/dev/chat

4:08 AM

speedtest.net/my-result/3867272879

For some reason, to get a non-crappy upload I had to set my congestion control algorithm to Illinois. The default cubic was terrible.

@derobert per our earlier conversation, I finally remembered why I didn't initially go raid6. I need 6 TB available and I only had the budget for 2 TB disks, iirc raid6 is 50% space efficient at 4 disks, so I'd need 4x3TB to get my 6 TB availability.

@casey yeah, but you were doing raid5 + a spare; that's the same space efficiency as raid6 (w/o spare)

So you'd do a 5-disk RAID6 v. a 4-disk RAID5

Unless of course you mean a cold spare, because you only have 4 ports

yea, and no room in this case for the 5th disk, nor the data ports for it

cold spare is not a terrible option though, as a swap is a 2 minute job with this case

4:23 AM

well, the scary bit about raid5 is that you're unprotected after a single-disk failure. Including against, say, a bad sector. Cold spare potentially adds hours to the rebuild time.

drives are all in tool-less caddies though its cables in the back rather than a solid backplane, so I still have to pop both sides of the case to un- and re-plug the drive

true. Its about 4 hours to rebuild the array as is to replace 1 disk

wow, 2TB in 4h? That's fast...

I guess it doesn't have much load on it. And has fast disks.

thats my experience so far, though I am extrapolating a bit as I attempted to rebuild onto a new disk with one of the faulty disks still in the array (before I scratched that and recreated the array and started the restore from backup) and it didn't actually finish.

I had nothing to lose as I got all the essential data into the backup and if it would tolerate a read in the bad region it might have worked...

but those consumer disks, they do not tolerate faults well. one bad read and the disk goes crazy and the array drops it and only a reboot will bring it back into its quasi working state

and XFS does not like it when it tries to satisfy a read off the no-longer-present disk :)

it just goes offline to preserve what little integrity is left

@casey yeah, disks like that are annoying.

@derobert very. My new disks advertise they are fault tolerant in a way that won't demonstrate that behavior

4:33 AM

@casey where did you find a disk that actually advertises that?

>RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER).
Prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives.

was in the marketing copy, time will tell if it actually works that way

@casey Ah, yeah, you may have to enable that using smartctl -l scterc,70,70

@derobert good to know, thanks.

5:27 AM

@casey Ok.

@FaheemMitha I run all my machines with swap. Though on my desktop I've been tempted against it, because once thrashing starts it seems I might as well hit the reset button. Won't be able to type anything in a terminal or switch to the text console before the watchdog hits reset anyway.

But really, I ought to set up cgroups or at least ulimits properly. There used to be a daemon (ulatencyd, I think) that'd set up cgroups for you, but AFAIK it isn't compatible with systemd

@derobert I'm not clear how cgroups is involved. How much swap do you use?

@FaheemMitha cgroups let you do something like (for example) group a bunch of processes together and limit them to x GB RSS. So you can (for example) put your X server in a cgroup, your window manager in another, your xterms in another, and then your memory-hungry things (e.g., browser) in another. Then limit them so that e.g., a browser going crazy can't eat all the RAM.

Or, as has always been the problem for me, put the random code I'm testing in a cgroup...

On this desktop at home, I have 8G swap (1.1G used). At work, 5.7G (0 used).

Work machine has been rebooted recently though

Machine here has 16G RAM; work machine 24G.

Or I have a web server at work. 2G real RAM, 14G swap (5G used)... And yet that's stable. Yeah for memory leaks.

@derobert mm... that sounds interesting

Yep. And ulatencyd used to do all that for you, automatically. It even used the cpu cgroups (which limit CPU %) to make the system more responsive. Worked great... but then the systemd folks decided that kernel feature is theirs and theirs alone to play with.

5:45 AM

restore from backup complete, array in degraded state, re-generating 1 TB of post-processed data. Hope I wake up to a finished job and not another disk failure. array gets rebuilt into normal state tomorrow afternoon... good night!

good night, and I'll keep my fingers crossed

I'll need it! thanks

@derobert Interesting. Is this commonly done? You should write a blog post.

But isn't the OOM killer suppose to take care of runaway processes? Though this method sounds more reliable.

@FaheemMitha Well, it won't take care of them until you run out of swap, I believe.

@derobert Oh, I see.

5:49 AM

I need to figure out how to get that to work along with systemd before writing a blog post. Or before implementing it...

@derobert Ok

@derobert do you think occasional heavy swap usage is Ok? I'm trying to build a CL compiler which (for compiler optimization reasons) uses a lot of memory at one point while building.

My 16GB RAM + 4GB swap isn't enough. The author tried to cut back on memory usage, but thus far as failed. So now he is saying - crank up the swap!

@FaheemMitha well, the alternative is to not build it, so...

@derobert True. Still not a fan of having my disk thrash away...

Note that with cgroups you can force it to, for example, not use more than 12G of physical RAM, so the compiler will thrash but the rest of your system won't

@derobert Ok. No idea how to do that. I'm really more concerned about the stress to my disks. He thinks it would need like 15-30 min to get through the bad part.

5:54 AM

@FaheemMitha Unless your disks are SSDs, writes don't really wear them out so much.

kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt

and of course lwn.net/Articles/604609 for an introduction to control groups

@derobert Ok, thanks for the reassurance.

BLOG POST!

And 30 minutes of thrashing, that's like less than running Windows Update. :-/

Where is @strugee when you need him?

@derobert No idea what that is.

@FaheemMitha No idea what Windows Update is???

Swap is like super slow compared to regular RAM, right?

5:59 AM

@FaheemMitha Yes. Very much.

@derobert Well, I guess I might have run something like that at some point, but not really.

I totally detest Windows, and try and keep it out of my life as far as possible.

@FaheemMitha Errr. It's the site random end users are supposed to visit to apply security patches to Windows.

Well, except you don't actually have to visit the site, its sort of built into XP, and fairly well built into 7.

@derobert Right. I think I must have downloaded stuff from there at some point. For my laptop, which runs/ran XP

The battery on that laptop died some time ago. Haven't used it in a while.

6:30 AM

systemd-run --user --scope --property MemoryLimit=1G -- perl should do it. But I don't have a memory cgroup on this machine (WTF) despite getting a Watt kernel: Initializing cgroup subsys memory at message at boot (double-WTF)... Hmmm... Well, it's almost 3AM, problems for tomorrow.

@derobert I don't know if this would run on wheezy, anyway.

Well, that's the systemd way. The plain cgroup interface should be in wheezy

@derobert Oh, ok.

oooh, maybe I need to add cgroup_enable=memory to my kernel command line here. Oh well, the machine at work has a memory cgroup...

I thought systemd was the Spawn of Satan? Or alternatively the Coming of the Antichrist.

Well, whatever it is, it is arriving with the next Debian release.

6:37 AM

@FaheemMitha Well, unless the current GR prevents that. "That" being "Debian release", of course.

6:47 AM

hmmm, systemd seems to set up its permissions so that only works for root. wtf.

definitely a problem for tomorrow!

@derobert Ah yes. The Jackson Effect.

It's OK. Maybe if they delay it a year, systemd will be ready by then :-(

Anyway! Bed.

@derobert lol

12:13 PM

osquestions.com

have you see this?

laughable.

@TylerMaginnis What's laughable?

if you look closely all content on that website is scraped from StackExchange

mostly, U&L

osquestions.com/unix-linux/105318/…

@TylerMaginnis Oh, I see.

I'm sure sites pop up like this all the time

@TylerMaginnis I wonder what the point of it is.

1:30 PM

@TylerMaginnis - there are dozens of these types of sites. They also scrape my blog too. There's really no recourse you can do, cost of doing business, basically.

I don't mind, as long as my name still shows up on the post, ha.

I was pleased that some of the content I posted finally got rolled into google.

If you want to get creative you can post content to your blog denouncing them or making fun of them, and then they'll post it about themselves too. But they really don't care has been my experience.

I did, for a time, try to stop it but it's like trying to plug a dike.

I wonder what their PR is

Ha!

0PR

56,668 backlinks!

Domain age: 2 days.

@sl

@slm The only way to plug that dyke is to use non-conventional software for your blog.

Q: How to format beautiful plain text email with Thunderbird?

1:54 PM

Yeah not worth the effort.

ppr

2:17 PM

1

I send only plain text emails with Thunderbird. Sometimes, I need some minimalistic formating to facilitate the reading. I wonder how to insert automatically this formating in Thunderbird. Is there an easy way (shortcuts for example) to obtain the following results? In a more general way, I am i...

2:58 PM

@TylerMaginnis they're doing it the right way:

>
Source: Stackexchange Time: Dec 16 '13 at 5:50 Asked: user54656 Answered: Tyler Maginnis, Rebornix

SE content is under the CC license, repeating with attribution is fine.

3:11 PM

sure I know this

3:41 PM

@ppr there, gave it the 5th vote

@terdon is there some clean up action on non/no-longer relevant comments going on?

@derobert s/Super User/Stack Overflow/ in your comment.

@Anthon No. I deleted the comment I left about its being documented and your answering comment since your answer renders both obsolete if that's what you're referring to.

@terdon Yeah, and the OP commented on that and slm removed that and my comment ;-)

@Anthon Yes, I hope you don't mind. They were only noise at that point since your answer had all the info needed.

@terdon no it is fine. I was just wondering if it happened as part of a larger clean up offensive

3:54 PM

@terdon The Super User in my comment refers to the suggestion in the close message to ask on Super User.

@derobert Ah, right, indeed.

I guess that's not fully clear... but my 5 minutes are up :-(

@Anthon Nah, we just tend to delete them whenever we stumble upon them or people flag them. If there's an offensive going on, I missed the meeting.

@terdon Two can play at that game :-P

@derobert Um, where? what?

:)

3:57 PM

@derobert I think so, do you look like Cpt Picard as well, that would explain Terdon's confusion

@derobert Ah, but I have super mod powers and can see the history, thus foiling your nefarious plan.

Oh, by the way, @derobert would you be willing to write an answer explaining that PSA about strings? It sounds like a useful Q&A to have on the site.

@terdon Chat comment history isn't a mod-only feature.

@derobert What? Really? So you can see the history too? Shit, they let anyone in these days...

@Anthon Well, maybe if Picard decided to ask the replicator for way too much food. Repeatedly.

And put on a wig...

@derobert Maybe a parallel universe?

4:01 PM

@terdon when I get super mod powers, I'm going to clean this place up ;)

@Anthon Could be. Or maybe one of Q's doings.

@terdon Sure, I guess I could do that.

/me puts it on his TODO list for Friday night

@derobert I was thinking of asking anyway, I glanced through that link but don't know enough about the libraries involved to grasp the danger.

Yeah, place 17 on the all time rep page and nobody left to overtake in the final stretch to 20K ( < 2K to go)

Yay! Go Anthon!

@terdon and after that I am going for a gold tag badge, so I can use the greasemonkey stuff I wrote for Stephane myself ;-)

4:11 PM

those gold badges are hard to come by

Indeed.

Especially since there isn't one for cows.

hi @Ramesh

Hello @slm

How are you?

@Anthon - been trying to get you to 20k

@Ramesh good, you?

am also good. Thanks for asking.

4:14 PM

@slm thx. WRT the gold badge it might be more easy on SO

@Anthon - agreed

you need a lot of Q potential to give you enough to provide A'ers within a given tag

@Anthon Cool! I hadn't seen that, nice script! Unfortunately, I only have a gold tag on SU and I don't spend much time there any more.

By the way, @Anthon you might be interested int this:

68

Q: Threaded comments

History June 6, 2012: Fixed an issue that can cause major problems with chat. December 17, 2013: Fix an incompatibility with the Winter Bash code. Screenshot Before: After: About Instead of showing comments in chronological order, this user script displays them in a threaded view, ...

script comments

re: @ Braiam Ok that makes more sense. The linearity of the comments here (and the required brevity) often make it difficult to follow threads.

@terdon I've heard Jeff Atwood even say during podcasts that the lack of threading in comments wasn't an oversight, that it was intentionally done so that they would be painful and ppl wouldn't use them more than they had to

He wanted comments to be a 2nd class citizen on the site

@terdon cool, thx

@slm And they are, but at least I can see them threaded :) Plus, not the author of the script, he's the dev in charge of comments anyway.

4:19 PM

@slm goal achieved I would say

But that is ok, it could change the site into a forum otherwise

@Anthon - that was Jeff's biggest fear, he didn't want SE to be too much like a forum

And given the tendecy of first posters to answer questions about ther post in comments instead of the Q itself I think that fear appropriate

yeah that's an annoying behavior/side effect w/ comments.

I'll often lift the comments up there and then tell them in a comment "look what I did" do that from now on 8-)

Is anyone going to take pity on this guy?

0

Q: Data deleted accidentally

I installed ubuntu 14.04 by replacing win 8.1 and then all my partions are gone.I thought it would replace the sytem files in C only but all my partions are deleted.So i want to know if there is any way to get those data back?

ubuntu

the code dumps in comments are the worst though

nope

too busy

4:25 PM

@slm Heh, yeah, same here.

@terdon Hope he did not run any update.

I believe he could still recover the windows partition.

You could try something as suggested here. — Ramesh 40 secs ago

@terdon Hmmm... I'm not sure what there is to do other than buy him a beer to wallow his sorrows in...

@derobert Tell him to stop using the drive, point him to data recovery software, explain what exactly happened etc.

4:46 PM

why is there tl;dr in some posts?

Is it because of this urban dictionary definition **Said whenever a nerd makes a post that is too long to bother reading. **

@Ramesh Yes, it means too long; didn't read and it's equivalent to writing: "Summary: foo"

That's funny :)

Not entirely the equivalent of adding 'Summary: foo'. tl;dr has a bunch of interesting and hard to explain connotations and ironic uses of said connotations...

@terdon I installed the script, and browsed to the comments on my answer at meta .... it forms a perfect inverse staircase (each comment is indented from the previous one) %-)

What can be the close reason for this?

4:51 PM

@Anthon Heh, yeah. Neat isn't it?

@Ramesh I just closed as unclear since it is.

@terdon Thanks.

unix.stackexchange.com/q/164850/#comment270660_164850

... LOL.

This is a good fit for superuser. Opinions?

@Ramesh Heh, refresh the page :)

Hmmm. Apparently 'an edit was made to this post' while you're editing doesn't just show you the new edit, it irretrievably and without warning discards the edit you're doing. Well then...

Whatever. It can stay in broken English.

4:57 PM

@derobert I think it depends on which edit was more extensive.

No, I hadn't submitted mine yet---I just got that message up top while editing. And mine was far more extensive.

@derobert I was editing to fix it up.

Yep.

@Ramesh Not at all your fault, unless you secretly work for Stack Exchange :-)

@terdon you receive the superfast mod award :)

@derobert And you clicked on the message. If you hadn't, it would compare the edits and keep the most extensive one (I think). I always copy the edit I've done before clicking on the message to avoid this.

4:59 PM

@terdon Yeah. I'd not run across that. And it's entirely unexpected considering if you e.g., attempt to navigate away it gives a big warning and confirmation about abandoning your edit

And oddly, when I navigated away, it gave me the warning. Even though the site had already discarded my work.

/me grumbles about installing Windows if he wanted software that works like that...

@derobert Oddly enough, the SE engines run on Windows! :P

Yep. Amazing how frequently the site is up.

5:18 PM

@terdon That might explains why some question never seem to get answered >:-)

6:05 PM

Wow, this guy's rise is really impressive (and deserved):

stackexchange.com/users/439723/michael-homer?tab=reputation

The slope is the most impressive I've ever seen.

yeah his answers are really crisp and sharp.

One of his first answers I read had a comment answering and correcting Stephane. I knew he was a keeper then :)

7:17 PM

@Ramesh - yeah he's sharp!

9:53 PM

Hey @derobert. How's that blog post coming? :-)

10:20 PM

in Tavern on the Meta on Meta Stack Exchange Chat, 8 hours ago, by rene

IE8 Compatablity mode in IE11 is awesome! It even crashes when the original IE8 would crash...

@Braiam - nice!

yeah, I know...

10:44 PM

@Braiam Who uses IE any more? That's so 20th century.

Proprietary Software is Passe.

10:55 PM

@FaheemMitha err... corporative clients...?

@Braiam You mean the corporate clients aren't all using Firefox? Or Chrome?

@FaheemMitha nope

@Braiam sucks for them

How many Allan's has the Xorg server developer list...? I'm counting 5 D:

@Braiam why are you on xorg dev?

11:00 PM

@FaheemMitha waiting for a bug fix for dri2/3 so my card actually work

@Braiam Oh, ok. What card is that?

@FaheemMitha radeon x1300

@Braiam Oh. I see

Do ATI cards have free drivers now?

older ones mostly

through radeon drivers aren't too behind on newers

@Braiam what are radeon drivers? Are they free?

11:05 PM

@FaheemMitha yes

they are like nouveau but for AMD/ATI cards

@Braiam Ok. So ATI has its own free drivers, and there is an independent free implementation?

yes, check their freedesktop page

Q: ASCII's 95 Characters...95 Movie Quotes

@Braiam Ok

Gilles

11:41 PM

17

In 2005 the American Film Institute produced AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes, a list of the best quotes in American cinema. Here they are listed exactly as they should be used in this challenge: 1. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." - Rhett Butler 2. "I'm gonna make him an offer he can'...

code-challenge restricted-source printable-ascii

I like that concept

11:52 PM

@Gilles I'd have expected this to grind to a halt fairly quickly, but apparently not. Apparently there are people out there with time and ingenuity to spare.

Gilles

@FaheemMitha yeah, especially as some pretty vital characters like quotes and parentheses went quickly