported, tried to connect to client, two of the user accounts were locked out because some genious used the last months password too many times.. FUUUU!! This happens almost every month!! FU! I go to the support dpt to check WTH is with those user accounts and got told the VPN is fucked up anyway so I will not be able to connect in any casr (disconnecting, bad transfer rate, it has a flue or prebirth cramps...whatever...). Ok, I ask if anyone notified our network admins and theirs.. And in response one guy mumbles something... I asked really really pissed off (due to the seriousnrs of the situation, we have max 8h to fix blockers and must check what is going on in minutes) if he is talking to me and answering my question or just talking to himself. He then a little bit more audiably said: we all are unable to work, you are not the only one with this problem & if you have a solutio... I already stormed out. Yes, everyone has problems connecting, no not everyone has a fucking blocker assigned to them!! Mayor malfunction on our system is not the same as archiving old processing data!!!

Simple yes or no question: did anyone notify our network admins & client's network admins?! And client's management that we have technical problems and cannot check the blocker situation immediately?! And I get a mumbling incompetents guy response... OmFG yes, I have a solution for you!! Go and jump of of the terrace!!

The IT guy my parents had often at their home.

This guy thought me how to manage our network, how to create mobile apps. How to debug problems and so on. He sparked so much interest for computers in me and now i can't stop fiddleing around with computers.

Also this "electrician" who worked for my parents.
Basically he fixxed old keyboards, loudspeakers and stuff like that. He thought me about resistors, transistors, blue prints and how to solder stuff.

"Lötzinn blödsinn"

They both started my journey into the rabbit hole of technology.

Sometimes I have to work with physical hardware. There are over 300 machines in our lab, split among two subnets. But for some reason, I can never access my machines by hostnames.

Every other week, there's an IP conflict on this network, requiring me to log into the active directory server and delete old DNS entries. This usually happens because someone decided to deploy 64 VMs on a huge server, all at once, didn't boot them with a delay, let alone with with a warning to IT.

Then when my superior asks how my progress has been and I respond with "I can't even get the machines to ping each other by hostname, there's something wrong with the DNS:, I get the following response: "HOW COME NOBODY ELSE IS HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THIS. YOU'RE FULL OF SHIT", from someone who spends 90% of the year abroad, working remotely.

Why is it that you guys are not seeing the big picture and reading between the fucken lines... why is it that people always have to run to legislation to fix their problems .... THIS IS WHY.. the other generation accomplished so much more because when there’s a problem they came up with a solution many times better than the status quo.
Those people are few and far between now.. those folks are the innovators. You know whom I’m referring to... those people didn’t whine to create laws to fix or protect their industry from competitors.
We need to stop looking toward our government to fix our issues... especially regarding this issue.. WHY because the people in government ARE NOT TECH PEOPLE!!! THEY DONT EVEN KNOW HOW COMPUTERS WORK! for Pete’s sake folks we had a lady in there who thought the term whip the server ment to literally clean it with a rag... come-on guys, do what they did years ago you don’t like something FIX IT.. by creating something new!
There’s a reason our grandparents generation made it to the fucken moon with less technology than a calculator, BECAUSE THEY PROBLEM SOLVED!
What have we achieved in the last 5 years that is really “big”... fucken apps

Unite together build the next internet learning from the issues we’ve seen with the internet over the last 30 years.. No it won’t be quick no it won’t be easy but nothing revolutionary is easy.
It took 6 years to land a man on the moon, I think we can rebuild the network infrastructure in that time OR FAR LESS if we unite together! Without the government interference we can eliminate the ISPs from the equation and screw them over for screwing us for so long

My group is has the solution, the vision and need, to get this done be we can’t do it alone I will make the official public statement within 24 hours of the vote results...
explaining everything, the plan, the work, EVERYTHING.
We need more people.
For reference the plan can be summarized like this.. nonprofit CoOp Tier 1 ISP.. members being the end users from both sides of the equation ...

TILL THEN
Contact me here,
Or SnapChat: theqsolution
Until I release all the contact info.

Is it normal that IT support of a multinational bigass corporate drops the "we may need to change your PC because maybe your network card is defective" after explaining over and over that you have problems with HTTPS only when using the corporate network (whether onsite or via VPN) and not in external connections?

Holy shit firefox, 3 retarded problems in the last 24h and I haven't fixed any of them.
My project: an infinite scrolling website that loads data from an external API (CORS hehe). All Chromium browsers of course work perfectly fine. But firefox wants to be special...
(tested on 2 different devices)
(Terminology: CORS: a request to a resource that isn't on the current websites domain, like any external API)

1.
For the infinite scrolling to work new html elements have to be silently appended to the end of the page and removed from the beginning. Which works great in all browsers. BUT IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE SCROLLING DURING THE APPENDING & REMOVING FIREFOX TELEPORTS YOU RANDOMLY TO THE END OR START OF PAGE!
Guess I'll just debug it and see what's happening step by step. Oh how wrong I was. First, the problem can't be reproduced when debugging FUCK! But I notice something else very disturbing...

2.
The Inspector view (hierarchical display of all html elements on the page) ISN'T SHOWING THE TRUE STATE OF THE DOM! ELEMENTS THAT HAVE JUST BEEN ADDED AREN'T SHOWING UP AND ELEMENT THAT WERE JUST REMOVED ARE STILL VISIBLE! WTF????? You have to do some black magic fuckery just to get firefox to update the list of DOM elements. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEBUG MY WEBSITE ON FIREFOX IF IT'S SHOWING ME PLAIN WRONG DATA???!!!!

3.
During all of this I just randomly decided to open my website in private (incognito) mode in firefox. Huh what's that? Why isn't anything loading and error are thrown left and right? Let's just look at the console. AND IT'S A FUCKING CORS ERROR! FUCK ME! Also a small warning says some URLs have been "blocked because content blocking is enabled." Content Blocking? What is that? Well it appears to be a supper special supper privacy mode by firefox (turned on automatically in private mode), THAT BLOCKS ALL CORS REQUESTS, THAT MAY OR MAY NOT DO SOME TRACKING. AN API THAT 100% CORS COMPLIANT CAN'T BE USED IN FIREFOXs PRIVATE MODE! HOW IS THE END USER SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT??? AND OF COURSE THE THROWN EXCEPTION JUST SAYS "NETWORK ERROR". HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL THE USER THAT FIREFOX HAS A FEAUTRE THAT BREAKS THE VERY BASIS OF MY WEBSITE???

WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL FIREFOX??????????????????

I actually managed to come up with fix for 1. that works like < 50% of the time -_-

Weekly status reports. BITCH, I'M TOO BUSY WORKING TO TELL YOU WHAT I DID THIS WEEK.

Mine are also almost always the same:
"fixed broken thing"
"worked on reports for broken thing"
"helped new teammates fix broken thing"
ISSUES REQUIRING ATTENTION:
"my connection is still shit, like i warned would happen before I moved"
"need workstation already connected to network to reduce connection problems"

These don't help the people who need to be micromanaged, and they just piss off those of us who don't.

fuck wordpress... Got a request to improve wordpress site speed + pagespeed score. 20-30 plugins, 15 or more additional ones off. Improved the score and noticed that my adblocker is blocking a lot of urls. Sure enough theres a hidden iframe in the bottom with 10 ad network scripts and bidding get requests. Someone is making ad revenue from this shit.. wtf. I've only had problems with shitty wordpress sites being hacked for some reason. It's always a shitty experience. Any tips on fixing hacked wordpress sites?

Fucking fuck fuck fuck outdated superiors that know jack shit about how software development works. Dnt even know about git, docker, cloud services. Everything is done on premise with network that is fucking crap and when an app is down "hey why is it down?" ask the fucking server and network admin how the fuck am i supossed to know? i have to create workaround codes when other devs just need to deploy their app and its fucking running as it should be. why the fuck do i need to spend my time debugging Ping timeouts? im a fucking dev. I have done designs, analyze requirements, build frontend, backend, optimize codes, paying attention to security and now i have to fix network problems as well? fuck off

Create Innovation my fucking arse. you just Keep saying that but then wondering "what is this new thing youre trying? its new and different why do that?" because you asked for innovation you fuck. If i copied some other concept its not innovation is it pricks.

Fuck them and all the brown nosers as well.

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

Saw this old post in my backup drive! Now that was a good one.

A little and sweet rant about RANTS! What the hell guys, I can finally think about a social network happily, but I have the feeling that I'm not a part of this awesome community :'( I mean, everyone is getting problem with some clients or whatever. But I'm currently unemployed, and never really get through that kind of problems. Ok they lied to me on the job, ok I paid 15000 euros 2 years of school where there were still people who doesn't care about the work, ok I left my girlfriend, ok I have a fucking hard time to go back to work with that... But all of this is not really juicy, my life is simple and mostly happy :'(
Maybe I should hope that my next job will be with stupid people :o
I love you guys <3

I was working on a new feature for this legacy project.. Just minding my own buisness then all out of the blue I got an email from our client (before the email I exported the live database because I needed to reproduce a weird bug) saying the sync stopped working
<backstory>
The database needs to sync every 15 minutes because it has a master-master relationship with a 3rd party database..
</backstory>
So I was like shiiit! Did I do that!? So I checked the logs, nothing... I called the 3rd part to check if they have problems, nothing.. Then I checked the network logs... Again all fine... 30 nervous minutes later, I got a new mail... Saying it finally synced... Still have no clue what happened or if it ever was a problem... God damn clients man...

Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

QA personal voice assistant that runs locally without cloud, it’s like never ending project. I look at it from time to time and time pass by. Chat bots arrived, some decent voice algorithms appeared. There is less and less stuff to code since people progress in that area a lot.

I want to save notes using voice, search trough them, hear them, find some stuff in public data sources like wikipedia and also hear that stuff without using hands, read news articles and stuff like that.

I want to spend, more time for math and core algorithms related to machine learning and deep learning.

Problem is once I remember how basic network layers, error correction algorithms work or how particular deep learning algorithm is constructed and why is that, it’s already a week passed and I don’t remember where I started.

I did it couple of times already and every time I remember more then before but understanding core requires me sitting down with pen and paper and math problems and I don’t have time for that.

Now when I’m thinking about it - maybe I should write it somewhere in organized way. Get back to blogging and write articles about what I learned. This would require two times the time but maybe it would help to not forget.

I’m mostly interested in nlp, tts, stt. Wavenet, tacotron, bert, roberta, sentiment analysis, graphs and qa stuff. And now crystallography cause crystals are just organized graphs in 3d.

Well maybe if I’m lucky I retire in the next decade or at least take a year or two years off to have plenty of time to finish this project.

F**king hate Windows for its insanely confusing proxy setup required for software development...

> Setup proxy in Windows network settings
> Then, setup HTTP_PROXY & HTTPS_PROXY environment variable at the system/user level.
> Followed by separate proxy settings for java, maven, docker, git, npm, bower, jspm, eclipse, VS Code, every damn IDE/Editor which downloads plugins...
> On top of everything, find out the domains which does not need to go through proxy and add them to NO_PROXY.. at each level..
> It does not end here. Sometimes, I need to setup proxy for SSH connections... like, if I have to use git with SSH and not HTTP/S... Uhhh....

More than half of the problems me and my dev team face is related to setting the right proxy. Why can't it be like, set in one place and everything picks up from there, like in any linux machine or for God's sake, a Mac ?

Worst of all is, my org uses a configuration script, which resolves into a list of proxy servers, from which one of them will be used. So, I need to download that script, find out which is the right proxy server and then, use it in all the aforesaid places... WTH ?????

Is this a common workplace problem for all developers ??? Will this be solved by Windows Subsystem for Linux ???

I started a short term contract job that requires access to company online resources. Only problem is the office I'm working in has really bad internet. The connection speed at best is comparable to dial up and at worse just non-existent. I tried tethering to my phone but this wasn't working either due to low signal. I mention this as an issue early on the week to the boss. Later in the week the boss asks how things are going at the same time that the network is down. I tell him the same problem. He then tells me his computer is fast and he has internet, so I show him the 2 computers I have access to and how they are too slow/no internet. He then tells me a bad workman blames his tools and he's not happy with me for having problems.

Don't even know what to say to that. I just told him this role wasn't working for me and clocked out.

I’m really struggling to see WHY IN THE HELL it was necessary to delete my FUCKING NETWORK PROFILES to update this FRUIT FUCKED ALUMINUM SHIT BOX!

How did they test this and be like, oh, yea, you can’t connect automatically to ANY of the WiFi networks you have saved, because we deleted all the network profiles. That is acceptable, it won’t cause anyone any real problems.

Sure you need to update some shit. But why are you even touching that part of the disk? Damn you filthy lying fruit fuckers!

1 - I love coding because since when I was a kid I really loved to solve problems and create things

2 - I always tried to understand how computers worked, and how could yo make a program because when I was a kid I was almost always on the computer and my dream was to create a virus 😂

3 - I was studying my baccalaureate and I hadn't decided what to study in the university. I was only playing videogames and installing software to make jokes. So, my computing teacher taught me to code in VB.net and how to manage a local network so I decided to study and IT degree before going to the university, and when I was studying that I falled in love with programming so I'm currently in the university studying software development engineer

Well, being the only one in the house who can really solve computer problems:
We have a home nas in our network for filestorage and since a few weeks, we couldn't acces the device through windows explorer, so today I went on a exploration... First I tried the nas in a seperate different network, and it worked immediatly! oke great, try it in our main network again. And 'ofcours' it's not visible. So I go to the router webpage, and the page of our router just really sucks! So it was quite hard to find out if the NAS was attached or not, ad if so, under which IP. Finally found that, tried to connect to the webpage of the NAS, but got a timeout, ping would timeout too! I thought that that might have someting to do with that the NAS would connect via static IP. So I changed that to a dynamic IP, and I could atleast get to the website. After that I could try all the services and all of them worked perfectly, except for samba... And samba is the only service we actually use, so after that I thought that the device not showing up in network view in explorer had something to do with that the nas wouldn't show me a hostname in the router. So I tried to fix that, after an hour of trying to get the hostname to showup in the router, I just thought that I might try to connect to the nas via the IP. So I found via SO that I could just use //192.168.0.104 and I got into the samba server. So I guess that it was actually working all along 😒. After that I didn't want to bother to work with the hostnames, so I just gave the NAS a fixed IP, made a few shortcuts for my housemates and now it all works again.. For now at least...

We are researching enhancing our current alerting system (we use Splunk) to be 'smarter' about who is emailed/texted/whatever when there are problems in our applications.

Currently, if there are over 50 errors logged within a 15 minute period, a email/phone/text blast to nearly 100 individuals ranging from developers, network admins, DBAs, and vice presidents.

Our plan is to group errors by team and let each team manage their own applications. Alert on 1 error, 5, 500...we don't care, let the team work out the particulars.

The trick was interfacing with Splunk's API (that's a long rant by itself)

In about a day or so I was able to use Splunk's WebHook feature to notify a WebAPI service I threw together to send myself an email with details about the underlying data (simulating the kind of alert we would send to the team)

I thought ...cool... it worked. Show it off to the team, most thought it was a good start, except one:

Dev: "The errors are not grouped by team."
Me: "No, I threw the webapi service together to demonstrate how we can extract the splunk bits to get access to the teams"
Dev: "Well...this won't work at all."
Me: "Um..what?"
Dev: "The specification c l e a r l y states the email will be team based. This email was only sent to you and has all the teams and their applications"
Me: "Um...uh...the service can, if we want to go using a service route. Grouping by team name is easy using a LINQ query. I just through this service together yesterday."
Dev: "I don't know. Sounds like I need to schedule a meeting to discuss what you are proposing. I don't think emailing all that to everyone is a good idea."

WTF! Did you not listen to what I said?!!!

Oh well..the dev's proposal is to use splunk's email notification and custom Exchange rules with callbacks into splunk that resend...oh good lord ...a fracking rube goldberg of a config nightmare ...

I suspect we'll go the service route once I finish the service before the meeting.

I slowly relise that "modrn" developpers don't know a minimal things about programming (yes, i'm using "programming" instead of "evelopping")

They copy paste shit, it works. They resolve some problems it works.

But... They have have ZERO understading of what they are doing.

Just couple of days, got a discution with a person who is "Blazor expert". who will be paied 200$ / hour to find problem in current implementation. I KNOW there are problems because couple of them I introduced my self.

We at server side. I provided test logins, plus 10 page document explaining infrastracture.

One of his first question in interview : "Oh. I cannot see ajax calls in network in chrome".

WTF DUDE ? Do you even understand how server side blazor works ?!

Welp, he is hired. FOrt 120 hours.

I' want to see what he will present, as it's clear as day he doesn't know a thing about server side blazor architecture.

When your network admin doesnt realize you are a developer and get paid to fix problems. Tries to change your background to Justin(e) Bieber with group policies and you overwrite them in the registry. Now to plot revenge...

Someone wanted to take a look to kde on Ubuntu 18.04 in my laptop, so did:

`sudo tasksel install kubuntu-desktop`

After rebooting and all did:

`sudo tasksell remove kubuntu-desktop`

and now I don't have GUI. The problem is that I can't also have network, neither by WiFi or ethernet. So I can't install packages.

The best way to fix that is to reinstall Ubuntu? Or there is a way to recover the ability to connect to network?

BTW, yes: "someone" was myself.
Shame on me 😔

So the company I work at is moving to a new location. We are a small company, so we were all talking about potential problems with the move - network, internet, firewalls, access to servers and so on. Us trying to cover all possible scenarios.

Our CTO looks up and says: “or we could just cross our fingers and hope for best”.

WTF🤯

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

tldr; Finally my NordVPN subscription comes to an end so I was looking at other VPN providers and I chose Mullvad. So far, it is an amazing experience.

It has been 2 years since I was using NordVPN. It was great at first but soon first problems started to appear. Speeds were not exactly breathtaking and I barely sqeezed more than 40Mb out of it. Another problem was connecting from PC to PC on local network with both of them connected to VPN. I never found a working solution.
Then Tefincom started pushing it literally everywhere. Ads on YouTube (+ partnerships), fake websites redirecting to NordVPN, etc. That was when I decided to just fucking wait until my subscription ends so I can finally delete my account there...
Today is the day. I decided to go Mullvad because it seemed to be really privacy focused (don't kill me - I know I can't have *real* privacy with VPN, but you also can't have that with your own VPN) - they don't know anything about me, no email, no name, no payment data (Bitcoin Cash). Speeds are absolutely f*cking amazing and also local network works!

So just now I had to focus on a VM running in virt-manager.. common stuff, yeah. It uses a click of le mouse button to focus in, and Ctrl-Alt-L to release focus. Once focused, the VM is all there is. So focus, unfocus, important!

Except Mate also uses Ctrl-L to lock the screen. Now I actually don't know the password to my laptop. Autologin in lightdm and my management host can access both my account and the root account (while my other laptop uses fingerprint authentication to log in, but this one doesn't have it). Conveniently my laptop can also access the management host, provided a key from my password manager.. it makes more sense when you have a lot of laptops, servers and other such nuggets around. The workstations enter a centralized environment and have access to everything else on the network from there.

Point is, I don't know my password and currently this laptop is the only nugget that can actually get this password out of the password store.. but it was locked. You motherfucker for a lock screen! I ain't gonna restart lightdm, make it autologin again and lose all my work! No no no, we can do better. So I took my phone which can also access the management host, logged in as root on my laptop and just killed mate-screensaver instead. I knew that it was just an overlay after all, providing little "real" security. And I got back in!

Now this shows an important security problem. Lock screens obviously have it.. crash the lock screen somehow, you're in. Because behind that (quite literally) is your account, still logged in. Display managers have it too to some extent, since they run as root and can do autologin because root can switch user to anyone else on the system without authentication. You're not elevating privileges by logging in, you're actually dropping them. Just something to think about.. where are we just adding cosmetic layers and where are we actually solving security problems? But hey, at least it helped this time. Just kill the overlay and bingo bango, we're in!

bruuuuuuuuuh I got an email asking for tech LatinX people to join for a talk on our problems facing x shit in tech.

As a Mexican American (I am more American than Mexican, but whatever) and your standard gun tootin Texan: fuck you, do not call me LatinX

I know both English and Spanish (and other languages that won't disclose here because fk u) well and believe that adding such buuuuuuuullshit to my beautiful Spanish is utter nonsense.

I sent it to the network admin and ask him to block them fuckers from ever sending emails my way ever again as spam.

LatinX....what a fucking joke

The networking group at my day job, hooooooolly crap I have some unprintable words. But keeping it professional:

* Days to turn around simple firewall whitelisting requests
* Expecting other teams to know the network layout despite not sharing that information anywhere and going out of their way to not share it
* Adding bureaucracy in the form of separate Word doc forms despite having a ticketing system - for no justifiable reason
* Breaking production systems multiple times per month
* Calling in with problems that are clearly network related, being told it’s our systems, and then the problems magically go away even though they swear they didn’t touch anything
* Outright verifiable lies or vague non-answers when they’re not talking to someone at the director level or a vendor from an outside company on conference calls
* Worse packet loss and throughput on our LAN than my home ISP

Doing anything with these clowns is my single biggest source of stress right now. I can’t wait until we get a full SDN stack set up and then we won’t have to deal with them for day-to-day needs any longer.

My boss swears it’s better that we’re not managing the network directly, but I’m pretty sure my friend’s dog could be loosed into the data center to chew on fiber, and eventually the pairs would be connected in such a way as to improve performance.

proxying youtube

today I thought writing a quick project, a youtube proxy server, as in, you browse localhost:<PORT> and youtube comes in the response.

this is not rocket science as proxy servers have around for a long time.

I thought it'd be interesting to code it in userland, as opposed to "systemland".

And 50 lines of code and some minor hurdles later I see youtube "running" in localhost.

Although youtube didn't just work as usual since the videos don't actually come from youtube.com, but from googlevideo.com instead. And my browser, expectably, enforces CORS and forbids any requests to it.

At that point I started to think of ways to somehow proxy googlevideo.com too. But the solutions are not at all trivial.

Then I thought what was the payoff of all this. I tried to proxy serve youtube out of curiosity, and sure thing, you can do it.

But what problem would proxying youtube solve? Maybe I should think in a fuller way what are the problems I have with youtube.

One issue I have is the exposure, discoverability. To explain it, let's say I have been watching a very, very big amount of videos as of today.

Personally I would expect youtube to understand very well by now what my tastes are, what do I want to watch and what I do NOT want to watch.

Notice that I am very black and white, and I do not have much interest in watching certain types of videos.

It could be true that if my expectations of how youtube should work became reality then youtube recommendations would become polarizing or echo chambering.

But that is my decision though, and the problem with youtube is that it's seemingly forcing a single recommendations algorithm onto everyone.

Some people are more open minded and want to watch EVERYTHING, and a lot of people don't.

But users aren't deciding what they should get recommended. Youtube is making that decision for them. And it sure feels like it's trying to maximize ad revenue.

I for one don't give two flying fucks about pranks or diva youtubers. Yet youtube is adamant in presenting some of these to me.

Now, trying to come up with a solution for this is really non trivial. It would definitely require some youtube mining, or some kind of network so as to not get rate limited when mining, and even then you still have to think of how a good recommendation system would work.

I think the implementation of all that would be too much for me (time and skill wise). But I think it's fun to at least try to outline how recommendations could work.

I would very much prefer that when youtube recommended something, at least it has some number of confidence meaning how much would I like that video, so at least I know what to expect.

It should also have some indicators like what is the mood of the video. As in, sometimes I watch youtube in the mood of learning, like programming videos, but most of the time I watch to get entertained.

These ideas are just brainstorms and could be terrible on reproduction, but I'd like to hear what ideas can some of the people here can come up with.

!tech #off_my_chest
when I look back to the earlier years of my life, I see nothing but loneliness. I had no friends in school, people didn't sit with me, only a few people barely talked with me and it was a mess.
I used to blame my parents for it: I thought they isolated me in a lot of areas which lead to hampering my growth and relations.

However, I recently got a taste of my old days and realized the root cause of the problem: DISEASES.

I used to be a very weak and sick child. I had extreme cough so much so that i will go on coughing for 1 min in every 2 mins. Cough hasn't touched me in last 10 years, but recently i caught cough again and it lead to a whole lot of revelations.

I currently have a good social network. I have one friend from past 10 years with whom I used to goto the park every day. I took off this park routine for 2 days citing sickness and he was worried. So once I felt better on 3rd day, i went to the park with him. While walking I again started coughing (albeit very less), but I could notice his expressions. he wanted to just get out of this whole situation. Next day, he didn't even bothered to message, and when i did, he started making excuses.

I had another group of home friends, who are so close to me that we went for snacks at any random time on any random day. Last year i went onto 3 road trips with them. but last weekend they straight up declined meeting me saying get better first.

---------------------------
I don't blame any of my friends or parents.
no one wants to be around a sick person, thinking that if the situation worsens, then the ill guy might need help that they couldn't provide, and if the situation went out of hand, then they would be the one to blame. And it's not just my illness, I think this might apply to anyone with an illness or a disability. everyone treats them as liabilities or time ticking bombs

Everyone wants to be in a homogenous group of healthy people with no one having any life problems so everyone could enjoy a movie life.

Guess what? THAT'S NOT HOW LIFE WORKS!!

People are at different stages of life in terms of age, knowledge, power, health, and finances. in a group of 5, if people come together to watch a movie, there maybe 1 person who is giving away his evening's dinner money for affording the tickets. another might be missing out on her sick grandma or office work just to be part of this one gathering for 3 hours.

And regarding ill people, we are not your responsibility once we are out of our patient bed!

I understand that I might need my friend's help in calling my parents or an ambulance if the situation worsens, but isn't that normal for healthy people too? what if 2 guys are walking on the street and one is hit by a car? won't the other call the ambulance?

And suppose My friend is not able to the help I needed, would I blame him for it?
NO!
Absolutely no! It was my decision to go out and meet people even when sick even if it was a risky move. Life only goes forward if we take risks. But if it backfired, then the instance where he was not able to help would be much less significant than the instance where i decided to get up and go out. That would be the only major blame area and the only person to blame would be me, myself!

The sick is just an inconvenience on people's souls, that's it.

--------

This whole experience makes me so worried about my office and professional situation. I am an excellent engineer working from home and this WFH has helped me keep my cough from worsening while working in a professional capacity.

But our office is shifting to WFO and that is a concern.
1. being in a different state, and working in office takes so much attention and focus that i often forget eating lunch or going to washroom. idk how i will treat my sickness if i got sick there.

2. being in home, i can do my work without bothering other people with my cough. at office, people will want to sit away from me and that ewould be not possible. eventually i would be forced by people to take leaves to "get better" as am bothering everyone

3. if i don't get "better" soon, which is there definition of being healthy enough to come to the office without any sickness (even though my illness doesn't hamper my efficiency), they will fire me .

i am royally fucked. even when i get better, WFO will always have a negetive factor like this. for cases of self illness, family illness, parents illness, if you are not being an 'office' slave (just being the 'work' slave isn't enough), you won't get the money

My workplace is still using xml based configuration, and non-spring boot projects.

So every spring boot tutorial I find feels like "Look at how easy you can get this running" and then it's just actually a toy you can't get into production.

Also it kind of bugs me that you need to be online to actually be able to initialize/create a spring boot project and every single tutorial says so.
You can make a local network m2 repository, but can one make a spring initializer service?

Either way, migrating every single project to Spring boot is a no-no,

And I'm stuck with like 5 prototypes of SSO integration from which only 2 work, and the other 3 have their own problems.

One does redirect to the login and all, but the SAML endpoint gets 404 on response when you log in.

One is on OpenID Connect, but I would need to update the project from Spring 3 to Spring 5 to get it working, which upon attempting to do seems to break everything else.

One has an external library handling the security context just the way we are accustomed to, but it only does a 401 forbidden when you go without logging in and I'm starting to think it is actually one of those that require you to extract the token or something manual like that, which wouldn't work for us

The other two are spring boot tutorials that worked out of the box, both SAML and OpenID, still can't use those for the main projects.

I'm tired of dealing with this configuration hell, been two months at this, I want to get features done as usual, not be stuck configuring stuff that might or might not work.

Rant aside, I think I figured I need to use a different Security adapter, but I needed to vent.

Who, more than I, totally HATE emoji?

lol I hate emoji after it caused so much problems with Microsoft Outlook and email backups from said program combined with emoji in subjects.

Wrote an subject filter in exim4 (took 3 days to debug and get working propely) that totally eradicate anything that isnt ISO-8859-1 from the subject line, then converts the rest to UTF-8 (because said IMAP client isnt following standards).

it also converts ISO-8859-1 characters in subjects to UTF-8 even if the original subject is declared to be UTF-8, because obviously some software (especially newsletter software) are transmitting ISO-8859-1 subjects that are declared to be in UTF-8 (but the opposite isn't true).

And also cuts subject to 100 chars, because too long subjects are a problem too. Same with date headers, I replace them with the server date/time because some software are sending Date: 1970 Jan 01 00:00:00, because some of these erronous headers are put by some mailing list software, aswell as causing problem in OEM clients like Samsung Mail.

Problem solved, all IMAP clients happy on internal network.

Windows diagnostic tool wants to search for a solution to my desktop's network problems on the internet :/
Plus, I discovered my Windows installation created 40+ ethernet connections on its' own behalf... Time to wipe Windows.. :/
Luckily I use Linux on my Notebook...

TL;DR: There was a Steam bug and I fixed it locally.

Some months ago, Steam had the problem, that if you tried to add anything from the Steam Workshop to a collection, you would get an error like "Process failed: 2", while it was loading the collection list.
I realized, that it would work, but there was a bug in the JS (Watched the network tab in chrome while trying to add to collection). I searched after "Process failed" in each js file and after 30 seconds I found the buggy if. It said something like
if (json.success != 2) {
//do error
} else {
//show list
}

After I changed that if condition to
if (false)...
it worked perfectly, although it would make problems if there would be a server side error.

At this point of my side project I wanted to check out openresty for dynamic proxy creation in nginx.

Happy to check it out I installed centos 7 as guest using new command I just learned virt-builder that would automate vm creation.

Spend 10 hours debugging why I can ping and ssh but cannot get to application port from any network.

Checked iptables, restarted network, reinstalled vm again 3 times with different methods.
Scrolled trough whole internet and it’s mostly outdated problems.
Learned bunch of new commands without new results.

Results were always the same:
No route to host.

Turned out firewalld is fucking thing now.

systemctl firewalld stop helped

Now I know that systemd would kill me at some point for sure.

What I can add at this point ?

Please add more distros, differences, standards and programming languages so world definitely would be better place.
I need a short break now to actually start making shit that I wanted to start at 4-5pm on Saturday.
It’s Sunday 3:30am and time for breakfast.
At least I am happy it started working.

So I reverse engineered the
protocol of QONQR: World in Play and made a mitmproxy addon running locally inside termux that can see when I launch in the game and uses Termux:API to notify me when my ingame resources are replenished.
I direct the traffic through mitmproxy using Drony. I configured it so that by default Drony passes traffic directly to the internet except if it comes from the QONQR app.
The problem is that while Drony is running, there is a chance of network traffic being corrupted so I often get spammed by connection and ssl errors.
So I have to either continue sacrificimg my network integrity or stop getting assistance ppaying QONQR :-/

Does anyone know an alternative to Drony (basically an app that can connect you to a proxy without root using the android vpn api, if possible with filtering by app or ip)?
Also does anyone else have problems with drony on Android 9 or other versions? I don't really have an opportunity to test it.

Edit: It only took 4 tries to post this yay

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

The name of today is Murphy.

So, the LAN at location A can't reach the one at location B. Turns out that something yet unknown is blowing fuses at location A, but after disconnecting a ton of unknowns, the router and a radio link station are up again. Yay Internet, but still no VPN connection to location B.

Needing the passwords for the OpenVPN servers, I notice that encfs4win refuses to mount the drive where the password manager files reside. Of course, any problem must have the company of other problems. Eventually, the encfs drive mounts on another computer.

So, I can access the OpenVPN computer running the client side and check the logs, which tell me that network B is unreachable.

Both networks and an encfs setup all die at the same time? Right, Murphy, what are you going to come up with next? No, don't tell me because I just got read errors from a hard drive.

Hell of a Docker

One application in c++. 4 in c# targeting Linux. Several logging places, Several configuration files , dozens of different folders to access (read/write). Many applications being called from just one that orchestrates everything.

OS is Linux. Installation is to be made inside a docker image and later placed in a container by means of several bash files and python scripts. All these are part of a legacy set of applications.

They’ve asked me to just comment out one line which took 3 days to find out because they didn’t remember where it was and in which application it was and what was in that line.

After changing it, I was asked to create a test environment which must have resemblance to the current server in production. 12 days later And many errors, headaches, problems with docker, I got it done.

Test starts and then, problems with docker volumes, network, images, docker-composer, config files and applications, started to appear.

1 month later, I still have problems and can’t run all applications at least once completely using the whole set.

Just one simple task of deploying locally some applications, which would take one or two days, is becoming a nightmare.

Conclusion: While still trying to figure out why an infinite loop was caused by some DB connection attempt in an application, I am collecting a great amount of hate for docker. It might be good for something, that’s for sure, but in my experience so far, it is far worse than any expectations I had before using it.

Lesson learned: Must run away from tasks involving that shit!

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

I am so close to crying it is just not funny, every time i close my eyes I picture Superman's Scream after snapping Zod's neck in man of steel i.e. filled with pain, anguish and not being able to accept what you have become... I am not a dev but I have been glued to a computer screen since 7 years old.

I work for a company as the I.T. Administrator that does quite a bit of specialized work in the regulatory industry and has there own in-house software. This was built by one developer after another, hired straight out of university/college and you cannot believe how big of a monster this became being built with direction from someone who cant code and a bunch of "drunk children" who do not know good principles (swear to god thousands of lines with no comments and no OOP)

Now I am validating and testing a system, i keep being asked if we will be ready by the end of the week and due to my lack of qualifications after dropping out of school I keep thinking yes, but every time i test something I find another problem, I may not be able to code but understanding quickly is my strength and I know this shit is not simple.

I am under constant pressure to deliver something quickly.

Any concerns I raise are almost brushed off because I am an idiot with no qualifications who should be greatful for the work I am doing and the low as balls salary

The problems I solve are commended by the 10+ years of experience senior developer writing the application for us, yet I get shit for taking an hour to find the problem that existed in our network setup because it is the devs job (OMFG HE WOULD NEVER HAVE REALIZED WITHOUT COMING HERE AND LOOKING AT OUR INFRASTRUCTURE... WE WOULD HAVE BEEN STUCK FOR A FUCKING MONTH!!!!)

I see only 2 courses ahead for my life. The easy way and the hard way.

Easy way, buy a gun and end it all.

Suffer for 3 more years in the place that is causing constant breathing difficulty and the occasional pain in my left arm, finish my matric, continue learning to code and leave.

But right now I just want cry scream like Superman!!!

TLDR: I didn't & still not sure if it is..

I love bug hunting & fixing & figuring out how stuff works, but many will argue this is not even real programming..

Long version how I ended up programming:
Back in highschool, I was deciding between english and mathematics & computer science.. I filled in the form for the latter. Got a change of hearts but I already gave the extra/backup empty form to schoolmate..

Figured it's for the better because it's a hell to get a job as an english teacher/prof anyways + I dislike comunications with people + documentation (if any) is in english etc..

At the end of first year, I didn't even apply for all the exams because you had to have both programming 1&2 to pass or even be eligible to take the year again.. I figured I'd fail them, so once I actually passed both (& actually not with bad grades), I was fucked.. had to retake the year, which means I lost time + still had to pay the rent etc.. decided to drop out and return home and do the IT engineer course instead to at least have some formal education to help me find a job. Finished that without problems, I 'specialised' in network administration.
I got a job straight out of school as a web developer.. the irony.. got some conflicts with the boss and was terminated (material for another rant).

Later I sought out admin jobs, but got declined because I was overqualified and had programming experince. FML, right?

Ended up sending out mandatory job applications for IT administration & programming to not lose the bonuses & got called up to a meeting in the company I work for since then.

No qualifications for .net & MS technologies, but they liked my CV so the ended up setting up the interview anyway. I didn't know half of the technologies and concepts by proper name, but they figured I understand enough of the content to give me a try. A few years later, I got the most fucked up project they have because of my love for new thigs and trying to understand everything. It's aaaalmost bearable now.. still needs a lot of work, but I'm happy where I am. Saddly, I'm still second guessing if I'm doing a proper job as a dev, but they seem to be very ok with my work. (:

My AP Computer Science teacher changed my life in 2001. Until then, I wasn’t considering a career in development. He challenged me to write a back propagating multi layer perceptron neural network, and an RPN calculator. Every day made me think about how to solve problems at an algorithmic level. He was brutally honest, and one of the reasons why I’m an team manager now. RIP, your legacy won’t be forgotten.

Not really a bug, but I have recently finished organising our Domain Controller.

It was a server set up about 8 year ago by someone with zero experience with server OS.

I had to completely re-work every single group, GPO, User Account, Login script, shared drives and DHCP.

I have now solved 90% of re-occurring problems with our network.

Now they want me to do the same with our Digital Storefront...

I had network problems.. and you know.. no shit.. the problem solve thing which might actually be just a for loop solved it.

Up until now, I never had any breaking updates on Linux on my laptop, Except for Nvidia drivers stopping. It would switch to noveau. Even my cobbled together hack of Broadcom Bluetooth solution worked without even having to touch it. Well, I still don't have problems with core Linux but add gnome to the issue mix today. Surprisingly, Nvidia drivers for the first time Nvidia drivers upgraded (to 340) and I didn't had to do anything for it to work. Gnome deprecated synaptics driver support and now uses libinput implementation for it. Well Ubuntu Gnome updater won't clean the configuration and I had to remove the driver and clean config myself. Nothing too much, i have to deal with these stuff on my arch installation but Ubuntu has been "it works fine. No need to interfere" thing for me. It works fine on Wayland (it always used libinput on Wayland a if I am correct) but nvidia drivers doesn't support Wayland. And then since the update gnome has been disabling some of my extensions at random. All on X. I have no problems with Wayland except for Nvidia fucking drivers. All that said, its still better than windows where I lost fucking network connectivity during something important. And the trackpad drivers on Linux are somehow much better than anything I have used on windows. (that or Sony made fucking great trackpads and nobody noticed). Here's to hoping Nvidia starts supporting drawing on Wayland and I can ditch X completely. I have seen visible improvements in performance under load and slight decrease in battery usage with Wayland.

When I was in high school, on our computer subject, we pass all our machine problems(html), in a network folder.

I discovered that if I paste a text file in the network folder, my classmates can read and edit that file.

So what I did is I created a text file that serves like a chat room. We just put our names, and then our message and save it. It was fun. But of course our teacher found out so I got scolded, because the text file were full of profanities. Haha.

I think that was the moment that helped me develop my liking for computers...

How about you? When was the first time you realized that computers are amazing? :)

Guys check out IOTA, get a light node wallet and buy some as long as it is still low. It is rising at a rising rate since some hours now.

IOTA is the solution to bitcoins speed and scalability problems. IOTA does not use the blockchain but instead a network called the tangle, which enables decentralized peer-to-peer transactions. There are no miners, no fees and the transaction validation speed depends on how many people are using the currency. One transaction requires your device to validate 2 other transactions through proof of work and therefore the system can never be overloaded by too many transaction requests.

Be warned though, the IOTA foundation is only currently building up the infrastructure, and people are just starting to trade since a few weeks so trasactions still may take a few hours.

1) love solving puzzles. It’s like a neural network of all the problem solving I’ve ever done manifesting itself in a product/tool someone can actually use to solve Their problems.
2) pays more than I think I’m worth.
3) people immediately think I’m smarter than I am, I got low self esteem but I really feel if you can work hard enough, you can even the playing field with those that are naturally better at coding. I love feeling smart when really I was just persistent with solving a problem and worked hard at finding a solution

Holy fucking shit, I hate ubuntu SO much.

So what it happened..
I was tryin to set up an Ubuntu server on my machine using virtual box, and I know what you are thinking, "VirtualBox?" yeah its the only machine I had lying around and it had windows and I didn't wanna re-format its hard drive.
So Here how it goes...
Install went fine.. But when I was trying to manage multiple network interfaces, it was Terrible & pain in the ASS 😡...
So initially I needed 2 network interfaces, one for NAT adapter and another Host-only interface for SSH and stuff.. so I made changes in virtualbox settings and rebooted the VM. and it stuck on "a start job is running for wait for network to be configured" I was like okayy and removed host-only adapter and rebooted, it booted fine :/ then I tried combo of bridged adapter with my Ethernet and a host-only adapter, and what? it booted finally! but this wasn't an optimal solution because it had and IP address within subnet of other devices with my router and half the bandwidth (like 50mbps or something).. I reverted back to NAT network & I checked with ifconfig and it STILL didn't had an IP address assigned to it for Host-only adapter!! FFS I deleted the VM and reinstalled the whole thing again but this time both interfaces attached..
after installing it stuck on same shit again :'(
"a start job is running for wait for network to be configured"... FUCK!
after about an hour of troubleshooting and trying different configurations, I still couldn't get it to work.. I never had such problems with centOS.

Fuck you ubuntu.. fuck you in the ass

I've been struggling with the network I set up for my bachelor thesis for weeks. Today I figured out it was all caused by STP which disabled connections that I tried to use. Disabling STP solved all my problems.

The relieve is strong

!dev Nice surprise... Hopefully...

Been having a lot of teeth problems and need like 2 crowns and 1 filling now... Old fillings just suddenly fell out. My regular dentist plan is ok for cleaning but isn't so good for these expensive treatments. And it seems the dentists in network are sorta so-so... The original fillings were done by them like last year....

Well somehow it popped up into my mind that with COVID.... Given its a health crisis and the govt is bending over backwards to deal with it... it may also let me change insurance plans during the year.

Usually enrollment is once a yr until you change jobs... But when I googled I saw that apparently they did.... Though it's upto the employer and the insurance company. They have to negotiate and allow it. Not required to by law.

So anyway last week, I called up my HR asking if they allow it. The rep said they'd need to ask higher up and get back to me this Monday.

I never got a call though but today I took off to deal with all the health stuff and just take a personal day. So I called my "current" dentist insurance to ask what I needed to do to see a specialist for the root canal crown as regular dentist can't do this one.

But they couldn't find my policy because it turned out it was cancelled last week. At this point I'm likeOK WHO FUCKED UP... WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK... IM UNINSURED NOW?!!!

I login to the company benefits site to get their support #. But it also shows my current plans. Where it shows that it got switched.

I still had to call the new insurance to get my ID info...

But I'm like hm... This seems to have worked out well... Assuming everything goes as planned. Basically got 1/2 year on cheap normal coverage but now that I need it, got to switch to the more expensive coverage, which now comes out better: lower overall costs, and better drs...

So last Friday I orders my new camera (Canon EOS 1300D) from Amazon with prime NEXT day delivery
It didn't turn up Saturday even tho I got told it would but I got £20 credit from them for their fuck up.
I was told it would be delivered early the next say (Sunday) and by 3pm it was still not there... Got another £5 from them for their fulse promises.
It arrived later that night at 6:30pm

So yesterday I ordered a tripod using my credit and next day delivery for today and im just wondering of it will arrive or not.

Weird thing is, The reason it was not delivered was because of "network problems"...

Spent days adding cloud-init to a CentOS kickstart script for a baremetal template.
I didn't want to have NetworkManager installed but had network problems.

Turns out you need to explicitly put NM_CONTROLLED=no in the config for the interface to not use NetworkManager.

Because that makes sense.