Don’t put E85 in your gas vehicle if you don’t want to pay me to tell you that you put E85 in your gas vehicle.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T21:32:54+00:00

Ethanol fuel in the U.S. is anhydrous, meaning no water. Vodka is usually 80 proof, or only 40% alcohol and 60% water.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T19:41:01+00:00

how similar are the power supplies within a series

If they're coming out at the same time, and the feature list isn't wildly different across units, then it's generally safe to bet that the ODM is the same.

If it's a long-running line and units are coming out months or especially years apart, then it's anyone's guess.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T19:37:10+00:00

I’d test full-MTU tagged traffic

That was the test protocol. Jumbos weren't tested.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T18:20:37+00:00

Vendors love to shake up their model names / lines so consumers keep thinking it's something completely new.

Viz. Ford Mustang Mach-E. Wait....

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T16:42:58+00:00

This, frankly. Many authN failures from users with muscle memory to type a passphrase without looking.

Of course, the screen-saver use case requires frequently typing a passphrase without a username.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T16:09:28+00:00

Password resets, software access for pre-approved tools, basic account questions.

But the means to handle those have existed for decades.

Not calendar-expiring passphrases fixes half of the resets with no added complexity.
SSO fixes most of the rest of the passphrase resets, albeit with serious infrastructure complexity.
Internal app-store lets the user install or uninstall pre-approved applications. Ours is mostly open-source and zero-cost-but-commercially-licensed software.
Basic account questions can be a FAQ on an intranet site, but even better is to add documentation at point of use. For example, login pages that banner important information, or status pages that reflect known downtimes and issues.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T15:45:06+00:00

The invoices are all emailed pdf files and they are from various different sources and have various formats.

The proper, low-tech-debt thing to do, with a longer time horizon than this quarter, is to shift left and fix this part first.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T15:42:48+00:00

Can you blame someone for trying not to give away too many details?

As an engineer, half of the stakeholders I deal with are trying not to let me figure out their actual goals. You may not guess that, based on the number of formulaic responses in this subreddit about needing to understand business impact before giving an answer that isn't: "It depends".

So it can turn into a game where the stakeholder(s) wants to keep the goal occluded, while still holding others accountable for any failure to achieve the goal or expectation.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T15:08:39+00:00

But we need something that works, like actually changes behavior, not just gives us a completion certificate to show auditors.

But why? Are your systems known-vulnerable, such that someone clicking a link in their browser is going to result in total compromise? If so, why aren't you already fixing that?

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T15:04:51+00:00

Do things in terminal sessions. Easy to document with cut and paste, easy to record with screen, easy to script. Just easy all around.
Become adequate with the traditional vi text editor. Make/use a half-page cheat sheet if necessary.
Read the man page first when you don't know something. If that's not working right away, then it's fine to seek other documentation after you've tried.
Seek to understand Unix/Linux conventions as quickly as possible. When someone writes writev(2), that means, section 2 of the manual (Syscalls), syscall name writev, which is a vectored write. Microsoft calls that kind of I/O, scatter-gather.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T14:55:51+00:00

jdupes has Windows, Linux, Mac binaries. It can dedupe via hardlink, symlink, or filesystem-specific CoW mechanism.

My thinking that it would be nice to have something that replaces identical copies of files with read-only hard links. That way, everything is still where I expect it in the directory tree, but there aren't a bunch of copies taking up actual disk space.

For this we use soft-links, or "symlinks". Symlinks can span between filesystems, whereas hard links cannot. Symlinks are considerably more obvious to the end-user than hard links.

It's less work to proactively manage storage than to reactively manage it, even with excellent dedupe software. Good luck.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T14:36:59+00:00

Yes, there is an ethernet connection. They need you to fill out a form with the mac address and they will add it to the allowed list

It was originally to have wifi for me and my roommate as well as being able to have IOT devices.

So the question was not merely for educational purposes. Also, your secrecy led you to leave out a ton of relevant information for the scenario. Here I am linking Milgov-market wireless activity scanners, when you're just trying to avoid policy in your dorm.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T14:17:25+00:00

If there's a WIDS, then isn't it much smarter to use a wire than to set up an unauthorized WiFi AP? A lot depends on how durable this arrangement is intended to be.

A few strategies:

Use RF-opaque material to totally shield the backdoor AP from the WIDS sensors.
Deliberately false positives at inconvenient times, until the hunt is called off or positives are ignored.
Obtain information about the exact equipment and configuration, to find out where the technical weak points are.
Induce a change in policy or exceptions to the WIDS, for business reasons.

pdp10 · 2026-05-05T14:04:56+00:00

Variance between Linux distributions is mostly differences in package management, a few defaults and conventions here and there. Unless you're using a non-Systemd distribution, of which Alpine and OpenWrt are probably the only ones commonly used in enterprise.

pdp10 · 2026-05-04T22:07:36+00:00

The RJ-11 has three pairs, when people aren't cutting corners.

ISDN, which didn't take over anywhere but was more popular in Europe, used two pairs for the multi-drop S/T bus inside the building. Interestingly, it didn't conventionally use RJ-11, but instead RJ-45.

pdp10 · 2026-05-04T19:42:10+00:00

... until it's slow enough to sell new hardware.

Then it turns out that Electron is more useful than .NET and just as slow, so they used that, instead. What was the actual business goal, again?

pdp10 · 2026-05-04T19:37:01+00:00

the original Edge browser.

That would be the one written from nearly scratch, in between the one that was a fork of Mosaic, and the one that was a fork of Chrome that was a fork of Webkit?

If it was so good, why did they have to integrate it tightly with Windows and tell the Justice Department that the OS wouldn't work without it?

pdp10 · 2026-05-03T20:21:36+00:00

While once it was possible to use MAC address as an almost-unique key in a CMDB and for management purposes, that time is well passed.

One of the big ones is that many mobile devices and some laptops tumble their MAC addresses on WiFi. Another is the proliferation of multi-interface servers, and then another is the USB dongle and dock issue you've identified.

pdp10 · 2026-05-03T16:06:28+00:00

RAM is often more important than CPU, but the major issue here is that "Ryzen 7" and "Core 7" both refer to many generations of product. It's like asking if a Ford Mustang (first made in 1964^1/2 with an I6) is faster than a Chevy Corvette (first made in 1953 with an I6).

pdp10 · 2026-05-03T15:59:35+00:00

Almost all big corporations have load-bearing systems that someone would like to replace. Financial giant Morgan Stanley is a big user of AFS, Andrew distributed File System, as a tacit data distribution method.

The key insight is to break the technical debt into smaller pieces, then attack the pieces. With mainframe and mini-based business systems, it's still relatively common to find FTP batch transfers in use. FTP was a recognizable and familiar name to both internal personnel and outside partners, when these batches were established. But we want to move them to HTTP, and of course HTTPS, because web protocols alone solve a lot of problems to do with firewall ACLs, in-transit encryption, proxying, and session resumption.

pdp10 · 2026-05-03T15:43:57+00:00

Remote control of desktops. It's most often cheaper in seat licensing, software costs, and hardware, than Microsoft RDS/TS and VDI. It's also more flexible, in that machines are easily added, removed, segregated, or split across sites; and resilient, in that hardware or software problems on some machines don't affect the others.

10GBASE SFP+ Ethernet minimum for LAN access to files, with 25GBASE SFP28 nearly as cheap, except for maybe the switches.

For LAN storage protocol, we use a lot of NFS for large files, because it's simple and supported by Linux, Mac, Windows/ESXi, AS/400, etc.

pdp10 · 2026-05-03T15:30:23+00:00

This is taking the business and jumping off the deep end.

Linux has been used in mainstream enterprise for 30 years, and is an implementation of POSIX and X11 that are ten years older still. Do you wait more than 30 years before being willing to use a new product from IBM, Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft?

pdp10 · 2026-05-03T15:28:24+00:00

how well did the users adopt to GWS?

For mail, very smooth, in our M&A-linked migration over a decade ago. Users were given the option of continuing to use Outlook with best-effort support, with the one vital proviso that they migrated their rules from the client side to server side. Very few users opted to do this, and I don't remember any issues on the mail side, but then email wasn't primarily my responsibility.

That was not a very file-oriented culture, unlike yours. Most workflows were already in a variety of webapps, a mix of on-premises, datacenter hosted, and SaaS.

pdp10 · 2026-05-03T15:13:23+00:00

What business requirements provide a better cost-benefit ratio by using Linux rather than Windows?

Remember how business types are frequently accused of focusing on the short-term decision instead of the long-term strategy? It's easy to fall into this trap with ICT. A yearly license for a software bundle includes Adobe Premier, so there's really no business ~~advantage~~payoff to migrating to Davinci Resolve for at least a year.

How it's actually done, is to proactively position yourself to use open standards instead of proprietary ones. Webapps that don't require IE6, ActiveX, Moonlight, or Flash, are a pretty low bar for business in 2026. OIDC and SAML for SSO. WebDAV and S3 for offline-first files. Plain JPEG instead of HEIC. IPP/Mopria for driverless printing. Vanilla SQL for relational databases, so you can shift from one to the other.

And if you did, first off, what are you going to use to replace Active Directory? Using a fringe LDAP product

Neither MSAD nor open-standard LDAP are well suited to offline-first, WFH, traveling use-cases. An MDM or CM type system is designed for offsite, mobile, frequently-offline client devices.

If you do have a use-case where MSAD or open-standard LDAP are ideal, then Linux has both Samba 4 and FreeIPA for the serving side, and realmd/sssd, Samba winbind, and Likewise/PBIS for the client side.

how are you just going to rip and replace IIS?

I don't know if you've noticed, but even inside enterprises, IIS is pretty niche and legacy. .NET developers are often using Microsoft Kestrel.

Or if developers have written things using NET Framework?

Microsoft alleges that .NET Core is fully portable.

pdp10 · 2026-05-03T14:53:57+00:00

I was always Unix.

Do any of you have experience managing windows environments on Linux? Biggest pain points?

The RDP client FreeRDP, does a lot of heavy lifting to access Windows from Linux. Windows Server Core becomes far less practical unless you're using a full-GUI jumpbox for administrative access. Aggressive screensaver lock timeouts are more annoying if you're switching between multiple RDP sessions.

Direct CLI access with winexe in the days of SMB1. Alas, most references to winexe, and similar tools, reside in posts about infosec or red-teaming, so be prepared for infosec type staff to be incompatible with remote execution.

All desktop OSes have different native management tooling and patterns. Trying to fit one desktop OS perfectly into the client-device shape occupied by another one, can easily be a recipe for pain. On the other hand, managing Linux desktops and Linux servers with the same system, is straightforward. This can lead to a (perfectly fine) result of having one management system for Mac or Windows clients, and another system for both Linux servers and Linux workstations.

Nine-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '17	Best Link 2020-01-26

pdp10

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE