Nick
@nick@shore.me.uk
169 following, 247 followers
The speakers at the third #MikroTik Professionals Conference have now been published on our website. We have selected MikroTik experts from all over the world who are coming to MTPC Prague in March to explain how to use many of the new features added to RouterOS v7 in the last few years. Tickets are still available for sale. Free beer (other drinks are available) the evening before! Plus of course, the famous free raffle! https://mtpc.world/agenda/
So excited to be sitting front row with @mellifluousbox at @neil 's talk on Online Safety Laws. 🔥
Neil is an authority on digital laws and its impact on Fediverse services (very relevant for Mastodon admins, mods etc!). #FOSDEM
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Neil on stage with the main slide next to him stating "Online Safety Laws, learnings from a lot of bro bono work"
Cynics might say that the UK Government have an incoherent approach to tech policy. Not so.
Sure, the AI Skills Hub is unlikely to turn Fatima the ballerina into a data scientist, but the VPN ban might create a whole lot of young cyberpunks setting up their own WireGuard networks and administering VPS endpoints for their friends.
At which point, they'll start developing opinions about Arch vs Debian, btrfs vs ZFS, BSD jails vs OCI containers—then we've guaranteed the next-gen of devops talent.
I tried the government's new 'AI Skills Hub'. Let's just say I was underwhelmed.
https://tommorris.org/posts/2026/turn-it-off-and-run-upskilling-for-the-ai-age/
@tommorris I can just see NHS workers having time for this. A family member is a medic & I remember their caustic remarks when back in the day govt decreed all NHS staff must pass the European Computer Driving Licence.
There are people who are directors of five companies and that’s considered a good work ethic. But if you’re an ordinary person and work two jobs to make some more money, the powers that be start calling it “fraud”.
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A black and white picture of Charly Shore playing saxophone
- Matter-over-Thread
- Bluetooth
- #WiFi7
- #RouterOS with #Terraform / #OpenTofu
- 2 GB RAM
- Around 500-600 PLN
#MikroTik hAP be3 looks nice, a real networking upgrade for me (from ASUS AX-53U with #OpenWRT) but it lacks SFP+
https://blog.streakwave.com/mikrotik-hap-be-media-mikrotiks-first-wi-fi-7-router
Like seriously who the fuck would go to America right now?
What does the slang word "bop" predominantly mean to you?
| An OnlyFans creator: | 0 |
| A good song/dance move: | 39 |
| A promiscuous woman: | 0 |
| Something else or nothing (pls reply): | 14 |
@davidnjoku To dance; a style of jazz; to hit.
@bodhipaksa @davidnjoku usually these things, I'm also aware of it being slang for a social event with dancing associated with social crowds linked to Oxford University (but was never posh or clever enough to regularly associate with such folk although I didn't live that far away for much of my life)
@vfrmedia @davidnjoku I think I’ve heard that too, but there’s also a “hop” and now I’m second-guessing myself.
kinda wish i could just `dig AXFR . @192.168.88.1` against my tik to see all the static dns entries because i am in a habit of not knowing the names of even a single asset at work and just piping a cheeky little zone transfer into grep to figure out what in the fuck the hostname of that thing is today
Kitchenware question:
In the old days it was Tupperware. I’m talking about “plastic boxes for food storage in the fridge, freezer, maybe a reheat in the microwave”.
We have some by Sistema but frankly they are rubbish. They get brittle in the freezer, then the lid latches break. We have tried other cheaper ones.
Are there any GOOD plastic food storage systems?
@bloor I upgraded to the fancy Sistema ones with the tritan plastic - these ones. https://www.sistemaplastics.com/uk/our-ranges/ultra
They have held up to freezing and dishwashers and all kinds of things so far. I've been really impressed.
@bloor I prefer glass containers over plastic as they can be heated in the oven and are easier to clean. John Lewis have some own brand ones that are decent.
@bloor it is better to avoid plastic in the microwave. The lids are ok, but where the food touches the box it can get too hot and melt the plastic. The fumes et al then permeate your food, not ideal for your daily intake of plastic but obviously we’ve all been doing it for decades. 🙄
@bloor For freezer we use cheap plastic pots with plastic lids; they're thinner and lighter than anything we'd use if we wanted it on a countertop, and don't have the clever seals or anything.
One option is the plastic boxes that takeaway food is delivered in. They aren't very robust but they are basically free. Recycle them when they fail 🙂🤷♂️
@bloor I moved away from plastic to glass with a silicone lid. Home Bargains always seem to have quite a few 'Lock n Lock ones which I really like.
@Wifiwits @ben it looks like zen are now available on my headend exchange. (As in their own network rather than using BTW)
Depending on pricing the 1.8Gbit is semi tempting but it still has the 110 up and I'd need an ONT swap
Keeping an eye on olilo at the moment but might just wait for OR to roll out XGSpon
I used to work with a guy 30 years ago who was proud of his facility with ed, when vi was not available.
vi is always available now. vi commands, particularly h,j,k,l, are frequently used elsewhere. When you have it under your fingers, it’s extremely useful & powerful. Not to be neglected imo.
@NAB No. The way to edit a text file on a Linux server is
* copy it to a Windows box
* edit it using a real editor
* copy it back.
You have to learn about line endings, but that's about the only hassle.
@NAB I’ve never learned anything with vi beyond how to get into insert mode and how to quit (with or without saving).
I think that’s enough unless someone particularly likes vi as an editor (I don’t, I prefer nano or a gui editor)!
@NAB Definitely. If he doesn't get comfortable beyond i a d w q and hjkl, that's enough to feel like the CLI isn't trapped. Whether he wants to do serious editing in vi, emacs, nano, kate, or whatever, is another question
@NAB Exposure to Vim and Emacs is important for people to get used to the idea that powerful software can sometimes have a learning curve.
James Watson sounds a *lot* like some other people I could mention…
“His signal achievements, and the way he accomplished them, inflated his belief not only in his genius but also in how to succeed”
What’s the name of this tendency for people to succeed at one thing to then think they’re right about *everything*, and to retreat into ever-more extreme positions when questioned?
Hello! And welcome to the third and final day of Jet Lag: The Game - Hide + Seek: Netherlands edition! It’s 10:30am, @quixoticgeek and, having discounted the War Games option (the only winning move is not to play), we are so back in the delightful town of Lunteren, where it’s time for us to Go! Go! Go!
Today it’s @darkphoenix’s turn to hide, and she is somewhere with the borders of the Netherlands mainland. We’ve got all day to try and find them, and we have to beat the time of 8 hours and 7 minutes it took us to find @quixoticgeek yesterday.
For those of you who missed yesterday’s thread, it’s up at: https://cupoftea.social/@moof/115513147403818486
For Day 1 (Friday), my thread is up at https://cupoftea.social/@moof/115507383775325900
Confused as to what #JetLagTheGame is? First of all, welcome to my little corner of the fediverse, you must be new here. But you can read a little primer I wrote about here: https://moof.space/what-is-jet-lag
So, it’s time to lock in, and get going…
(CW: selfie with eye contact)
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Selfie at Lunteren station
…to nowhere in particular. A behind the scenes tip: we all started at Amersfoot Centraal this morning, which is the closest station to our hotel for the night. We agreed to *notionally* start at Lunteren, and @darkphoenix has an actual itinerary that started at Lunteren at 09:30 to wherever they’re heading that will be within the 3 hour time limit.
So don’t believe all the photos you see on fedi.
In our case, we worked out when the first train after 10:30 arrives at Amersfoort and will be at the platform to meet it at 11:00am, where we are then released to be able to move.
That’s another thing, @darkphoenix is not actually at their hiding place. Much like we did with my run on Friday, she started later, and is notionally answering questions as if she were already there. We aren’t allowed to ask photo questions before 12:30 in order to give her time to arrive.
(CW: selfie with eye contact)
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Selfie in front of a big Amersfoort centraal sign at the entrance to said station
Speaking of questions, we can’t move til 11, but we are allowed to ask questions now, and house rules state that they are counted from where we physically are (to avoid us having to simulate the current train location or whatever). So we are definitely going to see how much we can reduce the entire map of the Netherlands without going anywhere.
We’ve asked whether @darkphoenix is within 80km of us, and she is inside the radius.
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An 80km radius from Amersfoort Centraal
Next, we want to know if she is closer to the coast than us. This is effectively an East-West split from our location. And.. she is. Which basically reduces us to the Randstadt, the area of the Netherlands that basically includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag and Utrecht. Aka “everywhere you’ve ever heard of in the Netherlands”
Long time #JetLagTheGame stans will be disappointed that we have already eliminated apostrophe es hurtigruten.
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A map that’s been reduce to, basically, the Randstadt. Looks like a pac man with a very open mouth
If you want to follow the other players, @darkphoenix has a thread going at
https://not.an.evilcyberhacker.net/notes/aeuzsu2tg7o300dn
@quixoticgeek has her thread up at https://social.v.st/@quixoticgeek/115519042948605723
It seems that @darkphoenix is also closer to an aquarium than us in Amersfoort. It means she’s not in most of Amsterdam, which gives us a train to get on, towards Utrecht.
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A somewhat weird shape on the map
And we are now sat in a station bench at Utrecht Centraal, listening to a pianist playing a jazzy version of A Little Night Music, as we wait for a response to our next question. Delightful.
So we decided to ask if her nearest airport is the same as ours… and it wasn’t.
So we have effectively stopped at Utrecht, got off the train, asked the question, gone upstairs, waited, gotten the answer, headed down to the same platform, and gotten back on the same train, which is heading towards Gouda
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An even weirder shape. Still some interesting locations though
We did a thermometer from Utrecht to Papekop (we saw the station as the train sped through). This has made more interesting slicing, removing some bits that were worrying us in Alkmaar, and we are now doing another thermometer from Gouda up towards the north.
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Lots of dots on a map
That was an intense few minutes…
We did a thermometer from Gouda to a little outside Alphen am der Rhein.
This managed to eliminate a significant swathe, including Rotterdam, which means the dreaded rail replacement bus is much less likely. We then boarded a train to Leiden, and got the curse of the hidden hangman, which we successfully identified as PYLON within five minutes. Because we’d boarded the train before the card, we continued on our way to Leiden.
We managed to ask for a photo of the tallest building from the station before declaring lunch at 12:30.
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A little wedge shape including Leiden and Den Haag
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Curse of the hidden hangman
As we expected @darkphoenix took a lunch break after ours finished at 13:00.
We took the opportunity to head to Den Haag Central to start a thermometer, and then headed on Den Haag-Ypenburg on rail replacement tram. There we finished the thermometer, and then asked if her closest theme park was the same as ours.
It’s left a very small area to search…
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Small area of den Haag and delft
With the judicious use of a tentacle based on zoos, we managed to track @darkphoenix down to Delft Campus, and are currently on our way there.
We are effectively in the end game, and I’m going to go silent, as this is a very intense game today. See you the other side…
We found @darkphoenix! It was in a random thicket by a
park. It took us 6 hours and 3 minutes, plus 80 minutes in effective time bonuses, making it a total hiding time of 7 hours and 23 minutes, which places them very much in second place. I lost, and @quixoticgeek won fair and square.
Today’s game was very intense, more so than the last couple of games. There was less time to rest, due to the very short train times inherent in the Randstat. We very much struck lucky by sitting down to rest right next to where she was hidden, as we were not quite in determined end game search every bush mode.
That being said, it was a fair game. Different from the last two, but no less enjoyable.
We are now sat at a bar in Delft toasting Kitty’s excellent win, and dissecting this game every which way to make it better. I’ll be writing up our conclusions in another round of Intercity Insights some time soon. Watch this moof.space!
And with that, goedeavond!
Electric vehicle drivers are likely to be hit with a new “pay-per-mile” tax in the forthcoming budget, amounting to an extra £250 a year on average. The scheme, which would charge EV motorists 3p per mile on top of other road taxes, comes amid falling fuel duty revenue as more people switch from petrol to electric.
@kibcol1049 how will they know how many miles are people driving per year?
@Disputatore Good question. Who knows how they propose to do it. 🤔
Apparently its from estimates of individual drivers mileage (presumably obtained from MOT for older vehicles or maybe self-declaration similar to applying for insurance (the govt could get this data from insurance companies/MIB, or even from manufacturers for vehicles still in the dealer servicing network with active telemetry)
But this is only going to fuel the conspiracy theories of the paranoid, and could even stall the wider adoption of EVs (especially as the easy customers with at home charging have already been cherry picked and there seems to be little effort to make it easier for those with on street parking)
@vfrmedia @kibcol1049 @Disputatore Think it's a silly way to do it. Why not just have a vehicle tax rate like they do for other vehicles?
@UkeleleEric @kibcol1049 @Disputatore
Its *on top* of the £195 VED for normal vehicles, hence why its a daft idea which could well put folk off getting an EV - if you can't charge at home you are at the mercy of various public charger operators with higher levels of rent seeking and data harvesting and at present less reliability than just buying petrol/diesel, and at present there seem to be 0 attempts to improve this situation (which won't change if left to the market alone)
@kibcol1049 Surely a better idea for ICEs and EVs would be to charge road tax through fuel prices for ICEs and charging sessions for EVs and therefore abolish road tax altogether. The more you use the vehicle or the bigger/less efficient the vehicle, the more you pay.
@nick @kibcol1049 VAT on EV chargers as well as VAT on the electricity?
@jayfell @kibcol1049 And that is where my suggestion possibly breaks down. It was an easy idea before EVs came along.
@PaulNickson @kibcol1049 or just apply car tax on a carbon release/mile and multiply it by distance travelled applied retrospectively after milage recorded at MOT. EVs charged at grid carbon component averaged over previous year.
@epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Yep. That could work.
@epistatacadam @kibcol1049 However the point is (and this may be controversial for some) that all road users (besides pushbikes) should pay some sort of premium for the upkeep of the road system. The more you use your vehicle, the more wear n tear you do to the roads. What I was proposing was a ‘Road Use Tax’. Payable by the gallon or kWh.
@PaulNickson @kibcol1049 I agree, I was thinking of a similar scheme but rather than on the energy alone, keeping the link to carbon emissions, and distance travelled, of course you could add a kerb weight component too so heavier vehicles get taxed more as well.
Either would be fine by me, though I use mostly my own generated electric in summer. So would that be taxed?
@epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Bugger. Hadn’t thought of ‘home-generated power’! Hmm, that complicates it.
@PaulNickson @kibcol1049 Sorry! But it would be hard to keep tabs on everyone with rooftop solar, especially as cars become grid support batteries too.
@epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Yeah that makes it tricky. Back to a scaled annual road tax then but by mile, read off the MOT cert I suppose. That would then work for ICE vehicles as well.
@PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 I mean distance travelled is an option. Sure some people might try to finagle it but in a country where you regularly have to have it checked it wouldn't be too hard.
@ariaflame @PaulNickson @kibcol1049 it just requires a chancellor to have the guts to a) think of a sensible system and b) rope their colleagues in to amend other laws if required. E.g. recording milage at MOT becomes compulsory, and on ICE I think carbon emissions are calculated already. And get independent checking of fuel/mile and KwH/mile.
@epistatacadam @ariaflame @PaulNickson @kibcol1049 using the MOT recorded mileage would mean that new car owners would get 3 years free.
@frantictdrinker @epistatacadam @ariaflame @kibcol1049 Ah yes. That doesn’t work either then. DAMN! This is too hard!
@PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the weight per axle, so maybe factor that in.
@rupert @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Hmm. So weight is another consideration. And power (because higher power shreds tyres more quickly). And tyre width etc. etc.. bloody hell this is complicated now!
@PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 And an extra 20% because the driver is a dickhead. How do we know? The Audi logo is a dead giveaway.
@rupert @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 3 months ago I would’ve agreed with you but I’ve since bought a s/h Audi A3!
@kibcol1049 @rupert @epistatacadam (My previous 5 cars were BMWs)
@PaulNickson @rupert @kibcol1049 it's BMW and Volvo drivers locally who make my blood boil. They never bother with indicators, as a pedestrian most of the time having people approach a side road, with no indication, then drive into your path....paying no attention to highway code.... Grrrh!
@epistatacadam @rupert @kibcol1049 I had 5 BMWs before the Audi and made a point of indicating whenever necessary just to buck the trend!
@PaulNickson @rupert @kibcol1049 exception proves the rule etc.
@rupert @PaulNickson @kibcol1049 I suspect pointless trying to get it too accurately aligned to road damage, but I feel it's important to keep pressure on manufacturers to move away from heavy SUV style cars. So a simple distance * kerb weight* length* carbon/distance factor would encourage purchase of small light cars, with low carbon consumption.
@rupert @PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 I didn’t know that. Ouch.
Would that be roughly the same trend for tyre wear and consequent microplastics, I wonder? Or does it also factor in the tyre contact area?
@PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Some places do this, actually. Many communities in the Chicago area (where I used to live) require drivers to buy 'stickers' for the front windshield, the lack of which can be fined. These are a road tax. (Chicago also has toll roads. And, ironically, some of the worst roads in the US.)
@lmgenealogy @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 Hmm not the perfect solution then but a step in the right direction.
@PaulNickson @epistatacadam @kibcol1049 I think the Chicago area has plenty of money for road maintenance. There are other types of problems there, including a very strong asphalt lobby in the state capital which ensures that roads are built with inferior materials (as per a friend who works in local government), and a city government that contracts with companies based partly on their connection to serving politicians and not fiscal responsibility. But the road tax idea does at least mean that the drivers are the ones paying for the roads - which might even encourage public transportation . . . if it existed outside of the city core. Sigh. (Chicago is an amazing city, but it does have its problems!)
@ninkosan @nick @alexlomas Ah hold on - is this the one that needs either the compatible car or charger? If so, I have neither.
@ninkosan @nick @alexlomas ah yes ok ... "intelligent go" versus just "go".
@nick @ninkosan @alexlomas My problem is I want to use a Victron EV charger, which will be locally smartified. And with other Victron kit; Cerbo GX, Quattro 15K and several MPPTs. So I'm kind of going to be a victron shop. And that means none of the best pricing.
As you know, we got shot of our faulty gas boiler and replaced it with a heat pump. Anecdotally I do think the heatpump is slightly cheaper to run at the moment, than the gas boiler used to be, even on a "any time flat rate" tariff for electricity; in my case 21.89p per kWh and a 62.22p per day standing charge.
I was paying 5.69p per kWh and 27.86p a day for gas.
So this is vaguely impressive.
1/2
2/2
So now I only have electricity and my tariff is up for renewal. And holy wow the price has gone up.
Unit cost for electricity rises from 21.89p to 26.44p = 4.55p per unit. Ouch
Standing charge falls from 62.22 to 43.66p = 18.56p a day
Mysteriously I think had I still had gas, my gas unit price would have actually fallen too!
I'm not entirely blaming Octopus but we are told electricity pricing is based on gas pricing. So how is gas kWh pricing falling, and electricity kWh pricing rising?
Additional thought (3/2)
We have two EVs and a heat pump. And we also run stuff like a hot tub. As a consequence of this our annual usage is like 12,000 kWh of electricity. Rather a lot.
That's a bit of a guess based on former gas usage translated to electrical usage.
But because our usage kind of can be any time, I still don't think we're better to go on differing kWh by time tariffs UNTIL we get a storage battery.
Long term, storage battery + solar, and near zero bills. But just now, oof.
@bloor we don't do any load-shifting, but have a tariff that's cheap(ish) for a few hours early morning and mid afternoon - in the current weather, the biggest draw we have is for hot water, and that's scheduled for the cheap times and saves a fair bit (especially when it's a dull day!)
Depends on provider, but Good Energy make it very painless to shift tariffs on a whim, so it's easy to tinker...
@bloor Try an app like Octopus Watch or OctoAid - they can do tariff comparisons on your actual usage.
@alexlomas I am wondering if in practice it is probably safe to assume we use more energy at night, simply because it is generally colder at night. Same with hot tub heating. And therefore, could a 2 rate tariff help.
My issue is that all my numbers are kind of new-ish and not perhaps maximally representative due to our recent killing of gas.
I'll look into those apps though, thank you.
@bloor Agile tends to be spendy at this time of year at peak hours but there have been a lot of very low prices lately as well.
@alexlomas Once we have battery, I'll go onto the tariff that has a 6 hour window at like 8p a unit and just fully charge always at that price...
@nick @bloor @alexlomas we’re on tracker. No EV, ASHP, et al. Nonetheless, this has saved us more money than anything that we’ve actually spent money on! 🤔
@nick @alexlomas Is that Octopus? If so, they seem to have reduced that to 5 hours not 6 for new customers.
Rate is 8.5p per kWh I think
@alexlomas @bloor agree about Octopus Watch. Our main storage is the hot water and I now use Havenwise to heat the hot water when cheap on Octopus Agile. Been using agile for years when when we had gas and other than a couple of months at the start of the year it's been working out the cheapest tariff with just a little load shifting of washing. Oh it's windy and prices are low, let's use it as an opportunity to make sure we get all the bed sheets washed etc
@bloor Can you time shift stuff like water heating and appliances ?
We did go battery and the works but the best single RoI on my spreadsheet once you factor in the costs and depreciation of equipment was actually simply doing shit between 00:30-05;30. The second was insulation and the battery itself was far behind (although of course it's kind of an enabler)
@bloor I've have thought charging the EVs and washing machine/dishwasher overnight would be a good win with IOG?
@ross We cannot get IOG. But we could get OG. And you are right. I am wondering if this would be a good trade. Even in the short term. Once we have a battery it's an absolute no brainer as we can continue to use "whenever" and just take from the battery.
@bloor My experience of solar plus battery so far is that I’ve managed to about halve our electricity bill.
28Kw battery, 3Kw of south facing solar, 1.5Kw of north facing solar (yeah, but better than nothing). Annual usage in the first full year including about 600Kwh of car charging, 7500Kwh. We don’t have a heat pump for the house though, we have electric radiators and a forced air system with heat reclaim.
To zero it entirely would require more storage (l double to cover max winter use in a day) and a lot more solar (which will be the limiting factor). And there are days in a row where we get low - very low - solar so actually it’ll never be zero for us. Contemplating an extra 14Kwh of battery but not sure it’s really worth the investment at the moment.
@gulfie my outline plan at the moment involves 32 kWh of battery and getting up towards 20 kW of panels. I don’t plan to feed back into the grid, but I think I will get zero usage costs for at least three quarters of the year. Roughly roughly.
@bloor Maybe Octopus Cosy would be worth a punt?
Day rate
29.07p / kWh
Cosy rate (04:00 - 07:00, 13:00 - 16:00 & 22:00 - 00:00)
14.26p / kWh
Peak rate (16:00 - 19:00)
43.61p / kWh
Peak rate is painful, might be an issue for cooking.
@bloor it's extremely hard to tell given the ridiculously warm weather, but we feel to be comfortably breaking even.
Digging through our LPG receipts, it looks like we ate around 21MWh of gas annually so as long as we hit a COP of 4 or more, we're in profit I think?
To be honest though, the monetary value of *not* trying to get gas delivered in the depths of winter is almost incalculable.
Vital piece of investigative reporting from Sky. They've uncovered the X algorithm which feeds users extremist right wing material from the moment they join the site. It is a far-right radicalisation engine, by design. news.sky.com/story/the-x-...
Many have already taken advantage of our early bird pricing for the #MikroTik Professionals Conference but it may be prudent to buy your tickets before the price goes up at the weekend! 😉 We are also very interested in hearing from anyone who wishes to present a MikroTik related topic. https://mtpc.world/ #MTPC #Conference #Prague
MS is having DNS issues. So the Dutch railways are having issues. Critical national infrastructure should not be on cloud systems owned by foreign companies. This is resiliency 101.
@quixoticgeek
actually shouldn't be on Cloud at all.
A National railway can afford its own servers.
@raymaccarthy
Not so sure about that with the Dutch Railways.
@quixoticgeek
@reinouts @raymaccarthy NS should be able to afford it. Whether they choose to, that's a different question.
@quixoticgeek @reinouts @raymaccarthy they can definitely get it at a couple of national hosting companies for a reasonable and predictable price.
@wsslmn
Well I know for a fact that they are heavily invested in Azure. Whether they can afford to switch, if they would want to, is dubious: NS are making structural losses since COVID and have had to make tough choices.
@quixoticgeek @raymaccarthy
@reinouts @wsslmn @raymaccarthy NS shouldn't need to make a profit. The purpose of public transport is to transport the public. It's a choice by the sole shareholder of NS, the Dutch government, to operate this way.
@quixoticgeek
I couldn't agree more. Yet, the reality is that budgets are tight for NS.
@wsslmn @raymaccarthy
@reinouts @wsslmn @raymaccarthy artificially. They don't need to be.
@nick @quixoticgeek @reinouts @raymaccarthy people often underestimate the actual cost of cloud services until something starts to use a bunch of resources, or your setup is so complex that moving away becomes impossible.
@quixoticgeek @reinouts @raymaccarthy
I'm not convinced it's even a case of being able to afford it. It is very likely that the cloud was sold to them as cheaper, but in the end I suspect it may actually end up more expensive due to various auxiliary cost management costs.
However, switching back may now be very difficult (and expensive) as they would have to rehire all the on-prem and Colo capable engineers. As lock-in strategies go, this is not a bad one.
@reinouts @raymaccarthy @quixoticgeek To be clear, running a server is, *relatively speaking* not that expensive. Especially when it's serving a relatively limited area. (It isn't as if they have to have their servers handling traffic across the world.) It can seem a bit prohibitive to us end users, but even for a struggling government a basic server setup isn't *that* big.
That said, anything as fundamental as a railway should be considered fundamental and be required to be self-sufficient.
@quixoticgeek in finance we have DORA legislation for digital resilience (you need to have a backup plan to stay running during such an event), but where are the same requirements for other infrastructure?!
@quixoticgeek so uh. As someone trying to do this for critical infrastructure: it actually probably should otherwise it will be down a lot more. At least in the current environment.
We should probably ask ourselves how to get out and still have the uptime, but it would need a far more honest look at our tech and how we fund it.
I cannot see that happening.
@Di4na as someone who's built a career out of building resilient computer systems. It can be done. But you need to have the knowledgeable staff to make it happen. And quite frankly. Those skills have atrophied across the industry.
@quixoticgeek i think they have not atrophied. We never had them that much. Because at no point in the past did we really handle that scale for so many different systems.
This is all new and we never built it.
And I have seen the results of the people telling me it can be done. Their uptime is not better, etc.
@Di4na the reality is that most organisations are not "that scale". So so so many companies massively over complicate everything.
@quixoticgeek
The Scottish Parliament has had to suspend business.
Literal democratic process is being affected.
@quixoticgeek
Trains were running mostly okay. It was just the App that wasnt working. With NS that's not that big an issue, since most trains run regular schedules. (If that happens to DB and their bizarrely irregular schedules and delays, it would have been a lot more of an issue to still get somewhere...)
@j2 and ticket machines. And ticket purchases. And OV fiets.
At Amsterdam Zuid I saw someone unable to travel cos they were unable to buy a ticket for their bike. Real world tangible effects.
@quixoticgeek Hardly anybody needs ticket machines anymore these days. You can travel with any bankcard. And I'm pretty sure that if you couldnt buy a ticket for your bike they'd still let you on the train.. It's the Netherlands: if the ticketing system doesnt work everybody travels for free.
@j2 I literally watched someone turned away because they couldn't buy a bike ticket.
@quixoticgeek Like on the actual train!? Wow. I think you'd stand a pretty good chance of filing a complaint about that.
@j2 @quixoticgeek a complaint? To get what? With what proof?
The fact stands: critical infrastructure shouldn’t rely on foreign providers. I’d argue that they shouldn’t rely on any kind of Internet connection at all, but the Dutch system as a whole would have big issues implementing that — I’ve seen the temporary OV chipkaart validators for NS buses with their big batteries and 4G cells, it’s a complete nonsense.
@j2 @quixoticgeek (also the part about « everyone travelling for free when it’s not working in the NL » is wrong, I’ve already been prevented from entering the station at Almere Centrum when some local incident made the validators out-of-service for like one hour. Everyone was invited to go away or wait until the issue was resolved.)
@j2 @quixoticgeek Do you know how many tourists we have around here lol
@SIT
Yes. And pretty much any bank card or creditcard will work.
@quixoticgeek
@j2 @quixoticgeek Global adoption of contactless payment is not as high as (Western) Europe, I wouldn't assume it for foreigners
@SIT
Even most Americans have that nowadays. And I assume 99% of tourists are on Google or Apple and could use that if they wanted to. I don't go to Amsterdam that much anymore, but even in The Hague or Utrecht I rarely see tourists at the ticket vending machines anymore...
@quixoticgeek
@quixoticgeek my train is also delayed, wondered if it was the same issue for a second but it turned out to be a much more Devon reason of livestock on the line
@quixoticgeek The Microsoft sales person probably promised it would be but it was more profitable not to keep that promise because they'd never check.
@quixoticgeek I predict it will selectively list, authoritatively, all members of a disapproved class as "not citizens", who then get deported without due process.
@quixoticgeek @cstross it has been proven over and over and over again that relying on the big cloud companies for critical infrastructure is a bad idea because it's putting all your eggs in one basket meaning it ends up not just being trains its trains, banking, taxis, supermarkets, hotel check in/front desk and your apartments shiny new smart lock that the landlord insisted on for some reason. Any one of these things going down would be a pain in the ass but all of them at once is a disaster
@quixoticgeek @stux You'd be surprised (or not) at all of the hospital systems impacted by this, too.
@quixoticgeek back in the day, the web hosting company I worked at had DNS servers set up with 3 different providers in 3 different places. In the 20 years the company existed, they never had a dns outage.
To be fair, AWS's DNS servers were up throughout the outage, they were reliably serving what they'd been told to.
It's just that automated systems had decided to remove a bunch of records from the zone...
New version! #MikroTik RouterOS 7.20.2 is available in the Stable channel https://mikrotik.com/download
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