Robocopy, CCPA, RPi, NSPK, Clonezilla, FIFO, OVH

  • Robocopy using Inter Packet Gap / IPG parameter to intentionally slow down massive transfers so those won't be taking up too much bandwidth. IPG is delay in milliseconds which are applied to transfer every 64 kilobytes. Limiting the transfer speed / load to network to desired level.
  • Studied California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) just to compare it with GDPR. Lot's of discussion about privacy and if IP addresses are PII or not. I don't see any problem there if those are PII. IP information shouldn't be public anyway. And at least in Finland, IP information has been counted as PII for ages. Just like any other telecommunication information. So, what's the problem? In many cases that's done so that log data is collected and encrypted using public key encryption. Then just very small and limited team has access to the decryption of that information. Or that information is accessible via logged and high security portal.
  • What's wrong with Raspberry PI a very interesting article. I actually didn't know that the GPU is the "main cpu" of the platform. I also didn't know that RPi got undervoltage protection. But it's not a surprise that people would be using it without adequate cooling or with some extremely bad power source, connectors and cables. That's just so normal.
  • Studied Russian National Payment Card System (NSPK) which is being used with MIR card payment system.
  • Clonezilla Network DHCP PXE UEFI boot, again the traditional fun stuff. On some forums I spotted, that the only version which works (or at least worked while the forum post was made) is AMD64 Alternate Ubuntu based build. Let's see how deep this stuff gets, before everything is working again. Also one guy has made us custom startup scripts, which also need to be manually migrated / merged into latest version. I also would prefer using HTTP instead of TFTP for data transfer, but let's see if I find suitable libraries for UEFI boot.
  • Lots of tuning with syslinux.efi, ldlinux.e64, UEFI enabled computers, boot menus, and of course attempted to use bootx64.efi too. Interesting. System loads syslinux.efi and immediately hangs, awesome. Ok, where's the problem. Ugh! It might be that the system we've been using to test the configuration doesn't actually support UEFI network boot. Smile. This is just why testing out new stuff is so much reading stuff, and trying stuff and figuring out what's wrong and why. Until you'll find out perfectly working (ahem, well enough working) configuration.
  • Meetings and discussion about (physical) FIFO versus software implemented FIFO in retail setup. In stock, software FIFO works very well. But some parties would like item level software FIFO implementation. Well, that's all easily doable, as demanded by the customer. And there's a different solution for a different situation. In worst case, FIFO will add just lots of extra work and doesn't provide any real-life benefit, because customers pick whatever products and do not honor the FIFO logic. Yet that can be slightly improved by using suitable article racks which make it much harder for the customer to pick anything else than the first offered product from the rack "queue".
  • OVH helpdesk continues to be absolute disappointment, now they keep invoicing for a server which has been terminated two months ago. It's so bad, it's more like they're focusing on getting rid of customers. Extremely slow service, basic ticket handling takes weeks and even then they do not resolve anything, but they tend give kind of stupid answers hoping that you'll figure it out and get lost. - They usually completely ignore any emails about tickets, and via ticket system, things aren't progressing either. - Great example of multi channel customer service, where none of the channels work.
  • Something different? Dong-feng-26 (DF-26) - Interestingly and annoyingly it's referred as "dongfeng", "dong-feng" and "dong feng" on different mediums.

2020-04-26