Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[Saskia]

 Well, I secured my way cluster using x.509, but now I need to make sure the fucking application can connect.
For this I need to enable external authentication and the username must be the subject of the certificate. How am I to incorporate that into the bloody application. FFS.
Water. Soap. Sponge.Clamps. battery. Coil. Let's go ...

[Kosmic]

The calibration/gain/compensation adjustments are complete for the Type 3A6 plug-in. It is now 100% functional.


And so.....

Back in May I started with this mess.




Took a while but the Type 561B is fully restored and 4 plug-in's repaired and 100% functional. Waveform from Type 114 Pulse Generator. On to the next project. 

Good job Med 

[Cerebus]

I have a deep loathing of X.509.

Simply mentioning the phrase "Distinguished Name" makes me want to kill something. An email adress like "mansaxel@besserwisser.org" is reasonably unique and as a naming structure delegatable and scalable. That must have been too easy, and also not Vogon Poetry Elegant and therefore Not Acceptable.

Yes, I hate it, too.

Yes, but that wouldn't allow you to associate the certificate with a directory record in an X.500 directory so you could send X.400 emails over an OSI network. 

We get stuffed with all this crap (e.g. ASN.1 in SNMP) left over from from the monster that was OSI, a set of protocols that completely failed to materialise in the real world, died but left all sorts of still wriggling tentacles littered over the place to entrap us. I once had to wrestle with the OSI IS<->IS routing protocol on a frigging IP network - made me start feeling nostalgic for RIPv1.

[bd139]

LMAO. Popped back into whine. Don't ever talk to me about X509. Every fucking Java knacker yard fadhole scum pit that does fintech integrations uses it somewhere for something inappropriate. That or completely fucked up SFTP implementations where someone tried and failed to be clever about something. Argh. And then there's full stack SOAP and WS-* still out there. The worst was one that used a completely NIH bastardised X509 signed WS-BrokeredNotification that used a completely separate SAML identity provider to sign the certs and then you had to send the fucking token with the signed request?!?!?!?!?! And of course their fucked up F5 infrastructure doing DPI actually buggered everything going through it.

But no everyone is suddenly using msgpack now which is basically json which is basically a subset of javascript which doesn't even have precision decimal types so is absolutely inappropriate for use for financial values which are just rammed into IEEE 754 double precision values by people who are too scared to care because if they do it's going to hurt them even more. Oh and it doesn't have a standardised over-http implementation so every damn endpoint is subtely different.

If you understand any of that you will be crying with me (and stuffing your mattress full of gold coins and medicines before the world ends)

Edit: back to unfucking kubernetes liveness checks

[Cerebus]

Sadly I do understand it all and I'm also confident that it won't leave me stuffing mattresses with zloty, shekels, doubloons or any other currency  because nobody would pay what I'd demand to deal with that crap^*. Also, I don't think I'd last more than a few weeks dealing with the kind of muppets you find in fintech without breaking someone's jaw (OK, I wouldn't really, but I'd really want to).

Last year I managed to dodge having to bodge up a layer to talk to a SOAP broker and the man who did get lumbered with it left two months later. I rest my case.

^*Possibly not true, in fintech someone might actually be stupid enough to pay what I'd ask.

[bd139]

^*Possibly not true, in fintech someone might actually be stupid enough to pay what I'd ask.

Yep. Worked for me. More cash you earn the quicker you can retire. That's my only motivation

[tggzzz]

^*Possibly not true, in fintech someone might actually be stupid enough to pay what I'd ask.

Yep. Worked for me. More cash you earn the quicker you can retire. That's my only motivation

There's a corollary to that: the more cash you don't spend the quicker you can retire.

[bd139]

There's a corollary to that: the more cash you don't spend the quicker you can retire.

Completely agree. One reason I tend to bounce gear regularly. The net expenditure on my hobbies and interests is less than zero

[tggzzz]

^*Possibly not true, in fintech someone might actually be stupid enough to pay what I'd ask.

Yes, but the large sums of money are necessary because you are dealing with the denizens of the fintech world. Frequently they are a good reminder that cream isn't the only thing that floats to the surface.

[tggzzz]

Latest acquisition is on test. Currently it agrees with my voltage standard to within 1.7ppm. It will be interesting to see how it behaves overnight.

I had measured my voltage standard for free, with an hp3458a that had been calibrated against a national primary standard 24hours earlier. Well free is an exaggeration; I paid £80 for a weekend in Hannover

[Cerebus]

^*Possibly not true, in fintech someone might actually be stupid enough to pay what I'd ask.

Yes, but the large sums of money are necessary because you are dealing with the denizens of the fintech world. Frequently they are a good reminder that cream isn't the only thing that floats to the surface.

Back at the end of the last century (Eek, it's got to the point where that's a sane thing to say) the ISP that I was head techie and bottlewasher for (OK, Ops Manager) kept our London office on Cannon Street, right in the heart of London's financial district. That meant if we wanted to go to the pub, and we did, a lot, we had to rub shoulders with the City mob. Just going for a beer became a masterclass in anger management as you were forced to listen to the (overly loud) idiots mouthing off. I've wiped classier things off the sole of my shoe.

[bd139]

Ah we've replaced most of those twats with a few lines of C# now 

[tggzzz]

^*Possibly not true, in fintech someone might actually be stupid enough to pay what I'd ask.

Yes, but the large sums of money are necessary because you are dealing with the denizens of the fintech world. Frequently they are a good reminder that cream isn't the only thing that floats to the surface.

Back at the end of the last century (Eek, it's got to the point where that's a sane thing to say) the ISP that I was head techie and bottlewasher for (OK, Ops Manager) kept our London office on Cannon Street, right in the heart of London's financial district. That meant if we wanted to go to the pub, and we did, a lot, we had to rub shoulders with the City mob. Just going for a beer became a masterclass in anger management as you were forced to listen to the (overly loud) idiots mouthing off. I've wiped classier things off the sole of my shoe.

I've always assumed that the Alex cartoon is a documentary, and Awful Warning.

[mnementh]

Ah we've replaced most of those twats with a few lines of C# now 

Over here we put 'em in the White House. 

mnem
*currently trying to find this tee in my size* 

[Specmaster]

LMAO. Popped back into whine. Don't ever talk to me about X509. Every fucking Java knacker yard fadhole scum pit that does fintech integrations uses it somewhere for something inappropriate. That or completely fucked up SFTP implementations where someone tried and failed to be clever about something. Argh. And then there's full stack SOAP and WS-* still out there. The worst was one that used a completely NIH bastardised X509 signed WS-BrokeredNotification that used a completely separate SAML identity provider to sign the certs and then you had to send the fucking token with the signed request?!?!?!?!?! And of course their fucked up F5 infrastructure doing DPI actually buggered everything going through it.

But no everyone is suddenly using msgpack now which is basically json which is basically a subset of javascript which doesn't even have precision decimal types so is absolutely inappropriate for use for financial values which are just rammed into IEEE 754 double precision values by people who are too scared to care because if they do it's going to hurt them even more. Oh and it doesn't have a standardised over-http implementation so every damn endpoint is subtely different.

If you understand any of that you will be crying with me (and stuffing your mattress full of gold coins and medicines before the world ends)

Edit: back to unfucking kubernetes liveness checks

As a non-programmer and never been involved in IT support in any format, that meant diddley squat to me but I gathered from reading between the lines that it basically is a huge clusterfuck and that there is some point that all of this clusterfuck is going to come home to roost and that we should be stock piling gold and medicines. Is this something like the millennium bug that has a date and stamp that all this doom and gloom is going to descent upon us   

[mnementh]

Worse... it's a fucking pyramid scheme of disparate hardware and software technologies all jammed together at high RPMs and friction-welded into a homonculous mass. It is only the hard work of crazy bastards like bd and myself who bother to jump in, shovel shit like crazy, then slap a patch onto it to keep the latest split seam from pissing diarrhea sludge all over the rest of the pyramid that keeps it all afloat.

The bitch part is that there's nobody in the last 2 generations who know jack shit about how it all really fits together except a few thousand freakazoids in Turkey and India who've been doing all the outsourced 3rd tier tech support for the last 2 decades (okay, slight exaggeration) and nobody since the millennials who could be arsed to do what I do; once the guys like them and bd and me all die off, the rest of the world is either going to be like the Eloi and those dingles on the Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B, or like the fucking Morlocks already in Congress feeding off them. (not in any way even a slight exaggeration)   

The worst thing that ever happened to technology was when they allowed corporations to patent software. 

mnem

[mnementh]

Huh...

https://flipperzero.one/one

https://pwnagotchi.ai/

mnem
*toddles off to ded* 

[Saskia]

Ahem, it's not just be and you, I am fucking old enough to remember all that OSI crap. Btw did corba ever materialize in any real world application ? Been doing that stuff since 1988, and I have sweet memories about a nice program I left at a bank for processing their futures settlements ...
It was written in make and had 67 lines. The initialization was done via a calling shell script. The Targets were recursive and calculated at runtime from variables set by the calling shell script which were modified using sed and awk as part of the target definition. When I left the bank it took them one employee for 18 months to get rid of that program.

Now I am tackling Mongo's authentication using  x.509 authentication and firewalling to harden my database for my translation system. Yuck.
Next step:. Attach a speech to text server with fpga speech recognition....
Just to add another layer of complexity ...
Out of sheer spite and to give me more job security.

[Neomys Sapiens]

Belarus 

You are not doing any half-assed bad decisions, are you?

[mnementh]

Ahem, it's not just be and you, I am fucking old enough to remember all that OSI crap. Btw did corba ever materialize in any real world application ? Been doing that stuff since 1988, and I have sweet memories about a nice program I left at a bank for processing their futures settlements ...
It was written in make and had 67 lines. The initialization was done via a calling shell script. The Targets were recursive and calculated at runtime from variables set by the calling shell script which were modified using sed and awk as part of the target definition. When I left the bank it took them one employee for 18 months to get rid of that program.

Now I am tackling Mongo's authentication using  x.509 authentication and firewalling to harden my database for my translation system. Yuck.
Next step:. Attach a speech to text server with fpga speech recognition....
Just to add another layer of complexity ...
Out of sheer spite and to give me more job security.

I said crazy bastards like us. You do qualify.    And I hope you understand, I mean that as a compliment. 

I am so very thankful that my end is only hardware. I spent my time working HellDesk; I have some small inkling of what it’s like to try and fix a problem via remote with nothing but a console and somebody else’s eyes to work with. What a luxury it is when you can have eyes and hands onsite that actually have half a clue what they’re seeing and what you need them to do!

In my old age, I am more than happy to provide that valuable service. Too bad so few of the current generations don’t feel it is beneath them. 

mnem
Do something, even if it’s wrong.

[mansaxel]

I once had to wrestle with the OSI IS<->IS routing protocol on a frigging IP network - made me start feeling nostalgic for RIPv1.

And here I am thinking that the ONLY thing that OSI ever produced that I like, is IS-IS. It is just like OSPF (both are Dijkstra graphs) but one instance is so estranged from IP that it routes both v4 and v6 without requiring double amount of config work and resulting mistakes you get in OSPF.  Yes, any IP net I build (and I've done a few) has IS-IS as its IGP. It is much neater than anything else. I've never had to deal with RIP, it's only OSPF, BGP and IS-IS, because that's what drives big nets. And MPLS of course. The ATM crowd's revenge on IP.

[Neomys Sapiens]

I hate those days where this red, flashing 'BULLSHIT' alarm inside your head just above your external field of view goes off repeatedly. But worse is the blaring klaxon that comes with it.
When one device A with Software A' can communicate flawlessly with the target device and device B with software B' can't do that, it is obvious that the culprit is the (HW) interface converter, which is totally dumb and transparent, right? And the reason is that it is newly developed hardware.
And when 5 friggin' lazy SW bozos keep repeating it, it must be true, right?
No. Simply no.

Maybe I need to get some advice from Saskia on some topics. Like:
- can I reuse the sponges despite Covid?
- should the persons involved become connected in series or parallel?

[mansaxel]

^*Possibly not true, in fintech someone might actually be stupid enough to pay what I'd ask.

Yep. Worked for me. More cash you earn the quicker you can retire. That's my only motivation

Someone once dangled a Very Fat Paycheck (to me, at least) in front of me. The down side was that I'd have to work in fintech, and manage a small network that could not be touched during operating hours, even when demonstrated broken, just because.  I politely declined and kept on working for less where I was happy. Retirement won't happen until I'm past usual retirement age anyway, with the gummint slowly raising the lowest age you can retire with pension (because the system was designed for people to live 10 years in retirement and then die from bad health; now that people don't work like the idiot-nostalgics that comment on British Transport Films love, ie. in suit and tie in heavy industry, without PPE, constantly smoking, people strangely enough live longer.) and since I'm only dependent on my brain and typing skills to do my work, that can happen.  Might as well work where I won't go more than slightly crazy.

[mansaxel]

I am so very thankful that my end is only hardware. I spent my time working HellDesk; I have some small inkling of what it’s like to try and fix a problem via remote with nothing but a console and somebody else’s eyes to work with. What a luxury it is when you can have eyes and hands onsite that actually have half a clue what they’re seeing and what you need them to do!

In my old age, I am more than happy to provide that valuable service. Too bad so few of the current generations don’t feel it is beneath them. 

mnem
Do something, even if it’s wrong.

I spent better part of Wednesday in our other data centre, moving the connection for our props, dress and scenery storage facility to something other than a 15yo Fiona-hp switch. Standing with hearing protection, alone, and inspecting fiber ferrules, cleaning them, and making certain that they connect to the right port is a nice meditative work, that can't be trusted to helpdesk, service department, or colleagues (except one, the newest one, who's built a country-wide DWDM network at previous employer and really, really dislikes dirty optics..) because they'll just patch it up and see a green light and call it a day... That day. Whether it'll work in 2 weeks is another thing.

Yes, I'd go crazy if I did not get time at the bench and time in the machine room. But my work is most valuable to the company when I simply think and talk to people and computers. Those other things are therapy.

[psykok]

Today arrival.    

cool, what are you gonna  do with all this nice res?