Outright Rant

Intel X710 NICs Are Crap

by

(I’m grumpy this week and I’m giving myself permission to return to my blogging roots and complain about stuff. Deal with it.) In the not so distant past we were growing a VMware cluster and ordered 17 new blade servers with X710 NICs. Bad idea. X710 NICs suck, as it turns out. Those NICs do all sorts of offloads, and the onboard processor intercepts things like CDP and LLDP packets so that the OS cannot see or participate. That’s a real problem for ESXi hosts where you want to listen for and broadcast meaningful neighbor advertisements. Under Linux you can echo a bunch of crap into the right spot in /dev and shut that off but no such luck on …

Read More

Fix the Security Audits in vRealize Operations Manager

by

(I’m grumpy this week and I’m giving myself permission to return to my blogging roots and complain about stuff. Deal with it.) Several bloggers have written about the Runecast Analyzer lately. I was crazy bored in a meeting the other day so instead of stabbing myself with my pen to see if I still feel things I decided to go check out their website. My interest piqued when I saw the screen shot where they show security hardening guideline compliance, as well as compliance with the DISA STIG for ESX 6. I do a lot of that crap nowadays. You know what my first thought was about the Runecast product, though? It was “This is what vRealize Operations Manager (vROPS) could …

Read More

Apple Deserves What It Gets From This Battery Fiasco

by

Yesterday Apple issued an apology for the intentional slowing of iPhones because of aging in the iPhone battery. As part of that they announced a number of changes, like a $29 battery replacement and actually giving people information and choices about how their device functions. This says a few things to me. First, it says that have gouged consumers for the cost of a battery all these years. Second, it tells me they are scared enough of these class-action lawsuits to admit fault publicly. There are a million reasons why an iPhone might perform poorly, especially after an upgrade. This has little to do with the battery, and likely more to do with background maintenance tasks that happen after an …

Read More

The Dangers of Experts Writing Documentation: A Real Life Example

by

There are some real, tangible dangers to having experts write documentation. Experts have the perfect tools, skip steps, know where things are based on experience, use jargon, have spare parts so mistakes aren’t a big deal, and as a result make terrible time & work estimates. This leads to confused, and subsequently angry, people, which is probably not what you wanted. I was thinking about all this as I entered my fourth hour of installing a trailer wiring harness on my Mazda CX-9 today. It’s a unit from Curt Manufacturing, kit #56016. When my CX-9 was in the shop for an alignment a few weeks back I had them put a hitch on it. They got squirrelly & weird when …

Read More

Intel’s Memory Drive Implementation for Optane Guarantees its Doom

by

A few weeks ago Intel started releasing their Optane product, a commercialization of the 3D Xpoint (Crosspoint) technology they’ve been talking about for a few years. Predictably, there has been a lot of commentary in all directions. Did you know it’s game changing, or that it’s a solution looking for a problem? It’s storage. It isn’t storage. It’s RAM. It isn’t RAM. It’s too slow to be RAM. It’s too small for storage. It’s useful now. Nobody will use it for years. Yup. Confusion. It’s because Optane is a bunch of different things. It’s consumer and enterprise, and it’s both storage and memory. There are plenty of articles out there on the technology itself. There’s a small M.2 version for desktops …

Read More

You Cannot Use open-vm-tools to Customize VMs

by

Homer Simpson: Kids: there’s three ways to do things; the right way, the wrong way and the Max Power way! Bart: Isn’t that the wrong way? Homer Simpson: Yeah, but faster! My biggest pet peeve with open source is that projects don’t ever solve whole problems. They get 60% of the way to solving a whole problem and then run off to chase another squirrel. The most recent example of this is VMware’s recommendation to use the open-vm-tools packages that ship with modern distributions of Linux. Dumbest recommendation ever. Why? Because the project got to 60% of the solution and stopped, effectively solving no problems for anybody. From what appears to be a VMware employee on the open-vm-tools mailing list archives: > …

Read More

The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The Way It Is

by

I hate purists. You know the type. They’re in all IT shops, in all projects. They’re the people who won’t do any work unless they know exactly how it’ll all look in the end. They research, endlessly. They’re pedantic. They sit and poke holes in your work, claiming that they’re just playing Devil’s advocate. They rarely start an answer with “it depends,” opting instead for condescending phrases like “if I were you” or “if it were up to me.” And they wouldn’t know a minimum viable product if it bit them in the duff. Nobody knows how a project or product is going to look in the end. And even if you do have a great vision, nobody really knows the …

Read More

New Java Security Settings: More Proof That Oracle Hates You

by

I began the day yesterday updating to Java 7u51, after which absolutely none of my enterprise Java applications worked anymore. I could not reach the consoles of my Rackspace cloud servers. I could not open the iDRAC console on my Dell PowerEdge. They all exited with some error about the Permissions attribute not being set. Being the guy that I am I decided to search for the error. Turns out that 7u51 sneaks a major change in a point release: on the default Java security slider setting of “high” no applet may run if it’s self-signed, unsigned, or is missing the Permissions attribute. Unfortunately, that describes all enterprise software, at least all the current versions of things I’m using. This isn’t …

Read More

Why Your April Fools Post Isn’t Funny

by

Ah yes, April 1. The day I wipe all my news feeds and wait for April 2. “Why?” you ask. Here are the general problems with the posts I’ve seen so far this morning. A corporate prank post announces a feature in a product that would actually solve a problem for people. But ha ha, you’re kidding. A corporate prank post announces a feature that wouldn’t solve a problem for anybody. What made the early April 1 RFCs a little amusing was that they relied on deep insider knowledge of networking topics and were decent original parodies in their own right. Imitation might be the highest form of flattery, but you’re ripping them off, not imitating them. Please stop. Besides, very …

Read More

Rackspace's Terrible Maintenance Plan

by

Update, 3/21/12: please read the comments, too — we got a good response from one of Rackspace’s folks. I got a note today from Rackspace, where I have two virtual servers in their Rackspace Cloud. It was opened in the form of a support ticket, waiting for input from me, but with the text of the support ticket labeled as if I entered it, which was weird. As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the best Cloud Servers service possible, we routinely perform maintenance and upgrades of our underlying systems. The majority of these are performed non-disruptively, however maintenances sometimes arise that impact Cloud Servers instances. At this time, a Cloud Servers host update is required that …

Read More

+ More Posts +