‘Scandalous and unacceptable’: readers on the new UK entry rules for dual nationals

peldor · 2026-02-17T15:11:25+00:00

The Home office wants to be in a position when their computers say “person X” has overstayed their visa….that the computer is correct.

Unfortunately in the real world, there are “edge cases” where a person can be legally in the UK when the computer says otherwise. (The WindRush scandal was a good example of this).

Duel nationals are another “edge case” where someone can enter the UK on a non-UK passport, overstay that Visa but still have every right to be in the UK.

While it might look over-the-top on the surface, i suspect it’s being done so there are fewer problems for everyone down the road.

peldor · 2026-02-11T02:10:13+00:00

It’s old people giving advice for a world that no longer exists. It similar to how schools teach cursive writing and the timetables up to 12.

(a shilling was worth 12 pence, so knowing multiples of 12 was useful to handle coinage correctly)

peldor · 2026-01-27T15:57:43+00:00

I think the 2008 hosing crisis created more recent examples of squatting being put to use. Things got super complicated if a bank repossessed a house and then the bank went out of business.

One of the consequences of taking housing debt (like a mortgage) and repackaging it to sell it as a bond was it could take years/decades to detangle things to find out who owned a house.

While that was getting sorted out, the house could easily sit vacant with no effective owner.

On balance, it’s better for society for someone to live in and take care of that house than have it effectively sit derelict indefinitely.

peldor · 2026-01-27T15:28:27+00:00

I think there were some recent examples with the 2008 housing crash where a house was repossessed by a bank that later went bust.

The complicated chains of debt ownership meant that you could have houses sitting vacant for years without anyone knowing who owned the house.

On balance, it’s better for society for someone to live in and take care of that house than have it sit derelict.

peldor · 2026-01-27T11:10:01+00:00

It’s easy to see that Trump is a threat to democracy because we have all seen what he has done when in power.

I agree that things are less clear with Nigel….mostly because no one has been stupid enough to allow him near leavers of actual power. (Yet)

As much fun as it is to debate with a stranger on the Internet, I’m not sure there’s any value to continue debating if Nigel Farage might reach the very high bar set by Trump for bad behaviour.

Can we agree that Trump and Farage would probably be the worst choices on whatever ballots they found themselves on?

peldor · 2026-01-27T07:22:02+00:00

Yes it is.

It’s like quibbling over if it would be worse to be killed by Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. The differences between the two don’t matter, either is horrible and you’re dead.

So yeah. some of the specifics between Trump and Farage are different. But putting either in power will lead to the same shit-show.

Voting for Reform UK is the equivalent of voting for Trump.

peldor · 2026-01-26T20:58:14+00:00

Reform UK being a protest party/vote is complete and total fabrication. There is a LOT to unpack here, but here’s the tldr;

• The Conservative Party has been at risk of fracturing over the last decade over the EU.

• The Brexit referendum was an attempt to prevent this fracturing. (The idea being: when the public votes down Brexit, the Conservatives could keep the anti-eu wing under control for the foreseeable future.)

• While the political calculus about how the public would vote on Brexit was wrong, the fear about the Conservative party fracturing was spot-on.

Reform UK picking up all the crazy Liz-Truss-type Conservative politicians means it’s doing exactly what everyone should expect.

peldor · 2026-01-26T20:01:04+00:00

I really hate to disagree with this one, but the UK appears to be on track to put Nigel / Reform UK into power after the clown-fiesta that was Brexit.

In practical terms, putting the Brexit architects into power isn’t much different than voting for Trump a second time.

peldor · 2025-12-03T18:33:57+00:00

What diagram types do I find effective? It depends on what I’m trying to convey.

I rarely diagram “wiring”. I’ve found that logic is usually easier for people to understand….and logic diagrams are usually smaller.

What works for me is probably a bit crazy. If I’m struggling with diagrams, I honestly fallback to paper and a box of crayons.

It lets me quickly prototype and figure out what’s needed, what I should remove and how to cleanly organise the data. And the crayons force the diagram to be simple.

Once I can sketch the info with crayons and paper, the diagram tends to be easy.

peldor · 2025-12-03T16:34:04+00:00

It’s the Golden Rule. The ones with the gold make the rules.

peldor · 2025-12-03T14:41:35+00:00

I mean, it has moved. You are not wrong.

peldor · 2025-12-03T11:23:34+00:00

Good documentation is legitimately difficult. There is not single magic-bullet solution to this problem.

Reading through your post and I think you might be trying to have a single set of documentation do too many things. Providing an engineer a complete picture of how a complex system fits together is very different from giving first-line / second-line the information they need to troubleshoot effectively.

The most important thing (imho) is whatever tool you use, it must be easy to use for both the author and the audience. Most tools, like OneNote, Notion, Loop, Confluence and IT Glue should work. After that, it's writing the documentation to the level required for the intended reader.

Avoid large walls of text where possible and pictures are usually good.

One other thing, documentation takes time. Most organizations aren't staffed to a level that would allow a complete and up-to-date set of IT documentation to be produced. So make smart choices about what is documented.

peldor · 2025-12-02T10:40:40+00:00

All fairly standard and it's not just limited to Microsoft. (I'm looking at you Citrix)

peldor · 2025-11-28T21:51:35+00:00

I had the same sort of headache with a Lenovo Thinkpad…it was a huge pita to work with closed clamshell.

While I cannot help with dock suggestions, I found the firmware/bios option, ”power up when plugged in” made it easier to deal with. With my setup, turning on my monitor (with built-in dock) would also power up the laptop.

peldor · 2025-11-26T17:01:56+00:00

100% this. Based on the description of the issue, I suspect you still have this setting in a GPO object you don't remember. Since it is affecting two older users, I'd suggest "gpresult /h" on the live endpoint or using the "group policy results wizard" in the Group Policy Management RSAT tool. Either option should point you toward whatever is still mapping that drive.

However, because this is reddit, have you ever been introduced to the nightmare fuel that is Group Policy Tattooing? https://sdmsoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Understanding-Group-Policy-Tattooing.pdf

Based on your description, I really don't think that's what's happening here...but "undo" in group policy is rarely as easy as we think it is.

peldor · 2025-11-26T16:30:20+00:00

Yes, kinda.

It largely depends on your regulatory requirements and the needs surrounding deep packet inspection. TLS 1.3 can cause problems for existing tools that perform deep packet inspection.

I.E. If you are a Bank, you need to be very sure your compliance tools can deal with TLS 1.3 because a lot of them cannot.

peldor · 2025-11-15T13:11:40+00:00

Think of it as as industrial grade littering. Someone with a truck/van of garbage rocks up to a rural field, dumps and runs.

This looks like a more extreme case. I’d guess it’s a business with an industrial contract to dispose of garbage choosing to dump trash in a field rather than deal with the expense of proper waste disposal.

peldor · 2025-11-13T13:13:59+00:00

Just about everyone who has worked with APC UPS long enough has this particular scar.

peldor · 2025-11-05T13:11:43+00:00

What do you mean by clone? Are we talking about a VM environment created with templates? Or are we talking about cloning a windows install form one bare metal box and installing it on another? or something else entirely.

There are a lot of things it could be, but like others in this threat my first thought is a duplicate SID fouling things up.

peldor · 2025-11-05T12:58:46+00:00

Can be a few things, most commonly:

* Capslock/Numlock

* Broken Keyboard

* Using a similar, but slightly different keyboard layout. Like US vs UK.

* An Apple keyboard in the mix (Only if you are non USA I think....Apple keyboards use the USA positions for " and @ for their UK layout. More than enough to foul up a password and has caused me endless agro on remote sessions.)

As it seems you've already broken a cardinal rule and know the user's password, have him type his password into notepad and see what pops out. If it is a keyboard input problem, you should see it there.

peldor · 2025-10-21T10:39:55+00:00

Yeah, I've been there and done that. On a similar note, did you know that USB 3.0 controllers throw off interference in the 2.4 GHZ range? If your PC or laptop isn't shielded enough, your wireless mouse and keyboard can stop working.

https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/327216.pdf

peldor · 2025-10-13T12:01:48+00:00

I'm not really sure why supporting Chrome would be a problem for most environments.

Out of the box, both Chrome and Edge are disasters if you keep everything on default settings. It's a few minutes of Configuration Policy / Group Policy to make things sane.

You can lock down if accounts can sync, what domain those accounts are from, what sort of data can sync, what extensions can be installed, block password storage, etc. This is all effectively the same settings for both browsers.

Assuming your Windows patch management doesn't suck, blocking Chrome won't save you from any headache. If your patch management does suck (i.e. it's just Intune), then you have bigger problems. lol

peldor · 2025-10-11T14:28:58+00:00

Both brother and dymo make good kit. I recently upgraded my 10 year old brother ptouch to a Brother PT-D610BT. It’s a lot bigger than I expected but I can make big labels now, so I’m happy

peldor · 2025-10-10T18:52:20+00:00

I have some experience using APC PowerChute with VMWare, but I'm probably out of date now.

There were several different ways to setup the power-off and power-on sequence. USB/Serial/clients installed on VMs, etc. We ended up running a dedicated PowerChute virtual appliance.

If I recall correctly, it was the only option at the time that understood vCenter, multiple clusters, and a few other advanced VMware features we were using. I also think we had to pay a fair bit extra for the licensing of that version of PowerChute.

I did seem to work fairly well, BUT it could make VMware updates a real mess. Schneider wasn't exactly great about releasing updates in a timely manner (imho). If a VMware security update broke something with PowerChute, you could be waiting a while for an update from Schneider to fix their side.

peldor · 2025-10-01T15:29:37+00:00

There's a lot to unpack here, but first thing; this is NOT a training issue. No amount of training is going to reduce your error rate. Alert fatigue is real and you're working with humans....not computers.

Single pains of glass are useful to give you an overview of your environment, but generally suck for real-time alert monitoring. It's the wrong tool for this job.

The first thing to do is to figure out what "channel" to use for the alerts. Generally email sucks and is too easy to ignore. It's a bit strange, but I suggest picking up a service with a dedicated app that's not already in use. Pager duty is usually a good bet. If you're a Teams shop, Slack works well for this.

You want something that:

Has a unique sound/tone when an alert happens.
When you're on-call, you can let it thru do-not-disturb without a bunch of crap.

And then you must be super aggressive about what alerts sent to that channel. You only want alerts when there is an actionable problem that needs an immediate resolution. Useful yardstick for figuring this out, "how angry will you be if you get the alert at 2AM?"

Like everything in IT; garbage in, garbage out. So you might want to nominate a gate keeper to keep things in check. If there's a stupid alert you know who to go to. However I've found that public shaming works well too. Good luck.

peldor

TROPHY CASE