That's a first. Someone contacted our Helpdesk looking for "one of your sysadmins, serverfault blog title of sysadmin1138", about a script fragment I posted a while back.
@Farseeker I know how it goes. You tend to over quote because being overbudget is taboo, but then if you're always too high and come in way underbudget all the time, people know your game.
I find that quoting prices is a great way to gauge my knowledge in something. Even if I think I know a lot about a topic, if I have trouble making accurate quotes (within reason), then it shows me that I'm not as knowledgeable in that topic as I think I am. At least, that's my theory.
FYI, anonymous / low rep user edit suggestions are now enabled ; if you see edit (1) on a question it is a suggested edit. Diamond mods can view queued pending edits via a topbar count notification which leads to a tab on /review .
I'm following discussions about the IPv4->IPv6 transition, and IPv6 doesn't seem to like NAT at all.
I've always thought that NAT was helpful in v4 for some security, I know it doesn't really hide the computers but it makes them harder to get to, certainly it makes it easy to limit access to por...
I installed 4GB of RAM on my Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (it used to have only 2GB).
But it says only 3GB usable, and I still often get a "Not enough memory" problem on Photoshop.
Is there any way to make it utilise the full 4GB?
it's funny, we get pre-release kit all the time and some of it is rock solid from day one but other times there'll be a line that's just awfully unreliable right up to weeks before launch - wish I understood (I'm I come from a chip-design background)
oh sorry, forgot, I did read your stuff and I'm in the same boat really, work on assumptions and past experience but we too say that we get around 0.625 to 0.7 depending on model and disk load out (of course it's awful on 2020's) but no I don't have the exact maths involved - that said we have netapp people around all the time - I'll ask if they have a calculator or something and let you have it if they do ok
@Chopper3 You would think that chips would want to be relatively stable when getting close to launch, but then I know very little about ship design and how easy it is to make changes
me neither, my quallies in that area were from the 80's and things are SO different these days - guess it's all about how far they're pushing the fabrication processes - Intel in particular are known for super stable very early dev desktop chips but that their mobile chips struggle with TDP issues right up to the wire - for xeons's it seems to be family related - the 55's were like this but the 56's were great
the basics are easy but there's some damn clever people been working in that area for decades since I truly understood what's going on and although I keep up it's sufficiently complex to lose me quite easily when put in front of these guys (I do PR work for Intel so have to do this every so often)
hm.. I've been assign to fix our meeting rooms to a better standard.. what kind of speakers should I get for this? I'm thinking like.. logitech-something with wall mounts could suffice, but then again.. BOSE or similar would give great audio "punch"
BOSE kit gives me a headache - too 'bright' and 'impressive' - that said I'm going deaf in my old age due to too many gigs as a kid
seriously though, if you need speakers why not do it as a kind of 'themed' stage thing like a small club/venue - it's be fun/exciting and your seniors would be pleased to be up there acting like rock stars - not too expensive either
I've recently been "forced" to perform some sysadmin work, while this isn't something that I absolutely love doing I've been reading, experimenting and learning a lot.
There is one fundamental aspect of server configuration that I've not been able to grasp - hostnames.
In Ubuntu for instance, o...
=( I feel bad for people in this position; whoever did that to him obviously, drastically underestimates the prerequisite level of knowledge required of a system admin.
well the moat can be achieved relatively easily with a spade and some effort, the sharks are a bit more difficult. You could start with Pike, or Koi or something
That reminds me, I was talking to an old friend last night, about an interview I had at a local school system a number of years ago. I did the phone interview where they asked about networking equipment and WANs, Windows Networking, etc. Got to the in-person and they asked all about Novell and Macintosh, which I know relatively little about.
@Sam Excellent idea. I'm patenting it right now. ;-)
we have a set list of questions we ask candidates... all the same ones as part of our equality mandate... So I ask everyone questions about windows, Unix, Mac OS. I don't mind if the Unix expert doesn't know Windows (though as a mixed shop which is predominantly Windows they won't be doing themselves any favours) but if the self proclaimed Mac expert can't explain Netboot to me then they better have a good reason for that
@ChrisS I'll look forwarding to seeing "A method for deploying genetically altered Koi Karp with laser based offensive devices in a spherical aquatic environment " at the patent office
they'd not butlers, they're EVIL toxin-resistant laser-equipped supervillians - the monocle (an egyptian invention iirc) would simply be an affectation
I figured a monocle would just be a teenage invention that came around shortly after glasses, judging from how well they take care of their cellphones.
@Sam-genetically engineer crystal based teeth, if the laser is their tongue.
@BartSilverstrim what freaks me out is then I look on google for an answer to a problem and not only get immediately linked to SF but when you look and find that your own answer was accepted - now that's spooky and possibly prescient of a failing mind
@Chopper3 happend to me a few times and I was like: strange - this guy has exactly the same problem as I before realizing that was one of my questions :P
@BartSilverstrim Nah, very old thing, older than glasses - oh and did I tell you I had MS in the other day for a meeting and they all had Mobile Windows 7 phones they were showing off - I told them I was genuinely impressed by how good it is, they were happy, then I told them they were two years too late, suddenly less happy
@ChrisS K/G will be awake in an hour or so, they'll know
@ChrisS for a user who wants to customise their UI I think it's actually a better interface than the iphone - and I frickin love iphones, they're just on rails for joe-public which is fine - but I was really impressed with WP7, not one line of original WM6 code you know, wish they took that approach with any single other product they have :(
@packs Well my first rep was from 2009.11.18, my profile says I've been around for 12 months, but didn't cross 200 rep until 2010.02.13. Could be what you said too... I'm not that worried about it, just curious.
@ChrisS Ah, so really it's been about 10 days. I'm not sure. I know the jobs that calculate some badges run pretty infrequently, but 10+ days seems a bit much.
@RobertMoir I do get frustrated with iphone's lack of customisation though, I know you can hack them to do stuff but I'd love to be able to press the button and see the first line of new texts, emails, missed call numbers, rss stuff, calender stuff - all in one view, WM5/6 could do that
@ChrisS yeah, there's a lot of profit in a product or service that is "pretty good" for >80% people - but for me I want the ease of use/update/media&app-buying etc but would also like to change a few things, not fonts or icons but just the 'first pickup' display
Linuxheads that customize things (or users that "accidentally" adjust things..."Where'd your start button go?!") can drive you nuts when trying to fix things.
@Chopper3 I've got a WM6 phone now, and love that it reminds me of that stuff when I hit the home page. I'm waiting for the HTC Evo Shift to come down in price a bit though, then jumping boat on MS Phone.
If you can work an iPod/iPhone, you can probably work someone else's with minimal hassle. If someone can customize it up the wazoo, you have to take ten minutes finding a simple function because they moved it or thought they knew better how to do it.
I've got a dev guy who's just a total linux nut (contributes to the kernel iirc) and when I got him a new workstation he said it'd genuinely take him 3 days to rebuild it how he wants - wow
@ChrisS It's EXACTLY that stuff that I miss, there's a iphone hack to do it but then you're into unsupported, potentially-unstable territory that deals badly with minor updates etc - we're not talking complex code here
@pfo this guy has three 28 inch monitors and runs multiple KVM VMs on his work machine ffs - I don't care really, he does a good job but when I lose him for half a week just because he's got a new box it does grate
Yep.. one reason I have macs at home... I don't want to feel like I'm at work when all I'm trying to do is watch a damn movie on the TV in my front room
me too - I don't have to maintain my hammer, drill, screwdriver - most of the time I just want another non-maintenance tool that just happens to browse/email/office etc.
My mother was getting a new computer and I said "If you don't get a Mac, I'm not helping you with your computer stuff anymore." She got an older MacBook.
for work I use either my MBP or a client-supplied lenovo W7 box that they look after completely - it's totally 'locked' - just outlook, office, ie8 - nothing else - not my problem, quite nice really
@RobertMoir the flip-side of that is that I used W2K8 with the desktop experience stuff for ages before W7 came out - loved it
but we've been using it for jobs like DNS, Domain Controller, etc. where you don't need the GUI... especially on VMs where its nice to save those guest resources. And every now and again you can hear cursing when certain colleagues log onto a windows server core machine to have a little "play" and gets confused
We still have a server around here with MS Office, Google Earth, Shockwave, etc, on it because I'm too afraid to touch it, it might stop working.. It's on my list of servers to decommission after the busy season.
Sony will blather on about how it improves lifestyles and that we should be grateful to hand over two weeks' wages for the privilege of merely touching one (probably)
a mate of mine works at a multi-platform games dev place, apparently the Kinect dev kit had a thing where if someone knelt in front of you your avatar would put it's hand behind it's head and lean back a bit :)
@RobertMoir I've switched PS to my default shell on a number of Core servers. PS is so much nicer than CMD when it's all you've got (excluding remote management).
it encourages scripting though, when we're configuring multiple boxes we get it right on one and script that onto the others. Scripting reduces the chance of human errors I think
but I do think its great for those simple basic roles
If you're installing, say 4 DCs, you can install one with the full version of windows and 3 core and use the gui tools to manage the others once the basic config and role install is done
@RobertMoir Absolutely. I certainly hope more and more "server" apps support running on Core, without any GUI, using remote management. Keeps things nice and clean.
if you use RBLs then you have to accept a small amount of false alarms
these days we outsource all our email gateway stuff to mimecast, but I spent some time trying to find the right blend when we did it in-house
now we have users complaining something awful to our helldesk if they get one spam a week. Whether thats a glowing testament to how good mimecast normally is, or an example of how naive users are and I should turn off the filtering for one week to show them what its really like.
@RobertMoir: I show my users the quarantine mailbox to remind them how bad it could be. There's never a perfect spot, and I always err on the side of preventing false positives.
I had all "spam" going to a quarantine mailbox, and while it was catching nearly ALL spam, it was getting a ton of legit stuff as well, more than I think it should have.
I've only got 4 layers to my setup. DROP list at the firewall, Zen, SPF; if it makes it through those it's delivered; but, goes through SA and if it's flagged there it'll get dumped in Inbox/Spam. I get about 1 per week currently (others are slightly more or less), and very few false positives (all people who have shitty server configurations one way or another).
Yeah, it's my main problem with IMF, too. It's too much of a blackbox. There must be a ton of spamassassin-type rules in there, but you've never any idea which one called it out. I think it puts too much weight on RFC misdemeanours, which is probabaly why the FP rate varies so much from site to site.
@Chopper3 Good answer, if he's not going to utilize at least one full server, there's no point in hosting in house (unless there's some other specific requirement)
Hi,
I saw iomega storcenter with 12 HDDs with very favorable price. Experts, what do you think about that :) Vmware certified! :) This is not a question, but I would be glad if you provide some pros/cons. Thanks!
So, i added sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org as an IP BL provider, started both the IP Block list and provider list features in EMC, but when i send an email to the test account, it comes back and says "Uh-oh, your SBL block is not working!"
I've had more problems with people not understanding SPF than the DNSBLs. They setup a record then test it against their server which is set for a soft test (or similar) and think it working. My servers are set to hard test anything, so they'll bounce you if your SPF record isn't correct.
You can do this using the Packet Filter Plugin, which is available by default in the Plugins section of the OpenFire admin. Using this plugin you can block messages between users of the Staff group from chatting with or seeing each other.
I'd post a screen shot and detailed instructions, but it ...
Part of the problem was I was late to answer, the Openfire site was down when I first tried to answer!
But the OP did log in before the bounty expired, so he got a reminder that his bounty was expiring and decided not to award it to me, even though my answer was correct. Oh well :-)
I have needed to duplicate a FastCGI + suPHP, and I have re-created the setup but unlike the CentOS one my error_log files are all in /log/apache/ instead of the directories where the script triggered the error. How do I configure PHP to write all error_logs to ~/error_log?
I just realized I have 8 active DHCP leases ... how did I get to this point, one is static too. So not including the network equipment I have 9 devices in my apartment :-P
I'd like to go IPv6 only, but the ProCurve I have doesn't support it and I haven't had enough time to mess with DNS64 and NAT64 to feel comfortable doing it.
Can anyone help me understand generally what the difference/relationship is between PCI-DSS, PA-DSS and PCI Compliance? We're certified PCI compliant but I'm being asked by a vendor if we're PA-DSS compliant, and I want to make sure I understand before I say yes.
@Josh The standards talk about their own relationships (PA-DSS deals with the payment application, PCI-DSS deals with the environment that application is plugged in to)
@Jacob Their DOCSIS network doesn't support IPv6, but they have 6to4 relays with the Anycast IP setup correctly. So their customers can use 6to4 and they will provide all the info you need to get it running (you're still responsible for knowing what to do with the info, how to get it into your router...)
see if page 9 pf the PCI-DSS 2.0 requirements & assessment procedures doc makes sense (I don't have the pages memorized, I just happen to have it on my desk because we're doing our annual review-of-paperwork :-P)
@Jacob The key is that you have to use the ethernet port on the ONT -- If you have a full MOCA setup I don't think their little cablemodem/router thingies are v6 capable
@Josh :) I'm lucky in that it's only the PCI-DSS that really applies to us (we use it as a guide to ensure that we're in the ballpark on HIPAA compliance)
@voretaq7 I've got a brand new Surfboard and it support IPv6, but it's the first cable modem I've seen that does. I know the ones that you can rent/lease from Comcast do not support it.
@voretaq7 We use payment gateways like Authorize.Net, QuickBooks, PayPal, etc. But the card numbers do get typed into our app, which passes them via SOAP or whatever
I know I sounds like a broken record, but I can't say it enough times. I've got Alix SBCs for wireless routers and it's so nice running a real OS that I can configure and customize to my heart's content.
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Ah, @voretaq7, it looks like we don't have to worry about PA-DSS as our application is entirely SaaS, and according to this document PA-DSS does NOT apply to payment applications offered only as a service
@Josh hmm... interesting. I wonder if that's talking about from the user/client's perspective or the provider's perspective? (seems like a gaping hole if providers don't have to be PA-DSS compliant, but I'd have to actually read the sheet to speak with real authority :)
Chris I've not heard this record before - so you stick in a bit of CF, it's got a NIC already, is the .11x onboard or is there a custom card for that? what about case? what OS do you use?
I've got them all over now, parents, parents-in-law, sisters... Just made a single image for a CF, so it takes minutes to get another one up and running. I've gone the extra step of doing unified address space, vpn, ddns, the whole enchilada. Pop an Engenius EMP-8602 radio in there and you'd have the same setup as me (if you're using FreeBSD anyway).
@Chopper3 Standard CF slot, CF is a modified ATA interface anyway, so it gets picked up as a HD. Two mini-pci slots for radios. My current image runs FreeBSD 8.1, but you can run just about any Linux, or you if hate yourself they even run Windows.
Cases are available, depends on what you're using it for. Small plastic ones; I've got aluminum "indoor" cases; they also make full weatherproof outdoor cases with up to 4 antenna connection and 2 weathertight GbE connections.
@voretaq7: Quote: PA-DSS does NOT apply to payment applications offered by application or service providers only as a service (unless such applications are also sold, licensed, or distributed to third parties) because: 1) The application is a service offered to customers (typically merchants) and the customers do not have the ability to manage, install, or control the application or its environment; 2) The application is covered by the application or service provider’s own PCI DSS review (this coverage should be confirmed by the
> 1) The application is a service offered to customers (typically merchants) and the customers do not have the ability to manage, install, or control the application or its environment;
The Alix boards are the newer generation of the WRAP boards (still go by that name in some circles). They're similar to the Soekris boards, but with more focus on being DIY-SOHO equipment.
@Chopper3 Well it is kind of the exact opposite of your Apple gear. Definitely not for people who just want to plug it in and work. But I love hacking stuff together, and this makes it too easy to create a crazy robust solution for my SOHO needs. =)
@SpacemanSpiff Hah! Our Zen never got to the level of pushing out GPO. At the time there was insufficient upper-management support for doing stuff like that.
I installed 4GB of RAM on my Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (it used to have only 2GB).
But it says only 3GB usable, and I still often get a "Not enough memory" problem on Photoshop.
Is there any way to make it utilise the full 4GB?
I've recently been "forced" to perform some sysadmin work, while this isn't something that I absolutely love doing I've been reading, experimenting and learning a lot.
There is one fundamental aspect of server configuration that I've not been able to grasp - hostnames.
In Ubuntu for instance, o...
Hi,
I saw iomega storcenter with 12 HDDs with very favorable price. Experts, what do you think about that :) Vmware certified! :) This is not a question, but I would be glad if you provide some pros/cons. Thanks!
I have needed to duplicate a FastCGI + suPHP, and I have re-created the setup but unlike the CentOS one my error_log files are all in /log/apache/ instead of the directories where the script triggered the error. How do I configure PHP to write all error_logs to ~/error_log?
