https://youtu.be/EuUyROUN-Bg?si=YboaUH-iSE_8mPTo&t=573

Alt...

Cartel del certamen

Comprar LA ATALAYA RECORTADA CONTRA EL CIELO (editorial Libros del Futuro)

Sinopsis:

Bran tuvo una adolescencia complicada, y su vida adulta no es mejor. Una sucesión de pérdidas familiares, una gran cicatriz en la cara y sus circunstancias personales han forjado en ella una personalidad esquiva.

Y como si fuera una maldición añadida, la protagonista hereda y debe hacerse cargo de una casa familiar, epicentro de buena parte de las desgracias que se abatieron sobre sus seres queridos.

Una visita a la enmohecida y arruinada vivienda, ubicada en un pequeño pueblo madrileño, sumergirá a Bran en una travesía angustiante por túneles oscuros, estancias claustrofóbicas y seres terroríficos.

Alt...

Portada de LA ATALAYA RECORTADA CONTRA EL CIELO

Here’s the brutal truth about mainstream success: You either need to be famous already, or you need to be willing to light yourself on fire for attention.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/want-to-make-it-as-a-creator-be-famous-go-viral-or-go-fuck-yourself/

Durante 60 años el estado ha reparado, mantenido y promocionado el castillo. El parque adyacente que sufrió la misma suerte hace poco también. ¿Vamos a recuperar de alguna manera esas inversiones o como siempre además de puta ponemos la cama y el condón?

O mejor aún, ¿cobraremos IBI o cualquier otro impuesto a la duquesa de marras y su casa nobiliaria o seguiremos igual, intentando negociar cualquier acuerdo porque la propiedad privada es intocable?

Lo mismo tres millones de euros anuales de IBI la convencen de hacer una donación al estado español, que tanto quieren y por el que tanta sangre derramarían, y así todos ganamos.

Hoy no tengo el día para pensar con equidad, lo reconozco. No obstante estoy harto de que ciertos lugares estén protegidos por el estado pero éste no tenga la más mínima potestad sobre ellos.

No, Elon Musk no es un simple loco. Todo lo que ha hecho y todos sus apoyos a la extrema derecha le han reportado beneficios directos. Y lo de Groenlandia, Panamá, Alemania, UK, etc., también...

Os hago un resumen en @elsaltodiario.com con arte de Byron Maher https://www.elsaltodiario.com/estados-unidos/elon-musk-sa-asi-gana-dinero-apoyando-trump-extrema-derecha

¿Qué tienen en común Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Fernando Savater o el rapero el Jincho?

Pues que todos se han dado cuenta de que se gana más dinero siendo un buen trozo de mierda.

Me quedo agusto en esta opinión en El Salto.
https://buff.ly/3BLChzK

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

#snac #ThankYou

Social media’s golden rule: if you see someone having fun, shame them for not taking the world’s problems seriously enough. Rinse, repeat.

Aerc (TUI) is also fine. It supports multiple accounts natively, but you can't move messages from one account to another (that I know of). I find the interface a little kludgy.

But everybody and their dog is sending HTML mail these days, and though both programs do their best to convert to text / use the alternative plain text format, you always have the sinking feeling that you are missing something (and sometimes you really are missing something).

Thunderbird is OK. It has its annoyances, but it's solid, multi-account, and supports everything. Sometimes it starts burning all my CPU cores at 100% and I don't know why, it's probably doing some garbage collection or whatever.

Evolution (GUI) is also kinda fine, but it's GNOME, and you may not like that. It's heavy.

Claws Mail (GUI) is also OK. It's lighter than Evolution or Thunderbird, but in the past it did something wrong that annoyed me and that I cannot remember and I stopped using it.

I also remember using Kmail (KDE) more 15 years ago and it was also OK, but a bit sluggy.

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

My Absolute Favorite Conspiracy Theory is that they hired Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing, but he was such a perfectionist and demanded such a high level of authenticity that he forced them to shoot it on the moon.

SQLite is a remarkable piece of software and I've always been curious about the system and the project. Here are several little known facts about SQLite.

https://avi.im/blag/2024/sqlite-facts

#SQLite #database

Announcing FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse!

UPDATE: I have created an account for updates and other information on FediMeteo - follow the account @admin to stay updated!

UPDATE: Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland have just been added

Weather has always influenced our lives: from agriculture to outdoor activities, to extreme events that, thanks to modern technology, can now be predicted with greater reliability. Personally, weather plays a significant role in my daily decisions, which is why I decided to create a service tailored for the Fediverse.

FediMeteo uses Open-Meteo data to publish updates every 6 hours, including current weather conditions, forecasts for the next 12 hours, and predictions for the upcoming days. Each country is served by its own dedicated instance (e.g., it.fedimeteo.com for Italy), managed through snac to ensure simplicity and efficiency in publishing.

You can follow FediMeteo directly in the Fediverse (on Mastodon and compatible platforms), via RSS, or by visiting the dedicated page for your city (e.g., fr.fedimeteo.com/paris).

Currently supported countries include:
Austria, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, – with many more regions coming soon!

FediMeteo is hosted on a FreeBSD-based VPS, with each country isolated in its own jail to ensure security and scalability.

Visit the main site to explore the national instances and start following your local weather updates today:
https://fedimeteo.com

Happy weather monitoring to all! 🌦️

FediMeteo is dedicated to my grandfather, who every evening would give me the weather forecast based on TV, radio, and his personal experience. He would convince me that the weather would be bad, so he had an excuse to accompany me to school instead of me going alone.

#FediMeteo #Announcements #FreeBSD #FediMeteo #WeatherForecasts #Weather #Meteo #snac #Fediverse #Mastodon

Wow, America has already found its iconic image to summarize 2025.
That was fast!

#America #Murica #UnitedStates #USA #Trump #Cybertruck #DumpsterFire

Alt...

A cybertruck (or is it a dumpster?) on fire in front of a Trump Hotel

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1003059/41b1d2ea281b6779/

Merry Christmas, Stefano.

5 years is a lot of time for a feral cat, but they are hard as fucking stones, and they know how to play their cards well, so it's probably taking a nap now in a warm house as a proud home cat.

antifascist + zionist = fascist

(just a little fyi to #38C3)

El protocolo de Nostr es técnicamente un buen diseño, pero la gente que hay detrás son criptobros de la peor calaña con las intenciones más rastreras.

No quiero emponzoñar tu hilo con detalles técnicos cuando lo que importa es denunciar la chusma que hay detrás.

CC: @alejandroamartin@laplaza.cafe

el protocolo Nostr (El de threads).

(respecto a lo demás, estoy totalmente de acuerdo).

CC: @alejandroamartin@laplaza.cafe

And Casablanca, of course.

Boss: we will be trialling the use of AI as a replacement for some of our developer roles in the coming months.

Seniors: ok, bye.

Boss: where are you going? We still have all these features to build!

Seniors: why should we hang around waiting to be replaced? You want to use AI, then go ahead - but we are gone. Best of luck.

Boss: but it’s not ready to replace senior devs yet! We just want to replace some junior positions!

Seniors: not our problem. Ciao.

And….scene.

Do you have a big monitor and often lose your mouse pointer on the screen?

Are you in denial about being old enough to turn on mouse trails?

Well, I have the solution for you!

A desk kitten!

Desk kittens can locate your lost mouse pointer in approximately 3 nanoseconds and feature a clear and reliable indicator that ensures you know EXACTLY where your mouse pointer is.

Get your desk kitten today!

Act now and we’ll throw in the relaxing “purr” mode upgrade, guaranteed to relieve stress while responding to people who are wrong on the internet.

This is a far too common occurrence in the U.S.

And people wonder why Luigi is so popular?

Alt...

Photo of a young man in a baseball cap. Reads: This is Alec Smith. He died on June 28,2017, at age 26, because he couldn't afford his insulin. He made $35,000/year as a restaurant manager, and couldn't afford his $450/month health insurance with a $7,600 out-of-pocked deductible. The insulin he needed for diabetes was $1,300/month. When he turned 26 and was kicked off his mom's insurance, he started rationing his life-saving insulin. He died a month later. All this in the richest country in the world, the United States.

long overdue attempt to cleanup/update a bit the relevant projects page on the pmc wiki.

email us if you work on something and want to be listed!

https://permacomputing.net/projects

#permacomputing

Si el Estado recauda más IRPF con un millón de personas trabajando es porque "el Gobierno se forra", pero si lo hace un gobierno del PP con 35.000 declarantes más entonces es "el milagro Laffer"...

Escriben para ignorantes.

#Memes #Christmas #Humour

“You’ll be visited by three spirits.”

The three spirits:

Remember that the true meaning of Christmas is using money you don't have to buy things they don't need to people you don't like.
#consumerism #Christmas #Memes #TheyLive

Alt...

A six panel montage inspired by They Live, with Santa as the alien, and the words "WORK" "CONSUME" "OBEY"

Learning Javascript is hard and and it's stupid.

Learning to make pastry - even a simple pie crust - is hard and it's glorious.

Choose carefully.

in switzerland you aren't allowed to have a train with exactly 256 axles because of an integer overflow in the axle counting machine

i wish i could fix my software bugs by making it illegal to cause them

Alt...

to avoid falsely signalling a section of track as clear by resetting the axle counter to zero, and thus to avoid collisions, the total number of axles in a train must not equal 256

Well that was an easy festive family tech support ticket:

Problem: USB flash drive was not working.

Diagnosis: that's not a USB flash drive. That is the dongle for your mouse.

Solution: here's a USB flash drive.

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

I want one.

Alt...

David AttenBruh @AlHendiify Kinda wild how the natural opposite to the red maga hat just organically popped up Oliya Scootercaster Supporter of Luigi Mangione outside of NYC Court (Picture of a man outdoors in a Luigi (from Marijo Brothers) green cap)

Stephanie recalled riding home with her sister in one of Waymo’s driverless Jaguar SUVs around 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night
-- when a car holding several young men began following them.

They drove close to the robotaxi honking and yelling,
“Hey, ladies — you guys are hot.”

If she or another human had been driving, it would have been easy to reroute the car to avoid leading the pursuers to her home.

But she was scared and didn’t know how to change the robot’s path.

She called 911, but a dispatcher said they couldn’t send a police car to a moving vehicle, Stephanie recalled.


“All the safety things then become unsafe if someone is following you,”
she said of the incident,
which Waymo confirmed and has not been previously reported.

As Waymo expands its service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin,
some passengers like Stephanie have found that traveling by robotaxi can make riders into sitting ducks for a new form of public harassment
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/22/waymo-robotaxi-passengers-harassment/

Estos son los 175 contratos de la Xunta con la empresa donde la hermana de Feijóo es directiva
https://buff.ly/4gO6Raq

#Amazon and #Starbucks workers are on strike.

Please don't cross the picket line 🙏

#Unions #Workers #Police

Alt...

B&W image shows police on horseback. One of them is wielding a baton and is about to strike a woman standing on the ground, who has an arm up in self defense. Text at the top of the image reads: REMEMBER: IT IS A HISTORICAL FACT Text at the bottom of the image reads: THAT DURING A LABOR STRIKE POLICE WILL ALWAYS PROTECT THE INTERESTS OF THE BUSINESS

Is it just me or does buying a Tesla in 2024/25 feel like buying a Mercedes in 1936?

WIRED article forecasting the generative AI bubble will burst in 2025. This is more optimistic than my own expectations, but if WIRED are printing it, it's the direction sentiment in Silicon Valley is running in.

(Hint: there's gold in AI, but it's in *analytical* AI, aka big data, not stochastic parrot bullshit.)

https://www.wired.com/story/generative-ai-will-need-to-prove-its-usefulness/

It's always nice when my random shuffle picks Ann Hell. Prince Prospero Meets the Red Death is solid coding music. Thanks, @angel !

https://archive.org/details/the_mask

#FLAC (https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9639) and #MKV (https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9559) are now #IETF proposed standards!!

Kudos to the CELLAR working group and to authors (for MKV: @robux4 , @mosu and Dave Rice)!!

#digipres

Tanto Milei en Argentina como Bukele en El Salvador dijeron que si la deuda es aberrante, que si recortando no haría falta más deuda, que si sus políticas iban a ir muy bien, que si los Bonos Volcán y que si no se iban a endeudarse con el FMI...

Los dos han pedido dinero al FMI y van a endeudar más a sus países...

"...a power outage at #SpaceX’s California facility caused a loss of #GroundControl, meaning that the mission control team was briefly unable to command the #spacecraft."

Single outage brought GROUND CONTROL down?! On the ground where power grids & diesel generators at a nearby home improvement store are! Have they never heard of battery backups and generators?! They have no idea what 3 points-safe₁ means, nor failover₂, and have no business trying to send so much as a spatula to #space.

🧵 1/3

While I was mucking about with an #openbsd port, I got an email from github offering me access to their ai code writing uselessness.

No! Bad website!

*spritzes with water bottle*

My code doesn't work at the moment. Broken is still better than this offer.

Dylan Roof killed 9 Black people with the motivation to incite a race war—NOT charged with terrorism.

Luigi Mangione killed 1 CEO with the motivation to rebuke healthcare injustice—charged with terrorism.

Class warfare is when wealthy CEOs are a protected class but working Black people are not.

Nonprofit work is hard. It takes a lot of time, dedication and, more often than not, you see volunteers taking in multiple different tasks and responsibilities to keep everything running. Thankfully, we occasionally get external contributors that help us out!

For instance, I would post something serious so as to promote our nonprofit, but it seems like #GitHub decided to help us with the marketing for the day by sending a bunch of its users (multiple) emails about GitHub Copilot. 😅

Mastodon #research 🚀

I’m working on my master’s thesis at the University of Vienna, and I’d love your input! My research focuses on sustaining long-term user activity on Mastodon, contributing to a more active Fediverse. If you have a few minutes, please take my short survey:
👉 https://sosci.univie.ac.at/MastodonActivity/

Your thoughts will contribute to meaningful research. Feel free to boost this post so we can reach as many users as possible. Thank you so much! 🙌

#Mastodon #Survey #FediverseResearch

https://mastodon.social/@kiwix/113622081750449356

I'm not following the thread, so things may have changed.

Más tarde me he dado cuenta de que empleando el correo electrónico las discusiones no tienen sentido y que más allá del duelo al amanecer no merece la pena discutir con gente que se ha construido un personaje público y saca sus garbanzos de ahí. Entre eso y los palmeros, a los que el tuitstar SÍ responde por que necesita tenerles en cuenta, es difícil estar a gusto; de hecho el término "pocosfollower" es el indicativo de una época.

Pero sí que he pasado mucho tiempo allí obteniendo enlaces y enterándome de polémicas para pasar el rato y olvidar cómo estoy y quién soy así que tampoco es que lo haya dejado hasta el sábado. Una vez que tengo mi servidor en el fediverso (con #snac) tengo siempre un lugar que considero mío. Por esa parte estoy cubierto.

Ahora estoy intentando ver qué aparece en BlueSky y de momento están todos con una limpia tremenda de nazis y demás chusma que está funcionando al parecer. También cuentas estupendas que estaban permanentemente candadas en twitter ahora actúan en abierto y son una delicia de seguir. Pero el lugar sigue siendo extraño, como un barrio bajo asedio, y quiero ver dónde terminará cuando los dueños empiecen a monetizar.

If there's not an apparent one, it's easy to find.

I was on the verge of moving to Hetzner when I read this.

CC: @stux@mstdn.social

#DanteAlighieri #DivinaComedia

CC: @stefano@bsd.cafe

Me corrijo: montar un sistema para enviar correo también es trivial; lo que es difícil es que tus correos lleguen y no queden marcados como SPAM.

Please, keep writing them. Also, your prose is very fresh and entertaining.

In 2021, I sent an email saying that, given the situation, I would not be able to keep your machines running with the current infrastructure. You replied that the funds are allocated "for migration to a cloud-based solution," so the machines must be kept running as they are. I strongly suggest you reconsider: your connections are unstable and slow, it would be impossible to work (via Remote Desktop, Windows servers) in such conditions - from over 30 thin clients. You responded that the budget is now allocated for this, and that the consultant assured you everything would be perfect.

The migration will never happen – after spending tens of thousands of euros – due to "lack of connection quality."

I "forgive" you.

At the beginning of 2023, I wrote to you that there are two critical issues that will soon compromise the security and reliability of the machines. You replied that you are "working on the plan for migration to a centralized solution in one of your locations." I responded that the connectivity is inadequate, that that location has data center flooding issues (it should at least be moved to an upper floor), and that, in case of problems, all your 9 locations would be down because of it. Therefore, given the situation, it would be better to keep a server and a replica at each site, with offsite backups, ensuring they are current and consistent.

Minimal financial investment, maximum uptime.

You replied that "the defined path is now set, so we are proceeding with it" because a "consultant has guaranteed maximum reliability."

I withdrew, predicting disasters and for the same reason: they present themselves elegantly, with glossy catalogs and buzzwords – they sure seem credible and modern!

Go ahead, it’s your money and your data.

This morning at 5:30, you woke up me because your location had electrical issues, and the other branches are facing external connectivity problems due to the (same) Internet provider (and the backup, which uses the same channels as the primary provider, unlike what the vendors had promised).

A downtime of at least 3 days is expected.

Everything is down. You want me to take the backups (made by others, I don't even know how), and restore the old servers in the branches (from 2015), as you believe it would be possible to resume work only this way – as suggested by the "elegant consultant."

I replied that I wish you good luck and went back to sleep with a clear conscience.

#IT #DisasterRecovery #SysAdmin #OwnYourData #KISS #KeepItSimpleAndStupid #NewWeekNewTroubles

This will probably also improve snac behaviour with other apps.

CC: @nowster@fedi.nowster.me.uk @justine@snac.smithies.me.uk @knapjack@elsewhere.cozysumo.space

I know the etiquette is evolving around this so here's my quick guide to sharing the road with self-driving cars:

If you find yourself in a city whose political leaders are corrupt and vain enough to have allowed this scourge onto their streets, you absolutely do not owe them the basic courtesy you would extend to any driver.

Bearing in mind safety and basic physics, it's perfectly fine to, for instance, not let them proceed at a stop sign; not let them merge in traffic; take the lane and bike super slow in front of them; take your sweet time in a crosswalk; accidentally leave your personal traffic cone on its hood; etc, etc. Just remember that they are recording you, should you choose to escalate your discourtesy beyond the the obnoxious-but-basically-legal.

Self-driving cars do not deserve the right of way, because rights are for sentient beings, not roving death cameras.

If you are worried whether someone is riding in back, just imagine it's Jeff Bezos and he's on his way to a very important meeting. The more inconvenient these things are to hire, the more ordinary people will choose better options, the more swiftly these businesses will fail and disappear.

Alt...

Photograph of a white "Waymo" car on a city street at night, outfitted with various cameras and sensors, headlights blazing. It appears to have been immobilized by the presence of an orange traffic cone placed on its hood.

Because this is the talk of the #internet again: you don't preserve digital media by stuffing the One True Version in an #archive. Make countless copies and scatter them to the wind. Make each a different format. You don't know which of them will still be readable next decade, so *don't try to guess*.

That goes for analog media too. The Library of Alexandria contained copies. Many classic paintings only survived as copies.

Copying is how life itself beats death. Embrace it.

96 files changed, 3224 insertions, 2326 deletions, 8 dead, 19 injured, 4 missing

I love English. It's a trash fire disguised as a language and I'm here for all of it. However, I really need to be better about people not speaking it "correctly." It's a goddamn trash fire. Of course people don't speak it correctly. I'm pretty sure there's no correct way to speak it. And that's leaving out all the racism and classism which goes into "grammatical perfection."

English isn't Latin. It's a glorious clusterfuck of stolen parts bolted onto a bastard chassis and powered entirely by the burning of dictionaries. There is no way that it should be the lingua franca of international affairs, and yet it is. Speak it any way you want. English doesn't give a fuck. English will take your error and turn it into a part of itself. English drinks prescriptivist tears like fine wine. Contribute to the delinquency of English any way you can.

One thing I’ve noticed about people who sell LLMs, it’s not just the models that hallucinate

You don't need to be a futurism savant to notice the connection and extrapolate a certain kind of future from these 2 sentences:

'Thursday afternoon in #SanFrancisco: On one side of Mission Street, hotel workers chanted and banged on a drum outside the Marriott Marquis, part of a monthslong strike for higher wages and more #jobs. On the other, a tech company’s billboard proclaimed, “Stop #hiring humans.”'

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sf-artisan-billboards-stop-hiring-humans-19969672.php

#AI

Alt...

Billboard in San Franciso proclaiming "Stop Hiring Humans, the era of AI employees is here"

Can you imagine anything more dystopian than this?

Billboards in San Francisco saying “stop hiring humans”

#ai #dystopian #capitalism #sanfrancisco

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/ai-company-trolls-san-francisco-with-billboards-saying-stop-hiring-humans/

Alt...

Artisan billboard saying that AI workers do not need work-life balance, meanwhile a homeless person is sitting beside.

"Are you going to take off those headphones so we can discuss this like mature adults, Harry? Or, are you just going to sit there like a petulant child?”

Alt...

An old man wearing headphones sits on a park bench with a pelican.

This is my favorite part of the OpenBSD installer because I get it wrong every time, but I love that they anticipated it! #openbsd

Alt...

Text from the OpenBSD installer asking "Setup a user? (enter a lower-case loginname, or 'no')". The user enters "yes" and the next prompt says "No really, what is the lower-case loginname, or 'no'?"

Y, entre esas webs tan especializadas está, estaba, Linkedin y para la que he descubierto un pequeño truco para conseguir que, al menos puedas enviar la petición de cierre.

Todas los documentos que he visto señalan que hay que ir a los ajustes y en la sección de seguridad elegir la opción de "Cerrar cuenta". Hasta ahí bien, ¿no? Entonces te preguntan por el motivo, le dices cual, luego te muestran a personas de las que vas a perderte publicaciones y te entra la risa floja. (¿Perderme publicaciones? Pero si nadie envía nada que merezca la pena. Ojo, al menos de los que tengo bajo mis "contactos").

Bueno, pues una vez superada la cuestión tienes un pequeño formulario donde debes escribir la contraseña y marca -si lo quieres- una casilla para no recibir comunicaciones de la empresa. Después se activa un botón que reza "Hecho" y ...

Y nada, porque el botón no hay manera de que se active. No la hay porque como he puesto una contraseña compleja y enorme -y uso un gestor de contraseñas- no se me ocurrió escribirla a mano si no pegarla.

No, pegarla no funciona. Y escribir la contraseña supersegura y compleja es una locura. Así que el paso previo es cambiar la contraseña por algo como "adiosatodos" y reiniciar el proceso entrando a manita la frase.

Y ahí sí. Ahí sí que funciona. Ahora voy con el resto de las webs: infojobs, trabajos.com, y varias más que no producen más que ruido. Ya veremos si es sencillo o también tengo que aprender cosas que no quiero.

This is the kind of HR diversity training we need.

Alt...

A screenshot from a social media site. It reads: so my brother was telling me about this human resources certification he attended a while ago. in a panel, the panelist asked a bunch of people in attendance, “who here knows if an applicant for a job s right for it in under 60 seconds?" hands shot up around the room, people smug about their ability to “weed out the riff-raff* when it came to hiring for their fortune 500. “you should all be fired and probably in jail." they said, waiting for the whole room to get uncomfortable, then continued, “because the only things you can really learn about a human being in under 60 seconds are all things that are fueled by prejudices and biases covered by american law. so now, i will teach you how to stop being racist, sexist, judgmental assholes and hire people that will better your company of employ

So law enforcement wants us to believe 'The Adjuster' went from being professionally-trained and calculating (even leaving a haunting message inscribed on shell casings) to someone who would be caught in a McDonald's with incriminating evidence on his person.

I'm not buying it.

Not one bit.

#unitedhealthcare

@kiwix Send them a request for information under #GDPR rules, specifically article 15, forcing them to send you *all* data they have. Hetzner is based in Germany, so they have to comply. Template at: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-access-request/

Ok, here’s my first IT Horror Story of the Saturday night. It's a bit long.

I was at a client, a healthcare facility, to replace some hard drives. They didn’t want to spend money, so we had to keep the current setup running, which was outdated and unreliable.
Now I can say it: they didn’t want to spend because the general manager’s goal was to give work to a company of his friends, who were already providing support on two VMs, and he wanted to hand everything over to them. The IT manager hadn’t yet understood the financial interests of these people and still believed everything was in good faith, that they really didn’t have the funds. We were holding everything together with duct tape, but it was working and stable. I had set up a "cluster" with OpenNebula and GlusterFS for storage (later replaced with MooseFS and then with Ceph), using all available hardware.

We scheduled an intervention and notified everyone to disconnect and shut down the machines by 12:30. By 13, we had completed the backups, aiming to start the intervention by 14 and get the work up and running by 15:30. The goal was to update the systems and check the disks. We shut down all the VMs, had everyone disconnect. It was lunchtime.
We updated the servers, rebooted them. One of the disks started throwing errors. GlusterFS, for some reason I never really investigated (I have my theories, which I’ll share later, but from that day forward, GlusterFS no longer exists for me), decided to overwrite both that disk and its replica with zeros. I hadn’t changed anything.

Panic – there were backups, but on a USB 2 disk (old servers, no USB 3)! I immediately stopped everything. I was almost fainting. The IT manager didn’t understand what had happened, so I explained it to him. He announced to everyone that we would cancel the rest of the intervention, restore from backup, and have the work back up by 15:30 as planned, prioritizing the most critical VMs.

The "competing" company reached out. They had powered on one of their VMs and started "doing their own interventions." Even though they had been warned not to do anything. And they complained "we" had lost some of their data. Of course, the manager and those guys went "carpe diem": they put me under accusation, saying I had undoubtedly made a mistake that led to "lost data." I wrote a technical report explaining what I had seen, noting various SSH logins from those guys during the intervention. The "history" had been erased. Of course, not by me.

They continued to harass me for a while. The last thing they asked was for me to go to a meeting "to explain in person." They tried to schedule it the day before my wedding. And they knew it.

They threatened to ask me for an unspecified (high) financial compensation for 'the lost data.' What lost data? The ones that, allegedly, the other company would have entered in the meantime.

Final result: no problem for me (I hadn’t done anything wrong), the backups were fine, they only calmed down when I proved (logs in hand) that I wasn’t the only one connected to that machine, and my witnesses (two colleagues and the IT manager) had seen all my actions, confirming I hadn’t done anything wrong.

In the end: I realized they would do it again and I left the client – even the IT manager decided to resign and change jobs. The general manager managed to install, at astronomical figures, the company he wanted to place. After two months, they got their hands on the system and broke it. They asked me for assistance, which I refused. At any price.

After a few years, I found out that the general manager ended up in jail for corruption, bribes, and for favoring his friend companies in many sectors.

That day, I celebrated.

#HorrorStory #ITHorrorStory #ITSupport #TechTroubles #SysAdmin