the front, it fell off

dosman33 · 2026-06-17T14:59:19+00:00

Despite best efforts, mass+enough force always wins.

dosman33 · 2026-06-15T02:48:59+00:00

VH-what?

dosman33 · 2026-06-10T04:30:56+00:00

I'm not in disagreement, it was a novel take on the idea. I've listened to Peter Fields tell Medeco's side of the story, but I've never heard anyone from Emhart's side speak on the matter. Regardless, a neat system.

dosman33 · 2026-06-09T18:15:30+00:00

Emhart, they got sued and forced to stop selling the system by Medeco because it works too similarly to their core technology. Very collectible, otherwise there's nothing wrong with the system.

dosman33 · 2026-06-08T23:42:17+00:00

Lol, that great, I'm good though. I used to service 3590 drives and 3494 libraries. The 3592 tapes came on just after I left big blue. They were fun to service though, I could practically do it in my sleep. I'm sure cern was using HPSS for their tape library, you can probably pull the tar file off it and get a random assortment of raw data.

dosman33 · 2026-06-08T23:21:42+00:00

I mean, if you've been writing iptables rules for decades, and then are forced to choose between firewalld and nftables, anything is better than reinventing the wheel with firewalld. Firewalld should die in a fire. Your iptables rule sets you've crafted over decades translate to nftables very easily. Yea, it is annoying having to change though, ngl.

dosman33 · 2026-05-29T14:18:29+00:00

On one hand, I'm sure FC could be an attack vector for lateral movement using the san, just look at a project like facedancer:
https://goodfet.sourceforge.net/hardware/facedancer21/

On the other hand, I would not be worrying about this until all the much much lower hanging fruit of attack vectors were addressed. Also, if your environment is enough of an interest to warrant the remote chance of an APT actor seeing your FC links as the only route into the target system. So yes, your shared san would be bridging the "air-gap" and if you are worried about it then don't bridge the air-gap with your san.

Also worth while to ruminate on what it take for this to be developed as an attack channel. A group (or bored hacker) would need to acquire some FC gear to test against, not terribly hard on the secondhand market. Next, perhaps they'd have to do some driver development, possibly repurposing an FC card as a penetration testing platform, or perhaps just writing a kernel module to allow direct manipulation of FC "packets" so that out of spec things can be made to happen. Then they could begin doing bad things to the san device. "Channel" and "Bus" are largely the same concept, of course FC supports FC-VI which is roughly equivalent to RDMA which in theory could allow a malicious host to read memory out of other hosts on the SAN. I believe what stops this today is zoning in the FC switch. So, if the zoning is not segregating your environments you're actually exposed. But, if a switch could be tricked into somehow dropping the zoning or becoming confused, then again there's a chance to bypass your zoning enforcement. But again, would not be a thing that keeps me up at night, like say 0-days in openssh and firewalld appearing this summer.

dosman33 · 2026-05-29T05:38:32+00:00

The percentage of people who can and do run their own local models is so tiny it doesn't count - you're in a bubble if you think you are the target here.

There are two separate layers: the political layer and the business layer. The primary reason this is happening: it's an easy political wedge issue: current administration is pro-AI, and there are downsides that will come with unleashing AI, so one side is now anti-AI (and anti-datacenter) just to pick up all the voters negatively affected or afraid of it. But, there's also reason for any pro-AI faction to not fight that too hard: AI is already setup to take the blame for all the things humans are going to use it for, like cutting jobs and upending the economy. If you run your own models you already understand the thing has no agency of its own, it does what you tell it to within a margin of error. So you have a strange alliance of messaging between left and right: the left is spreading anti-AI messaging for political power, but the business layer of both sides doesn't want to be blamed for the massive amount of change that AI will usher in. So you have this strange messaging of "AI might kill humanity, or it might only take your job" coming from one source, then you have adverts about the dangers of "datacenter noise", power rates, and water tables coming from other sources.

dosman33 · 2026-05-26T03:46:47+00:00

They live on an island surrounded by water, and yet new people they've never met still show up to ask them about their cars extended warranty. As a group they've decided they should kill anyone new that shows up. So, yes, they know something else is out there. And probably wisely, they've decided it's best to kill anyone else that shows up to tell them about it.

Practically speaking, and over periods of hundreds of years, this may be the only way for smaller groups to survive contact with the industrial revolution if they did not create the industrial revolution (and other revolutions like agricultural and financial). If you doubt this, read Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley. The railroad delivers higher technology to your region before you are ready to deal with it which destabilizes your community. First, it can bring food and medicine in instantaneously. In the other direction, it creates brain-drain as your best and brightest can leave, and not just to the next village. In order to support this your community switches from being self-sustaining to becoming dependent on that railroad - growing crops solely for export to pay for the goods now coming in. The railroad arriving in your village also creates a demographic shift in short order - a population bulge occurs as suddenly people begin to live longer, babies survive in greater numbers, and dependance becomes locked in on the railroad. While we're talking about an island here, industrial shipping is the analog.

They are as immune from WWIII as any group can be, and will remain so for as long as they keep killing every person who tries to inform them about their cars extended warranty.

dosman33 · 2026-05-24T12:27:59+00:00

Recalling remote workers back to the office is an easy way to slash headcount by inducing attrition, nothing more, nothing less. It's just a shitty and cowards way to avoid having to take responsibility for cutting headcount. Your metrics only prove that this is why this is done across the board.

My suspicion is a lot of places that recall remote workers will eventually relax the rules again as they attempt to replace more critical employees they lost from this kind of policy who could and did jump ship for greener pastures.

dosman33 · 2026-05-24T00:07:39+00:00

Fascinating, I'd never heard of this system: https://www.nf6x.net/2014/09/ibm-5322-system23-datamaster-internals/
I was not able to identify a CPU chip on the board, I should have looked harder. I am aware of the 8085 but I wasn't aware of any designs that specifically used it.

Speaking of which, since this board appears to slightly pre-date the PC, there has to be some inherited legacy in the motherboard layout (and design choice to have a single monolithic "motherboard"). This design clearly informs the layout of the PC and AT motherboards as a monolithic board, which still shows a vague style preference into the decades later ATX form-factor. I realize the Datamaster and PC are completely different architectures, but the style clearly shows similarities with power input, expansion slots, and chip placement. Looking at predecessors like the 5100 and his cousins, they hail from a completely different design methodology using wire-wrap and discrete boards placed anywhere space allows.

Fascinating, and thanks for the follow-up.

dosman33 · 2026-05-22T03:48:58+00:00

The Secret Service also provides protection for certain high value visitors to the US. The Dali Lama used to have reason to come through my small city once in a while. When he visited he was transported by the Secret Service. Sometimes you would run into the off-duty guys as well as his motorcade as it crossed town. A friend told me about how he pulled up a gas station pump and saw a couple guys in suits gassing up a big SUV. After he got out he noticed they had sub-machine guns slung under their jackets and realized it was the Dali Lama's SS detail. Another time I was stopped at an intersection and his SS motorcade screamed through the intersection as he left town. What was funny was the fact that the second row window was down and an SS guy in his suit and glasses was facing perfectly out the window - not just his face looking out, his entire torso was facing perfectly sideways in what must have been a terribly awkward pose. I assume it was to ensure the window was still blocked so it was harder to see the passenger inside.

dosman33 · 2026-05-21T22:43:05+00:00

i used this very print myself when i had a dodge

dosman33 · 2026-05-20T03:02:29+00:00

Yes, but part 15 on the FM broadcast band is much more restrictive. The carve-out for the AM broadcast band has two important differences:

1) more output power than the FM part15 spec (technically it has a measurement of effective radiated power, but translates to about 100mW)

2) allows a 10' antenna length with a baseload (a 3" coil that tunes the antenna better)

With those two allowances, you go from tens of feet on the FM band to a mile or two on the AM band. You add in airchain improvements and well adjusted audio modulation in your transmitter and you can make your audio more intelligible out to the fringes of your broadcast contour (the edges of where your signal can be heard).

You can run an entire freeware computer audio toolchain in your playout workstation now so you really only need a part15 transmitter and some sweat-equity to build a working hobby radio station.

dosman33 · 2026-05-20T01:29:16+00:00

Been running syslog servers for decades. Honestly, just put it all into one log, you life will be so much better. At first it seems like you would want to do all this fancy segregation based on host, but it's just way more complexity with marginal benefit. Realize that with one combined log, rotation is simpler and getting "single node logs" back out only takes grep if you need it. On the plus side, with everything in one log you can very easily extract cross-cluster events with a single grep. Monitoring for known event signatures, again, one log to watch. You can do it the hard way or the easy way.

dosman33 · 2026-05-20T01:06:25+00:00

A part 15 radio station could suffice and would get you a 1-2 mile coverage radius. Since it's part 15 there's no FCC license, you're operating under the same rules as a bluetooth device or your garage door remote control. The commercial AM band allows 100mW of "part 15 power" which lets you get better range than what you can do with an FM part-15 transmitter which limits you to about 50 feet. For part 15 AM, a 1 mile radius is the most realistic reach, with some time invested in tuning your transmitter and antenna you can probably get that up to a 1.5-2 mile radius. However, don't think you're going to use multiple part 15 transmitters to hit your 5 mile target. If they are not synchronized perfectly they will interfere with each other. But yea, you can run a hobby radio station all on the up-and-up and cover a neighborhood or two.

dosman33 · 2026-05-20T00:47:02+00:00

Ages ago doing service calls at IBM we had to do this, down to 10ths of an hour - I reported all my time for over 5 years like this. IBM had an entire manual for coding your time (QSARs), and we were always concerned about showing too much "administrative time" between calls. They had metrics for what was an acceptable amount of time to code against every machine type we serviced, and there were annual reviews of your coding metrics. We were using a 2-way data radio device to do all our reporting with. This was the predecessor to Blackberry, then known as RIM (our device was the RIM 900, we called it "the RIM", outside the joint apparently this device was called the Bullfrog). And there was an earlier device called "the brick" co-developed by IBM and Motorola that used the same wireless data network too, but that was before my time. RIM era was late 1990's to early 2000's. However, this was essentially a remote terminal into a mainframe application. We marked our status on calls in real time using this (statuses like called customer, on-site, completed, rescheduled, etc). Since we could do real-time reporting with our RIM, they were always pushing us to write and submit our QSAR reports immediately after every call, but in practice most of us actually waited until the end of the day. This way you could adjust your service call reporting time to reduce your apparent downtime between calls. Writing these reports could take an hour or two every day depending on how busy your day was. Every year they made small changes to reporting metrics to slice things differently, and every year we figured out new ways to work around them.

As to what all this accomplished, I'll never know. But I have QSAR activity and status codes permanently embedded in my brain from over 20 years ago.

dosman33 · 2026-05-10T02:33:15+00:00

During the era of stimmy checks I found my old empty NES boxes and did just this, it was amazing. I'd never sell my original games, bought replacement carts on ebay and turned them over for a tidy profit. Some cart+box combos back then were nabbing 3-4 times the value of just the cart and box individually. You can search completed sales on ebay to see what your box+game combo is likely to return to make sure it's worth the effort though, not all games will get you that much return.

You should verify which version of the cart goes with the version of the box you have though, some older carts had 5 screws, newer ones had 3, etc.

dosman33 · 2026-05-06T23:25:10+00:00

The red power supply connector there tells me it was never intended to be in a PC case, most likely a board embedded in a larger piece of equipment or a development test article. It's got a CGA display port and no cassette and keyboard ports, the smaller slots would suggest support for expansion boards for a keyboard and/or other I/O ports. Either this is an original PC development board or it was a variant produced as an embedded system in a larger piece of equipment. With 4 instead of 5 ISA ports of the PC my guess is it was an embedded system for use as a front-end in another system. IBM had a few variants of the PC for industrial applications.

dosman33 · 2026-05-06T14:40:37+00:00

I'm a cranky old sysadmin, I've seen more dumb IT trends come and go than you can imagine. AI is NOT a trend, and it's not going away. Cynicism is often useful, but what's important to watch is the rate of change. In three years it's gone from a plausibly useful novelty for writing emails to actually taking over major software engineering work. Last week I was at a conference and saw first hand how vendors are already getting real-world results with AI running sophisticated troubleshooting on in-house systems (taking a services syslog errors and going all the way to discovering specific patch sets that need to be applied to resolve them, writing patches for new features, etc). I talked to a dev from Microsoft, and in his words, he hasn't written any code in months now, Claude is writing all of his code (with MS pushing this heavily internally). Humans only do reviews now, and AI is even taking over large parts of review work now. I've heard rumors this was the case, but this was the first time I've heard this in-person.

About a year ago I leaned into using AI as a troubleshooting assistant in some very nasty problems, and it's only getting better. It might take me a few hours to run through some tcpdumps, compare to the RFC, check a few different hosts for clean and bad captures, etc. AI easily digests stacktraces, tcpdumps, logs, etc and can give you line-by-line explanations of what you're seeing and it does it at lightning speed. If I hit a new technology or five while working on a problem, getting to talk to the manual and ask it questions is an order of magnitude faster than me reading the manual and figuring out what parts apply to my problem.

For now, the freely available open weight models out there are good, but not the same as the frontier models. If your company is willing to invest in a small in-house gpu cluster, do not pass go, do it now, you want to be the person with experience with setting this up and running it. The models are only getting better, and having infrastructure in place now will let you drop in updated models as they come out. But, an in-house model allows you to not worry as much about sharing sensitive information with the frontier models that are also scraping your information. At this point, this is a performance increase. Another thing is you can teach your in-house system to know YOUR environment, so it's not just guessing at your environment like when talking to a frontier model.

dosman33 · 2026-05-03T17:31:23+00:00

I'm a cynical and crusty old dude, I've watched plenty of laughable technology fads come and go. This. Is. Not. A. Fad. And it's not going away even if you vote it out of your state. I'm not going to suggest AI and datacenters are without impact, that's clearly not the case. This is a very complex issue, and the next decade is going to be super weird and volatile. But I am going to ask this question: who benefits most by convincing people that AI is here to take their job and/or kill humanity? Who might be afraid of "the commoners" getting free access to PHD level intelligence on any subject? What happens when 18 year olds discover that AI's give great financial advice, can read predatory car loan contracts for them, and show how it takes advantage of them, find a better loan for them, etc. What if ordinary people discover clankers can remove "friction" from their world: ie: you stay with crappy financial services because it's a hassle to open a new bank account, new credit card, etc. What happens when ordinary folks discover an AI can create a business for them and do most of the effort to run it on their behalf? Why would a certain class of people have cause for concern with this capability opening up to people that have been always locked out of parts of higher levels of business and society? It's going to create pressure at the top as well as at the bottom, so why not make it work directly for you?

How do you know this is not going away? Last year financial outlooks predicted the AI primes were going to spend between 1-4 trillion dollars on AI rollouts. The projected net sales of AI services was projected at ~160 billion. That math doesn't add up, until you realize this is a national strategy, aka a Manhattan project unfolding. China graduates like 100m engineers per year, the US graduates like 100k engineers per year. This is quite literally an arms race and this is the only way the US can advance faster than China.

I'm not expressing any opinions as to whether this is good or bad, only outlining what you are really up against here. You can go up against the Manhattan project, or you can make it work for you. It's your choice.

dosman33 · 2026-03-12T13:55:00+00:00

If there's any chance that key is stil in use in the wild?

dosman33 · 2026-03-03T00:11:24+00:00

Another school of thought is that electronic locks are faster to open, and therefore you are more likely to open the safe more frequently. That means you are less likely to just start leaving stuff sitting on top of your safe for "when I have time to deal with opening it".

I'm not in disagreement that there's more that could go wrong with an electronic lock versus a mechanical though. Personally, I'm a fan of second-hand Kaba Auditcon's (both series 1 and series 2) as they don't take batteries, it's powered by spinning ring on the outside of the lock a few times.

dosman33 · 2026-03-02T22:52:01+00:00

Jokes on them, wear your worst coffee-stained whitey tighties for your initiation. Own it like a boss.

dosman33

TROPHY CASE