downside of being in the medical field: We have to be VERY fiscally conservative until mid-late this year when insurance codes are finalized and we can start really collecting some scratch
@pfo not "highly", but we're in the black on an annual basis. I don't think we've cleared our initial investment hole yet though.
(that's part of why I'm not spending my full budgets though -- this last year we shelled out $OBSCENE in consulting and legal fees for our CPT codes and various private insurance coverage things)
part of that stuff eats into my schedule which makes it hard to spend the cash, but also a lot of that cash is better spent on stuff that will advance the business and improve long-term profitability rather than "nice to have" enhancements like making our failover firewall a 64-bit machine :P
and then there's stuff that lands on my desk and gets thrown on the floor (like taking our website out of 1995 -- Yeah the site is shit, but it's not the product, and I have better things to do than write marketing content)
here I was able to get buy-in on that disruption based on long-term benefits (we went from 95% and 97% uptime the year before I started and the year I came onboard to routinely exceeding 99.9% general and hitting 100% when discounting scheduled outages/maintenance)
A lot of that credit goes to our software team fixing bugs, but an equally large chunk of it is the infrastructure reorg I started when I got here (which got put to the test last year when one of our switches blew up - I'm very proud to gloat over the fact that it was a non-event)
@pfo I just left a ~170 people company and I'm now in a 20 people company. There's definitely pluses and minuses to both, but I'm definitely preferring the smaller place (thankfully!). My opinion actually seems to count here, and we can get stuff done without as much red tape, which is nice
"No, it's NOT the monitoring system's fault the server is running out of disk space. The server was underprovisioned 10 years ago and needs to be replaced. Raising the threshold will not fix the problem."
for example, our database cluster is only "up" if: 1) It answers ping 2) It answers SNMP (host-resources) 3) It answers DB sanity queries 4) It answers DB Status queries 5) It answers business-logic trending queries
failures on that chain will put it in any of warning/alarm/critical/down states
similar to our app status check that does a login as a dedicated unprivileged user: Log in and confirm you got back a 200/OK and a specific string appears. Any other status code or absence of the string is a failure.
@pfo for the stuff we track InterMapper forwards it all to a Postgres database and we use their reporting tools plus a few custom queries I've written.
yes :) If the charts are created on the InterMapper server they're available from InterMapper's remote access client (where all the other stuff is configured/reported). If they're not and we're just storing it you have to log in to the reports server and query it (also if you want data beyond the chart's aging thresholds)
@pfo NAGIOS IS A FESTERING BOIL ON SATAN'S LEFT BUTTCHEEK.
I have NEVER seen a Nagios installation that wasn't total crap. It's impossible to configure, a huge pain in the ass to maintain, and honestly it's worse than homegrown scripts.
i mean how can you possibly know what 85% CPU utilization means on a box without history - it can either be completely ok since it was like that since the machine got into service or it can be hell happening and someone botnet'ing your stuff but without proper trending/histroy you cannot answer that question.
I know this because you can see swap utilization creep upwards about a meg every 2-3 weeks, and if you look @ the fattest process by swap you see it's snmpd
@pfo If anyone could suggest a enterprise-supportable desktop linux GUI that is integrated with LTSP, I'd be hassling my boss to migrate us starting tomorrow.
but we manage them with radmind now -- trying to manage them using apt lead to that "breaks on the SECOND reboot behavior.
@pfo I keep touting InterMapper because (a) it's cheap (for pay-for monitoring software), (b) the suck quotient is relatively low, and (c) the suck is mostly tangental to my use case.
@voretaq7 Same here. We have to run LTS releases here. COnsidering our hardware stays in place for ~7 years, I don't want to have to do full nuke & paves 4 times over the hardware's lifetime.
@pfo seriously - gnome-whateverthehellitis is usable on a tablet.
unity? Made of suck. Unity GREETER is made of suck (font color: Hardcoded white. Hello! Developers! What if I want to have a WHITE background image on my greeter screen? Whose testicles do I remove??)
Why? Why can't I keep Gnome 2.28? It works and it does EVERYTHING that my users want and nothing that they don't. Because it doesn't feed Shuttleworth's ego. That's why....
Thanks for the Show & Tell, @voretaq7. Much appreciated. I'll take a peek tomorrow for any other tidbits you wish to share. Time to go cook salmon for the ladyfriend.
@voretaq7 We've recently made the switch from argus to netflow for most of our stuff. I'm thinking there might be something useful up in your noodle after all.
I am working with a local startup to help them get off their feet. I develop software and know enough about configuring servers to be dangerous, but by no means am I an expert (or "intermediate" for that matter).
I am trying to help them determine the server requirements for getting up and runn...
Lucas is going to hate my commentary in the VTC room.
But at least I usually try to poeticize it. Let's see, last month it was abusing Charge of the Light Brigade. Maybe this month... "dead every enourmous piece" by ee cummings
Wow, not sure why mailq got dogpiled on. I haven't seen anything particularly abrasive about him. Perhaps not going to get any Shirley Temple awards, but wow. Maybe I miss his more inflamatory contributions?
If a job says "ten years experience needed" how cheeky is it to apply with only six or so years?
Personally, I think their insistence on ten years and strong preference for bachelors degree is classically misguided, so it already mildly puts me off, but it still seems like a good possibility.
@WesleyDavid General rule of thumb when listing a job want ad is to double what you actually expect the apply. They'll get people who have virtually no experience still applying even through it says 10 years. The simple truth is that many people blatantly lie on applications and resumes. Being honest is a disadvantage at this point (getting caught is worse of course).
@ChrisS Yeah, I'm a bit too plain dealing I guess? If someone says "We need ten years' experience." I think:
But then I think "Dangit I can do that job though!!"
This is the downside to having gotten so many jobs through word of mouth, friends and family. Now in a new place with no deep connections, I'm in a whirlwind trying to figure out recruiter and job posting culture.
The moderator election states that there are two positions open. With the recent loss of Chopper3, this means that this is a net gain of 1.
There's some discussion with regard to the specific count for this election; maybe some more general discussion is needed on how many moderators are needed...
I'd venture an opinion that we could use 6 "active" mods, where we have 2 that would qualify for my definition of "active", 2 "semi-inactive", and 1 basically "inactive"
@MarkHenderson I haven't been seeing nearly as many actions from Sam recently - which is why I said in that question that it really feels like we've got two truly active.
I mean, it's not like I'm able to keep a running total of all the mod-hammer actions that I see, and a lot of them I don't see at all, so I can't really say; that's just where it feels like we are from what I gather.
Damn you @ShaneMadden - I took a while longer to put links in my answer to serverfault.com/questions/348343 and by the time i've done tat you've already had a +1
Looks like TomTom has got home from work and opened a beer already
I haven't read your whole post yet, I want to very quickly say:
Iain should just be appointed, and then we need two other new moderators.
It's unlikely that SE.inc is going to appoint Iain, so I totally agree that three new mods makes sense. This gets us a net gain of 2 compared to a month or ...
@Greg: Lets see, two modems (there's a reason for that), two independant wireless networks. Naturally the gig-e capable router is nowhere near the pre-existing cabling ;p
@Greg As @MarkHenderson points out, the problems occur when they're not on the same circuit. I've seen them work very nicely in a pinch, but I've also seen them do sweet FA :D
I am working with a local startup to help them get off their feet. I develop software and know enough about configuring servers to be dangerous, but by no means am I an expert (or "intermediate" for that matter).
I am trying to help them determine the server requirements for getting up and runn...
The moderator election states that there are two positions open. With the recent loss of Chopper3, this means that this is a net gain of 1.
There's some discussion with regard to the specific count for this election; maybe some more general discussion is needed on how many moderators are needed...
I haven't read your whole post yet, I want to very quickly say:
Iain should just be appointed, and then we need two other new moderators.
It's unlikely that SE.inc is going to appoint Iain, so I totally agree that three new mods makes sense. This gets us a net gain of 2 compared to a month or ...
