@voretaq7 cunning - didn't know you could do that. Will have a play.

@AdrianK I don't consider the latter a virtue myself. On our field units I tolerate it as a necessary evil (because I'm not rolling my own FreeBSD desktops)

@WesleyDavid buy him this;

@voretaq7 I don't really care either way. MS irritates me just as much as anything else does.

@growse could do what, remove the compiler?

Anyone ever done PXE booting of VMware images

@voretaq7 sorry, ages ago, turn notifiers off between certain times

VS5 does that already

the auto deploy is basically pxe for esxi

Is that for booting the installation?

Can some folks go to their profile page and then click on their flag weight? I'm getting a big ol' "Oops! Something Bad Happened!" Is it just me?

it works too, with host profiles anyway, beats trying to boot esxi from san anyway

@growse yeah, it's just pxe booting/installing plus host profile application

@WesleyDavid broken!

BROKENNNNNNNN! flails on keyboard like a user

@WesleyDavid it is broke

@WesleyDavid x3

@voretaq7 Nagios probably has something similar, but it'll be buried somewhere

@Chopper3 ah, I'm not licensed for host profiles

@WesleyDavid I genuinely don't know how to do that, getting used to this 'user' business - where is it?

only got Std

@growse bawws

@growse "Oh it's easy you just pipe the alert through a shell script that doesn't emit it if it's between certain hours" -- Nagios style solution right there.

@growse heard that about you ;)

@voretaq7 genius

@Chopper3 :(

@Chopper3 go to your profile serverfault.com/users/1435/chopper3 Click on number that is right of 'flag weight'

Right, Zordy beat me.

I swear if someone stars that I'mma punch a kitten.

/me punches self

@WesleyDavid go on. punch yourself.

@Zoredache I don't see those words though

:-)

someone star the kitten-punch line so it floats.

@Chopper3, are you logged into the site? It only shows if you are authenticated.

yep, course

Star wars.

there we go :)

@Chopper3 Dunno, then, maybe your account is still not completely normal.

the star-wall sorting logic is kinda.... strange.

Or you have no flag weight, have you flagged anything?

@Zoredache @Chopper3 Grab the website by the throat and shake it until the flags fall out!

@voretaq7 Yep. But the one thing that MS absolutely rocks is the GUI. And Linux just isn't quite there for non-technical people.

I mean... er... :-)

yep, did the other day

@AdrianK I wish MS would just write a gui for a real operating system and be done with it.

lol

@AdrianK Have you SEEN Vista or Windows 8 yet???

I think the reason MS is very good at GUIs is.. that is basically what they do

none of that showing sorry

Windows 8 has a giant cellphone interface . Vista... was just slow

@Chopper3 Well, MS decided with PowerShell they can get out of the GUI business now :)

@Chopper3 Yeah, you're borked.

@Chopper3 No. We just now have a couple 7 units in.

guess so

(and I will give them credit for PoweShell. They're... oh... 40 years late to the party, but they have a usable CLI/Scripting shell now)

@AdrianK Windows 8 is making me concerned, honestly. Not looking forward to client deployments of that if it stays on its current track. I'm sure its guts are nice, but the paint job blows.

@WesleyDavid WE FIX! Replace with Unity!

Oh you want lock users out of Windows Explorer? YOU NO CAN HAS LOCKOUt!

@voretaq7 Which is why I'm worried about Ubuntu.

is rather hoping they have a proper non halfbaked classic desktop option

@JourneymanGeek . . . OS X?

@voretaq7 Yusss. PowerShell is a welcome change. I'm looking forward to more and more Windows Core deployments to the point where there will never be a Windows server with a GUI installed on my watch.

re: W8, the change of APIs has absolutely KILLED Windows as a custom platform for most if not all corporates - they've literally thrown away any uniqueness

@AdrianK: ubuntu has a tendancy for slightly halfbaked choices - say pulseaudio

Their desktop stuff is fully cooked. Their VFS layer? For fun one day dd /dev/zero into a file and watch the system lock up

@voretaq7: ugh. no.

Hates OS X

@JourneymanGeek c'mon, who needs I/O concurrency? Just because EVERY desktop ships with like 128 CORES now...

I can almost understand how other people use it, but it totally does not jive with my workflow

(are you listening Apple? Can you fix this? It's been since freakin' 10.0.0!!!)

@voretaq7: 64 cores should be enough for anyone ;p

Here's a question: Would anyone use a service that forwarded nagios / cacti data to a central (cloud-based Wooo!!) service that consolidated everything together?

@JourneymanGeek To run Windows Vista? :)

@JourneymanGeek If 12.04LTS sucks, we're going to have some hard choices to make about what to deploy to our LTSP folks.

Useful maybe if actual nagios/cacti installations are behind corp firewalls and inaccessible from internettings

@voretaq7: windows vista wouldn't run well on anything ;p

@AdrianK I had to move off 10.04 LTS because our new hardware is too new for it

@AdrianK: I might suggest running one of the alternate desktops honestly

@voretaq7 I dislike Ubuntu for Servers, I like RHEL...

@growse there are a bunch of services like that floating around in cloudspace actually. Me personally I like keeping my monitoring data totally in-house/

@voretaq7 Uh, we're still on 9.10 here. We didn't like the social media integration as this is a business not a home PC.

xfce or lxde (both of which are 'official' forkish things) would make more sense than unity or even kde

@Jacob I'm taking about desktop hardware. I don't run Linux on servers.

and you don't get most of the bizzare crud you get on the big two desktops

@voretaq7 maybe one of those things that only I'd find useful :(

I really do not consider any Linux distribution to be "production quality" for servers. RHEL is the closest, and I don't like that they force you to use their tools...

@JourneymanGeek That mean's I have to spend 3 months testing them out though and another 6 ironing out all the growing pains as I move up to larger and larger deployments. not happy about that bit.

I know a bunch of people deploying SLES in anger

@growse lots of people do it - they have wonderful reporting tools

although they're not using them for trading systems, admittedly

they're still using VMS for that

@AdrianK: considering you'd have to do it anyway switching OSes...

but for me the InterMapper tools are good enough (and getting better every year), and I'm really big on keeping all my data where I can get at it.

And I think some NT4.0

o0

oldschool

@growse there are 2-3 places I know of that have various BSD flavors with custom kernel hackery too,

@JourneymanGeek Nobody else here knows it, which makes it a tough sell to the boss.

@voretaq7 mere mention of the word 'BSD' will get you shouted at where I work

@AdrianK: Well, beats unity i suppose.

@growse because?

granted, i never ran gnome cause it felt too maclike (and i mean OS 9/8) for my liking, and they haven't futzed around too much with kde... so i wasn't very affected by the move to unity

@JourneymanGeek Maybe. Wasn't impressed by what I've seen so far. The GUI is barely usable for me.

meows at @WesleyDavid

@voretaq7 crude answer, it's not Windows. Used to be that saying "linux" would have lawyers turning up at your desk

@TomOConnor /me does Big-Cat chuff

@AdrianK: Everyone needs to stop trying to make damned desktops like cellphones. ;p

@JourneymanGeek I use OpenBox or XFCE usually :P

@growse ahh, so you work at one of those companies I'd sooner go to McD's and flip burgers before tolerating.

If we whine enough, can we get /me to work in here? Effing heck, it works in Skype, people.

@voretaq7 the trick is to carve out your own niche

and then own it

@WesleyDavid And if it works in skype, then it NEEDS to be everywhere ;)

@SimonSheehan QFT

QFT?

@WesleyDavid Yeah.. I'd like /me triggers in here.

@JourneymanGeek True. We even talked about moving to Win7 awhile back. Decided that it wouldn't be worth the hassle of simply moving bottlenecks and problems off the desktop and into the infrastructure.

Who do we need to bitch at?

There's a guy I know who's trying to convince the powers that be that we need to through out TPM for package and configuration management and move to puppet instead

@TomOConnor I bet if we ask @RebeccaChernoff she could hook us up.

@TomOConnor Jeff/Joel, who are adamant that this isn't IRC :)

@SimonSheehan: at one point i was running openbox + cairodock. I'm mentioning those two cause they're official varients, and vaguely like windows XP (LXDE) and gnome (xfce)

@growse Tivoli?

OH NOES I SAID HER NAME AGAIN!!!

Given Tivoli has been embedded within our ops culture for about as long as Tivoli has existed, that's a tall order

They're Adam Ant?

@JourneymanGeek I always tried to install Cairodock and it failed :P

I've been using astrixes for psudo /me ing

@SimonSheehan: you arn't using the repos are you?

@Zoredache, the walking Meta dictionary.

@growse I used to work for Tivoli's Performance Management group.

@Zoredache Where does your nickname come from? What is a Zored, and why does it ache?

@JourneymanGeek No, my PC just exploded usually due to its lack of memory :P

@TomOConnor yes. But only on weekends.

back in the day

o0

Hook you up with what?

@SimonSheehan: i used it with 256 mb of memory, no swap ;p

@WesleyDavid I just added a bounty for it too, maybe that will make it happen.

@RebeccaChernoff I think I love you for your comment on this post: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/62987/134121

@JourneymanGeek 512MB RAM, something was up with the video card maybe? I don't know, that was years ago :P

I dislike these dock clones usually.

@AdrianK I'm not a Tivoli guy. I'm not even an ops guy. I just know it's everywhere

I've mentioned lobotomy before, right? pentium M system, basically had nearly every damned component fail?

@JourneymanGeek Lol, yep, I remember that.

but our kittens are bemoaning the lack of the ability to do "/me falls into a catnip-induced trance"

Oh rchern.github.com/StackExchangeScripts. Grab the chat mod.

@RebeccaChernoff Oh, and we're whining about /me not working.

(actually at this point i can't remember if anything is original)

@RebeccaChernoff lol - were you bored?

@voretaq7 /me bites and rabbit-kicks the next person who asks what size server to use for a mega-facespace-killer site

@WesleyDavid I think I'm going to have to add an autocomment to my thingo dropdown boxie whatsit cos we get so many of them

@WesleyDavid jeez you just got clean man!

Although I guess that the shopping one matches most fo them

The /me trigger wasn't the reason for the userscript.

@RebeccaChernoff no it actually seems to do useful stuff too

damnit, now I have to install the greasmonkey stuff for Safari!

Okay, so let's give 'er a try now

rubs on @RebeccaChernoff's leg

OH SWEET MOTHER OF A LITTER OF KITTENS IT WORKS!!

@WesleyDavid: isn't scratching his eyes out more traditional?

@RebeccaChernoff If you shake a can of nickels at him he'll knock that off

@WesleyDavid Where's the sexual harrassment panda when you need him?

lol

@MarkHenderson Nominated for "best quote starred out of context" - especially since the star wall trims the @

/me recollects that a friend of his co-worker invented the All The Things meme.

ah. per-user, I see.

@voretaq7 My cat is disciplined by canned air. Just one hint of the hiss and he stops trying to eat the Christmas tree. He's only vomited up a bundle of pine needles once this year!

My god, just reading the starred messages. @WesleyDavid likes to punch kittens, @growse has an STD, @WesleyDavid is also punching himself...

@MarkHenderson This is normal. Where have you been?

It's not easy being me :(

Looking at that part of the sidebar can get scary @MarkHenderson

And Zordy is beating me. You forgot Zordy's violent tendencies.

@WesleyDavid Clearly not here...

Although he does play a mean medic in TF2. =)

heh, ok crazy people - I'mma go get me some burrito before I burn all of tomorrow's stars tonight

::ROAR:: (I flee)

@WesleyDavid I figured you had enough ;)

@voretaq7 Chew 20 times before swallowing.

I WANT A BURRITO

Hmmm burrito

It IS lunch time

Yeah, I see some out-of-context potential up there...

I might go get one

GODDAMMIT

@growse You can't HANDLE A BURRITO!!

Cya

@AdrianK :(

I could take a burrito

I could take it down

downtown

I wonder if I'll bump into Jack Nicholson next week. It's possible.

Flying into Sun Valley to visit the GF's family. =0

I'm going to sleep now

and I'm going to dream of burritos

gnite growse!

(mmmm, salsa)

thanks, now I want nachos because of this chat :/

night night!

ANybody got any good horror stories about out-sourcing their backups to Iron Mountain?

I got good horror stories about doing online backups to another company

@pauska Destination device is /dev/null ?

or well, just one story really. When you install a new server and you want to take backups of it, the company NEVER gives you installation instructions or a software download link (they refuse it). They insist on you firing up teamviewer on the server, and then a 1st level tech just sets up the backup without even asking you what you want to create backups of (or how often you want it done)

o0

The only reason we're using them is because a company we bought had a 3 year agreement with them

@pauska Ah, sounds like PeopleTrak.

I'm terminating the contract in a few months

Sweet, just got (one of) my X-mas present early.

It's like "is this a file server?" "Yes." 1st level tech clicks to create full file backups of every single disk on the server

@Jacob what'd you get?

the punchline is this @AdrianK - make sure you get a account manager who actually asks about your needs and helps to create a backup plan/project/tasklist

My favorite is when the PeopleTrak tech insisted that we needed to punch a hole in our firewall for Rdesktop so that they could log into our 2k8 WTS farm to do their install.

and demand documentation/installation instructions so that you dont have to call them every single time you need a change done or a new server installed

@AdrianK Yeah, stuff like that is something that should blink a red light inside your head and a voice telling you "walk away... walk away..."

lol, that sounds familiar

figured it was laziness though

@pauska thanks. I just wish the IT dept. had software purchasing authority. We usually only hear about this stuff after they've bought it and are now expecting us to conjure up a server to run it from.

@SimonSheehan A nice box for my workstation here( my dad is my boss too)

Our provider recently hired a key account manager, but its too late for them regarding our contract. He tried to offer me a local backup server for free (as a staging server) but I refused

@Jacob Nice! Box as in server/computer?

@Jacob a box to put your workstation in?

@Jacob: lucky

lol

"Thanks dad!! Just the color I wanted!!!!"

@SimonSheehan Yeah computer.

@pauska :(

ooh, PII or III slot 1 ;p

@pauska Hey, how'd you get that picture of my PC? :O

I have one of those (with a case) in storage ;p

@JourneymanGeek It's AMD.

@Jacob good specs?

im actually threatening my boss about buying a new workstation

@SimonSheehan You left your webcam on... You should see the things he posted earlier.

@SimonSheehan Quad core( haven't figured out clock yet) 6GB ram, 1TB drive.

@Zoredache Sees the light on the cam it blinking oops...

@Jacob: the system he posted isn't

I want to get something that can hold atleast 32GB of RAM.. but I might have to bite the dust and use our old servers for lab instead :(

@Jacob Oh wow, very nice!

wait...

@pauska What do you do that you need that much RAM? and why wouldn't they buy you a new one?

@pauska: i have an IDENTICAL system right down to the passive heat sink

oh and FUCKING WINDOWS HOME PREMIUM. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO CONNECT THIS TO A DOMAIN Microsoft?

lol

@SimonSheehan Endless virtual machines for lab'ing new software/ad/whatever.. it happens all the time

@Jacob Guess you'll have to buy it, find it from a friend or uh...get it from...the places..

lol

@pauska Ah yeah, seems to happen a lot lately.

My new workstation is an iMac ;)

@Jacob get yourself a technet subscription, and just evaluate the software a lot.

If its a work system the latter two may not be an option

we have some old farty poweredge 1950's with 48GB of ram, so I'll just use those until they die

@Zoredache I was kidding, I have one

@Zoredache technet is GOLD.. I wish more people would realize that instead of pirating stuff

speaking of which, I forgot to activate my personal one after attending tech ed

Love this for some reason;

anyone her attending teched florida in june?

orlando to be specific

I want to send something to unix.SE, but I can't figure out how. I can sent it do meta.SF, SO, SU or webmasters.SE . Maybe it's my browser?

@84104 "Send something" ? As in migrate?

@84104: for vote to close?

@84104 flag it for a mod.

@SimonSheehan Yeah.

VTC migrations only have a limited number of options as set per your site

there's only a fixed set of places you can 'auto' migrate to

Anything that isn't in that list you should flag, as @Zoredache said

@Zoredache I'm trying to flag, but the flag isn't giving me the option that I want.

choose 'other' and leave a comment.

@84104 The option would be "other"

@SimonSheehan There was no other....

@SimonSheehan I was in too deep. >_<

Indeed.

Each site only gets 4 or so options for migrating, so anything else has to be done by a moderator.

Fair enough.

on the bright side, it means you get flag weight ;p

I'd rather have rep.

All my flag weight these days comes from "not an answer"

you don't get rep for voting to close either

@84104 Sacrifice rep for the greater good of your fellow community members!

@SimonSheehan I do.

VTC you get your name stamped on some soon-to-be-annoyed users posts :P

Anyway, homeward bound. Hopefully, nothing catches fire over the holidays.

@SimonSheehan: On the one site where i can do that, i very rarely actually get pissed off users ;p

@JourneymanGeek I think we just don't notice :p

yay

answered my one question for the day there

Hopefully at some point i'll have the skills to do that on SF :)

@JourneymanGeek I've been trying your one answer a day thing... and failing :p

@SimonSheehan: You don't always have things you can answer. I have lull periods ;p

the point is to try

@SimonSheehan These days I only see about 1-2 questions a week I feel qualified to answer

@MarkHenderson: There's almost nothing on SF i feel qualified to answer

@MarkHenderson All I do these days is editing, VTC'ing, and flagging :P

but on SU, one of the things i try to do is answer at least one question a day. My knowledge of proper serverish things is lacking :/

@jscott @voretaq7: Yep, I have so many rams as I'm building 72 servers. Or rather, the other chumps in the office are as I'm on vacation as of today! Yay!

@MikeyB Yes, it takes many rams to build a proper servers.

Enjoy the vacation.

@JourneymanGeek Do you think this guy somehow believes it should be possible to make a DVD blank pretend to be a CD?

To be fair, you can burn a CD ISO to a DVD

So I can see how confusion might arise from a person who's not smart at computers and stuff

filesystemwise, yes

It would need great big magic joojoo to burn a DVD that a cd player can read

@Zoredache: i don't see why he needs either. If he has any common os, bootstrapping an install off it is easy

@JourneymanGeek well, perhaps I am being condescending, but if he doesn't know the difference between a cd and dvd drive, I kinda doubt he will be able to handle a pxe boot or something else more advanced.

Wisdom is knowing when to step away from the keyboard and go pour yourself a beer.

@Zoredache: unetbootin is nearly idiotproof

gnite gents. Time to go get the hair trimmed down so I don't look like a hippie.

Wow, the #xfactor dancers in this number look like what you'd get if Samus Aran and a disco ball had a love child.

Oh lord.

Facebook, someone is asking if they know someone who can fix her computer on the cheap because it's infected with something and "loosing my programs one by one." Someone responded that they built and torn down computers for 10 years and was a programmer, and could fix it for free. First they'd try defragging it then take it down to factory (settings?) and that fixes just about everything. O_o

Is there a way to facepalm yourself to death?

absafragginglutely

though i would say a reformat would fix everything

and they'd lose their programs all at once

solved!

That would indeed work.

Defragmenting at most may speed up some access. I use it to exercise the drive when seeing if there's any problems as a poor man's burn-in test. And it looks impressive. Well, that, and Deep Freeze screws around with arranging files around like crazy over time. But why in hell do so many people think that a defrag "fixes" problems?

Here, let me light your file cabinet on fire while you get it arranged in alphabetical order. Let me know if that works out for you.

According to my phone, it's raining out.

@BartSilverstrim: the only thing defrag fixes is fragmentation

on many XP systems it almost seems like a miracle

With the right GUI it's quite impressive.

lol

I used to use jkdefrag - girl i knew apparently spent a whole two hours saring at it

That's what I download.

ya, the new version is bloaty tho

quickmeme.com/meme/35jwqw

I really never found defragging did much unless at least 1/3 of your drive was fragmented

which happens

@JourneymanGeek No defragging for 5 years taught me that ;)

I use a filesystem that is resistant to fragmentation. Seems to work well enough. :-p

lol

Win7 has a defrag process running on schedule i think

and my personal system has nearly nothing on it

Doesn't help our systems.

I'm not sure what my system's fragmentation level is since OS X doesn't have it built in. But I do know that it will automatically defragment files <20 meg in size.

ya, that helps

Linux filesystems I think (ext?) try to pre-allocate space to reduce fragmentation.

ya. and ext4 will eventually have a defrag tool

I don't think I've defragged anything in 5-7 years

Sure as hell never defragged a server or a RAID array

Servers are naturally defragged by deleting the user's files when they call for support.

@BartSilverstrim Haha, BOFH

Doesn't Windows 7 allegedly defrag in the background?

I remember the good old days of Windows 95 defragger, with those billion tiny little blocks and as soon as there was a single disk access outside of defrag, back to the beginning it went

And I also remember the satisfaction of loading defrag in XP and seeing an almost entirely red bar, and watching it turn blue as the hours dragged on

@MarkHenderson: if does by default

Scheduled task, isn't it?

Not auto.

@BartSilverstrim There's not much difference to the regular user

It happens automatically, or it happens as a scheduled task, same shit different smell

There is when it's scheduled to go off when the computer is turned off :-p

Well to be fair, if the computer is off, neither of them will be triggered

Its a bit how someone argued with me once that TCP is not a reliable protocol because if he unplugged the network cable halfway through a transmission the packets would never get to me

Auto would happen as they're using it, though. Scheduled means we get complaints because every day the computer slows down at a particular time, so something must be wrong :-p

You had someone argue that?

Did you tell him that breathing is unreliable as you stuffed his socks into his mouth and covered his nose and mouth with duct tape?

@MarkHenderson: i'd like to see a protocol that would handle that

@BartSilverstrim Haha no but that's a good one. When people go down that road I quit

@JourneymanGeek I guess it could release a storm of nanobots to create a conductive link between the source and destination device in the event that the link is severed, or sends out just enough nanobots to generate enough torque to push the power button on the machine

Or you punch them in the nuts and plug the cable back in.

@BartSilverstrim That works too. I'm seeing a lot of people punching people in the dick today. Is this some new meme?

Not that I know of. It's just reaching the point where a punch to the dick is the only damn thing people understand anymore.

Ooohhh

black-aperture.com

What does it meeeeeeeeeean?

It links to half-life3.com with 301's to the orange box page

I guess I should be looking into the gaming chatroom, I'm sure they're all over it