For anyone in here earlier, I think my struggles with the PA Department of Transportation and their toll transponders are coming to an end. Though, I will continue to receive toll violation notices for as much as a month after this.
Basically, I've had a dead transponder for a month and have thousands of dollars in fines (that will all be dismissed) that are percolating through their system
@84104 We're just an under-resourced non-profit IT dept. Our non-salary annual budget is about $30k, but everything except our servers is 2nd-hand or paid from other department's budgets.
While on the phone with the customer service person I was informed that my sheet came out blank on their end. I assured them that if a fax machine was any kind of important technology I would know which way to orient the paper. Since it is unimportant technology, they were going to have to wait another minute while I sent it again.
@AdrianK I feel your pain. I donate some time to a charity and I had to fight tooth and nail to spend $6,000 on a new server for them (second hand of course) even though their network was going down at least 3 times a week and they were missing a lot of emails
I feel the need to scream. A senior manager just filed a ticket asking us to rescind a staff termination request for someone they requested be removed by COB last Friday.
@Alnitak Our first blades was a Dell 1855 chassis from eBay. Ahhhh the fun of finding it had 6 15-amp power supplies and we had no 15-amp outlets. It cost us more in electrician fees that it did for the entire chassis
I had a load of BL25p Opteron blades but they all started failing (bad VRMs). Getting the second hand BL20p blades was a great way to get the system working again at negligible cost.
@AdrianK Man I get that every day. We made accounts billing so efficient that admin staff submit invoices, and then accounts send the invoices out to the clients, and then two or thee days after the clinet has paid the invoice they inform accounts they've made a mistake - because their old billing process had at least a 2-week delay while invoices were processed by hand
@ScottPack I wish it were that simple. EVERYTHING goes through out in-house agency management web-app, which means a copy goes to HR and a copy goes to us and is processed in parallel.
@voretaq7 I'm pretty sure I made you a hat pic the other day, no effort required on your behalf except to log into gravatar.com, forget your password, do a password reset, and THEn change it
@ScottPack Uh, yeah. Agency has grown 3x since that was put in place and it's become entrenched. But, I might be able to get it fixed if I can get terminations, new staff setups, and password changes completely automated.
@voretaq7 bahaha my wife went to one of those shows, she said watching oily short italian men grind on her was gross... so how do you know about the chippendales?
@TomOConnor I think the one thing that SOPA has going for it is its name. "If you're against the "Stop Online Piracy Act", you support online piracy!" and of course, everyone who has ever downloaded anything dodgey from the internet deserves to rot in prison for eternity
@MarkHenderson I think the only thing Congress has going for it is their ability to name acts something diametrically opposed to their actual effect, and still get paid.
@voretaq7 I should become a politician. I have no idea how much they earn in the US but even a low-level back-bencher shadow minister in Australia gets a minimum paycheque of $253,000/year
And I don't think they really have to do much work
And they get a car + driver
The downside is you have to live in a place called Canberra, which is a big minus
would someone please up tick (my) comment #5 on this answer serverfault.com/a/342287/216 so it gets included in the default list of comments? The other two upvoted comments don't make so much sense without it.
@Alnitak On that question, the crazy thing about Windows DNS is that it DOES allow records with underscores, but an underscore is not part of the DNS spec and it breaks virtually every browser
I was wondering if it is a good idea to replace a hard drive in a (fairly) system-critical database server after a certain number of years of use, before it dies. For example, I was thinking of replacing a hard drive after 3 years of use. Since I have many hard drives across servers, I could stag...
@MarkHenderson I think they're about equal - There are some cases (rare ones) where you may have server drives that aren't in RAID and the rebuild issue is less important.
@voretaq7 I've just been emailed about SMART errors in one of our servers yesterday and replaced it quick smart, but I'm shcoked again at the rebuild time, even for RAID1
I think infant mortality is the real issue myself - I've had machines where literally every disk failed within the first year of operation, but once they spin for a year they tend to be fine for 5-to-N years after that...
So for me, the issue of rebuild time is wayy more important, especially if you have a hot spare, then there's nothing to be gained by replacing the disks before they fail
not just HDDs - those blade servers I mentioned earlier - they were to replace a batch of 5 year old (out of maintenance) blades that all failed with the same voltage regulator fault after a power cycling. Stressing old components just isn't good for them.
@MarkHenderson mmmmmaybe -- depends on if you can get a good backup before starting the rebuild. If you have a good backup system the risk is mitigated anyway though.
@voretaq7 True. Biggest frustration I have with arrays lately is that I've been forced to buy disks from other manufacturers (I'll get whatever I can with the shortage), but it just happens to be 2-3kb smaller than the other drives in the array, which makes them worse than useless
At $job[-1] the FreeBSD servers weren't in the normal backup rotation (ARCSERVE SUCKS!), so if we had to do a RAID rebuild we would run a manual tar of the important shit first. Saved us from at least 2 rebuild-induced calamaties.
@voretaq7 All future arrays (as of about two-three months ago) are now only generated to 95% of the disk capacity, to leave space for dispairty in different disk brands
@voretaq7 Hah wood, that'd be nice. I have melamine (pastic coated MDF, and MDF isn't really wood, its sawdust and glue) and plastics
@voretaq7 We've got maybe 50 2.5" drives in production now, some in blades, some in normal rack chassis, some SAS, some SATA, no major issues to report
After all, laptops have had 2.5" drives for decades
@voretaq7 My god, I've just surveyed the office, we don't have ANYTHING real wood. Melamine desks, plaster walls, glass conference table, stainless steel chairs, plastic everything else. Nobody even has any wooden trinkets on their desks. There's pewter buddahs and some indian god, fake christmas trees and tinsel... but no wood. Anywhere.
Ahah I found a photo frame that's made of wood (well, painted pine to look like oak) but I guess that counts
We are working on a way to perform automatic updates for our RHEL/RHEL-based servers.
Initial idea: Using Puppet, we disable the default repositories and point to our own. Then, we use ensure => latest for the packages we want to automatically update.
Problem: We are seeing that some service...
@voretaq7 According to some people it is :P I make a habit of downvoting and shaming the people who tell users to switch to Linux for no reason than they're using Windows
seriously - his answer is OK except for the preaching. Is he also a vegan? Is he going to say I can't have my chicken burrito with sour cream and cheese (a/o/s)?
We are working on a way to perform automatic updates for our RHEL/RHEL-based servers.
Initial idea: Using Puppet, we disable the default repositories and point to our own. Then, we use ensure => latest for the packages we want to automatically update.
Problem: We are seeing that some service...
