I tried to buy an external 20TB drive from Amazon twice. First one that came, I bought refurbished; the drive had been shucked and replaced with a 146GB drive.

Second one I bought was 20TB, but was clicking and grinding from the moment I turned it on. When I tried to initiate a return saying “drive is clicking and grinding, indicating that it’s failing,” their support bot helpful informed me that a clicking and grinding drive usually indicated drive failure.

They did accept the return for the latter. They also accepted a return for the former, but it took literal months and several support interactions where the (seemingly real) agents actively lied to me.

I’ve had okay luck with smaller Amazon drives in the past, but will have trouble recommending them for this kind of purchase in the future.

A little passive-aggressive of you

That’s a fair interpretation, but in fact I was trying to avoid the appearance of passive aggression by providing a reason for my exiting the conversation, rather than just bailing.

Ah. Well, I have questions or comments I could make about the license. However, while I feel passionately about Unix and Linux and OSS in general, I don’t think I have anything useful or interesting to add to the thread that hasn’t already been said.

I wish you luck both with finding engaging conversation and with your licensing.

I kind of suspected it might be something like that, but it was a genuine query that, yes, was intended to be mildly humorous. I don’t intentionally annoy except maybe my wife.

Your indirect accusation made me smirk, but as far as I’ve noticed you’re the only one who does this without doing it on every comment, which seemed interesting enough to observe.

Does the lack of licensing in this comment mean it’s okay to steal?

A decade and change ago, in a past life, I was tasked with switching SELinux to permissive mode on the majority of systems on our network (multiple hundreds, or we might have gotten above one thousand at that point, I don’t recall exactly). This was to be done using Puppet. A large number of the systems, including most of our servers, had already been manually switched to permissive but it wasn’t being enforced globally.

Unfortunately, at that point I was pretty familiar with Puppet but had only worked with SELinux a very few times. I did not correctly understand the syntax of the config file or setenforce and set the mode to … Something incorrect. SELinux interpreted whatever that was as enforcing mode. I didn’t realize what I had done wrong until we started getting alerts from throughout the network. Then I just about had a panic attack when I couldn’t login to the systems and suddenly understood the problem.

Fortunately, it’s necessary to reboot a system to switch SELinux from disabled to any other mode, so most customer facing systems were not impacted. Even more fortunately, this was done on a holiday, so very few customers were there to be inconvenienced by the servers becoming inaccessible. Even more fortunately, while I was unable to access the systems that were now in enforcing mode, the Puppet agent was apparently still running … So I reversed my change in the manifest and, within half an hour, things were back to normal (after some service restarts and such).

When I finally did correctly make the change, I made sure to quintuple check the syntax and not rush through the testing process.

edit: While I could have done without the assault on my blood pressure at the time, it was an effective demonstration of our lack of readiness for enforcing mode.

I’ve been trying to find a network capable KVM for home use. They’re all pretty expensive or lacking functionality. I don’t actually need one or I’d pull the trigger, but I sure have been tempted.

I think I’m a cloud engineer, so I can’t use the same reasoning as you; but when I started at my company, I was given the option of either a Linux laptop with root or a Mac laptop. Obviously I selected Linux, but about a year later they started retiring all Linux laptops. The reason for this, I was told, is because the IT department didn’t know how to manage Linux laptops but they were familiar with Jamf. They did let us keep root on them, though.

I still miss using that laptop for work. The good news is, since they never implemented mandatory RTO policies, the company moved to a much smaller office. In doing so, they needed to reduce inventory, so they gave away the old laptops (sans drives) to their employees. I now own the same laptop (or a very similar one)!

With all respect, the first paragraph seems self contradictory.