@DennisKaarsemaker If typing at least helps them get to a good answer, I'm not sure that's really a problem. Knowing how to find answers to unexpected question is a useful skill all on its own.
@JennyD It is a problem. I'd rather have them say "Don't know, but here's where I'd look" instead of losing 5 minutes in mumbling before getting an answer he won't have had the time to understand.
@DennisKaarsemaker I see what you mean; trying to hide how you come up with an answer is definitely not on. I was thinking more in terms of e.g. looking up syntax or man pages.
"does not meet our quality standards" - Fixed by rewording my title, most noticably adding a question mark to the end? That message sucks (and yes I've seen meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/92074/…)
@DennisKaarsemaker Completely agreed. I got to do some web-based test that had some questions like that a while back. They even had some javascript that would intercept attempts to switch windows, to enforce that the testee shouldn't be able to look stuff up.
@PriceChild Yes, it can be a bit unpredictable and have some funny work-arounds. We don't see many people get it on ServerFault though, tends to be a StackOverflow issue.
@DennisKaarsemaker I did not take that job, no... But I aced the test. (Because I have more than one computer and found no problem with looking at man pages on the other one. If they have stupid tests they get unreliable results.)
@DennisKaarsemaker I've been looking at that and the difficulty I'm having is filtering out 'legitimate' things like p2p - perhaps I'm looking over too long a timeframe
Speaking of webbased tests: at some point we made dev candidates write a brainfuck compiler before getting an actual interview. We didn't turn anyone down based on the web test, but were trying to see if there's a correlation between results of that test and interview results. Turns out that "ability to write a BF compiler in under an hour" and "good programmer" don't correlate very well at all.
@DennisKaarsemaker I've been in interview for sysadmins. One of my favourite questions is "You arrive at the office, turn on your desk light and find that it doesn't work. There's no janitor staff around. What do you do to fix it?"
I know little about commercial programming, but from what I've seen of SysAdminning/Engineering the ability to simply deal with the customer appropriately is half the battle that so many people fail at.
@JennyD it's not as bad as "why do sewer pipes have round lids instead of square", but I prefer to talk shop instead. My favourite question is "whayt's the biggest problem you caused and how did you fix it". Followed up by "how did you convinve management you're not an idiot". If the candidate has a sense of humour I sometimes even ask them in those exact words :)
This one trips up most people: "So, you have a computer science degree. So do I. What was your favourite subject at university, and how does that translate to your current career?"
In our environment and with our way of working, you will screw something up, and you will cause downtime and cost money. I want to know if you can handle that.
I took CS 101 for one term, except as a night class so it took a whole year, and that was basically just to get a paper saying that I knew something. But most of what I know, I've learned on my own.
@DennisKaarsemaker I suppose part of that is, once you've done it long enough you realise that huge mistakes are all part and parcel of the game and that dealing with them (And preparing beforehand) are the key thing
Like the time I once accidentally pulled out the wrong blade and took down an ESXi host. But it was fine because everything was redundant, vSphere HA was working and we had backups anyway.
My friend was writing a script which sent e-mails to a catch-all help desk e-mail. He added an infinite loop and didn't notice. I believe the count was 10,000 e-mails :D Corporate IT loved that
@DennisKaarsemaker I've been fortunate enough at the current job that most severe screwups have been in test systems - they case costs as devs can't do their jobs without testing systems, but it hasn't affected customers.
@Dan probably when I dragged an excel =sum bounding box wrongly which lead to 8 people being made redundant, I only spotted the error the next year - does that count? if no I've got more
@Chopper3 Oh my stories are all tame, I work in education so there's no real monetary cost to downtime. And we all know the best fuckups cost the most cash :D
@tombull89 one of the people was a guy whose wife left him and took the kids because of the redundancy, he later topped himself in on the steps of a council office - so there's SOME guilt involved from my side
@Iain got to go out but here's another - remember ogrish.com? I got a junior into that site and it eventually led to him getting arrested for filthy kiddy pics - prison, register etc. not entirely IT related but kind of
@TomO'Connor although I have pulled many a trigger
@Dan the spackers are usually very clean due to lack of use and have that handle thing next to the loo that can come in handy, there's loads of extra tummy-wipes plus you can wash off the muck in the low sink when you're done.
I'll find it one day, but I swear I was in a school that had a childrens book along the lines of "Mommy, where is daddy going" and was an account of a father going to prison
In Sweden there's a series of children's book that start with "Look, Max's $foo" (e.g. "Look, Max's dog"). The author decided to make one for adults. It's called "Look, Max's grave".
@Dan Had Christmas dinner at the Alderley Edge Hotel (where we had our wedding reception fact fans) and he was there, pissed as you can get, at the end of the meal he got up, paid the bill and drove off - twat
I recently read this paper from Dell about DDP aka Dynamic Disk Pooling.
Quickly explained, it offers these characteristics:
no reserved hot-spare (all disks contribute to IO and redundancy),
almost no limit on the total number of disks within a pool,
easy growing,
must faster rebuild aft...
ISSUE:
I have a Windows 2008 R2 VM that runs a 3rd party ERP system. They have a utility that will run scheduled jobs to backup the Oracle database and their app data nightly with a 7 day rotation.
The problem is that it must run as a desktop app interactively within a session. It can't run a...
@TomO'Connor maybe edit out the request to star the repo? It's a bit suspicious that that's his only activity on SF, but he's open about writing it himself and not aggressively marketing it.
@ChrisS - I think the problem with the auto-login you linked is that it won't be an "RDP" session but local. It sounds nitpicky but I'd like to be able to RDP in at any time just to visually confirm the desktop app is running.
@TheCleaner There's no difference between the two anymore, except that the console would be viewing the auto-login session until the screen saver auto-locked it.
If a session is connected to the console and you RDP into it, the console is disconnected.
@DennisKaarsemaker - he could be....he's probably written a netbot that runs through SF's connected IPs and gathers intel for his future takeover and eventual rename to ServerAnderson.com
@TheCleaner I'm curious how it integrated with Outlook. Was there a way within JDE that when you receive an e-mail it would go into the contact history for that company?
Contact history of the supplier/customer? That part I'm not sure of. We used Optio and Strategy in conjunction with JDE. But yes, you can send/receive emails within JDE (either the module will send via SMTP settings, or via the current logged in user's Outlook profile).
To be honest, I think your best bet is the Raspberry Pi. The school had some delivered earlier today and I was quite impressed. I might borrow one for the bank holiday weekend.
I think our school bought 15x Pis, with the Pi, Keyboard, mouse, HDMI cable, wireless dongle, and a USB hub, as well as a 4GB pre-setup SD card for about £50.
@Dan, that link it perfect. Thanks! Do I need to plug the Pi into my computer or can I just set it up on the ethernet and ssh into it? I should go buy one right now! :D
@Jess What Tom says, the PC is it's one standalone system and the SD card acts as the BIOS aswell as the firmware and operating system. This makes it impossible to brick, but it means you need a PC to get started by putting the image on the card. After that, treat it like a normal machine with a keyboard and monitor
OK, so once I have the PI set up with Raspian and node.js. Can I unplug the monitor, keyboard, etc. and just have it plugged into power and ethernet and treat it like a web server? ssh into it from there on?
And if anyone has copious free time to burn, here's a useful timesink that you can burn the next few years of your life going through: physicsdatabase.com/book-list-by-title
@TheCleaner I got an Arduino about 18 months ago. I feel that it's been worthwhile, but if I hadn't gotten that, I would definitely have gotten a Pi by now.
I think it's because APC because I use only APC system for cache. Here is the full log:
2013/04/23 19:15:05 [error] 539#0: *1305213 open() "/var/www/cache/e4ce8db565491cdcf27ab61a441xxxx" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 2.83.130.yyy, server: zzz.com, request: "GET /cache/e4ce8db5...
We are implementing a new WiFi network at my work, and I am trying to think through a design of the security for the network.
Use case 1: guests. We will have a captive portal setup, guests will accept an acceptable use policy and will be restricted to only the Internet, no access to LAN. Simple...
@ewwhite that last email is pretty much what I would do aswell, except that I think its a shame to do all that work without adding a faster tier with 15k's or SSD's to move the hottest data to..
@pauska Client has lost confidence in the VNX and doesn't wish to invest more into it unless someone were to give a real accounting of the performance boost.
@pauska TO me, it seems that EMC has been bad about sales engineering... OR my staff didn't use the resources they should have. There's no reason file should have been configured this way, right?
@ewwhite Yeah, that part about it not being best practice before is bullshit.. the filer on a VNX is basically a Celerra, and they have been striping luns as long as I can remember
this should have been multiple luns striped together to a file storage pool
I recently read this paper from Dell about DDP aka Dynamic Disk Pooling.
Quickly explained, it offers these characteristics:
no reserved hot-spare (all disks contribute to IO and redundancy),
almost no limit on the total number of disks within a pool,
easy growing,
must faster rebuild aft...
ISSUE:
I have a Windows 2008 R2 VM that runs a 3rd party ERP system. They have a utility that will run scheduled jobs to backup the Oracle database and their app data nightly with a 7 day rotation.
The problem is that it must run as a desktop app interactively within a session. It can't run a...
I think it's because APC because I use only APC system for cache. Here is the full log:
2013/04/23 19:15:05 [error] 539#0: *1305213 open() "/var/www/cache/e4ce8db565491cdcf27ab61a441xxxx" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 2.83.130.yyy, server: zzz.com, request: "GET /cache/e4ce8db5...
