Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

June 15, 2014

How much for the little girls?

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , — wimminz @ 1:39 pm

It wasn’t exactly *common* knowledge back then, but it was known, you could take a 1980 car with a totally flat battery, on a piece of flat road / track so there was no possibility of bump starting, whaddaya do?

A pair of humble PP6 lantern batteries,  and you got power for the points and coil ignition, not for long, but for long enough to get it started, if you only connect it when ready to start.

But what do you do, crank handles went out with the thirties, and it’s flat..and you’re alone… piece of piss, your vehicle is fitted with a differential, so you just put it in 4th and jack up one side, and turn the wheel on that side by hand, which will turn the engine, which will start it.

It was the same with being “stuck” in sand, let all the air out of all the tyres, you’ll move again, and even a bicycle pump *will* inflate a car or light truck tyre, eventually.

Try it with a 2010 vehicle and you’re shit out of luck, that first “stall speed” step I talk about is much higher, thanks to the technology under the hood, even if you mate turns up with a brand new fully charged battery, a lot of cars will insist on going back to the dealership for the on-board computers to be reset before they will allow any ignition process to initiate…. and how are you got to hot-wire the sealed boxes of an ECU and electronic fuel injectors and hall effect ignition triggers? All of which want input from sensors measuring oxygen and temperature and pressure and throttle position and only start in neutral sensors before even beginning the ignition initialisation process?

“Black box” engineering is great, ***if*** you have a ready supply to hand at an affordable price of the appropriate black boxes.

I talked yesterday about my NAS box, and how I have a shit ton of drivers, every version of windows, every version of office, several Linux distros, yadda yadda yadda, walk into my workshop and the shelves are groaning with all sorts of cables and adapters, that’s about six different sorts of mini USB to start with.

You now need the equivalent for cars, the merc diagnostic suite, the ford diagnostic suite, the Renault diagnostic suits, the firmware for every version of every ECU, including the “chipped” varieties, all the different O2/lambda sensors, temp sensors, yadda yadda yadda.

And it is all fucking proprietary, of course, even though underneath it is as standard Bosch as the manufacturers can get it, to cut the bottom line…

HP, an engineering company killed by a woman, who can no longer compete in x86 hardware, not even the proliants, is now trying to talk about an entirely new set of PC architecture, cos, you know, if we can’t compete in this game, how about we just invent our own proprietary game, that way we can assure world dominance in that new game.CS-CISCO1941-_2fK9-NFO_4_13_08_26_12_13_08_b

Cisco, frankly, the same, everyone else is eating their lunch… and it is no wonder, take a look at the 1941, it’s a thousand pounds, near as dammit, by the time you actually have a *useful* IOS bundle/licence installed on it, and it is pretty much the minimum spec you can go with if you have a 10 mbit fibre or EFM connection coming into the building.

Look at it.. one non hot plug PSU, which is bad enough, but horror of horrors, that fucking PROTRUDING on/off rocker switch, one that is *very* light, it only takes a couple of ounces of force to operate it.

And this is a grand before you buy any of the EHWIC add in cards.

For 600 quid the Draytek 3900 eats it’s fucking lunch, 4 WAN ports AND a fibre SFP in as standard, load balancing and fail-over as standard, 2 LAN ports as standard, firewall and QOS as standard, and yeah, it’ll handle 1 Gb on the WAN side too, and when I say as standard I mean lifetime licensing and software to do all the above built in as standard, this is how Toyota won years back, headrests, radio, all the shit everyone else charged extra for they did as standard.

I spend my life swapping out dead Cisco kit, and sure, the installed user base is a lot bigger than Draytek, but you wanna know how many dead Drayteks I have come across? … one…

Their IP-PBX and IP phones also blow away anything Cisco can do, for much less money… two level fail-over built in as standard, Main WAN > backup DSL > USB 3G, shit designed by *engineers* who sit there and wonder what happens if this goes wrong, OK, we better do this..  not shit designed by marketers and accountants… nickel and dime, bait and switch, ongoing licensing, up-sell, it’s bullshit.

I mean, what do you fucking do? The one good thing about the Cisco’s is the configuration is basically a human readable text file, you’d think this would be used to it’s fullest, so each ISP would have a default basic minimum template config file that does everything that ISP might need to do, you’d fucking think so, but you don’t wanna know the number of times I have got on site with a pre-configured router, or a blank one and a config, rack it up and lo and behold, the ISP can’t log in, because they screwed up the config sections that are supposed to get them remote access…

! is the equivalent to REM (not that I am a coder) and you’d think the cunts would use it because it would make like easy, you’d also think “sh int desc” would be used to full effect, and you’d get “GE 0/1 WAN primary EFM circuit number 123456” but oh no, if you’re fucking lucky you get “WAN“, and bear in mind you could have two currently active WAN’s on site, plus the two new ones because the site is migrating from one ISP or circuit to another, and no, none of them have labels or asset tags, or, if they do, one item will be referred to by two separate codes, eg a Bosch lamp fitted to a merc, Bosch have one part number, merc have another, same physical item, but whaddaya know.. you’d like to maybe guess, and take the entire site hard down, or worse, the central radius server for the whole enterprise?

Not on my pittance fucking wages mate, I’m paid just enough to cover my own ass, that’s it.

Now and again you hit lucky, you get on-site and find someone of a similar age as the in house tech, and you share jokes about MS and Cisco gold partnership and prince and seven sigma, MCSE = Must Consult Someone Else, and yeah, I may not be certified up the ass and I may not be an expert at this, but at least I have an actual functioning brain… and you don’t wanna know how often that and that alone is what stands between a job being a success and a total fuckup… just one underpaid uncertified old fuck on site with an actual functioning fucking brain.

Usually it’s people who don’t understand anything about the technology you are using, and they know they don’t understand anything about it, but they do know the whole ongoing process is symptomatic of gross institutionalised incompetence, and they are fucking right.

Finding a good enough wimminz to be with is much like finding a good enough ISP, and no, it don’t matter if you are a humble domestic client looking for cable/dsl, or a business looking for a 100 mbit fibre primary and 10 mbit EFM secondary circuit, mucho dinero, it’s going to the burger bar, lots of fixed choices, none of them you actually want, no bespoke service allowed.

Speedtest.net (which, frankly speaking, ain’t all that reliable) tells me my current home cable connection is 18 ms ping, 62.3 mbit down, 3.01 mbit up, (checks ebanking to see what it costs me) £31 p.c.m. so call it a quid a day, this is basically the cheapest broadband only package they do… allegedly the products are 50/100/150 mbit, they are all the same product in reality, the 50 and 100 just have rate caps, depending on overall network utilisation, so I can pay more money and have the rate cap lifted, and get not one iota more speed, because the network itself or the link to the site I want or that server itself is the limiting factor.

The 100 mbit dedicated fibre from the ISP for business is the same product, but a/ it isn’t contended / shared at the street box with 128 other customers, and b/ it is symmetrical not async, and c/ I can actually buy a fixed IP, a la phone number, instead of having an IP that is assigned dynamically, but happens to be pretty much fixed as long as the DSLAM/router doesn’t go down…

Incidentally you know you have a deep and thorough understanding of this if you were thinking so called high class (eg expensive) whore v the $10 whore, it’s the same fucking product, you just, allegedly, don’t have to share it with 128 other subscribers in your area.

In that scenario, I’m not the pimp or the fixer of the clap clinic doctor, I’m the guy who rolls the pig in flour and then puts some lipstick on it so you find it acceptable to continue to fuck, and therefore pay for.

The black boxes in the network operations centres are intercepting all your traffic at will anyway, no matter what type of customer you are, or how the pig/whore is being marketed to you.

If you think the “corporate persons” have any connection to real persons, eg any morality at all, you are sadly mistaken, if I came up with a true panopticon monitoring and interception system that actually did what it said on the tin, and told them my price was I want to fuck a lot of little girls, preferably aged five or less, the corporate persons would retire to the other side of the room to discuss the various merits of an orphanage or a clinic for young girls, to which I should be given the directorship, kid yourself not about this.

Mistaking the whore who allows you to empty your balls into her in exchange for some remuneration, with wife/girlfriend 1.0, is possibly fatal, the whore really doesn’t give a fuck if you just lost your kids / job / house, it’s play to pay and who gives a fuck about the product.

And getting back to the start, this is how the stall speed step gets ever higher with time.

It is NOT because the technology is evolving.

Every 12 and 14 mm spark plug on the planet is the same, physically, mechanically, with the exception of reach, and there are only three varieties of that, and temperature, and there are only a few varieties of that… and most importantly, ANY spark-plug can be connected to ANY ignition system.

Indirect fuel injectors could *easily* be the same, ditto lambda sensors, and all the rest of the shit.

There is no excuse whatsoever for making an ECU that does not have a physical switch (or more than one, like jumpers) that invoke default settings for each function that will work with anything, or indeed ignore or bypass anything.

Making an ECU that you can plug *any* timing system for *any* engine into, after all, physically, there are only so many possibilities, and crank the engine, and the ECU says hmmm, this looks like a hall effect trigger system for an in-line 4 cylinder engine with 180 degree crank primary balance, ok, we will start with a default setting of  0 degree advance at 50 RPM ramping up to 25 degrees of advance at 2,500 RPM, please select Y/N

If you select N it allows you to enter parameters, or just point it at a a file.

This is literally a far simpler problem to solve than plugging a random PCI card into a computer, or USB device…

Then if you like you can proceed with fuel injectors, lambda sensors, anything else you like, and it should work, to do otherwise is to make a PC motherboard that will not even boot, unless PCI slot 1 is populated with a specific sound card, PCI slot 2 is populated with a specific video capture card, PCI slot 2 is populated with a specific RAID card, and so on.

And yet, look at what we have.

You *really* think routers and the internet are any fucking different.

Let’s take BT, British Telecom, if you are a xDSL customer in the UK, you have two choices, buy from BT, or buy from someone who is reselling a BT product.

I have talked before about carrier detect etc

https://wimminz.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/is-my-ass-supposed-to-hurt-this-much/

Here is something you probably don’t know, and bear in mind, all DSL in the UK is basically a BT product, either bought direct, or from a reseller.

xDSL modems use a CHAP user-name and password combination to log you on to the network….

bt_test_user@startup_domain is a test BT CHAP user-name, no password needed, doesn’t give you internet access, just proves that there is no problem with either your DSL line or your physical router. This isn’t a secret bit of info, it’s public domain, but not even BT include it as a default “test” feature in their own broadband routers, which they order, custom built, by the tens of thousands.

So everyone who has a problem, cannot just press the test button, and either include or eliminate the DSL circuit and the physical router hardware from the problem, instead you get put on hold to Mumbai, and maybe a week later someone will mail you a new router, which may make the problem go away for a while.

Only those who are working at the coal face of technology even see this, the ever increasing hight of that stall speed first step, not just in one area but across the board.

It is not ***just*** the case that this makes whole systems more fragile and harder to fix when they do go wrong.

It is the case that when you do this across the board, sooner or later you add the straw that breaks the camel’s back, you do not *need* any failure events to appear, the system *itself* is no longer able to function.

And CTRL-Z undo that last one thing you did, no, that won’t bring the system back up, because *that* point in the overall system’s inherent stability and ability to recover is so far back in the rear view mirror it is now invisible….

I dunno where that point was, but for sure the 1980’s car analogy that we started with is far enough back that I can say with absolute certainty, at this point, the system could recover itself without any insurmountable difficulty or mega scale disruption.

Which is like saying in the 1980’s, Michael Jackson was alive, only a matter of time until he releases another record.

December 31, 2013

NSA, sex or spying

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 2:01 pm

It amuses me that the National Security Agency shares an acronym with a type of casual sex known as No Strings Attached.

It amuses me that millions of people can watch Bond movies and be amazed at the gadgets from Q division, then act horrified when they find out the NSA (and every fucker else) has 99 different ways to hack into a PC including embedding shit in VGA cables, USB cables, RJ45 ports, etc etc etc

Hello…..?

It amuses me that so many people think you have said something profound and intelligent when you say “And Bill Gates walks into a Shanghai sneaker factory, and everyone is a millionaire, on average….” into a conversation about cost of living and inflation and average wages.

It amuses me that when people discuss distasteful stuff like paedophilia or incest or bestiality, they think that evil abusers + poor victims = 99% of all cases, and not just the 1% of all cases that were so unhappy about it they complained, when there is no particular real reason for only these crimes to be comprised only of abusers and victims, which doesn’t add up, for every other crime there is a whole milieu of activity that may well be criminal, but all the participants are quite happy to carry on partaking.

It amuses me that merely asking for a scientific proof of something before making a law criminalising everyone is equated to being either an apologist for that thing or worse still a believer in that thing.

It amuses me that at 14:07 hours someone can be quite happy to live in a certain place, talk to a certain person, buy a certain product, and at 14:08, though nothing FACTUAL has changed one iota, except that someone just got some extra data that they personally were not aware of before, they are no longer happy about anything.

It amuses me perhaps most of all that despite the fact that we now live in a 24/7 world of IT, and despite the fact that my job is field engineer, and my office is manned 24/7 and I am on call, the traditional 2 week fuck all happens Christmas and new year hiatus still applies, and January will be as dead as it always is in IT, when there is zero technical or physical reason for this seasonal hiatus, yet, when it is over, suddenly everything is going to be very very very urgent all over again.

———————————————————————-

I’ve spent that last couple of days talking to a couple of guys determined to better themselves, and to this end they are investing a considerable amount of their own time and own money to get Cisco and Microsoft certification.

So they turned to me, as someone actually earning money in this field, for my opinion, it wasn’t what they thought it would be, as inevitably you can’t discuss employment and salary without touching on the wider economy… but… here is what I told them.

1/

At my level / role / position, you can’t really extrapolate to other roles / levels positions, sure, a full set of Cisco and MS certificates will be the kind of thing the guy pulling a solid high 5 low 6 digit salary will be holding, and sure, that guy will have forgotten more about such subjects than I will ever know, but….

2/

You can’t say with any authority that having all those certs will guarantee you that sort of job at that sort of salary, but you can pretty much guarantee that if you do have (the full set) them, nobody is going to offer you MY job at MY pay scale, even if you were happy enough to take it.

3/

So, despite it being the same field, that guy with all the certs, and me with decades of field experience, actually don’t have much in common, any more than the guy who fills the ATM at your local bank branch has in common with the regional accountant for that same bank.

4/

At *my* level, I tend to see the same faults over and over and over again, do the job 12 months and you have probably seen them all at least once, that doesn’t really give you/me a good basis for assessing the value of the full set of certs, or the capabilities of someone with them… however….

5/

Two other things that are not necessarily congruent are a body holding a full set of certs, and that same body actually having a functioning brain…. I have *literally* had conversations with people holding said certificates doing the remote while I am on-site, and I have had to repeat myself three fucking times to explain the concept of a fucking “air gap”, eg the cable ain’t plugged in / there is no electrical or data connection, ergo no data is going to pass between these two items, eg the thing you are talking about cannot fucking physically happen.

So of course the obvious parallels here are to our leaders, our bosses, our CEO’s, our bankers and economists and politicians.

They are all certificated up the wazoo too, but, we only notice the ones with the certification who can’t do the fucking job, because they have the certs but not a functioning brain.

I *do* come across those who have the certs *and* a functioning brain, in fact quite a lot of my fellow employees and colleagues fall into that category… but I recognise that I am in the minority in being able to say that, if I worked in retail for instance I would not be able to.

Which brings us back to our two chaps pursuing certification.

They are in place X career / employment wise, and they hope these bits of paper will put them in place Y career / employment wise, because, being brutally honest here, these are about the only options on the table.

Statistically speaking, they have as much chance of making it to that high 5 low 6 digit salary in a place Y career as they do of getting a job alongside me, but at least the path they are taking has an established procedure, the path I took looks like nothing more than random chance / luck / chaos theory at work.

Speaking factually, the guy who took a chance on me and gave me the job was worried, even after spending a couple of weeks at HQ boning up on their shit, because the only way he could asses me was to ask me a couple of questions, just like an exam, just like a cert…. and my answers were correct, but slow in coming, because I was running through them in detail before actually speaking.

Meanwhile the guy who has spent two weeks with me making sure I knew their shit told the other guy “he’ll be fine” – “you sure?” – “yup”

Which very very neatly highlights the problem with certs.

Cisco and MS particularly try to address this by making the exams *hard* as in you get hundreds of questions that cover all areas of everything, but then you get a vicious feedback cycle, and the tuition then becomes cramming and committing to memory type learning, rather than real understanding type learning.

So I will get guys who hold ALL the certs telling me that the noise, signal and attenuation numbers for the line, which are measures in dB, which is a logarithmic scale, don’t really matter, because the coursework is concerned with how for example a xDSL connection works in theory, but to understand that properly you have to understand the telecomms side of things and the cabling side of things to, which these certs don’t cover.

This started YEARS ago, I am one of the last few that experienced a secondary school eduction that featured “Chemistry” lessons, and “Physical Chemistry” lessons (ditto physics etc) where you actually went into the chemistry lab and attempted to replicate what you had learned from the books in the classroom based chemistry lessons.

I won’t even bother trying to number the amount of times or regularity with which I would sit there in the class just not getting any of the shit I was being taught, sure, I was hearing it, and could muddle through when coaxed by the teacher, but none of it was sinking in or making any proper sense, I wasn’t actually LEARNING…. then we would go to the lab, try and replicate that stuff physically, and suddenly it all just fell into place and made sense, made so much sense that my brain took it, processed it, and ran with it, so for example we were being taught at 13/14 about the various bonds and structures of the various forms of carbon (this was before buckminster) and it became obvious that these were like the tiles on a floor, great, but what happens at the edges, if you print all these out of paper and cut the paper in half you get all messy sticky out bits, aha, teacher says, surface chemistry, this is a whole other field of chemistry, go to university if you want to study THAT…

You see the problem here.

You end up with certificates up the wazoo types, which is a bit like those that persevered in classroom chemistry, they’re good, but there is little true knowledge and understanding. Ther can fire up the CAD workstation and simulators and design a car.

And the me types, haven’t got a (relevant to Cisco or MS) piece of paper to wipe my ass with, but, within the limited roles of responsibility that I have, eg a grease monkey for t’intertubez, I’m a good guy.

Nowhere is there an Issigonis, a Chapman, a Brunel, and more importantly, nowhere is there the kind of guy they would employ and work with on a day to day basis….

Which makes it really difficult, getting back to the two guys pursuing certs, to know what to say, or advise them, or even just how much truth in required when answering their questions… at what point does truth become non-helpful.

There are the territories knowledge and skill wise where I work now, I can’t go much higher, it gets rarefied real fast, and the level of effort I have to put in rises real fast, and the remuneration for all this extra effort and so on is not an up front deal, so where is the incentive, given I can live on what I earn now, and work basically fuck all,

Let’s take device X, call it a Cisco box.

One of the factors limiting the quantity and quality of certified guys available to connect to that box is your budget, that is pretty much as it has always been, but, it is now a global marketplace, if I want to start a new business ISP that always has 10 x CCNP + 2 x CCIE + 1 x CCT on 24/7 availability I can go out and hire that, and I don’t care if they are Chinese or Indian or Brazilian or Martian, except the ping times might make things difficult for the Martian.

It’s no big deal.

One of the other factors limiting the quantity and quality of certified guys available to connect to that box is the physical connection, there has to fucking be one.

If the box is dead swap it out or reflash the config or IOS, if it is a cable or switch issue again someone has to go onsite, and again ultimately if there is 3g coverage all you need is a guy with a 3g tethered laptop connected directly to device X, and some remote control software.

Yes, there are middle grounds, there are times when the ideal solution is to get a certified network security guy on-site with direct physical access to the switch layer, but these cases aren’t the bulk of it.

The bulk of it is the hands on guys on site need to be good enough all rounders, to ensure that the cubicle guys with all the certs can connect and do their thing.

Right there, it isn’t just a case of certification = salary any more, it is a case of do you wanna effectively be your own boss on the road every day to a different physical site, or do you wanna be a cubicle guy.

The potential employer has two good reasons not to give the guy with all the certs the field job, one, he is overqualified so will prolly walk for more money, and two, it is not exploiting his abilities in return for the maximum revenue for the company.

What do I tell these two guys, who clearly haven’t even considered being the red stapler guy in the cubicle in return for this high salary.

Which job is more resistant to both emerging technologies, eg cisco going from command line to just checking some radio boxes in a GUI, and virtualisation, eg not a physical router layer but a virtual one, and to the ongoing financial pressures of outsourcing?

Under certain circumstances, that 420 second ping to Mars vs the 0.15 second ping to Mumbai might not be a show stopper, if the Martian is willing to work for 10% of what the agency in Mumbai is asking.

Would the certified guys be willing to relocate to Mumbai and take a 90% drop in salary to keep their jobs?

You see, the other thing, because I tend to see the same shit over and over again, I get very good at it, the certified up the wazoo guy may spend 0.5% of his time coming across these issues, but I spend 90% of my time on them, so within a year *I* am the expert with the specific experience, and because we are only talking about that small sub-section of all that the certified up the wazoo guys know, it’s my specialist subject, and they think I am hot shit.

I get to shine….. without trying.

Big fish in a small pond…lol

You see why I think I have (while it lasts) a great job.

You see why trying to advise these two other guys is so difficult, and despite their ambitions, I do not envy them one bit.

November 13, 2013

Follow the money… even if it isn’t at first obvious.

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 11:27 am

In my day job, Cisco kit is *very* popular, for values of “very” that compare with android vs blackberry market share.

This isn’t because cisco kit is good, it is now all made in china and very cheaply too.

It is all because of the two pronged thing that is Cisco IOS and Cisco certification.

Cisco IOS + certification means anyone anywhere with a TCP connection can log in to your switch or router and admin it*****, so cheap Chinese hardware and cheap outsourced to Mumbai tech support means major mark-up to the product hyped and sold here in the west.

***** Except when this isn’t true, and the only way in is in person with a console cable, or the cheap Chinese hardware is dead and the only way in is in person to swap it out.**********

********** And it is THIS that virtual machines are designed to eliminate, nothing else, that is the unique selling point that matters, not any of the other reasons given.

If you were to ask me what to buy, I’d tell you to buy Draytek, it’s less money and better kit.

As an aside, there are still niches, when it comes to bonded EFM / SHDSL it is still pretty much http://www.rad.com or nobody in real life on the ground, as in I can’t remember the last time I saw anything else, same as anything picking up a BT fibre connection is going to be an Adva box.

In all of these above if you follow the money you can see why the decisions were made that were made, even though technically the same or better results could have been achieved for less money, a bit like in the 80’s the Equipu copier guy who came around every two weeks to fix the copier, that is how the company that supplied the copier made money, not by supplying the copier or toner, but by the constant and ongoing support it needed, that you were not told about when signing up.

I know a very wealthy man, his business put out a tender for quotes, he wanted dual homed gigE to his new office building, and he wanted a flat fixed fee per annum, which he was happy to pay up to 5 years in advance, and, he wanted an SLA, 100% uptime of at least 100 mbit, don’t give a fuck how you do it, just do it, and don’t bill me for it.

He got ZERO tenders, because his SLA requirement explicitly forbade the business model that *everyone* out there was founded on, so in the end he started a new company that did nothing but provide connectivity to his new office, he has his dual homed gigE fibre laid by his new ISP company which has only one customer, himself, with dual homed redundant microwave links on the roof to other sites in town where he has taken offices that hold nothing but the switchgear for the dishes on the roof and connectivity, and a third dish providing a satellite link.

He has 5 guys working shifts to give 24/7 coverage working on-site to ensure all these connections stay up, and to monitor the internal network, and 2 guys working day shifts to monitor and maintain the racks of servers and NAS boxen.

Frighteningly, his numbers for all this aren’t more than 20% higher than the lowballed numbers the various mega providers quoted him for the standard service, excluding the constant ongoing support calls and outages or brownouts where he had connectivity but not full bandwidth.

His “business” is selling racks to certain other business customers, each customer has a multiple of 2 full custom built racks, which are mirrors, and backups of their business, live, 24/7 replicated, backups, the deal is he can *literally* power down and disconnect the rack in 5 minutes from that customer’s phone call, and literally 5 minutes after that the rack is sealed in a custom enclosure and in a van with 2 drivers up front and 3 “guards” in back to verify seals aren’t broken etc, and that van can be at any of the London airports within another hour, or anywhere else you like at an average road speed of 50 mph….  so one copy goes to the customer, one stays in situ, and another one is built pronto to replace the one that was just pulled.

This is a very specific business segment and all of his customers are known to each other and themselves, some of them actually own others as subsidiaries,  in the same business sector… I can’t say much else about all this, but the data is basically customer records and billing databases.

The point of this is that for those who are wise to the iniquities of the “ongoing revenue from ongoing support” business model, which is essentially almost everything nowadays, there was a gap in the market, albeit a gap only someone with about 20 million of his own cash available to kick-start the project could exploit, but the gap was there, by design.

Market theory will tell you that such gaps are exploited naturally by market forces, not so, such gaps are CREATED naturally by big business, who seek to corral and control and manipulate customers, and while those who create these gaps do not exactly sow the ground with U238 and landmines, they do not do anything that might help anyone else exploit this territory.

I had the idea he is now doing, in 1998, at the dawn of the xDSL age and the end of the dial up 56k age, I didn’t have the wherewithal to exploit it, and back then I was thinking single hard disks, motorcycle couriers, small businesses with a single NT3.51 server, I wasn’t thinking big.

This man will himself tell you, part of the process before spending his own 20 big ones was to sit down with some heads and see if his project would in any way tread on the toes of those already in the marketplace, specifically, would starting his own ISP to get the product he wanted screw him with the major players, and the answer was no, on one condition, that the only customer his ISP ever served was himself.

This man told me, that it is in this business environment, that BT’s recent surprise and winning bid for nearly a billion quid for the football rights is being seen in the business world as the equivalent (and this is his words, not mine) of the USA launching Gulf War 1, which was of course all about freedom and democracy and mom’s apple pie for the kurds, fuck all to do with oil.

It is a gloves off, hat in the ring, launch *all* the thermonuclear missiles type of move, as far as all the other incumbents are concerned.

£897 million / 60 million (population) = £15 for every man woman and child in the UK, the vast majority of whom will neither be paying BT Sport customers, nor football fans.

It is, according to him, because Sky started selling broadband, hilariously effectively being a reseller of a reseller for a different BT group product, XDSL, but basically straying from the monthly subscription for a TV dish business model into the monthly subscription for a internet connection business model.

To be fair, it was a move Sky had to make, hello youtube, hello BBC iplayer, only a matter if time before the broadcast model fell to the on-demand model.

Nevertheless, it was an annexing the sudetenland moment, a kristallnacht moment, the gloves are off and now it is all down to burn rates and war chests.

The whole newspaper phone hacking thing, unrelated? Not at all, that was the archduke Ferdinand and some slimy Serbs, after all, the Murdoch empire has dirt to dish.

That is the trouble with following the money, if you aren’t aware enough you won’t see the drug dealer deliberately throwing away a million in product to burn a liability / competitor in a bust, or the biggest rivers on the planet being under the oceans.

You can’t even follow the billions, because that particular fiat currency might become worthless overnight, analogous to certain films where the protagonist must spend 100 million dollars in one year, and have *nothing* to show for it at the end…..

If you *know* you *have* to spend it now, while it is *still* worth *something*, or if you are involved in what is really a currency EXCHANGE, say 897 million Sterling at today’s “worth” for 10 million extra subscribers on monthly subscription….. the “sheeple eyeball month“, that might be a good exchange rate, I don’t know, depends if we are looking at the sheeple eyeball as a unit of currency that can be converted into sales of Brawndo, or votes, or apathy and the po-lice state…

Currently, in the UK, if you take “The Internet” to mean the backbone and all the switching gear, the local ISPs, the colo facilities and servers, home and business networking and computers, and increasingly the portable computers called mobile phones that shift *everything* as “data”, eg 0’s and 1’s, I have a truly frightening statistic for you.

The Internet = 17% of total UK electricity generating capacity.

and since all electricity consumed ultimately gets converted to heat, that means 17% of electrically sourced heat generation in the country is from “the internet”

That is bigger than *anything* since the days of steam dawned.

October 8, 2013

Stuck in the RAM

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 10:06 am

I have had jobs where sites stop being able to connect to the mother-ship, usually these are sites using an xDSL modem to log into the mother-ship, and login is of course by the trusty Radius server.

The problem isn’t that the cheapo xDSL modem is dead, though that is always the second thing investigated, or the cheapo xDSL line is dead, though that is always the first thing investigated, the problem is the Radius server just stopped working, and you can “fix” it by making a change that simply should not make any difference, changing the Radius password on the Radius server and xDSL modem / router.

I’ve had this on Cisco kit too, you need to TFTP a patch across so configure terminal and then give it an IP address, give your laptop and IP address and as a final sanity check before starting the TFTP you attempt to ping each box from the other, and it doesn’t work, and you can repeat the process ten times, and it won’t work, but if you reboot the Cisco box it will work first time.

Neither of these problems should exist, within the framework of “things as they should be” or rather “things as they are taught”.. for example it is heresy to suggest rebooting the Radius server, so it is discounted as a source of problems when a client site cannot log into a mother-ship, and for example it is heresy to suggest that any console / command line output from Cisco IOS is less than 100% truthful, and yet, if either of these statements were true, the fixes I used would not work.

When asked what the problem was, I say something “Was stuck in the RAM“, which is of course meaningless *and* inaccurate, but it is an explanation of sorts, and it is *far* closer to the truth than the official answers.

I’m not a coder, but I suspect the truth could be found somewhere in the realms of buffer overflows and bounds checking.

However, nobody calls a senior coder in when a remote office fails to connect to the mother-ship, (which one way or another is what 99% of my day job is about, making two sites connect to each other) so as a result you get anything *but* the truth.

As an aside, before I continue, if you are thinking that these are only problems encountered because I am working with cheap ass kit on cheap ass contracts for cheap ass clients, you would be as mistaken as you can possibly be… I absolutely guarantee that even if you have never set foot in the UK you will know 50% of the end users by brand name and reputation alone, even if they do not have a presence local to you.

Most of the kit is relatively speaking not very much money, anything from 500 to 5,000 bucks a box, and that is not a lot of money for a site that is turning over a million a week or an engineer that costs the end user 250 bucks before I even leave MY home, much less turn up on site… the kits itself is very mediocre quality, hardware wise, and that is me speaking as an engineer. Trust me on this.

Cisco kit sells because it all runs IOS, and finding people with Cisco qualifications who can write / edit / troubleshoot the config files, which are the files that tell the IOS what to do, is about as hard as finding a web designer, worst case scenario is there are several tens of thousands available for not very much about 90 milliseconds away in Mumbai.

This, by the way, is the SOLE reason everyone loves the cloud and virtual machines, virtual machines don’t have ANY hardware, so you NEVER need a field engineer to turn up and move a patch cable, power cycle to unstick the RAM, do an actual install or upgrade, or anything else…

So, back to the plot…

It’s down to ETHOS, car brakes were basically designed so the default state was that they were off, truck brakes were designed so the default state was they were on (and it took air pressure to keep them off).. so you pressurise a car system to make it stop, and you leak pressure out of a truck system to make it stop.

Ask yourself two questions;

  1. Which is safest.
  2. Which is cheapest to make.

Suddenly everything becomes clear.

Unless you are the bit of NASA writing the actual code that directly controls the spacecraft flight hardware, or the bit of GE writing the actual code that directly controls the control rods in the nuke pile, or… and I cannot think of a third fucking example…..  then option 2 always gets a look in.

Most of the time the bottom line is the bottom line.

“Good enough” (mostly)

By definition you are excluding the “one in a million” event from your calculations.

Which is great, *until* that event comes along… luckily for humanity in the sphere of my job until I fix it that means someone didn’t get their wages, someone didn’t get their stock in trade to sell, someone didn’t get a product or service that they were going to re-sell to someone else.

It can all be very serious and even life changing to the individuals concerned, but, the small print can cover that shit, nobody got killed…. fuck em…

We have had quite a few “cascade failures” in teh intertubez, they aren’t yet as serious as the power grid blackouts we have had, but then again the power grid is everywhere and literally in everything, and the net is still a relative newbie, chromebooks running exclusively on data living on a virtual machine in the cloud somewhere and 100% of fast net connectivity even to boot up into anything useful are still rare.

But the times, as Dylan said, they are a changin’

I am seeing, as a result of these changes, where the 1st, 2nd and 3rd level responses to problems simply do not work, because the RAM that is stuck is not in the local machine, it is in a central machine that MUST NOT be rebooted, or worse still, in a cloud virtual machine.

At that point the on the spot field engineer (me) can no longer just ring the remote server engineer, compare notes, agree on a likely cause and course of action, and resolve the problem.

I saw this happen, in the flesh, before my own eyes, for the first time, personally, yesterday, NetApp, unfortunately there were so many levels of virtuality that the server guy couldn’t diagnose which layer or virtual RAM was stuck, or where, and there was no possibility of simply rebooting as that would take the entire enterprise down and trash that whole day’s production, which was already sold and due to be in the shops tomorrow, or changing chap/tacacs/radius logins and resetting the problem that way… no worries, a whole new virtual machine was created, problem ignored.

Fuck it, I still get paid either way.

Asking people like me about my opinion on such things, well, that would be like asking a doctor about disease, fuck that, ask the pharma marketing machine, they have their eye on the bottom line.

June 3, 2013

If you build it, they will come…

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 9:58 am

Talking to a friend of mine, in a steady but boring IT admin job, been talking about bailing for years.

Along side my day job in IT, I have a side job, running my own business in IT.

I do the day job because the business doesn’t get enough custom.

The business is thoroughly professional, competent and economical with stunning service… its job is to convert gasoline into motive power.

The day job is total wank, a knackered old v8 intermittently firing on each cylinder, but who cares as its job is to convert gasoline into noise…

The thing my friend doesn’t get, the thing many hopeful small business owners don’t get, the thing many men don’t get, is this….

THAT IS THE WAY PEOPLE WANT IT.

If there is ANY GAP WHATSOEVER in between the engineer and the end user, then whoever is in that gap, and it can be a layer cake 27 levels deep, is not interested in either the engineer or the end user, only in their own slice.

Let me tell you something about Cisco kit, it basically *is* the internet, a vast product range with an equally vast software and licensing range, basically quite small boxes, and you look at some of the small business stuff and it is a small box that retails for 10k, and the prices go on up from there.

But, with Cisco stuff you need three things;

  1. The Cisco box itself, e.g. the hardware
  2. The correct version of the IOS for both the box and the job in question
  3. The correct configuration file for the box, IOS and job in question.

It is as simple as that, three things, have them all on site when you turn up and the job is a piece of piss, even better, two of those things can be delivered electronically as an email attachment.

(OK, to be specific the IOS cannot be corrupt, and the config cannot contain any errors, both these are routine in real life)

You would think, that as the bottom layer in the cake the on-site guy like me would not have to ask those three questions about EVERY SINGLE FUCKING JOB you go to, you would think all the layers previous to me would get those three simple ducks in a row, you would think that BETWEEN all those layers it would be impossible for the job to progress down to me without those ducks in a row.

But no, since NO-ONE in those layers is concerned in any way with either the engineer or end user, only their own slice, I almost NEVER get all three handed on a plate to me, and if I do, items 2 or 3 are probably incorrect.

This is a TOUGH lesson to learn if you are an idealist, or naive, or young, or a man, but you better fucking learn it or your ass gets hung out to dry.

The lesson is nobody else gives a fuck, so you better not either, not beyond anything except covering your own ass, which means the ONLY fucking part of your job that matters is getting the paperwork straight, signed and filed.

You cannot correct this without removing every single layer that stands between the end user and the engineer, in effect, this means removing business/corporate from the playing-field, it ain’t gonna happen, it’s like asking for a hot dog minus the onions and sauce and bread, it’s a fucking sausage, not a hot dog.

It’s why the NAWALT thing is bullshit.

Take away all those components that make wimminz like that and what you have left is a drooling retard in adult nappies.

Those of you thinking hard times will cure this are equally delusional, hard times will decimate the layers in the cake between the end user and the engineer, but there are still going to be layers in the cake.

I’m reminded of the (true) clip in the film where Barnes-Wallis went to the War Department to ask for the loan of a Wellington bomber to run some prototype tests on the dam-buster bomb.

The clerk asks him why the fuck he thinks the war department will lend him a valuable Wellington bomber to play with

“Perhaps, because I designed them (Wellington bombers)” says BW

So even in the darkest days of war there were layers of cake getting in the way, and they were the most incompetent and parasitic layers, all the semi useful ones got shit-canned.

Those of you trying to survive, or rebuild after an FRA etc, better get this shit straight and cold before you even think about going into business for yourself.

Sure, the local firms that endure a series of fuck-ups may well call you in to fix X at zero notice, and then they will go straight back to the layer cake, you will NEVER get your way in and carve your own niche, not while there are any layers there.

 

May 23, 2013

I see cunts everywhere

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 11:23 am

In some ways I must be careful what I say for obvious reasons, but in my day job I go to all manner of workplaces, from the local tyre fitters to government offices, and it was at one such quasi governmental office last week that I saw something.

A moderately fuckable late 30’s early 40’s slut, no bra and a gratuitous view of her cleavage as she bent over to grab the server room key from the bottom drawer and hand it to me.

She was dressed as all wimminz are at “work” nowadays, appropriately for being on holiday, or relaxing at home chilling with a bottle of wine, but it was when I returned the key after my work there was done that I noticed the bitch was barefoot.

It reminded me of a gig I had about a year ago where I was contracting for big blue at another office, this time a personal finance / insurance joint, again mainly staffed by wimminz, dressed like they were on holiday.

This dump had a “dress down friday”, so of course all the wimminz came in dressed like sluts, and all the niggerz came in feeling very rad in their stonewashed 501’s.

*my* job was humping desktops out of storage, deploying the OS and software bundle and adding them to AD etc etc, then putting them back into storage ready for install, some 2,000 desktops, boring repetitive work at minimal money but hey…

So one of these bitches dressed like she is on holiday pulls me about wearing jeans on a tuesday, I just looked at her and said “I’m a contractor, not an employee, and you know what you can do with your dress code”

Predictably, she didn’t like this answer, and made threatening noises, I told her straight, “There are 2000 desktops to build, the job is already 6 weeks behind schedule, and you think big blue are gonna delay it even further and can my ass for wearing jeans while carrying boxes?”

She stomped off, never did know if she took it further, but I never got canned…

So I was thinking about the barefoot bitch, driving home through my home town at around rush hour, and I notice something.

Most of the faces behind the wheels of the cars coming the other way are wimminz, and without any doubt whatsoever, all of them were commuting from “jobs” as valid as the barefoot bitch and the dress code nazi, in the economic sense I am sure they are a huge proportion of what passes for the economy, but it in the productivity sense you could line the lot of them up against the wall and shoot them, and then dynamite the offices they “work” in, and nothing of value would be lost to the TRUE economy.

I wish I felt at liberty to post pictures of the things I see at work, being an old hand, I take pictures of everything, as I found it, what I did, as I left it, because we all know the last bloke out the door was the one who broke it, and nothing covers your ass quite as well as extensive photographs and other stuff such as putty logs.

The reason I wish is because years ago you could gain some sort of notoriety for posting a pic of a particularly nasty and messy server room or cabinet.

Now, it is the norm, and the standards are dropping, FAST… so far in 2013 I have seen ONE properly done, neat, tidy, workmanlike rack, and bear in mine some days I can be at two or three sites.20130523_095410

Server rooms used as dumps for boxes of papers, tables, chairs, cabling like snakes on acid fucking, things just thrown on job of one another or leaning against other stuff, no power conditioning, no HVAC, sprinkler valves sitting DIRECTLY above racks, HVAC systems leaking water that is running across the floor…..

I can’t post the pics because sooner or later someone would identify the locations, and soon after that, me, and I’m out a cushy little no responsibility job.

There is something DESPERATELY fucking wrong when the average guy’s home setup is far more workmanlike and neat than a so called commercial installation, and no, the added complexity of a commercial installation makes no odds whatsoever.

Of course if you want to see a fuckup of things that barely work plugged in at random and so on then go to any wimminz house and look at the tangle behind the flat screen telly / sky box / pvr / etc

Pic above is a recently acquired second hand HP Media Smart EX470 NAS, I paid not much more than beer money for this, it’s actually a nice little bit of kit (which is why HP stopped making them, HP, run by a wimminz…) and runs WHS which again I have to admit actually works very well indeed, so I bung three WD 2 TB disks at it at 75 quid each (these old ones won’t run larger than that) and hey presto, it is a good little NAS box.

So, the past day or two I have been running freefilesync sync jobs between my older and more obsolete NAS boxes to this thing, so this thing becomes the main online NAS and the others are now snapshot backups that can go offline.

I am now where I wanted to be, which is a single small portable box that contains all my digital shit, for around 250 notes I have 6 Tb (expandable to 8) of fairly responsive NAS storage.

It’s not seven sigma / five nines or any of the other crap out there, but in sheer functionality terms, and indeed in terms of how quick and cheap can I get back up if it all falls down, it blows away anything I see at work.

My home network uses two cheap gigabit switches, neither is fully populated with RJ45 cables, and neither is cable of running the entire network of available RJ45 end points, but if one dies I can just move a couple of patch leads and everything essential carries on running, until I go out to the local hardware store and buy another cheapo gigabit switch.

Make no mistake, I have surplus Cisco kit here, ranging from obsolete 877’s (obsolete but still being deployed…lol) through brand new 887’s through 1920’s to high end stuff, but none of it is real cisco, it’s all made in china or eastern europe, and so 50 quid TPlink / DP stuff does me fine, and if / when it dies I pop out and buy another one.

See, my guiding principle, and I employ this at work as well as in my home, is before starting any task I look at what could go wrong, and take steps to ensure that in the worst case scenario I can roll back to where I started, not think I can, but actually be able to do it.

Put me on a job with cisco kit and the very first thing I do is take a copy of the running config and the contents of the flash (the IOS and patches in other words) and sure it takes a few minutes, but what the fuck, I’m not paying for the time.

Contrast this to some of the younger engineers, who buy into all the gung ho GO GO GO GO GO corporate wimmiz and niggerz bullshit, and they dive right in and do a write erase and then try to apply the new config, which just happens to be broken, or apply the new IOS patch, which just happens to be corrupted (yes, it happens) and suddenly they find themselves with a site that is hard down and no way to get it back up without looking like an asshole and involving others finding and sending them the required files, assuming they actually have them, often they don’t.

Which all brings me neatly back to the barefoot bitch and cars full of wimminz driving home from the McJob at rush hour.

There was an old axiom that was drummed into me in my engineering days.

The differences between theory and practice
are far greater in practice than in theory.

But it doesn’t just apply to engineering, it applies to everything, except we now live in a world where thanks to the wimminz and niggerz, everything is theoretical to them, when it comes to practice and something fucks up, well, you make a support call and I turn up, and you STILL DON’T FUCKING GET IT, because you haven’t been made to clean up your own mess.

I can remember being about 6 and playing with a penknife, my dad warned me, “all knives are sharp“, which is theory, practice was me being a smartass and saying “this one isn’t” and proceeding to prove this by running the blade across my hand, only to find out that it may not have been sharp, but it was sharp enough to break this skin and draw blood…

Dad just looked at me and shook his head.

I’m sure my lip trembled a little and my mouth scrunched up, but you DO NOT CRY OR SHOW IT HURTS when you fuck up like that in front of your dad…. because you didn’t want him to see you as a baby, or worse still, as a girl, bad enough you just made yourself look stupid.

Bitches be protected from ever coming into contact with practice, they live in a world of theory, a world of make believe, a world of no consequences, or if there are any, it ain’t your fault baby.

I work for a company that is starting to disappear up it’s own ass with paperwork and tracking of this and tracking of that and forms to fill in, so I fill em all in, and bitches in the office send me an email asking me shit that was written on all those forms and photos I submit at the end of every job, not every day, every job, because it is fucking easier than looking at what I have sent in.

Then when my (eventual, I feel no sense of urgency) response points out that all they had to do was look at what I sent in already, they coo in wonder about how I am all organised and shit.

Cunts

March 8, 2013

Living in a virtualised world

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 10:39 am

I’ve been busy of late, hence the dearth of new posts..

My current gig is basically summed up thus, world + dog are chasing economies wherever they can find them (a good example is regional offices that years ago would have been on leased lines now being connected by xDSL) and so ACME corp’s 447 regional offices get new Cisco 887 adsl routers and all that, and the IT management can then be outsourced and offshored…. 447 expensive leased lines dropped, the in house 500 strong IT department sacked en masse, loadsa money saved, trebles all around at the bean-counters offices.

But some cunt has to turn up with the box and physically plug in the patch cables and so on, and when, not if, when that shit breaks, some cunt has to turn up and physically reset or repair the thing that cannot be fixed remotely…. even if that someone is just a remote pair of hands for a resellers resellers resellers reseller….

Don’t get me wrong, this shit is slick, but it is a basic engineering principle that the more layers of complexity you build up, the more there is to go wrong… which is why twice in the last week alone the NatWest Bank customers have seen all the ATM‘s simply stop working and no on-line banking either, and this is being repeated across the nation in all things IT.

Like the song says, Do your fucking job till the end

Till your job ends that is…. meanwhile back at the gig the crowd I work for are all gung ho, gangbusters and corporate image, which is fucking great while it lasts, which is by definition going to be a finite amount of time, we are hyenas feeding on corpses, for the moment it is a banquet…

I smile sweetly at them all, and friday rolls around and I think to myself that is another week’s money grabbed, wonder what next week will bring, because you see I am old enough and cynical enough to know that in this solyent green world, the crowd I work for can disappear with as little warning as the jobs of those we are replacing with little Cisco boxes (themselves now made in the Czech republic, oh the irony) went down the swannee…

They tell me about all the valuable skills and qualifications I can earn while working for them, and there is an element of truth in that, but I had valuable skills and qualifications in my previous trade of marine engineering, and they don’t put food on the table today, but my survivalist attitudes to life do, so what is more useful to me?

Never take a job you aren’t prepared to walk away from on a moment’s notice is a good motto, because already in this young and dynamic company I can see signs of the rot setting in, and the infection is spreading a lot faster than it did 20 years ago… I see this all over now, they will give some guy a £25k car to turn up at the customers premises in, because it looks good, but no 5 dollar uniform sweatshirt, just wear something of your own, and if you are given any tools they came from walmart, it is utter fucking madness…. exactly the same brand of utter fucking madness that created the jobs in do in the first place… by sacking all the IT staff and sticking in a remotely managed router and some switches.

Of course VOIP is all the rage, so when the cute little cabinet goes down the ACME corp regional office does not just disappear from the HQ WAN, all the fucking phone lines go down too… how many of these sites have all this shit running on a UPS, even a cheap and nasty will only keep it running for ten minutes SOHO job from APC or similar?

You got it, haven’t seen a single fucking one yet….

It is fucking dreadfully incompetent and amateurish, I don’t give a flying fuck how swish and fancy and cute all this remotely managed Cisco kit is, WHEN IT IS WORKING, I don’t care how impressive the tricks are that you can do, WHEN IT IS WORKING, I don’t care with what ease you can do quite complex tasks, WHEN IT IS WORKING, all I see is a system that studiously ignores the 9,000lb gorilla in the room, what the fuck do you do when it stops working, and their answer to that is to point at dudes like me…. whoooosh…

So anyway I’m chilling after a job yesterday with another of the field engineers, who is of a similar age to me, and we are discussing this, and the one thing my extensive experience has taught me…. and this is from the year dot of web servers on…

  1. The least likely person to bork such a box is the field engineer sat there physically in front of it, in true CYA mode he covers his ass at every step, when I am asked to type in console commands for a box that has lost connectivity to a remote IT management centre I read and spell everything back phoenetically, and then ask them, do you want me to press return now? No matter how simple the command.
  2. The MOST likely person to bork such a box is the remotely connected tech telnetting in or whatever, they don’t give a fuck, and this is before they get confused between the three other field techs they are talking to simultaneously to me.
  3. The MORE of a wizard the remote tech is, the WORSE they will bork the box…

All of which means that instead of us field guys being remote waldoes for the megamind remote admin guys, which is how all this shit is marketed by the bean-counters, we are just another point of failure, for exactly the same reasons that someone playing Call of Duty will have a different approach to a crunchie on the ground in Afdiggastan with actual bullets flying around…Networkfailure

Now these people, if you push them, will admit that there are things like the graphic above, a “cascade failure”, but these same cunts have never had to RECOVER from one, because the fact is they have never been in one, of if they have, they were but one node…

I can distinctly remember being in a large hydroelectric turbine hall when a (local) cascade failure hit, because one of the turbines was tripped out by a vibration sensor, which they think was caused by a log getting down into the vent, so one goes down, and it takes aaaaaages to spin down, but the SOUND is indescribably different when it is not under load, and then the next one went because it was overloaded thanks to the first one going down, and then then remaining three went almost together…. and everyone is stood there looking at each other and the hall lighting goes out, and emergency DC lighting flicks on and the turbines continue to spool down… it is the most eerie motherfucking experience… and it took on the onsite diesel gen set and four hours or work before they could start spooling up again, another two hours to get the first two turbines synced to the grid, and another four hours for the remaining three.

But they had ENGINEERS on site, not fucking remote wizards and the only thing on-site some field techs told on a phone press this button now, now press this one, now type this in, now move that cable from here to there, OK I’m in, you can go to the next job ta….

SLA’s, well SLA’s are fulfilled if the resellers reseller can get a warm body on site within 4 hours, that warm body doesn’t have to actually DO anything, or FIX anything, he is just there so the SLA penalties can’t be invoked.

What the people I am currently working for do not know, that I do, is this.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE, IS GREATER IN PRACTICE THAN IN THEORY.

So what happens in extreme cases, well someone ships a new box down, and it gets swapped out and we see if that fixes the problem, the only thing rarer than a UPS is the proverbial “smoking gun” when responding to an error call, nobody know what went wrong or what the causes were, and nobody gives a fuck, this job has had a 2 hour slot allocated to it, and that’s all there is.

Various three letter government agencies are waffling on about the threat of cyber terrorism, and hackers are getting sent to gitmo for 999 years of waterboarding pre trial, but the fact is that the real terrorists are all the fucking beancounters putting these bastard systems in place in the first fucking place, it isn’t IF it falls over, it is WHEN it falls over.

Currently these failures ain’t that bad, wossname bank goes down for 6 hours, wossname ISP goes down for 8 hours, wossname supermarket goes down for 4 hours, but no measures are being put in place to improve on this, on the contrary…. the opposite is what is happening.

Currently, cascade failures in IT have been confined to so called fucked up countries where fucked up stuff like the so called arab spring uprisings were going on, and again shit was blamed of guvvmint shutting shit down, hasn’t YET happened to a western country on the scale of the seventies east coast USA power grid cascade failure, which was ultimately caused by ONE part dying…  hasn’t happened YET.

But it’s gonna, why else is everyone getting the pre – emptive bullshit excuses in place about digital pearl harbours.

And it is not just ACME corp and your local supermarket and your local mobile phone shop doing this shit, it is also your local Court of law, your local Police station, your local lawyers, your local bank, your local hospital, and the technology is spreading in all these places.

Sure, they may well have a diesel genny out back that can be fired up to keep the lights on, but what fucking use is that when packets carrying everything from data to voice suddenly find no routes outside the LAN?

Which reminds me, next week’s money I need to buy myself a new NAS box and a couple of WD Red 3tb disks… lol

 

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