@allquixotic Agreed, loved your answer... But then again any tech in a data center should do the things you posted without really thinking/needing guidance
my answer is kind of a long, sprawling brain dump on 80% of what I know about network performance engineering
@HaydnWVN the way people can BS through interviews and resumes means that a lot of people are employed way above their head and don't know half of what they need in order to do their job effectively :/
also I just updated my answer about 38 seconds ago with even more info
The fundamentals are the same regardless of size... Isolate the problematic network node by working around it, then test other transfers/access across it
as I understand it, Skype's reliability (which is amazing, imho) is due largely to the fact that they employ a low chattiness protocol, AND they use a huge CDN so that they practically have a server sitting in your backyard, with lowish latency and packet loss
@HaydnWVN if he's a datacenter engineer, sysadmin or network engineer who doesn't know everything I said in my answer off the top of his head, and can't even be bothered to read it, he should be fired on the spot
it's remarkable: you can look at my activity levels on SU and see when the applications I test are down, or when I was off for holiday/vacation/disaster, or when I'm eating lunch, or slacking off, by the number of questions I answer
@allquixotic Nice, i've just had such a shit hectic couple of days I'm just catching up with what needs to be done before monday rather than any actual proper work lol
My managers away... Last week when he was here nothing went wrong... Nothing has for months.
this week i've had the mailserver die, our router reset itself, several server related slowdowns and to cap it all a fibre-optic failure on our main site today
I have multiple levels of boss, some of which aren't even technically my boss in the sense that they don't decide whether I can remain employed or not, they just hand me assignments and evaluate my performance
it goes: senior members of my testing team; the Sub-Team Lead; the Team Lead; then my work order manager; then my real boss (he can say "you're fired" unilaterally), then my boss's boss, then my boss's boss's boss
all of those people are aware of me individually and monitor my progress rather closely, but at decreasing levels of detail the higher up you go
then there's the ash fungus dieback disease (I work on a UK plant nursery) so i've had to 'free up' 100's of lines from orders as we're not allowed to sell any...
I've spent the week just re-gaining access to systems I need because I let my stupid password expire and had to go through all this bureaucracy to get it reinstated
and the system I'm testing has had plenty of problems of its own, unrelated to my account, which impede testing
@HaydnWVN I get that all the time when external environmental factors impede my progress, and I'm like, come on give me a break guys, not all of this is my fault
Hahaha, you have 'dependancies' totally out of your control?
i had to restart a switch earlier and went through the offices (3 offices here, 1 couldn't connect) telling everyone to get off the servers plugged into the switch
but we have such a large organization, and our processes are so compartmentalized, that everything I touch is completely separate from our production systems
we have physically separate validation systems and tons of people to support that
by the time i was ready to restart the switch, users from the offices had logged back in assuming i'd finished... So by the time i'd got them all off the server again one of the remotes had reconnected...
people are really cubby holed into the knowledge they have about their immediate job, here... so you get used to calling numbers and sending emails to people you've never met before requesting information or requesting they do something for you
I try to branch out as much as I can and understand stuff that isn't directly my responsibility so that at least I can speak at a level of discourse that makes me sound informed when dealing with data or systems outside of my little alley
but in general people have their one area and trying to speak to people from another department is like trying to speak English to someone who only knows Chinese
I've been to cross functional meetings and they're pretty hilarious
a manager or some guru is the only guy in the room who can translate the things being said, from one person to the other
department specialist 1 says "Bluh bluh bluh bluh", guru translates to department specialist 2 by saying "grah grah grah grah", then specialist 2 says "ohhhhhhh" and says "grah gruh blih bleh?" and guru translates back to specialist 1......
@HaydnWVN yeah, basically knowing just enough to scratch the surface, and apply an "algebra of terms" (often of acronyms you don't even know the expansion of) in order to get them to say something that provides novel information to you
which you then proceed to store in long term memory so that you can use that as further ammunition to peel back the onion and get even more info later
also very useful to store all emails back to the beginning of time in case you ever need somebody's help again, because there's no way you'll remember all their names
We have different departments here... Propagation (were they talk in cells, division and cuttings), Irrigation (where it's all fill rates, pump times and coverage), Technical (spraying, pest and disease, infection rates), Potting (pot sizes, compost types, fertilisers) etc etc etc
then we have the "back-end" people who know mainframe stuff
the number of people who can bridge that terminological divide can be counted on one hand; most of them have 30+ years of experience
I guess the org is looking for people to eventually be able to have the same level of guru knowledge to step up and take their place in case they decide they want to retire
so, being young, I'm more than glad to become the next protege for such an esteemed position ;)
yeah... I was talking to a guy the other day who said he's been eligible for full retirement for over 10 years but they gave him some kind of benefits incentive to stay on for additional years because replacing him would be next to impossible and the org might permanently lose some skills that only he has
and i think he modified his employment contract (at their request) to give the org 3 months notice if he wants to retire, so they have extra-extra time to find a replacement and have this old guy train him on everything
that's bad, but doesn't hold a candle to using a language invented when punch cards were the only way
of course we don't use punch cards; the hardware the systems run on is not terribly dissimilar to what you young whippersnappers use to run all those fancy SQL databases and ASP.NET application servers. but the operating system it runs is quite old and crusty
yeah, there's also a general cultural perception among our engineers and systems architects that having backends which are rooted in very old technology (at least on the software side) is good for reliability
in production that seems to be more or less true, so hat's off to them
Am currently running Windows 8 in Fusion off Mountain Lion, but Unity is disabled.
I cannot find a way to just download an ico and start a fresh vm. Do I have to order the disk?
Thanks
@allquixotic My usual desktop work envionment - 3x old DOS style screens as they're faster than the windows GUI versions lol - dl.dropbox.com/u/66653574/desktop.jpg
So i'm doing some Windows 8 update work at the place I work and I can say that Windows 8 seems to be much much worse then then when we went to XP->Windows 7 . Almost everybody is confused and hates it. Have you guys heard much about Windows 8 in the workplace?
@HaydnWVN ooh, in-house custom ERP systems based on pathetically old software is one of my favorite things in the whole world :D well, defining "favorite" as "pay me twice as much as anyone else in my field and I'll maybe consider working there for one or two years before I collapse on the floor in a ball, cry myself to sleep and sign my resignation in blood"
@allquixotic I'm working at this startup and we need to make sure that our devices work on Windows 8. So we decided to dog food, which tastes like dog food...
@allquixotic Lol tell me about it... Although this system (being totally bespoke) is quite amazing and stable... But some of the ways things work drives me mad
@EinsteinsGrandson In relation to what and which country?
in the US it's called "vocational school" or "tech school" for short, if it's a secondary school designed to teach a career skill, like being an electrician, or plumber, or car mechanic.
but I don't know about how they'd call it for a school dedicated to sports
@HaydnWVN Now, now. Be kind to professional massage therapists. They are a legitimate business which has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality. But I get the joke.
That said, I would be totally embarrassed to have one of those at my place of employment, as it does seem just a little bit taboo. Valve Software HAS ONE in the office. O_o
"Secondary Vocation School of Physical Education and Sports" would be a (long-winded, but accurate) title that you would put after the actual name of the school
You should just say what you were trained as and then list the school. For example: Massage Thearapy (School of the Americas) 2013. There is no need to qualify.
So, I worked at the teh google for a summer and they did indeed have a massues, but it was hard to find them and I knew of nobody in our division using them.
@EinsteinsGrandson Good; I can't express how relieved I am that we don't have a professional masseuse in Root Access.
I find those people to be extremely frightening, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, age, body type, skin color, or any other discriminating factor. I have a sensitivity to physical contact that exceeds even Denobulans.
That's okay. I have the next best situation, a (long) step down from that singularity-inducing state of having a SO (not a StackOverflow): the rare CWG resides in close proximity.
new CWG { taken=true, wearsRedDresses=true, blonde=true, young=true, friends=true };
So you're saying they had RAID5, one of the drives (not the parity drive) died, and now it's running off of one of the data drives and one of the parity drives?
I just set up raid 5 on linux using three HDDs as per a guide. It all went fine until when I rebooted I got the following text: https://i.sstatic.net/Zsfjk.jpg.
Does this mean one of my HDDs has failed? How do I check if any of them are failing? I tried using smartctl and didn't see any issue...
No. 3 drives configures as a single RAID5 volume. Format. Reboot. comes up as degraded with two drives. I asked for the config files. Those got posted and show spares is 1
I don't know. :( "Spares" could just be mdadm's wonky terminology for referring to the parity drive, or it could be an actual spare (which would make it RAID-6?).
Also... if a clean format is immediately producing a degraded array, it's probably hardware failure (lots of bad sectors on one of the disks).
The thing is that I have a PC with Windows XP with only 1.9 GB of RAM. How much of RAM does XP need? 400 MB? So, if I give my virtual Windwos XP in vmWare Player only 1.5 GB of RAM... will it be enough for Cognos TM1? Another thing is that the virtual system will also need some memory... so maybe I will be left with 1.2 or 1.3 GB for TM1... Will it work or there is no chance for me? ;o)
@EinsteinsGrandson The way virtual machines work (traditionally, at least) is that they need physical RAM to be available, not just swap file.. I don't think this is possible without either somehow fooling Cognos (which could very well cause it to run out of memory), or buying more RAM.
most VM solutions will refuse to start if you allocate too much memory, so since you don't even have enough physical memory to equal 2 GB in the first place, you can't leave your host with "0 MB".
even a bare metal hypervisor couldn't do that because it still needs memory for the host, just less
@Hennes Even dedicated GPUs can use system memory. For example, the GTT/GART. This is one of the reasons why programs which use the AMD or Nvidia graphics drivers (Direct3D or OpenGL) can't use anywhere near the full virtual address space.
If you were to see a memory segmentation layout (split out by object module) of the VAS of a program after initializing a 3d graphics driver, you'd see that several hundred megs of VAS are reserved for graphics operations. Nvidia's driver is worse.
I mean that the amount of physical memory the host OS needs depends on your system, which drivers you use, which programs you have installed, and so on.
@Hennes TIL. I thought RAID-5 dedicated one drive to XOR'ed parity and otherwise acted like RAID0 for the remaining drives. o.o
@EinsteinsGrandson Three hundred programs? Yeah, this is not going to work, unless you have absolutely none of those programs (or any of their services) resident in memory.
also, you need to call my credit union and order them to put a hold on my account, because I stared at the Surface for about 2 hours last night and almost could stomach liking it... it was almost as uncomfortable as it'd be to come out of the closet, considering my background in FOSS, to feel my emotions undercutting what my mind tells me to do
thing is, with my ThinkPad T530, taking it out and doing work feels like a real time commitment, like, I'm going to spend 3-4 hours doing this thing alone, and I need lots of space, and silence, and a power plug
I am actually dreadfully attracted to the concept of a device with a full keyboard like that which has a much simpler engagement/deployment strategy
i.e. whip it out, hook up the keyboard and go
I'm of the same mind as Jeff Atwood on this
he blogged about a similar thing recently
probably what I will hold out for is to hear proof that Surface Pro (or a very similar device) works reliably with Linux, so I can install it on there
or better yet, to wait for a company to push out Linux from the factory on a device like that. Google, probably
Chromebook looks too cheap and it has too short battery life... I actually want something expensive at a similar form factor... good build quality, great battery life
and for Hades' sake, why doesn't Motorola license their secret sauce for the super-dense batteries that they've put in their "Maxx" branded smartphones?! Imagine that on laptops, omg
it always boggles the mind how every upcoming Motorola smartphone OTA update is magically "leaked' a few weeks before it goes final
I think Motorola unofficially releases it to let hackers/rooters try it out and report any bugs before the soak test even so they have time to do another build
Question: What do you guys think about Total Commander's licensing? I know there are free updates for now from the very first version to the latest, but there is a paragraph, saying "until further notice". So basically there is not even a promise that I will get ANY next versions. :/
@Shiki Depends on how much you value the software versus the risk that they may decide to turn off the fountain of future updates
Also, even if they did require another purchase for future upgrades, I can practically guarantee you that they would heavily discount the price for the upgrade
even Adobe does that, and they're the greediest company in the entire world in terms of software licensing
you could ask them if "until further notice" means they are planning to make you buy upgrades, but more than likely they'll play coy with you and pretend like "Us?!?! Never!" and then a year later do exactly that
proprietary software vendors are like politicians -- they'll say anything to get a sale, and do nothing to make you happy when you are dissatisfied
Crap.... without even trying I inadvertently answered enough windows-8 questions to pass Level 1. Blasphemy! I intentionally didn't want to support this travesty until they have an "Ubuntu 13.04 Challenge" or a "Apple OS X Mountain Lion Challenge", but now I feel like a collaborator. :/
Can I set my shipping address to one of your addresses? Who wants a free SU teeshirt?
Avoid doing that... unless you go with Optimus. Nvidia does not "run Linux properly"
Or did you miss Linus T.'s rude gesture during one his lectures...?
The nvidia proprietary drivers have pathetically high latency for 2D and composited desktops. It's an absolute eyesore to use the nvidia binaries when web browsing or writing documents.
Using desktop GPUs (NVidia), I had an A+ experience with Linux desktop. Both 3D and 2D. Not even a single crash, and it installed like a charm. I loved that thing. :)
Why do I think Optimus is the best? Because, with Bumblebee, you can run your composited desktop and 2D applications on the low-latency, silken-smooth Intel graphics, and for OpenGL / CUDA games, you can fire up the Nvidia binary driver.
Want a low-power, open-source, low-latency and stable 2D and composited desktop experience? Covered -- use Intel IGP. Want OpenGL 4.2 with the latest games and CUDA and OpenCL? Covered -- wrap your command in optirun.
HD4000 graphics is built into the CPU on Ivy Bridge CPUs.... I can't imagine how that would die unless you buy laptops with inadequate cooling solutions that cause it to overheat
@Shiki o_O Sure, that happens sometimes still with the open source graphics drivers (on any hardware), but the basic composited desktop experience is perfect... For your intensive 3D applications you just wrap the command to launch it in optirun, and it runs on the Nvidia GPU with the proprietary driver. :P
It's just the very "advanced" 3D effects that trip up the open source driver, but since you run the intensive 3d apps on the Nvidia GPU with proprietary driver, you don't hit that path.
Am currently running Windows 8 in Fusion off Mountain Lion, but Unity is disabled.
I cannot find a way to just download an ico and start a fresh vm. Do I have to order the disk?
Thanks
I just set up raid 5 on linux using three HDDs as per a guide. It all went fine until when I rebooted I got the following text: https://i.sstatic.net/Zsfjk.jpg.
Does this mean one of my HDDs has failed? How do I check if any of them are failing? I tried using smartctl and didn't see any issue...
