The Comms Room

12:00 AM

@syneticondj Ah, You're a Man of Precision, I see. Which isn't necessarily the same as a pedant. =P

I really hate being pulled into 'software test' for Devs. But I'm the only person in the org who understand network interaction in the upper layers of the TCP stack.

syneticon-dj

How do you get around to still efficiently manage yellow pages? I mean, the number of users must have exploded over the years since when NIS was the bleeding edge

Jacob

Hello folks

AdrianK

@Jacob howdy Jacob.

Mark Henderson

@Jacob Morning

Gunna go grab some lunch, cya all later

syneticon-dj

hi @Jacob, bye @MarkHenderson

AdrianK

12:18 AM

Oy. Supervisor complaining because their staff has the wrong extension # on their phone. Said wrong extension being provided by said supervisor in the staff transfer request, of course.

syneticon-dj

you have that documented somewhere, don't you?

Just quote it incidentally in some response with a request for clarification :)

Mark Henderson

Well that was dumb. Went out and bought a sandwich, forgetting that I'd brought my lunch today. Upside: Free lunch tomorrow!

syneticon-dj

12:53 AM

good night everyone

Mark Henderson

Night

AdrianK

1:07 AM

@syneticondj Yes, but not that it matters.

ewwhite

2:51 AM

Spent too long on this answer...

1

Q: HP DL585 G1 with VMware ESXi 5 - SATA solution, need more storage

I have the following: 2 x DL585 G1 (8 cores) with built in Smart Array 5i (2 x 74GB SCSI in Raid 0) I installed VMware ESXi 5 and got it all working :) However I need more space. I was thinking of getting 2 x P600 which I can install in the DL585 G1 however I am not sure if it will support...

Mark Henderson

3:03 AM

+1 for you sir

Holy crap, a G1

How did he even get 8 cores into that thing

AdrianK

Hyperthreading on a Dual-slot Duo-core?

Mark Henderson

Ah, 4 dual-core's

AdrianK

Ah. need new glasses, thought it said 380.

Mark Henderson

Although I dont think the 800-series opterons were dual-core

Hmm, ok the really, really late 800-series were dual core. That thing must have cost a fortune when it was brand new (many moons ago)

ewwhite

The later revisions of the model were dual-core chips. I skipped the generation, choosing to sell DL740 G1's instead

but i am amazed that the poster was able to get ESXi on it.

AdrianK

3:10 AM

@ewwhite Even I'M getting rid of hardware that old as fast as I can get its replacement purchased.

ewwhite

I just had to go to my data center to collect my defunct circa 2009 ML370 G5's before they were sent to the recycler.

that's an x5450 3GHz CPU... useless, these days

Shane Madden

Me and the decade old hardware I have still running in production in a couple spots are deeply offended that you're tossing 3 year old hardware. That's a pretty quick refresh rate.

ewwhite

Cost too much to power.

AdrianK

Honestly, I'd rather have 8 or 16 1Ghz cores on a chip than the higher frequency. All my workloads are high process count terminal servers.

ewwhite

@Ethabelle gets one of them :)

Journeyman Geek

3:16 AM

lol

Shane Madden

Fair enough.

Journeyman Geek

@ShaneMadden: depends on your reasons

though, a friend of mine is currently in the process of terminally retiring old systems for a client

ewwhite

But I was running several of these things as ESXi hosts, coupled with a Sun x4540 for storage. Going to modern G7 proliants and a smaller, denser Nexenta system saved me $6k for the year in power over the old setup.

and fits in 6U versus 14U

Journeyman Geek

@ewwhite: one of the things that "But it works fine" dosen't cover

grouches

ewwhite

But I also come from an industry with a 8-month hardware refresh.

Journeyman Geek

3:20 AM

eh i need to mess with nexenta at some point

@ewwhite: I think the majority of the hardware in my current 'work' environment are PIV 1.6es ;p

ewwhite

@JourneymanGeek It works... but takes some massaging to perform well. It's not meant to be low-cost anymore.

AdrianK

@ewwhite Wow. I guess it really IS possible to turn green with envy....

ewwhite

Nexenta is pretty adamant about SAS disks throughout... including SSDs..

Journeyman Geek

@ewwhite: that might be a problem in my case. but i suppose i can try other varients - i'm pondering using zfs for home/sohoish storage and backup eventually

ewwhite

@AdrianK - The financial world is demanding, so 8 months is about as long as you can go before the next high-end CPU comes out.

@JourneymanGeek - I mean, it will definitely work with SATA, but Nexenta support gets all indignant when they have to troubleshoot SATA issues.

AdrianK

3:24 AM

@ewwhite Damn. Gotta figure out a way to get me some of that hardware after you're done with it.

Journeyman Geek

lol

well, i'd likely end up using the community version, so support...

ewwhite

@adriank I buy it cheap...

At my last firm, we recovered an HP ProLiant DL580 G5... maxed out with 128GB RAM, 8 x 300GB disks... the works. It had been in use 14 months... and we had no use for it.

too slow to run the current apps. Too big to power/cool...

so it's just sitting...

AdrianK

@ewwhite cry

Journeyman Geek

eheh. I can't even do that ;p

AdrianK

I could run my entire rack full of servers off 1 of those. I think I've got 8-10 4-year Supermicros with internal storage doing various virtualize-able tasks right now.

ewwhite

3:30 AM

well, I just had this discussion with the people at my personal colo... there are ways to get HP hardware for a lot less than you'd expect.

AdrianK

@ewwhite We're hoping to get a decent deal from CDW Non-Profit. But we just don't do enough business to go direct to vendor.

ewwhite

I mean, one G7 DL380 could probably carry the workload of those Supermicro's.

WesleyDavid

What is a "PRD Machine"?

ewwhite

<-- sells this stuff, too

WesleyDavid

@AdrianK If you're interested, I deal with a reseller for all my non profit orgs that seems to get great deals.

They deal with for-profit places, but started out as a non-profit focused reseller.

ewwhite

3:34 AM

Not sure if I can give all of the details on Google-able serverfault chat, but we/I can always beat CDw pricing on HP gear.

@adriank what are you looking for?

AdrianK

@ewwhite Thanks. And no worries. The management is decidedly non-profit in their thinking. I'm lucky to get IBM x3550 occasionally to address attrition. I honestly don't have much visibility into what is out there just yet.

ewwhite

so the IBM is similar to a DL360 G7... A good price on a well-equipped DL360 G7 (X5660, 12 cores, 24GB RAM, redundant power/fans) ~$4k + disks.

Should be a few thousand less than a similarly-spec'd IBM.

<-- in a sales mood.

AdrianK

@ewwhite Ugh. Yeah, I just paid $3500 for 8GB with 2x500GB and 8 cores, no redundant P/S.

ewwhite

:(

AdrianK

Yeah. Small wonder my boss wants to stuff all our storage and apps up into Amazon instances and host it from there.

Shane Madden

3:49 AM

That's never gone horribly wrong.

ewwhite

Be the hero! Save the boss-man some $$$!

AdrianK

@ShaneMadden My biggest concern is how much pipe we'll need to get similar access times to local storage. I'm stuck with more 18 months on a contract for a pair of Bonded T1 circuits.

Shane Madden

Eeek.

AdrianK

@ShaneMadden Tell me about it. I was given 2 weeks notice of the last contract's expiry while in the middle of a huge project and didn't have enough time to get something new lined up before he decided to renew.

Shane Madden

I mean, T1s are great and all, but, .... I can't finish that sentence.

AdrianK

3:58 AM

They're reliable. I'll give them that. We've had 37 minutes of downtime in 30 months. But I was 1 week away from getting 20/20 Metro Ethernet in for just $300/mo more.

Shane Madden

Ouch.

Mark Henderson

@ShaneMadden A friend of mine is a sysadmin at a chemicals company. They had a 200m2 datacenter filled with Dual Pentium Pro 90's with 256Mb RAM (hows that for > 10 years old ;). They virtualised them last year, they got from about 200 4U servers down to... one 10U blade chassis and a small SAN.

ewwhite

Exactly.

as it should be

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite One backplane failure and thousands of angry shareholders later...

ewwhite

Get two chassis, then :)

AdrianK

4:23 AM

Fault-tolerance. Live it. Love it.

I feel for that gWaldo guy who's going to be doing AIX and Solaris. I hated having to go back 10 years on the GNU tools in Solaris 8/9 at $job[-1].

Seems a little shopping to me as currently worded. Could probably stand a bit of editing?

0

Q: Connect approx 30 users to a remote office

Info: My company has a base office in Little Rock and we are setting up a remote office in Virginia with approximately 30 users. We do A LOT of SQL and Oracle data manipulation (heavy processing). The SAN and servers that do this processing will stay in Little Rock. Now for the question: Wh...

vpn remote-desktop remote-access vdi

WesleyDavid

5:21 AM

Benefit of being ambidextrous:

Rebecca Chernoff

HI @WESLEYDAVID

WesleyDavid

@RebeccaChernoff asdg;aoiheq;lijf;asdlkjz.c,bn!!!

cowers

Rebecca Chernoff

q:

AdrianK

I think that's the sound my cat makes when I spray her with the water bottle.

of course, that's only after she gets a wild hair and tries to rip my face off.

Rebecca Chernoff

lol

AdrianK

5:28 AM

I dunno. She's mean enough that she might give the coyotes in my neighborhood pause.

ErikA

Evenin' @RebeccaChernoff.

Rebecca Chernoff

yo yo

ErikA

@RebeccaChernoff You get my "thank you" email?

Adrian

@erika that poor sap with the Bugzilla question. I gotta feel for him on that one. I'm staring down the barrel of an identical migration here.

ErikA

@Adrian I've done it as well. I really detest Bugzilla.

@Adrian I didn't think it was really an appropriate question for here, though.

Rebecca Chernoff

5:41 AM

@ErikA mmhmm (:

ErikA

@RebeccaChernoff When I opened it, I had to explain what StackExhange was. :)

...to my wife, that is.

Adrian

@erika yeah, agreed that it's not a great fit even if it weren't worded so poorly. Question read like the flailing of a drowning man or someone in seriously over their head.