Two-and-a-half admins episode 156. I'm Joe. I'm Jim. And I'm Helen. And here we are again.
Let's do some news and a couple of stories that go together. Zoom the company is requiring
that their workers return to the office at least a few days a week. And also I saw blue jeans,
which was a Zoom competitor or a Google Meet competitor that Verizon bought for an awful lot of
money shut down recently. And that made me think, have we just come out of the back of this thing?
Is work from home just dead? No, no. There are certainly a lot of high-corporate muckety mucks
who desperately want it to be dead. I should be honest, they're plenty of small business owners
who want it dead also. But that's reactionary nonsense. What you're really seeing at a Zoom
thing, it's important to note. Zoom is not saying, okay, screw remote work, haul everybody back
into the office all the time. They're saying, we need a little bit more in office. It's moving the
slider a little bit. It's not flipping a switch. Yeah. There's specifically saying, if you live close
enough to an office, although 50 miles is not that close to an office, but then you have to be in
the office two days a week, which is still plenty hybrid for work from home. It is ironic that the
company that enabled so many people to work more from home is requiring people to come back to the
office. But it's not that abnormal either. Well, yeah, that's the big headline here. Zoom,
the company whose whole business model depends on remote work, is now saying that remote work
isn't good enough for them. Well, there's a lot of different factors that come into it. Part of it
is they have a long lease on some office space and they're like, we've got to use it or we look
really bad. Yeah. That is definitely a problem. When a company has made like 20-year plans
that involve buying or leasing enough office space to house all of their employees full time
and then they discover, oh, it turns out we need like 10% of this because we have a largely
remote or hybridized or whatever and we literally just don't need this much facility,
those operational costs can be immense and it especially starts getting panicky for companies
that have already bitten off long-term plans like that that it's hard to get out of prior to
the pandemic. If they have any competitors that were not stuck in that far ahead and have been
able to actually downsize and get rid of those massive operational costs, that starts to look
kind of scary and you start looking for ways out of that. Yeah, I've also seen a lot of interesting
things about not so much zoomly but other companies in certain industries where because of
remote work, they have better compliance and they're wanting to avoid that. Basically,
anything done remotely gets logged as messages get sent or whatever and those have to be stored.
But meetings people have in person don't get recorded and don't have to get stored.
And they're like, it turns out we do a lot better when we, you know, people aren't worried about
getting recorded or if our competitor is having meetings in person that aren't being recorded
and they're deciding to do something and we're all working remotely and everything we do is recorded
and so we're being on our best behavior, suddenly it means that we're not keeping up with
our competitor as much. That's certainly something to think about. I would like to push back some
on the idea that it's just like, it's an unvarnished good to be able to have, you know,
these unrecorded meetings and therefore be able to talk about and say and do things that you could
not if that was out in the open. That can be a short-term gain. It can also be a long-term very
much not gain because as we've seen a lot over the last few years, whether they're in person
or not, like I don't remember a whole lot of remote work in the White House but boy, how do we
see an awful lot of text messages, haven't we? Yeah, well in particular some of the things they
found were that remote work led to less fraud and they found that through research that a lot of
that led to if a bunch of people at work see somebody doing something bad and getting away with it,
they think that they can get away with it as well and it causes more bad things to happen than
when people are left to their own devices, they're more likely to follow the rules and they actually
tied this into some policing stuff where they saw one police officer getting too many excessive force
complaints or whatever so they move them to a different department so they won't affect his peers
but it turned out that just spread the problem to more people. Yeah. That was an interesting analogy
that you made there, Alan because I was I was reaching for a metaphor like I knew it was in my head
but I couldn't quite get it in place but you just nailed it. What this is really reminding me of,
this discussion about, you know, oh well if we can have these in-person meetings like it doesn't
have to all be recorded, what it was reminding me of is cops hating body and dash cameras. Yeah and
my original point was mostly from the financial sector. If you're dealing with mergers and
acquisitions and there's, you know, some little bit of leeway you want to have with the compliance
rules, you know, people might do that in person but they're not going to do that in writing
or anything that's recorded. But yeah, I'm definitely with Jim that it's not an unvarnished good
at all but it can be why businesses decide they want to have more in person. But being fully remote
is difficult as well, you know. Speaking as someone who runs a fully remote company,
there is a lot of value in getting people together and having meetings but oftentimes, you know,
you can get away with that by just having meetups like three or four times a year and getting
most of the value out of that versus trying to make people come into an office multiple days a week.
Because your company wasn't fully remote before COVID, right? That was my previous company.
Right. So this company was fully remote then. This one was always fully remote. There are no
two people in the same city that were for us, which is part of the reason. But it allows us to
hire people wherever they happen to be instead of being restricted to people that could make it
into our office. Yeah, which surely broadens the talent pool enormously. Yes. And it's been
very good for us. But it does mean, you know, you have to make allowances for that and deal with that,
you know, a lot of people find that while it's not necessarily a good thing that a very large
person's or social network is made up of the people they spend all their time with at work.
And when they suddenly shift to remote work, they don't have nearly the level of social
interactions that they were used to. And so people that were used to an office and then start
working for a fully remote company, often being very isolated because they're not talking to very
many other people. And they have to make lifestyle changes to make sure they get out there and
actually talk to other people and and have a social network outside of work, especially with
remote work when you got spread across time zones. It's like, yeah, most of the time I'm awake,
half the other team is asleep. And so, you know, it makes it hard to even get that amount of social
interaction out of work. You've definitely got to point about the social interaction. But again,
I want to push back a little bit and point out that's a problem for roughly half a people and
it's a win for roughly half a people. And extroverts fuck you. Now you get to feel what it's
like to be on the wrong side of that. Us introverts were on the wrong side of that for in some cases,
you know, 30, 40, 50 years. Now you get to feel what that was like for us. You no longer have the
degree of social interaction during the day that you would prefer and you don't like it. We didn't
either. There's also probably something to be said about. It's not the worst thing to inject a
little bit more separation between your work life and your social life. Again, as the oldest
fart in the room, I grew up and began my working life in an era when it was completely normal
to date people at the office. By the early 1990s, people were starting to say, oh, well, this is
an ethical problem. You just shouldn't do it. And, you know, start, you know, saying things like
don't, you know, crap in your mess kit, you know, poop or you eat whatever, which is a weird
thing to say about your love life. But anyway, they were just starting to say, well, maybe this
is a bad idea. But that's because before then, it was absolutely normal. And one of the reasons
that it became possible to denormalize this whole just like, you know, treating your co-workers as
a dating pool thing is because, honestly, of the rise of internet dating, which is almost like
the remote work of your love life, you know, like you have a chance now to interact with a much
broader pool. You also have a chance to, you know, not get choked in your own exhaust gases,
you know, I mean, one of the big reasons that no matter how great a person you are or how ethical
you try to be, it kind of sucks to date people at work as a normal practice is you still have to
work with them if and when you break up. And that can be difficult and that can be really unpleasant.
And that's why splitting those things off is a good idea. For the same reason, it's maybe not the
worst thing to not rely on co-workers is like your only source of friends and social interaction.
And again, this was a worse problem for us introverts than it was for the extroverts. You know,
the extroverts largely are like hanging out all day at work with their work friends and then
hitting the bar with some of their work friends and, you know, a whole bunch of other people who
are not at work and making more friends, whatever. Meanwhile, the introverts are just kind of stuck
with whoever they work with and all the issues that, you know, apply there. Really the remote
work thing and they're not just, you know, bathing in other humanity all day long, it just,
it really kind of ups the incentive and, you know, the best practice of like, look, I need to put
some actual work into having a life outside work because life at work definitely will not be enough
to just kind of get me through. Yeah, and, you know, well, like we said, it's ironic that this
is happening at Zoom particularly. In a survey Zoom did, they found a boat half their employees
preferred a hybrid model where there was some in the office time and some remote time.
But I imagine if you're one of the people that lives 40 miles from the office, you would really
prefer less hybrid. Again, in my younger days, it was not that uncommon for me to have to commute.
You're not like 50, but 35 miles was pretty common for me for a daily commute.
It's maybe not great, but I mean, when you're only talking about a couple days a week,
even 50 miles is not that bad. I mean, it's not like we're talking about like 50 miles through
downtown traffic. If you get a drive 50 miles, most of that is going to be interstate driving and
probably a fairly straight shot. Where I live being about an hour from Toronto, there's a big
contingent of people that drive that probably 50 plus kilometer trip every single day of the week.
Yeah. And two days a week starts looking pretty good, to be honest. And you know, those two days
a week, odds are pretty good. If you're 50 miles away from a really big area like Toronto,
there's probably some things you wouldn't mind doing in the big city, roughly a day or two a week.
And well, you're already there now. So, I mean, you can kind of double up on that commute.
So we haven't really talked about blue jeans yet. I don't know how much there is to say about it.
I did get a chuckle out of nine to five Google describing it as the platform that you've probably
never heard of. If you haven't ever heard of it, that probably means that you have never worked
at a news outlet like nine to five Google or ours, technical or the verge or wherever. Because
that was the first time I heard of it when several large corporations would want to have like,
you know, bigger press conferences on blue jeans. I never really saw the appeal, but apparently the
platform scales better to particularly large gatherings. That was at least that was the
reasoning I was given for why I had to find and download yet another thing. That would explain
why some of the conferences used it that I'd heard of that because that's the only time I've
ever heard it used is with certain conferences. Yep. Exactly. Yeah. And it had some really
compelling features for conferences such as instead of doing screen sharing, you could upload
the slides as PDF and it would synchronize switching to the next page of the PDF across all
the viewers. So they would get full fidelity with just downloading the PDF rather than streaming
the PDF at 1080p for an hour. I mean, use a lot more bandwidth family for people that were constrained.
I never knew about that feature, but yeah, it does sound like I'd save a lot of bandwidth if you're
streaming to several hundred or a few thousand people. A lot of times it was also being used as part
of education software. And so especially in the case where, you know, people might not have very
good internet being able to just synchronize switching pages of a presentation instead of
screen sharing could make a big difference there. My three kids just started at their
three various schools in the last couple of weeks and please, please don't make me talk about
educational software right now. Yes. Okay. This episode is sponsored by Collide. If you work in
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That's K O L IDE dot com slash two five A. I think we have to talk about Sandisk Extreme SSDs.
There were reports a couple of months ago. I think of people losing data on these. These are the
NVME based USB SSDs and Sandisk or WD who owns them said that it was a firmware issue and they
released a firmware update. Well, that hasn't worked and people are still losing data on them
and they are still selling them often discounted quite heavily on Amazon. I wonder why. Indeed,
this is turning into a bit of a mini scandal, I would say. I'm just happy that it is turning into
a mini scandal because it reminds me very much of the crucial SSDs many years ago. I had a local
hardware vendor talk me into deploying a whole bunch of those and I ended up with about 50 other
them out in the field. All 50 were dead within 18 months due to firmware issues and nobody ever
seemed to give two shits about that. So I am not surprised that some model of SSD is just
calking out and losing people's data all over the place right now. I'm just frankly kind of happy
that people actually care enough to make think about it. Yeah, I think one of the interesting ones
the link from the verge, they're saying that they had one that had this problem and they
warrantied it and Western Digital sent the replacement and said this one will work and then
it had the same problem. It's not clear if the replacement they sent actually had the newer firmware
or not. Again, it shades a crucial because like when the crucial debacle, they came up with
firmware updates and swore up and I'll just update the firmware and it'll be fine and in some
cases like you could get a bricked crucial MX SSD with the bad firmware. You could get it back
up and ringing again with the new firmware. Neither doing that nor applying the new firmware before
you ever saw a problem had much impact on that eventual like 18 month death sentence that I saw
on everyone that I deployed. So again, this is all sounding very familiar and I'm just happy for
the stink. Yeah, this particular problem seems to be something with the firmware where the
device will fall off the bus and when it reconnects, it forgot that it had any data or how it was
formatted or whatever and even attempting to format it seems to not get it to work again.
Sounds a little bit like maybe it's somehow losing the key it used to encrypt all the data
or just the metadata itself about which sectors actually map to which physical flash locations
because I don't think these actually try to claim any kind of encryption. But if you lose that
metadata that just the flash translation layer, then yeah, but you have is a bunch of flash and
you don't know what's what. And so the sectors that were at the beginning of the drive that had the
partition table aren't there anymore and you don't have any relationship between where the cells
and the flash are and where your actual data is. We have to point out who owns Sandisk these days.
It's Western Digital and that company has not managed to get itself much in the way of good press
for many, many years now for good reason. That was the company that we saw with the absolute worst
of the scandal with SMR discs being submarined into consumer lineups and NAS lineups several years
ago. It's the company with the nasty warnings on NAS drives just because they were a few years old
that was making people think those drives were failing. So it's hard to cut them much slack at this
point because it just seems like another day in the Western Digital calendar. Yeah, I think my
closing thought, especially when I just read the headline and hadn't actually dug into the stories to
know what the problem was is don't trust any disc ever. Yes. Doesn't matter how good the brand is,
doesn't good matter how good the reputation is. It doesn't matter how expensive it was or how
enterprise it is. Disc will die. Disc will lose data in lots and lots of different ways. You're
going to need more than one disc. Yes. Now, in this case, if you had mirrors of these, they might
have both died at the same time and you'd still be screwed. Well, that's because what aren't mirrors,
Alan, say along with me, mirrors aren't back up. Well, yeah. And the verge lost three terabytes of
video because they put it only on this one disc. Surely, if it was that important,
they should put it on one sand disc and then one a different brand. I don't want to get too deep
in the weeds here because I don't know what that workflow looked like. But having worked in the same
industry, there's very frequently not really great like Siss Edman practices on the leading edge
of like news content generation. That's not usually who you have writing those articles, you know,
even at technical outlets. It very much wreaks to me of just like, oh, we'll just record that.
And that's fine. And that's where it lives. Whereas, you know, the proper workflow would have been
if you can't record to a proper server infrastructure that already does have redundancy and
automated backup and you don't need to worry about it. And you need to record onto that portable
device. Okay. All right. You record to it. But the first thing you do after that is you make a
copy of that data because it's expensive in time and money to have to reshoot all that. Yeah.
Any photographer that takes digital photos, the first thing you do is get them off the SD card
onto something that's going to get backed up. What disappoints me the most about this is that it's
Sandisk. A brand that I have always had really good experiences with. Well, first thing I'll say is
Sandisk stop being Sandisk when they got bought by Western Digital. You've like Western Digital paid
to be able to shit all over that name. HGST is no longer HGST. Sandisk is no longer Sandisk.
They're Western Digital. And like I said before, that company has been
determinedly earning itself a reputation for quite a few years now.
Let's do some free consulting then. But first, just a quick thank you to everyone who
supports us with PayPal and Patreon. We really do appreciate that. If you want to join those
people, you can go to 2.5abments.com slash support. And now that we're part of the late night
Linux family, you can get an advert free RSS feed of just this show for five dollars a month
or all the late night Linux family shows for $10 a month. And if you want to send any questions
for Jim and Alan or your feedback, you can email show at 2.5abments.com. Another
perk of being a patron is you get to skip the queue, which is what my check is done. My check
writes, I'm considering building a home server based on ZFS that will double as a media server.
ECC RAM is supported in modern consumer CPUs, most Ryzen's and 12th 13th gen Intel's. But matching
Intel motherboards are extremely expensive and only more powerful AMD's with GPUs have ECC.
I'm targeting a RAID Z2 pool of six discs with PCIe extension. I've struggled to find
comprehensive and up-to-date resources on hardware for home usage. Do you have any tips for a
reasonable home setup without breaking the bank? Okay, so there's one misconception here I want
to dress right off the bat. The idea that only Ryzen's with GPUs support ECC is incorrect.
All of the Ryzen's I'm aware of since the Ryzen 2000 series at least have supported ECC RAM,
I did just double check and that includes the new Ryzen 7000 series. They also all support ECC.
That's one of the things I love about AMD. They don't really gate away features the way Intel does
to create a monstrous list of SKUs and try to nickel and dime everybody. The issue on the AMD side
is, well, it's largely the same as it is now on the Intel side. It's finding the motherboard that
supports a consumer processor with ECC RAM that's getting more possible to do than it used to.
There was a time when there would generally be a handful like five or six different
motherboards that would support a Ryzen with ECC RAM, but it was always under the table support.
It was not explicit and then Azeroth came out with the Azeroth Rackline that explicitly supported
ECC with Ryzen's which is why I own several of those motherboards. I'm less familiar with the
trials and travails of finding Intel motherboards that support core processors rather than Zeyons
with ECC, but it does not surprise me that they tend to be very expensive. Even over on the AMD
side that Azeroth Rack I talked about, I've bought several of. It was like a $350 motherboard
competing with like $150 motherboard that supposedly, you know, many reports came in that ECC was working,
but I just took the stance that without explicit no kidding, it says right on the box,
yes, this is a supported configuration, I didn't want it.
But you don't actually need ECC RAM for ZFS, right?
Definitely not required. It's a great thing to have. So, you know, if you can find one of these
motherboards that supports it, then definitely do that. But if it's going to be hundreds of dollars
extra, you might rather spend that money on more storage instead.
I want to be extra clear here. ECC RAM is not a nice thing to have with ZFS. ECC RAM is a nice thing
to have with your computer, whether you're running ZFS or not, whether you're using the ZFS file
system or not has absolutely no impact on whether you would benefit from ECC. ECC is nice because,
bit flips from cosmic ray impacts absolutely do happen. Issues with, you know, like a stuck bit
in a stick of RAM absolutely do happen. There are a number of issues that crop up that ECC RAM
can insulate you from and without the ECC RAM instead, you end up with corrupt data, randomly
rebooting computer, you know, what have you? When those problems are really bad, you have a very
unstable system that crashes all the time. Most people, most technical people will recognize that.
I think fewer technical people realize that, you know, when you're used to the idea that, yeah,
well, you know, my computer just kind of locks up once in a blue moon. Yeah, once a year or so,
like I really know why, but it'll lock up or just randomly reboot. Well, it's certainly not
the only possible reason for it, but the odds are quite good that what you just had was an
unfortunate interaction that resulted in a bit flip and RAM in an area of RAM where you noticed it,
because that's the other thing. Bit flips actually happen a lot more frequently than you realize,
but the odds are usually pretty good. It'll happen in an area of RAM that you're not going to depend on.
Either that area of RAM is free, or it's being used for disk cache, and you don't actually use
that cache before it expires and gets reloaded, or, you know, any of the million other reasons you
can have things in RAM that it turns out you'll never notice the bit got flipped in it. But
sometimes it's in a critical area, and you do notice if you're lucky, you notice it right
then when your computer reboots, if you're not lucky, you'd notice it a whole lot later when you
start finding corrupt data on disk, and it really doesn't have anything to do with the file system,
it was corrupted in memory, but then you saved it to disk, and you didn't notice.
ECC saves you from all those things. Right, well, we better get out of here then.
Remember show at 2.5adbins.com if you want to send in your questions or your feedback.
You can find me at jrrest.com slash master.
You can find me at jrrest-s.net slash social, and I'm ad allenjude on x.com. See you next week.