The Comms Room

12:04 AM

@Wesley Of course, like any sales organization, they sometimes promises things they can't deliver. Which is where I usually came into the picture. =/

My stay at IBM, even in the tiny little niche I was in, was one continual Crit-Sit after another.

Wesley

@Magellan Crit-sit? Is that code for explosive diarrhea?

Magellan

@Wesley No, far less pleasant that even that.

Wesley

@Magellan Bloody stools for everyone!

Magellan

@Wesley Yeah, that always seems to be involved though.

Big team of engineers fly in and tell you everything you'd done wrong for the past few weeks and what you need to do to make the customers happy. Support always gets blamed, of course, even if we have no control over the situation because it's a complete political issue caused by the customer who's using the process to wrangle a discount on the next services contract.

MDMarra

12:50 AM

@RyanRies & @jscott today an engineer created site links at a customer and deleted their 100+ manual site links only to find out that +IS_INTER_SITE_AUTO_TOPOLOGY_DISABLED was set on every single site.

So, that was fun

Danila Ladner

1:01 AM

I used a lot of KVM in my experience, i love libvirt and virsh.

Magellan

@DanilaLadner had an interviewer get pissy with me the other day. He was talking about the joys of his hypervisor wrapper and I asked which platform they were using it with. He raged at me that it uses libvirt. Considering that Libvirt can manage all sorts of platforms including Xen, I figured that it was a valid question

Once I specifically asked him whether it was KVM or Xen, he got a disgusted look on his face and said, "Of course it's KVM".

Danila Ladner

yeah that it is just a API

Magellan

I doubt that they'll be calling me, and frankly, I'm glad. Staggers my mind how they could've been voted the best startup to work for in the city.

Michael Hampton

@Magellan libvirt also manages ESXi and Hyper-V...

Danila Ladner

to KVM/QEMU, XEN

yeah

and virtualbox as well

Magellan

1:05 AM

@MichaelHampton exactly. A freaking laundry list, IMHO.

Danila Ladner

if you go at it

+ virsh is quite good as well, can script the shit out of it.

Magellan

I really detest sysadmins that have so little social grace that they can't even be trusted to handle a 30 minute slice of an interview loop.

Danila Ladner

@Magellan Frankly

now i am working with the client they actually using Xen

instead of KVM

Magellan

@DanilaLadner No, I'm not Frank. He's Frank.

Danila Ladner

as hypervisor

Magellan

1:09 AM

@DanilaLadner Yeah, I know a few as well. One place I was talking to actually had a cluster of RHEL 4 boxes.

Danila Ladner

yeah, and if the guy was like you said, i'd never choose the job, can't work with assholes.

Michael Hampton

0

A: Why 160ms to ping <5miles

I was joking when I commented that for all we know, your traffic is going to Hong Kong, but it appears that it actually is going to Hong Kong. Several online traceroute tools based in Hong Kong show that IP address to be within a very few milliseconds of their locations. Now, as to why your tra...

Magellan

@MichaelHampton I saw that all the time at job[-3]. Different ISPs for buildings next door and Level 3 was the cheapest transport between them and Level3 routed all the traffic to/from CenturyLink's Consumer DSL through San Jose.

Michael Hampton

@Magellan Yeah, but... Google is sending the traffic from California to Hong Kong.

Danila Ladner

I actually did not know IBM were offering KVM

Magellan

1:15 AM

@MichaelHampton Well, probably for the same reason. The transport is cheaper.

Michael Hampton

@Magellan Cheaper to send traffic across the ocean than across town, on their own fiber?!

Magellan

@MichaelHampton Maybe it is broken. But if it stays that way for awhile, perhaps there is a reason. I've heard some wierd ass stories about routing due to bizarre peering agreements.

Wesley

1:29 AM

@Magellan Weird ass-stories.

Magellan

@Wesley Yes, those too.

Hot damn. Got it all working.

Next Step: Re-install Chef for automated Ruby Dev environments and managed infrastructure.

Matt Bear

gizmodo.com/…

nsfw..

kind of

Scott Pack

If it's on Gizmodo it can't be NSFW.

Ryan Ries

@MDMarra Ouch

MDMarra

All 2003 too

So no native powershell

I told him "Log into one DC for each site and run repadmin /siteoptions -IS_INTER_SITE_AUTO_TOPOLOGY_DISABLED"

Ryan Ries

1:44 AM

@MDMarra Seems like people are always setting weird ass obscure replication flags in your environments. I'll usually get something like an AD environment that has sites on every continent, nothing but a default-ip-sitesink, and they go 'We have no idea which sites are able to talk to one another. You figure out and show us the new links and bridges.' But they usually haven't screwed too much with the heuristics

MDMarra

I could have whipped up some psexec for him but....not my problem

It was obviously a bigger problem than it normally would be since the replication topology was already disconnected at that point

Ryan Ries

Sigh

Yes, admins that know just enough to break shit

MDMarra

note to self: always run repadmin /siteoptions before you touch a customer's environment

Ryan Ries

Wisdom

MDMarra

@RyanRies this place was impressive 100+ manual replication connections created by a script because they didnt know how to make site links the right way

Ryan Ries

1:48 AM

Usually the figuring out a concept comes before the scripting of it :P

MDMarra

yeah dude

I facepalmed when I saw it

Wesley

@RyanRies Weird ass-obscure flags.

I don't get any better tonight, foilks.

MDMarra

btw, this is a bank

Ryan Ries

We totally got your money, bro! Don't worry about it!

MDMarra

I once asked them "So your banking platform. That's on Unix right?"

"Nope. Windows"

I hope no one I know has an account here!

Obviously not a knock on Windows as a platform, but a knock on their windows admins that no doubt manage it

Ryan Ries

1:51 AM

Yep, admins can muck up whatever platform they manage

MDMarra

I don't think I got MVP :(

People that were awarded one were supposedly contacted this morning

Ryan Ries

Shit!

MDMarra

Can't win em all

@RyanRies how can you check site options in powershell?

Ryan Ries

Don't know off the top of my head. Would have to look it up. Kinda' doubt that there is anything built in. Not to say that you can't do it with PS of course, just that I'm not seeing the options in any of the Get-ADRepl* Cmdlets... so we'd probably just have to end up writing old fashion queries.

MDMarra

I've been poking around with Get-ADObject -Filter 'objectClass -eq "site"' but no dice so far

no worries

Ryan Ries

2:07 AM

Would be a great question for main, or either, give me a little while to find out and it would make a good blog since I haven't posted in a while. :)

MDMarra

0

Q: Detecting AD Site options using PowerShell

How can I use PowerShell to find AD site options like +IS_INTER_SITE_AUTO_TOPOLOGY_DISABLED in PowerShell? I've been playing around with the following command, but can't get it to spit out anything useful. Get-ADObject -Filter 'objectClass -eq "siteLink"' -Searchbase (Get-ADRootDSE).Configuratio...

Magellan

2:51 AM

This is going to be fun. Next step is installing Chef on Debian.

Why Ubuntu is explicitly supported as a distro for Chef Server and Debian Wheezy is not is completely beyond me.

Andrew

is that photo at the top of the star wall SFW?

Michael Hampton

@Andrew Um, yes?

Andrew

@MichaelHampton will I need brain bleach afterwards?

Michael Hampton

@Andrew Probably not.

Chris S

@MDMarra My Credit Union's system is all Windows now... I have little doubt that they've been infected over the years, and have never received any sort of notification as required by law.

Magellan

3:04 AM

@MichaelHampton The guy with the watchdog script whose code review question got closed as "minimal understanding". Wouldn't that be an "Off-Topic" instead? Sure the question sucks and I'm not advocating re-opening it, but considering that he did script that, he at least has a minimal understanding of the problem. (serverfault.com/questions/542858/…)

Michael Hampton

@Magellan This question was edited after it was closed.

Magellan

@MichaelHampton I know. And the only real change was grammar.

Michael Hampton

@Magellan Huh? HE added his whole script

Andrew

eh, code review should be "1. Have you actually tried it? 2. Take it to StackOverflow"

Michael Hampton

I'm not convinced to reopen it, because

I don't see anything in this script that attempts to send mail? — Michael Hampton 49 secs ago

Magellan

3:06 AM

@MichaelHampton Oh, sorry. My bad. I thought the green in there was my text selection.

Andrew

for the sheer joy of seeing 1000 stupid answers before it's closed as off topic.

Magellan

@MichaelHampton Not suggesting it be reopened. It's closed and needs to stay that way.

Andrew

@MichaelHampton if it was a cron job it implicitly would, but that's Doing It Wrong

Magellan

@Andrew How is a 'cron job' doing it "wrong"?

Andrew

@Magellan emailing when there's not an error...?

3

Q: Monitoring E-Mail Alerts Scalably

Anyone know of a way to monitor e-mail alerts scalably? For many of my on site services I have them e-mail me on success (and failure) of critical tasks. The reason I have it e-mail on success, is sometimes the failure is of a nature that the service can't e-mail a failure alert. Unfortunately ...

email monitoring logging cloud alerts

Magellan

3:10 AM

@Andrew Ah. Thought you were implying that stuffing a script in cron is the wrong solution. Y'all need to start writing your response with complete thoughts.

Andrew

@Magellan isn't "y'all" plural....?

Magellan

@Andrew Thought you were going to go there. Monitoring a network of hundreds of machines with scripts is stupid. A small network would be better with cron'd scripts.

Andrew

> There is no good reason to alert on success.

Magellan

@Andrew No. All Y'all is plural. Y'all is singular.

Wesley

@Gowtham Another kitteh! MROW

Magellan

3:11 AM

@Andrew We don't always get to make the proper choices. Sometimes they're imposed on it.

Wesley

The perversion level in this room grows exponentially to the amount of cats in it.

Andrew

> check a domain every 10 minutes. If it doesn't respond check other 5 times. If there is no response. - remove a file - run 2 simple commands - send an email