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So, on one hand we have that "Tech Talent Strategy", which I assume comes from the demand for more IT workers globally. On the other, we have Canadians such as yours truly who would like to upgrade from a Helpdesk position sooner rather than later. I realize that sample size=1, but why don't we properly train permanent residents instead?

(Also don't forget the IT job market which has slowed practically to a halt, as a direct opposite of that Strategy)


Location: Rural Quebec, Canada. 1 hour+ away from Montreal, Quebec City && Sherbrooke

Remote: Yes, most definitely. Also open to some hybrid work to the cities above, assuming fuel expenses are somehow compensated.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Many! Mostly on a junior-mid level. See note below and the "IT Skills" section in my CV.

Résumé/CV && LinkedIn: https://cv.bilange.ca

Email: hn@ (domain name mentioned just a line above ^^)

New job planned date: Soon (Valve Time)

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Hello there! I have 15 years of experience in Level 1 Tech Support/Junior Sysadmin roles with a bit of scattered programming here and there, and I would like to jump ships and land a role as a Junior DevOps/SRE. To skill up on that matter and get on-par with the market, I am currently following a DevOps course online (Nana's DevOps course to mention it) as well as a few other primers courses in the pipeline such as AWS Fundamentals, Python, Golang, etc on LinkedIn Learning. If you are from a company who cares about your employees skill progression (where learning is expected and encouraged), I think I may be a good fit- hit me up! As for a date for a job change, there is an ongoing migration at my current workplace I wanted to complete before jumping ships. Mostly new AD Domain and new fleet of PCs to deploy, then I should be good for a switch. No clue for a date at the time of writing my post, however. Thanks!


Location: Rural Quebec, Canada. 1 hour+ away from Montreal, Quebec City && Sherbrooke

Remote: Yes, most definitely. Also open to some hybrid work to the cities above, assuming fuel expenses are somehow compensated.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Many! Mostly on a junior-mid level. See note below and the "IT Skills" section in my CV.

Résumé/CV && LinkedIn: https://cv.bilange.ca

Email: hn@ (domain name mentioned just a line above ^^)

New job planned date: Soon (Valve Time)

------

Hello there! I have 15 years of experience in Level 1 Tech Support/Junior Sysadmin roles with a bit of scattered programming here and there, and I would like to jump ships and land a role as a Junior DevOps/SRE. To skill up on that matter and get on-par with the market, I am currently following a DevOps course online (Nana's DevOps course to mention it) as well as a few other primers courses in the pipeline such as AWS Fundamentals, Python, Golang, etc. If you are from a company who cares about your employees skill progression (where learning is expected and encouraged), I think I may be a good fit- hit me up! As for a date for a job change, there is an ongoing migration at my current workplace I wanted to complete before jumping ships. Mostly new AD Domain and new fleet of PCs to deploy, then I should be good for a switch. No clue for a date at the time of writing my post, however. Thanks!


> Come to my house? Inspect my basement?

I would love the OQLF to try. On my main PC, I use an Ergodox clone, basically a kind of split keyboard. Keycaps for said keyboard are tricky to find in sets that fits for every key (unless I buy them per piece I suppose), and that's for a basic English-US keyboard. Anything else is virtually unheard of- let me know if I am wrong. Anyway, using English keycaps is a big no-no from the OQLF and would require me to switch, but to what?! Here's the kicker: I am typing that with the Bépo keyboard layout, basically a French Dvorak. This would require me to make a special request to a keycap maker, as anything non-alphabetic is really different. So installing a blank keycap set with unmarked keys would be the cheapest way to go about this problem, but I don't think this would pass the OQLF requirements neither.

OQLF suggests but in no way requires the Canadian Multilingual keyboard. Typing in French, with associated keys properly marked, is what matters to them.


That's a nice keyboard you have, would be a shame if you had to apply stickers to the keycaps! I'm not even joking, IT distributed sticker packs with all the french chars on them after the inspection. Afaik nobody actually used them. I imagine they would become a sticky, fuzzy, nasty mess after prolonged daily use.


> IT distributed sticker packs with all the french chars on them after the inspection

They had to. It's either "Product maker has to provide you the French labels, or if they don't, print your own". Literally. I remember a certain VoIP desk phone company shipping us "universal" labels with graphic symbols, that was considered acceptable by the OQLF since there were no english words.

IT has generally a bad opinion on OQLF precisely because of these kind of ridiculous requests they have to comply to.


The language police could care less how non French workers operate, merely that it’s fully possible for Francophones to operate fully in French. Maybe this is limited to 26+ or 50+ sized companies but I escaped years back. They’re quite aggressive about this and don’t care about the impact. Walmart, for example, needed to add magasin and KFC was PFK etc.


Wait... Walmart is too English? It's been a while and I barely remember life from before the pandemic anymore, but I'm pretty sure it was still Canadian Tire and Target, not Pneus Canadiens and Cible.


> Quebec can zing you if you hire a Quebec resident and aren't prepared to allow them to work in French, even if they don't speak French themself.

For the uninitiated, this means having all UI elements in French, (OS, software, ...) as well as all things physical like keyboards signs, everything.

Even if for example I am perfectly capable (and actually prefer, to lookup errors messages online for example) of working in English, the OQLF still requires Quebec employees to be exposed to French language first and foremost, regardless of users preferences.

Source: IT Guy being on the receiving end of said directives.


How are these regulations handled in a practical sense?

Are employees shipped equipment and served internationalized documentation that defaults to French, and then allowed to choose their preference afterwards for all services and applications?


The companies I worked for are headquartered in Quebec (with the exception of my current job), so I can only confidently comment for the "internal to Quebec" situations. I recently joined a company that was acquired by a bigger US company, and now all company wide communications are bilingual since then. ERP was already bilingual since the 90s as my direct employer is basically Canadian-wide.

I know the basis of these regulations is to give Quebec employees not fluent enough in English the power to ask/require a fully French environment. I BELIEVE this can escalate up to the OQLF being able to fine companies not being able to provide a French environment to their employees, but don't quote me on that.

As far as english language software is concerned, most Quebec employees have a varying degree of "letting go" on this matter when confronted to English messages, as long as their internal documentation/knowledge let them know what messages are considered normal in their work process, even if they don't understand fully what that means. The OQLF, however, believe this is a major problem to be dealt with yesterday: IT HAS to make available said software in their French version, if the software publisher actually publish a French version. If not, I believe you are encouraged (forced? not fully sure) to ask the software developer about availability.

Even if the software developper released a broken (or even partial!) French version using Google Translator, it becomes THE version to deploy, no buts.


This might have a min-size component, but forbidding a Quebec resident from working in French is a Bad Thing. Language laws are onerous enough that some companies do not do business in or even deliver to Quebec. And their websites block transactions accordingly.

There’s all sorts of other Quebec/Canadian taxes and fees. Thought hiring contractors pushed the hassle onto them?


I *had* to get myself out of lurking mode to reply specifically to you; this issue seems widespread for 1st-gens Ryzen. I see your chipset also is close enough to mine (X370), and I felt a strong "déjà vu" by reading your freezing symptoms.

I reused my now old X370 Ryzen build to run TrueNAS Scale (Based on Debian), and have hard lockups like yours.

My personal notes on the subject seems to stabilize things a bit but not completely, and it's a mixture of BIOS Settings Tweaks and Kernel boot parameters that seems to help partially. Things I tried/applied with varying degree of success:

- Disabling Cool&Quiet

- Disabling C-States

- Gear Down Mode: Disabled

- Power Down Mode: Disabled

- VDDSCR_SOC: Offset by +0.00625v (seemed to stabilize things on Windows)

- Someone in the kernel bugreport mentionned the need to power off (as opposed to just reset) so all the BIOS Settings are applied correctly (didn't try it myself yet)

See those links for more infos:

- https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683 (a very long bugreport thread, people commented lots of things they tried to stabilize their build along with kernel parameters ideas)

- https://gist.github.com/diracs-delta/876d74d030f80dc899fc58a...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20201020144021/https://www.truen... (linked from Archive.org as TrueNAS WAS specifically mentionning Ryzen stability in the first paragraphs of this page)

Good luck; and if you ever found how to get rid completely of those freezes, let me know :)

(edit: formatting)


Thank you for emerging from lurk mode for me :) I will try those things.


I found some of the settings but not all of them, but here’s the ones I found, and changed now:

- Global C-state Control: Auto -> Disabled

- AMD Cool’n’Quiet: Auto -> Disabled

- CPU NB/SoC Voltage: Auto -> Offset Mode; CPU NB/SoC Offset Mode Mark: +; CPU NB/SoC Offset Voltage: Auto

(The offset value can only be auto with my machine, not a custom value it seems.)

Only ones I couldn’t find were Gear Down Mode and Power Down Mode.

Clicked save and exit in the UEFI.

Then I powered down the machine and even flipped the on-off button of the PSU to off and let it stay off for ~20 seconds for good measure. Then turned the PSU back on and then powered the machine back on.

Currently reading the bug report thread and will try some of those things as well.


Now I've read a bit of those links and also read a bit of the following other links:

- https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/KernelRcuNocb...

- https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Setup

And I've changed the following line in my /etc/default/grub from:

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
to

    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rcu_nocbs=0-15 processor.max_cstate=5"
since my CPU has 16 threads. And I've saved it and have run

    sudo update-grub
Now I'm about to reboot the computer and then hopefully it will be more stable from now on :)

Thanks again for the help bilange.


Having now turned the computer back on I've also confirmed that these flags are indeed now being passed to the kernel when it is booted, as seen in the output of

    cat /proc/cmdline
which shows the following:

    BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.11.0-38-generic root=UUID=4dcba509-efff-4ccc-a099-f919240c767c ro rcu_nocbs=0-15 processor.max_cstate=5 quiet splash vt.handoff=7
And that's the "rcu_nocbs=0-15 processor.max_cstate=5" we added to our GRUB2 config shown right inside of there.


It's even more funny looking at the commit itself. Thanks for the pointer!

Although technically speaking, it's a contre-casse!


Long ago, I wanted to make a microservice that uses choon.to as the domain, pointing to popular shoutcast streams. The goal was to have a regular HTML webpages with the stream info served when using a browser, but send HTTP redirects to the actual Shoutcast stream source when media players being used to open the same URL. I thought having to paste into Winamp/Foobar2000 "http://choon.to/difm-trance" * was more user-friendly (or marketable?) than a bunch of numbers like "http://12.34.56.78:8888".

*: Although I was more of a di.fm Trance listener back then, another Trance channel, Afterhours.fm, still uses choon.in today as their shortcut domain.


> If their website/service disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, would I still have access to my passwords locally?

They provide a selfhosted alternative to their cloud service.

Not only that, there is a rust based birwarden server reimplementation that doesn't phone home (IIRC I believe the official self-hosted server needs an API key?), is compatible with all platform clients (at least for my needs). https://github.com/dani-garcia/bitwarden_rs


> It's been surprisingly difficult finding a good replacement for keep. If anyone has suggestions I'm open.

I've been on the hunt for a good Keep replacement myself, but not exactly a replacement for the "Simple" Keep interface. In my perfect world I wanted something markdown based for taking notes, and syncable between mobile and web. Most (but not all) of my personal checkmarks has been checked with Joplin[1] which was not yet mentioned in this thread; at a glance:

- Synced via cloud accounts (Either it's Dropbox, OneNote, or even your own Nextcloud via WebDAV, if you wish to be public cloud free!)

- Notes are Markdown based

- Notes import done also via .md files, folder of .mds (including nesting), or even Evernote's ENEX format.

- Dedicated applications for PC/OSx/Linux and even Android & iOS native apps. No web interface available since it's used to sync to an external source. But with that much access with said applications, it's a tradeoff I can take.

(I just found out about this app this morning, so please excuse my enthusiasm :)

[1] https://joplin.cozic.net/


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