The Comms Room

ewwhite

12:05 AM

Oh, Chicago life... - Are any of you familiar with the concept of "Dibs?"

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite I am familar with the concept of dibs

Not on parking spaces though, but sounds fair in that scenario

ewwhite

@MarkHenderson You are?!?

There's no snow there!

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite More like "Dibs on the last chicken wing" or "Dibs on not sitting in the middle of the back seat"

ewwhite

@MarkHenderson DIBS is a time-“honored” tradition in Chicago (and other snowy cities) whereby a person who shovels out a street parking space is entitled to that space, theoretically until the spring thaw.

This is how we live in Third-World Chicago...

Anonymous

lol

Mark Henderson

12:08 AM

@ewwhite Yeah fuck living in a city where it snows though

ewwhite

It's getting gross.

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite That's not dibs. That's just rubbish.

ewwhite

@MarkHenderson MY PARKING SPOT!

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Well fucking clean that shit up

Or, you know, get a garage

ewwhite

And if you disrespect Dibs, people will break your headlights out.

Oh, I have a garage... :)

freiheit

12:11 AM

I'm mostly just confused about the weird white stuff all over everything. ;)

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Fair enough but you're letting the team down if you decorate your parking space with junk mail

ewwhite

I've seen slashed tires, feces on car windows...

Mark Henderson

@freiheit @ewwhite jerked off

ewwhite

@MarkHenderson Nah... I'm cleaner than that.

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Ohhhh I want to, but I'm not going to, star that

Anonymous

12:13 AM

@MarkHenderson done for you

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Now your Google Image Search history has "randy jizz" in it

ewwhite

@MarkHenderson Nah, I keep that one handy.

And my Google has much worse in it. I've resorted to just using multiple browsers...

Can you imagine what it was like going to my consulting clients and having "brazzers.com" URLs auto-compete?

freiheit

@ewwhite I suppose "no, no, they're a client. just a client. really!" doesn't help much in that situation.

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite .... I had never considered that

Remind me to cancel my contract with NAMBLA

3

ewwhite

:(

Okay... another non-brazzers client has 900GB of production data and 500GB of tiff files. All running on a physical CentOS Linux box. How would you handle backups in 2014??

Anonymous

12:20 AM

non-brazzers?

ewwhite

@PatoSáinz My last job had a large pr0n site as a customer.

Anonymous

nice!

ewwhite

@PatoSáinz not nice... not with Supermicro

Linux backups today!?! @MikeyB @MichaelHampton @Iain

freiheit

@ewwhite Seems like an LTO6 tape changer would be overkill for that...

ewwhite

@freiheit They used to have an LTO-3

but the data contained within doesn't lend itself to incrementals... so it's full-backups all-the-time.

freiheit

12:32 AM

@ewwhite And how often do you need to do backups?

ewwhite

@freiheit I'm not sure... that's a good question. Client has application-level mirroring that replicates transaction logs every 10-minutes.

but I want to protect the main bad situations...

server fail...

ooops we erased something

and shit, our building is on fire

freiheit

Snapshots and replica to a DR site?

Magellan

@freiheit bingo

ewwhite

@freiheit I host the DR site...

so I have a local mirror on a 10-minute RPO, and a remote mirror 1800 miles away with the same 10-minute interval.

Magellan

@ewwhite I didn't figure you had that much pipe to, well, serve up that much pipe.

ewwhite

12:35 AM

I have Gigabit to the interwebs....

and client is... ~20 Megabit

I handle the backups at my DR site.

since I've found a way to leverage VMware's Avamar implementation for dedupe

but should I be taking local backups as well?

or just throw whatever the current LTO tape tech on the main server.

Damn... LTO-6 is out?!?

The HP LTO-6 Ultrium 6250 tape drive represents HP's sixth-generation of LTO tape drive technology capable of storing up to 6.25TB (compressed 2.5:1) per cartridge - 1.44TB/Hour

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Whoah

Finally a tape drive that I might actually buy

ewwhite

400 Megabytes/second

Mark Henderson

EH970A	HP LTO-6 ULTRIUM 6250 SAS EXTERNAL TAPE DRIVE						15	$2369

ewwhite

EH970SB - $2700

SB == Smart Buy... US-only

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite The same thing is commonly done in Boston

Mark Henderson

12:46 AM

Haha, it comes with a free Parrot Done2 quadcopter

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton Including the feces and violence?

Mark Henderson

freiheit

@ewwhite For close to a year now, I think...

ewwhite

@freiheit I'm totally gonna buy one!

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite No, I haven't really heard of any of that.

Parking chair

A parking chair is a chair that is used by a vehicle owner to informally mark a parking space as reserved for oneself. Other space savers are also used for this purpose, including trash cans, ladders, ironing boards, and other similar-sized objects that are commonly found in households. For curbside parking spaces, two or more items are normally used. The practice of using parking chairs is common in inclement weather in urban residential areas of the United States where parking is scarce and vehicle owners do not wish to risk losing their vehicle's previously occupied space in its absen...

And, you can never have too much wasabi.

ewwhite

12:48 AM

@MichaelHampton We use EVERYTHING here... not just chairs.

Anonymous

crazy chicago

freiheit

@ewwhite This all looks like a photo essay on why governments subsidizing car-parking so heavily is a terrible idea. ;)

2

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite Bostonians put some thought into it, it seems...

ewwhite

44 mins ago, by ewwhite

2

How can you argue with cat-shit!?? @wesley

Michael Hampton

Apparently there's a web site full of these notes.

ewwhite

1:10 AM

Is anyone here good at Visio?

And network diagramming?

I suck at it... wondering if there's a business opportunity.

Mark Henderson

Hehe, thanks to @MDMarra's constant bemoaning AD naming schemes, I'm now able to buy certificates from public CA's to cover internal DNS names. Yippee to me.

2

ewwhite

:(

Mark Henderson

Just bought my first public cert for an internal name. It felt weird, but also so good at the same time

Journeyman Geek

1:43 AM

@ewwhite: I'm convinced no one is really good at visio ;p

(tho, its one of the things I am trying to do. I want a proper network diagram for here before I leave)

cole

1:55 AM

good evening

Mark Henderson

@cole Evening good sir, may I take your coat?

cole

@MarkHenderson thank you kind sir. Don't mind the fact I have no pants on though.

Mark Henderson

@cole That is ok sir. This club is strictly pants optional. Please find our fully stocked bar over to your left, and a wide range of our services to the right. Feel free to see the concierge if we can do anything at all for you.

ewwhite

2:13 AM

@JourneymanGeek I would like to outsource my network diagramming

Mark Henderson

2:27 AM

@ewwhite I charge $150/hour and reserve the right to scribble it on a napkin, take a photo of it and email it to you as a complete diagram

Joel E Salas

2:56 AM

Is it fairly typical for a cat to puke a new food??

freiheit

@JoelESalas Yes

Joel E Salas

@freiheit I'm halfway debating buying another bag of the old food and phasing the new food in slowly

freiheit

@JoelESalas It's typically recommended to phase in new food with progressive mixes...

Joel E Salas

@freiheit i just ran out and bought him a nicer food instead of the same crap food

now he's puking the nicer food

bastard

freiheit

It's also possible that your cat is sensitive to the new food and not the old food. One of ours definitely does better on a "sensitive stomach" food than the old food.

Joel E Salas

2:58 AM

Ugh he's probably allergic to this expensive-ass food

he never pukes the bargain-brand clumps-o-ash food

freiheit

@JoelESalas Check the nutrition information for serving size / caloric density. Often cheap foods have fillers. He may have simply eaten twice as much actual food as he's used to because the nice food isn't full of filler and gotten overfull.

Mark Henderson

@JoelESalas And this is a problem because...?

Sounds like your cat is a cheap date

Joel E Salas

@freiheit I think maybe he got too excited and gobbled the new food without chewing, because he's closer to the porcine family than the feline family

freiheit

@JoelESalas So, maybe before buying a bag of the old food, try giving him tiny portions that he has to finish and wait a few minutes before getting another?

Ryan Ries

@MarkHenderson That deserves like 400 stars

freiheit

3:03 AM

4

A: Can I change my cat's food?

I've also heard of the issue of not changing cat's food, infact it is stated here that the first rule of cat food is to never change its food. But thanks to petmd.com we are given some steps to take when changing cat's food. Find a Similar Cat Food Formula : Always try to pick a new cat food th...

ewwhite

3:16 AM

@JoelESalas You wanna do my network diagramming?

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite From scratch? Using netflow? OpenNMS?

ewwhite

@JoelESalas from scratch... in lucidchart.com

freiheit

@ewwhite How about in graphviz?

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite When do you need it?

ewwhite

@freiheit Not sure. The client won't do visio

they are anti-windows, so the online graphing thing made sense

Joel E Salas

3:23 AM

@ewwhite Yeah I don't blame them

ewwhite

@JoelESalas it's silly...

@JoelESalas I'm trying to build a virtualization cluster for them

@freiheit sure... I guess. I'm just not good at diagramming, and it's not cost-effective for me to do so

@JoelESalas You should appreciate this.

VMware versus KVM ;)

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite The client wants KVM?

freiheit

@ewwhite With graphviz you don't have to be good at diagramming. You just have to generate a list of nodes and edges in the right format and let the software do the diagramming for you.

ewwhite

@JoelESalas The client wants a good solution. They have high IT turnover. Their internal IT guys are Linux champions, but don't know much about virtualization. One likes VMware. The other likes KVM with libvirt and qemu.

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite So it seems that the most important selling points will be ease of management and visibility

Which VMware wins on both counts

basically you don't want too many baked-in surprises

ewwhite

3:33 AM

We had a long talk when I was onsite...

and in order to appease both sides, the guy I report to was like, "get some hardware and let's do a head-to-head"

VMware versus ??

The only KVM-based suites I could think of were Openstack and Promox

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite That's the thing though, there's absolutely no comparison

the only thing I could argue in favor of would be something like oVirt or possibly OpenNebula

openstack is too opinionated a tool

ewwhite

@JoelESalas ovirt will die.

because of what Red Hat is doing

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Oh really? Is RHEV meant to completely absorb that user base?

Or is it something beyond RHEV?

ewwhite

@JoelESalas This is going to be a HIPAA-compliant infra... due to this and their turnover issues, I wouldn't recommend any solution without support.

It's only going to be a 2 or 3-host cluster

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Honestly at that scale it probably doesn't matter too much, but VMware will be a nicer experience for them

ewwhite

3:38 AM

@JoelESalas support

but the admins refuse to use windows...

or a mac

so I'm going through and making sure all of the VMware utilities can be accessed via Linux.

freiheit

@ewwhite Not even rdesktop into a windows server/vm?

ewwhite

it's a software shop, so everyone else has a mac

@freiheit one admin hasn't touched windows since 3.11

But I do wonder if it's a silly exercise...

since I can't think of many commercially-supported KVM solutions that make sense at small scale.

but I need to present an A/B comparison

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite They can if you're using firefox

Running a vcenter server will make them unhappy

ewwhite

@JoelESalas Needs the newest flash... only works with Chrome

vCenter is a SuSE-based appliance with PostgreSQL.

Joel E Salas

►

This is how I feel when everyone tells me openstack sucks ;_;

Mark Henderson

3:48 AM

Quick question for perspective; last month our systems in our DC transferred a total of 500GB of data over the internet (in+out; mostly RDP + HTTPS websites). Would you consider that a lot? Not much? I know it all depends on what it's doing...

It was 300GB out, 200GB in

Joel E Salas

@MarkHenderson We do about 10-20 GB out a day

Mark Henderson

@JoelESalas So roughly the same then

ewwhite

@JoelESalas why?

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite It's a big investment and now I'm wondering if it's the right choice

ewwhite

I think Openstack under the Red Hat approach is an option for companies with large virtualization footprints.

but I like VMware

@JoelESalas having problems?

Joel E Salas

3:53 AM

@ewwhite Not yet, it's just a huge engineering undertaking and I've been working to sell people on it for about 6 months

ewwhite

@JoelESalas I'm sorry.

are people not buying in?

from what I've heard about your stack, I don't think it's the right choice... but VMware may not be the right option either

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite What would you recommend?

I'm honestly thinking bare metal pizza boxes running apache httpd would be more than sufficient for the non-elastic part of the stack.

ewwhite

@JoelESalas web nodes can be virtual

i don't think I'd be running physical web boxes

why do people value elasticity so much?

It seems to be the holy grail in devops shops

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite They conflate "pay for what you use" with "save a lot of money"

which is generally untrue

ewwhite

what's the bottleneck?

what breaks? Why do you need to scale-up?

Joel E Salas

4:05 AM

@ewwhite Our bottleneck is the data tier, it's not even the web servers

ewwhite

so, whats actually wrong with vm-warrrrre?

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Cost

ewwhite

which cost?

Joel E Salas

Mainly the cost of licensing and support, which we don't pay right now

ewwhite

a well-designed cluster doesn't have to be super large.

you're wasting more on finding backend storage than enterprise plus licensing would cost.

but how many VMs will you guys be running?

Joel E Salas

4:10 AM

@ewwhite It's hard to say, we're expanding to more LOB applications while improving the codebase

ewwhite

300 VMs? 80 VM? 40VM?

Joel E Salas

Right now it's about 200, I imagine it'll stay in that range for a while

Like I said, the Ops guys have a boner for running off of bare metal so we might end up doing that

ewwhite

hmmph, can be wasteful?

There's no good reason to use bare metal boxes here...

unless the web tier does heavy processing?

Mark Henderson

4:32 AM

Anyone here familiar with ASA High Availability configurations?

Actually I think this is a good enough question for the main site

0

Q: ASA High Availability failover link configuration

According to the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Configuration Guide, Cisco's perferred method of configuring your network is as such: They have two switches on External, two switches on Internal and then two direct, non-switched connections between the two ASA units. Why two links between the ASAs? T...

MikeyB

5:08 AM

I wouldn't say that's a lot...
Numbers for home:
Last Month:
Bandwidth
In 395732 MBytes
Out 145819 MBytes
Total 541551 MBytes

Work:
300 GB in
500 GB out
(averaged over the last three months since last month was christmas and it was way lower)

Journeyman Geek

o0

I think our bandwith usage over the last 30 days dropped to 1/3 what it was the last time I checked....

(topped out at ~300gb total, now we're at ~70)

Mark Henderson

@MikeyB Yeah but how much of that is porn and torrents?

@MikeyB Yeah; I took my samples from November

Mark Henderson

5:30 AM

Man what kind of person favourites a question but doesn't upboat it

Michael Hampton

5:45 AM

@MarkHenderson The OP

Magellan

6:54 AM

plus.google.com/photos/110558071969009568835/albums/…

Iain

7:46 AM

G'day

Dennis Kaarsemaker

@Magellan developers...

Magellan

@DennisKaarsemaker yes. And mid-level sales people.

Mathias R. Jessen

8:27 AM

Mornin' gents

pauska

g'day

Magellan

mornin

Iain

@Magellan night shift ?

Magellan

Reading a book on my laptop, actually. It's still Sunday night for me, albeit rolling in Monday morning.

Iain

doh! more coffee required ...

@ewwhite this is the dibs I recognise - it's not limited to parking spaces cleared of snow

Magellan

8:53 AM

much better. f.lux installed on all my windows pcs now

Iain

@Magellan I've had f.lux for about 2 years now and I forget it's there

I don't feel my eyes anywhere near as tired as they used to be

Magellan

@Iain new to me. especially working this shift stuff.

Iain

@Magellan it should be really useful for the shift stuff

Dan

I've not started my week well - there was a crash on the motorway that delayed me for 45 minutes or so. And then, it turns out that I was driving to the office when I should be 100 miles away

tombull89

9:13 AM

The start of our network merge project today - having engineers in to install the servers, SAN and other new stuff.

Dan

Good times

pauska

9:24 AM

nothing like new equipment :)

tombull89

course, if it's actually needed or not is another matter...

Dan

9:38 AM

At least you can chuck some new brand names on your CV :D

mossy

Does the security.SE twitter bot tweet after a question gets 1 upvote? Seems weird to me..

pauska

9:56 AM

blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2013/12/03/…

I wonder how much overhead we're talking about

tombull89

10:07 AM

I've got "I'll make a man out of you" from Mulan stuck in my head D:

Stack Exchange

11:17 AM

The Nubby Admin: Fixing “The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect” in Windows Server Backup

posted on January 13, 2014 by Wesley David

The Problem: When adding a disk to Windows Server 2008 R2′s built in backup tool in an already scheduled backup, you receive the error “The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.” (Note that I’ve had problems with this exact error wording, but with a totally different scenario and solution. For more info, see: Solving the Issue: The Filename, Dir…

Mathias R. Jessen

Does ICMP require ARP resolution?

pauska

@Dan starting my one week project of migrating from xp to win7.. going to use your GPO stuff

Dan

@pauska Enjoy - let me know if you want me to clarify everything

pauska

it's weird though, it seems like the activex component is missing from you site.. i can't collapse etc

Dan

@MathiasR.Jessen Yes

pauska

11:27 AM

and it also seems like you exported the report while missing some templates?

Dan

@pauska Possible - it was a client site

pauska

I'll probably dig out the relevant info :)

Dan

@pauska Like I say, let me know if there's anything specific.

pauska

Yep, will do. Thanks mate.

ah.. it's IE11 that can't load the activex

Mathias R. Jessen

@Dan Thanks, thought so. I've identified a client address who keeps trying to bruteforce AD credentials, and asked the customer to isolate the node in their network. The reply I got was "The IP replies to ping but its unable to resolve via ARP" - makes absolutely no sense in my ears

pauska

11:38 AM

@Dan I see that you also found out the ridiculous default setting of not having remote registry running..

Dan

@pauska Yep, stupid

@MathiasR.Jessen Yeah, that makes no sense. Bear in mind ARP would simply be the first router, not the end device

pauska

May I ask why you're allowing everyone to modify program files, windows and the system folder?

Dan

@pauska That bit wouldn't have been me - probably someone trying to "fix" something

Or a shitty legacy app

pauska

@Dan good to hear

Mathias R. Jessen

@Dan Yes, I assume ARP can only resolve for the local segment, but still, no answer = no routing

Right?

Dan

11:41 AM

@MathiasR.Jessen Yep and yep

Actually - now I think about it, I wonder if whoever is pinging it has tried to check their arp cache for a match with the IP

Which won't happen

Mathias R. Jessen

I should seriously read up on some non-microsoft specific network topics

I think I'll give them a call and ask them to go through the steps again to get a picture of what's actually going on...

Thanks @Dan

Dan

@MathiasR.Jessen Probably easiest - things do get lost inbetween

Mathias R. Jessen

Exactly... I think that's the number one reason for wasted time, when doing Ops - not picking up the phone and having actual conversations

Dan

@MathiasR.Jessen Couldn't agree more - mis(or lack of) communication is easily my biggest timewaster

pauska

11:56 AM

man, having windows 8 (.1) locally with Hyper-V is great

like now when labbing and creating group policies

Mathias R. Jessen

It's the bomb

Bought a new workstation just before Christmas, lovely that you can just spin up a new machine whenever anything needs to be put to the test

tombull89

Don't only certain 8(.1) versions come with Hyper-V?

pauska

pro and up

@Dan ugh, disabling smart card logins wasn't easy

The only way I can that kills it is disabling the smart card service, but that also means that people can't use smart cards at all

Dan

Must admit, I've had little experience with cards

mossy

Question. If I wanted to wget a tar.gz from a URL and run tar after

it wouldn't be wget url.com/file.tar.gz && tar -xvf !$

it would be...

Mathias R. Jessen

12:10 PM

curl > wget ... curl url.com/file.tar.gz | tar xvz - yes?

curl url.com/file.tar.gz | tar xvz

that is

mossy

ohhhhh

duh

I don't know why i used &&

i still want to figure out how to call the last portion of the URL / path.

/man bash

Mathias R. Jessen

mossy

@MathiasR.Jessen ty :) still early here heh.

just rolled out of bed.

Mathias R. Jessen

It's 13:20 here = also, still early :D

jscott

12:28 PM

Dan

@jscott On a serious note, there is some malware purporting to be MSE

jscott

@Dan Yes, and we've seen a few of those "anti-virus scan" malware as well.

Dan

Can't actually remember the last time I had anything like a virus or malware

jscott

Typically machines which never return to our network for Flash/Reader updates.

We've a bit over 4300 machines, so there's always a handful or so languishing at users' houses. The remedy is always a nice reimage.

Dan

Truth

I'm a huge fan of solutions (i.e., centralised storage, good app management etc) where a reimage is a dead easy option.

I'm never confident in a machine that's had a virus

jscott

12:36 PM

And once the machine has been off our network for long enough, a reimage is faster than waiting for the machine to pull all the Windows/Software updates its been missing.

mossy

holy shit this is awesome.

macrabbit.com/slicy

Dan

Feels dirty"

Sorry, PSD - I'm going mental and scan read it as PDF

Dennis Kaarsemaker

Today has been ruined already

too much SOAP

not enough bleach to erase it from my mind.

mossy

This is why I shouldn't work with websites. I'm considering just exporting this site as one huge image and checking the ticket off.

Thank you Slicy. Best app 2014

Tom O'Connor

Failover is always a pain really, the number of things you end up considering for it has always meant in my experience with SME's you are better off outsourcing! — Sam 7 hours ago

what?

Do you book flights first, hotels later, or vice versa?

£10.48 Airfare per adult
GBP32.01 Taxes & Charges per adult

Smooth.

Thanks Government.

Dan

1:00 PM

@TomO'Connor I always book stuff at the same time

And if you do them literally at the same time with Expedia you get ATOL protection

Tom O'Connor

This is multihop, so I'll have to figure out whether that works.

Dodgy.

Sysadmin1138 Expounds

SysAdmin1138 Expounds: NetWare Retrospective

posted on January 13, 2014 by SysAdmin1138

As I've recently been through a change of jobs I've had a lot of chance to look back on my career. That career is long enough to have included Novell NetWare in it quite prominently, though I no longer point...