The Comms Room

Q: What is good (neat) architecture in programming?

t.co/MKEbxu2Qci

4

Andrew

7:27 AM

@JennyD blatant lies

24

When I build a simple website, e.g. a contact book where I can add, delete and update contacts, I create an index.php file where a user, if he's not logged in, is requested to enter a password and if he enters the right password, he's assigned a session and can do certain things with the contacts...

eh, suffice to say that I got google results.

My facial hair is longer than the hair on my head. Last step to #neckbeard status: migrate everything to FreeBSD. #sysadmin

Tweeted by Nonapeptide on April 20, 2014 at 12:01 AM

@Andrew Well that totally makes the joke not at all funny.

Andrew

@JennyD jeena.net/php-the-good-parts

@Andrew :-)

Andrew

fabien.potencier.org/article/64/…

7:52 AM

The main advantage of PHP is that suddenly Perl has become a mature language used by skilled people. Most of the previous anti-perl sentiment has just gone s/perl/PHP/g

:D

Of course, when it's said about PHP it's totally fair whereas when said about perl it was vicious slander :-)

"Last, but not the least, PHP even comes with a built-in web server that eases local testing... and it starts in a matter of micro-seconds." ಠ_ಠ

Morning

Hey @Dan How are u?

8:03 AM

@MichelZ Not thanks, bud - bit of a cold, but finding that things feel a bit different when you won't get paid if you don't turn up

:(

@MichelZ Yeah, today would have definitely been a duvet day normally I reckon! Oh well. How are you all?

morning @dan

@Dan Feels like I'm getting over the cold, finally

@JennyD Must be that time of year!

@Dan At least I don't have allergies... my girlfriend is miserable right now; asthma and pollen allergy do not go well together with spring.

8:08 AM

@JennyD No, not at all. My hayfever has kicked off a little this year, but I'm hoping it'll calm down - it's definitely getting better as I get older

my hayfever hasn't kicked-in yet. but can't be long now. but has gotten lots better over the years

@MichelZ I find being allergic to plants a ridiculous state of affairs

I only get hayfever on about 3 days a year

@MichelZ Birch exploded here in DK over easter, it's been a living hell

:(

good thing i'm more of an inside-person :)

8:22 AM

same here

+ inside has AC <3

Had a single day with meds last year, but otherwise almost nothing ... Now it's back with a vengeance, determined to ruin my sinuses and my summer :(

Honey from local hives is supposed to help desensitise hay fever - one of these years I'll get round to having a hive myself

@Iain yeah, I've heard that

@Iain That makes a lot of sense.

Chopper3

8:41 AM

Is Gripping-the-fuck-up not an option? :)

@Chopper3 Ayup, is that like rule 5 ?

Chopper3

@Iain yep :)

Can a mod execute this spammer please; serverfault.com/users/217361/zhuzhu

someone here implemented a CFEngine class to deploy a proxy client configuration to a set of servers. Failed with it, left the class behind and gave the servers direct access to the internet on the firewall.

I hate everyone who used to work here

@faker You should love them. They challenge you ;)

10:23 AM

People who rate items badly because they were DOA should be shot

@Dan only worse are those who rate them bad because delivery took too long

10:36 AM

MDT Deployment of windows from zero to fully working in under 5 minutes. That's impressive.

@TomO'Connor MDT is nice

@Dan Especially as another team did all the hard work, all I had to do was follow their documentation

Wait until they want to start pushing apps like Adobe Creative Suite out, though.

@Dan Fuck that.

We're not paying license costs for that kinda shit.

Haha

It was more the deployment time I was aluding to

10:39 AM

@Dan We've got other tools for the software deployment.

Dunno what they are..

The neat bit of this is that I intercepted the WDS pxeclient, and put the stock ubuntu one in

so it netboots to ubuntu, then pxechains the wds client

so you get a menu asking which OS you want to install.

If we transmit the bus, we can get to the XML program through the multi-byte EXE microchip!

3

@TomO'Connor You know MDT / WDS can do that natively? ;)

@Dan Not without a considerable amount of jiggery pokery.

@TomO'Connor It's native funcionality?

This was following the microsoft instructions on how to do it...

I dunno if the two are the same thing.

10:41 AM

Perhaps - I don't remember any Ubuntu stuff, but it's not really the stuff I do

SCCM is nice for deployments

I need to learn this stuff, but I may have lost my chance a little with giong contracting

@RobM isn't SCCM just MDT on steroids, and MDT is WDS on acid?

we've found its quicker to deploy an image with VS 2013 installed everywhere and run a task sequence to uninstall it on the machines we don't want it on than it is to install it where we want by task sequence, but its still good.

@TomO'Connor No, SCCM is huge

10:42 AM

Yes. Yes it is.

Fight

I mean there's lots more to SCCM besides but I assume we're just talking about the OS deployment module here, because Dan's right about SCCM overall.

we've got a huge image with VS 2013, full install of Office 2013 with all the salad and Adobe Creative Suite with all its options too and SCCM bashes it out to target PCs quite quickly. I will say that.

Anyone used BIG IP F5 stuff?

@Dan a lot

we have about two dozen of them I think. Maybe more

Without sounding stupid, is there a simple rundown. I don't need to do anything with them, but they're using them here and I udnerstand nothing

Is F5 the name of an actual product, or are there loads within it?

10:51 AM

@Dan www.google.com :D

I think F5 is the Company, and BIG IP is the product

Sorry yeah, I'm mixing myself up

I guess what I'm trying to establish - you buy a BIG IP firewall. Do you select based on size and then license based on features?

Okay, I think I'm getting it now

@Dan I wouldn't have said they're firewalls.

More application-aware load balancers that might have FW capability.

They're more like reverse proxies / LB's

aren't they?

yah

Fair one, yeah

Problem is everyone just says "Oh, the F5 will do that"

I hate high level discussions, I need to understand

@Dan good for you! More People should try to understand stuff they're dealing with

we wouldn't have so many n00b questions then

11:02 AM

@MichelZ they are mostly attributable to laziness

yes

@Iain The problem I'm facing is the more I read up about this F5 shite the more I realise I don't know

and not trying to understand is lazyness

They have, at least, published a lot of decent Citrix documentation

@Dan that's not a problem

11:04 AM

@Iain Feels like it, I've got a meeting tomorrow where I need to sound like someone with half a clue

@Dan Probably, but probably not very well.

@TomO'Connor That, thankfully, ain't my problem

I think I should be allowed to lock gratuitously dumb people in a room with some rabid, angry badgers.

You can send them over to do my Visio diagram if you want, I'm bored already

11:19 AM

you wouldn't want these people doing your visio diagrams. You wouldn't want to watch them tie their own shoelaces.

Actually now that I think about it, the particular people I'm thinking of mostly wear slip-on shoes...

Q: How to ensure that the «if» statement gets parsed _before_ a given resource/class?

1

Sometimes there are complicated interactions between packages. To avoid class interface with countless, seemingly unrelated parameters, I though about using tags, defined(<resource>) function to let the resources slightly change their behaviour based on the rest of the configuration (not facts)....

puppet

am I wrong or does he need to put that in different stages?

@Dan I dunno if i'd let them make a choice that was going to suck in future.

@TomO'Connor You could, as a 2 week contractor, tell the PM of a half done multi million pound project that they've picked the wrong vendor if you like ;)

@faker no, s/require/before/ is what he needs. Stages are just a lame excuse for not getting your dependencies correct.

@Dan Sure.

I'm not afraid of them.

If you want a firewall, buy a firewall. If you want an Application LB, buy one.

Don't buy an ALB and expect it to be a good firewall.

Screw the UTM. Evil idea.

Core2Duo chips suck.

11:31 AM

@DennisKaarsemaker hmm confusing, I think he needs to have userdoc before. But not before the File, before the if

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork I thought my sarcasm was automatically conveyed, given his question, but you might be on to something

Still hopelessly in love with the new nick btw xD

@MathiasR.Jessen Yeah, you wouldn't know it based on the question he posted, but that fellow sure made a valuable contribution to the community anyhow. :)

@faker I missed the circular references. I don't know what he's trying to achieve, but it looks stupidly complicated.

not going to open that can of worms, answer deleted :)

sometimes it is better to just walk away...

Journeyman Geek

@tom: Meh, they're old and the entire system they are on is probably slowly failing

11:44 AM

@DennisKaarsemaker I'm not sure either, also couldn't he declare it like class {'vbox': require => Class['userdoc'], }? That should work. Sucks also though.

@faker I don't know if those tags will work properly in that case, I don't use tags in puppet

Standalone Sysadmin: No updates lately - super busy!

@MathiasR.Jessen I got the sarcasm! :D

Stack Exchange

posted on April 23, 2014 by <a id='post_author' class='fn' itemprop='name' …

I've been writing less lately than normal, and given my habits of not posting, that's saying something! Lately, I've been feeling less like a sysadmin and more like a community manager, honestly. On top of the normal LOPSA Board Member duties I've had, I'm serving as co-chair of the LISA'14 Tutorials committee AND the Invited […]

@MichelZ With his question on-hold, he probably will too ;)

12:03 PM

Sweet! I get a free trial of cPanel with my hosting account!

5

@Travis Get out.

@TomO'Connor For realz!

@Travis He probably meant it literally. Get out! :D

lol

Never used it before. Why the hostility toward it? I always assumed the GoDaddy interface was pretty cPanelly

Good morning.

12:08 PM

@Travis because it fucks up your system

@DennisKaarsemaker Too funny

in addition to fucking up your system, it will fuck your wife, and eat all the food in the fridge, and it will hide your TV remote

Hey now! Them's fighting words! Fat kid ain't gonna have nothing stealing his food!

damn spelling today...

@Travis Because cPanel makes you into a shit admin, and if you ask questions about it, we'll close them.

12:10 PM

I realize I totally missed the fuck my wife part.

@TomO'Connor I don't like the idea of having to pay to be a shitty admin

@Travis That's reiserfs, isn't it?

Oh wait.. That just kills your wife.

lol

:)

damn Hans

or what's his name

Maybe I shouldn't have redirected my primary account's .com to a porn site...now I can't test new websites...

12:19 PM

@TomO'Connor I'm not afraid of them, I'm just not going to get in a debate over something I can't change

I'm tired of the cloud.

yah, let the sun shine!

@MichelZ Reiser.

@Tom

firstname Hans

is it not?

Hans Reiser

Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 19, 1963) is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. He is the creator and primary developer of the ReiserFS computer file system, which is contained within the Linux kernel, as well as its attempted successor, Reiser4. In 2004, he founded Namesys, a corporation meant to coordinate the development of both file systems. In April 2008, Reiser was convicted of the first degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in September 2006. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder, as part of...

12:22 PM

yap

Oh, i thought you meant you didn't remember his surname.

Which would be vaguely amusing.

it would :)

damn sql profiler. overwhelmed by some lines of string

12:36 PM

@RobM It really should be shunned (the way that the SUN is in Liverpool) by the whole country

@Iain Except people believe this stuff, which is why it winds me up so much

My sister-in-law (an otherwise intelligent woman) believes it all

There are still a lot of people who think newspapers wouldn't be able to print it if it wasn't half true

And of course, the "no smoke without fire" argument

12:53 PM

@iain as a football fan, even if not a liverpool fan, I've not purchased the sun since Hillborough, either.

so totally agree.

abstrusegoose.com/474

5

BigHomie

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2610693/…

@RobM No. 2 is a bit unfair, a lot of conservative newspapers described the NSDAP as a vocal defender of sound conservative values during the 30's, it's too easy to point fingers at it in retrospect

@MathiasR.Jessen perhaps, but the daily fail has had a habit of this. And pointing fingers in retrospect is fair game when you play by the fail's own rules.

@Iain I love that

1:00 PM

Everything is so sore...oh god getting old sucks so bad

@Dan it made me snigger

Made me do that laugh/cry thing.

TheCleaner

Hey @HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork - I found your Superuser Moderator campaign billboard...lol

4

I'm still curious when you'll let them know you don't give a five if you get elected...

@RobM Oh, don't get me wrong, the mail and their conduct is pure filth - the fact that you point to at least one annual shameful scandal for the last 6 years is pretty saying

yep.

1:13 PM

@EEAA beat me to it by a few seconds

@TheCleaner Not sure I will. I think I'll gain more amusement out of watching them never figure it out, TBH.

EEAA

@Iain My general assumption with questions like these is that if the OP doesn't mention anything about backups, they likely have none.

@EEAA snap

@EEAA What kind of cups? I have lots of plastic and glass cups, even different colors in my cabinets.

Q: Filesystem performance degraded during RAID rebuilding

Is it just me or does 40T in RAID5 scare anyone else ?

3

So quick question - our RAID5 is currently rebuilding and there is a VERY noticeable filesystem performance hit (home directories are NFS mounted on the array). I'd sort of expect that, given you're rebuilding the array so there's massive read/write burden on the controller, but it occurred to m...

performance raid filesystems

EEAA

1:16 PM

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork I prefer lowball glasses.

@Iain That's terrifying.

@Iain Anything in R5 scares me

@Iain definitely!

@EEAA aye

RAID5 should just get banned from the planet

3

Don't you just know they're 2T consumer grade disks too and their next question will be how do I recover from a URE during a RAID5 rebuild

1:18 PM

so highly likely for a double failure

@Iain But they're so cheap!

:)

and I bet they have no backups either

@Iain why backup.. they have raid!

;)

@Iain They're 2.8 TB disks, according to a just-now comment.

EEAA

1:20 PM

I have a ~15TB R6 array of WD 3TB drives, and even that is slightly concerning to me. Fortunately it's more or less a backup of one of our S3 buckets, so the data is elsewhere.

How does that question have 3 upvotes and only my downvote, by the way?

Then I hope they have good backups

This is hardware RAID5 (LSI 9266-i8) on a 40TB array I'm tempted to close this as unprofessional. A 40TB RAID5 array is not professional, and indicates that either someone is very bad at his job, or is doing a passable job at sabotage. — HopelessN00b Genius of network 1 min ago

THe question isn't bad

I'm happy to announce our new Hitachi arrays are RAID6 (our current Sun storage is RAID5)

1:21 PM

@Iain Not bad, but not worthy of +3, or even +2 (at least by stingy ServerFault upvote standards).

Read the last line. libressl.org

on that page

Is anyone using SCCM with multi-site/multi-national deployments?

@DanilaLadner Yeah, it's been mentioned in here at least 83 times in the past few days.

CA sucks so hard and we're looking to move off of using it.

oh sorry.

haven't seen.

1:23 PM

@cole We has multi-site SCCM deployment that I did. Not multi-national, but one of our sites is in BFE, Kentucky, which might as well be a 3rd world country.

I agve up on wondering how stuff gets voted on

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork Sounds about right. This would be for 87+ sites.

@DanilaLadner Heh, no biggie. It is kind of amusing/curious/WTFish.

How does one survive in this country, prices seem go up like every other week.

@cole We're at... like 2 dozen, but with a much flatter hierarchy, and much less NT 4.0/Windows 2000/Windows 2003 than you guys. If you could get SCCM set up into that environment, I'm sure you could write a best selling horror novel about it.

1:26 PM

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork NT4 is almost decommed completely

Is SCCM just one agent? CA has two agents - software delivery and management.

@DanilaLadner <shrug> Prices stay the same as long you steal everything.

@cole Yeah, one agent. SCCM client. Management is handled with the agent, and AD and the SCCM server software.

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork haha. oh that is why relatives from Russia say no inflation there.

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork hard to get this info from Microsoft's site. They're just like TRY O BUY THIS

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork does it have or is the remote agent deployment capability pretty good?

@DanilaLadner Which country is that?

@KevinSoviero Russia

well i mean if you steal everything, so there is no price hikes for you.

1:32 PM

@cole You mean "push client installs?" (Telling the server to deploy the SCCM client to a bunch of client computers?) Yes, it's pretty good. Can be hair-pulling infuriating when it doesn't work for no obvious reason, but it usually works, and usually works pretty well.

@DanilaLadner You could always move to the Ukraine... Oh, sorry, I mean "New Russia."

Not sure how that'll go on your older OSes, though, it was mostly smooth sailing for us, even on XP and Server 2003 client machines.

Apparently it's a 40T R6

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork Yes - we're not terribly concerned about the 2000 boxes as we're starting to actually phase those out too and NT4 will be gone shortly as well.

Just say no to RAID5.

(and sometimes RAID6, unless you know what you're doing)

1:34 PM

RAID5: Not even twice.

@ewwhite explain

@Iain Better, but still... it should be multiple RAID6, and not one

R6 is still parity RAID, and still runs a not-insignificant risk of disk failures during rebuild tanking the whole thing, especially with larger arrays.

@Iain Well, it helps to understand the performance profiles... I'm amazed that so many people on SF post about 40TB arrays and such. In y day-to-day, I rarely deal with anything over 8TB (and never more than 2TB on produce systems)

RAID5 is okay on enterprise disks... but not nearline. I think RAID 1+0 is just the simplest approach.

@ewwhite I didn't realise you were referring to the 40T I though you were being more general.

TheCleaner

1:37 PM

I swear Sears just gives money away now...I get the "Shop your way" rewards weekly emails saying "you have $15 in surprise rewards"...I end up getting stuff for free weekly from that store.

some of this spills over onto ZFS, because a lot of people try to use RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 (R5 and R6-like)... and there are too many downsides to doing so.

When you get right down to it, parity RAID in general is a way of reducing costs on disk by increasing risks to data, and thus, is generally a bad idea, which should only be used by those who know what they're doing.

How can you use ps to print just the process cmdline?

@KevinSoviero cat /proc/pid/cmdline (or really) ps -o command

@KevinSoviero ww | ef

1:41 PM

@KevinSoviero Effing hell, man. I was trying to parse that and thinking "what the hell are you trying to print with PowerShell??"

@Iain ermagerd how many axles? (bro do you even RAID60?)

@MikeyB 2.8T each

@MikeyB ps -eww -o command

That does what I need, thanks

@Iain So, that would be... probably 16 3TB nearline SAS disks in R6? Not sure if that's really much better than R5, now that I do the math.

quite possibly not

JohnD

1:46 PM

gj @Community meta.serverfault.com/posts/6218/revisions

@JohnD yeah someone ran a job that updated a load of links

@KevinSoviero you may also find something like -o comm:32=CMD -o command handy

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork mmmmm reducing costs on disk by reducing performance.

@MikeyB Explain?

I don't know if someone already posted this, but as far as RAID 5 is concerned: baarf.com

@KevinSoviero Haha, you think things are any different in Ukraine, even more so of stealing and bribing.

only the executable name vs full (possibly modified) command line:
COMM COMMAND
/usr/bin/terminator /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/terminator -b

1:53 PM

@DanilaLadner I was more interested in making fun of the current events in that region, rather than any specific economic conditions.

So I had a Linux server crash this morning... and it dumped a huge file in /var/crash - filling up /var, and taking more services down

should I be planning to have more room in /var/crash ?

@ewwhite /var/crash? Distro and version?

@ewwhite are you going to do anything with the dump files ?

no, a 5GB dump file may not be too useful for me

BigHomie

@ewwhite It's just going to fill up whatever more room you give it

1:57 PM

Disable the dumps then

this is the only time I've ever seen this on a Linux box

projectnaptha.com

plenty on VMware and Soalris

Cool

I've never enabled crash dumps anywhere

Nathan C

1:57 PM

for some odd reason I can't get my custom web server template to appear on the web enrollment...but the default cert does

@ewwhite is RHEL default (as of 6 I think)

@MikeyB If you have more than 8G of RAM AFAIK.

@MikeyB normally my systems don't crash in this manner... never even saw it at Logicworks.

so it could be a fluke

@faker most of the time they are useless, but also dangerous due to filling up partition with crap.

@DanilaLadner Mount /var/crash as ramdisk?

1:59 PM

@DanilaLadner exactly, I would only enable them if a box crashes all the time and I want to investigate it

@faker and in that case if it were me I'd send them to another box if possible.

@KevinSoviero yeah, it is as an option, but I wouldn't even bother enabling it, unless some specific hardware needs to be debugged how it kills the kernel.

One with lots of disk space.

i dont feel like doing shit today

I have a headache to be honest, weather is shit.

2:05 PM

I'm sore from my first softball game last night.

@Dan That's pretty nifty, man. Noice find.

Okay, this was my fault.

@HopelessN00bGeniusofnetwork To be honest, I wasn't sure it wasn't a joke at first. It does work - a little faffy (it could do with a little icon to say its processing), but could come in handy

@ewwhite I thought the Comms Room had long since established that it was always your fault.

<3>Out of memory: Kill process 12057 (zfswatcher) score 1 or sacrifice child
<3>Killed process 10632, UID 0, (zpool) total-vm:27124kB, anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:4kB
<0>Kernel panic - not syncing: An NMI occurred, please see the Integrated Management Log for details.
<0>
<4>Pid: 0, comm: swapper Tainted: P         C ---------------    2.6.32-431.3.1.el6.x86_64 #1

I couldn't sleep last night and woke up a half hour late...

2:09 PM

I'd been experimenting with zram devices

<7>zram: Read before write: sector=4193824, size=114688
<7>zram: Read before write: sector=4193824, size=114688
<7>zram: Read before write: sector=4193824, size=114688
<7>zram: Read before write: sector=4193824, size=114688
<7>zram: Read before write: sector=4193824, size=114688
<7>zram: Read before write: sector=4193824, size=114688

and forgot that I left them on...

Naught @ewwhite.

But you're talking to the man who once nearly destroyed a fully functional XenServer host when trying to fix a broken one because he typo'd an IP

I'm sure you all have made changes to something, then forgot about them....

e.g. when the filesystem fills up from the debug logs you enabled... or the server catches fire from the lit cigarette you left on the top cover...

You mean like leaving debug logging enabled. :D

Haha, see

reddit.com/user/poem_for_your_sprog This makes delightful reading.

This is a Windows one - but I used Regedit to import the hive of a mandatory profile. This locks the file and, in turn, makes the profile completely unusable for the clients until you manually close the file. Yeah, that went well

2:12 PM

@ewwhite Yeah, I call the days I do that on "workdays." ... of course, that also happens because of drinking on the weekends though. So, really, it something I only every day of my life.

I've made the mistake of tipsy command-line work.

@ewwhite It's significant;y easier and more dangerous if your CLI supports auto complete.