I stumbled upon a great resource today that I had no idea existed. Apparently, USENIX hosts the Computer Failure Data Repository, which is a series of datasets from various installations that includes failure data for various components. There are around a dozen different data sets, most from HPC clusters, but they’re actively soliciting for additional [...]
@BartSilverstrim not that I know of - monitoring hasn't reported any outages
@PeterGrace Re: economy of verbiage & RTFM - Remember most of us got to be this smart by reading the documentation (or learning how to google Right Damn Quick!)
@voretaq7 But we can't show off our intelligence if we don't regurgitate the information to people!
Besides...we're dealing with the next generation of system admins now. They went through a school system ideally created to give them information on a whim, where they didn't have to do things like "think" or "process" information so much as regurgitate it.
@BartSilverstrim I don't want to show off my intelligence, I want to not be bothered by questions that I produced documentation for
@BartSilverstrim those aren't sysadmins. they're users at best -- barely trained monkey creatures that have learned not to shit where they eat (we hope)
I have found that young'uns today don't question. They "learn" the minimum to get by, and regurgitate information, and expect you to put information into the slot if you want it to get back out later.
They don't think or process information, they just grab it and repeat it.
It's impossible to know everything about everything - that's why Google and SF is useful, but there's nothing quite like getting a book, documentation, or manual and having a good damn read.
@ewwhite Yeah, some of our students are like that. Facebook ninja, but ask them to diagnose a hardware problem and their brain would leak out their ears, and boil on the floor.
I ignore most of the game stuff (set it to not show) but there are some that still manage to intrude. And the sorting algorithm keeps getting reset on me.
Twitter is more like a custom crawl line that can yield links to things of interest. An aggregator of pointers. And sometimes funny joke posts.
It can be useful for getting in touch with businesses you want to bitch about too, the ones the pretend to care about new media. Because it's limited in how much you can post at a time, they tend to pay more attention to it.
Facebook keeps trying to act like a community aggregator while being everything to everyone (make money from add-ons) so it's getting more and more cluttered while not having a good focus.
All the whiners that wanted them to do something with the money...even though it meant they could shut down production for years and still keep their workforce employed.
@BartSilverstrim I approve of the stock repurchase because of that -- If they do a split-and-buyback they'll have plenty of stock to give away to employees without diluting the share pool too much
the dividend... well they have the cash for it, so why not?
but I'd prefer to see them cancel that dividend if cash-on-hand drops below about $60B - having more money than your competitors is a good thing strategically
Our district had a "large" amount of money on hand in the bank, and certain people in the board thought it was a waste, so they made it a mission to spend it. I think that was the beginning of the projects to redo buildings.
Now I think we have our rating reduced, meaning our interest payments have risen.
Yups.
If we still had the cash in the bank, we could have ridden this out longer.
Next year we're shutting down outlying districts and consolidating.
More cuts means we're probably going to negotiate a merger with a neighboring district.
I think that was part of why Jobs didn't want the money spent.
Of course I didn't know him, just reading a lot about him...
but the picture I get is that Apple was really his big "artistic achievement" and legacy.
Especially after it almost died.
He was making sure it wouldn't happen again.
He personally didn't seem to give a rats ass about money.
Honestly I think he approached it through some warped lens of being an artist and perfectionist, even if it didn't make the most money.
The idea to spend money just to spend it, well, of course it pleases investors...they're not there to make great products or art, as Jobs saw it. I really think he lived in his own little reality, insulated from the real world and considered that rules just didn't apply to himself. And he was lucky enough to have the money and influence to largely be supported in that belief. Now that he's dead one of the biggest challenges will be maintaining that kind of "Artistic vision."
In our case spending the money just to spend it led to "Oh great who would have seen this coming?!" in our district. Well...just about everyone who knows bad times come after good times saw it coming, derp.
They spent our cushion so now we're all in the same boat as other cash-strapped districts. Raising taxes. Bigger fees in interest payments. Layoffs, slashing spending on things like tissues and notebooks. Ridiculous emphasis on turning off lights to save a few pennies here and there.
There's also the businesses (walmart /cough) that came in and got a tax-free-pass thanks to our wonderful state...some kind of "business zone" thing that means no taxes for 10 years.
@ewwhite You can go to youtube and search for "flooding athens pa" to see lots of video coverage.
But a number of families have had to move from the area. Condemned homes. Flooding wasn't covered.
Our schools became a shelter in the gyms for a few nights. mattresses upon mattresses brought in to house the residents.
I think we still have some teachers that are living with other teachers after homes were lost.
I live on a high point but lost power for three or four days straight. Not a big deal for some...but it's something when you consider that in the previous 6 years we've had maybe half an hour of power out at my house.
And we were actually cut off from getting anywhere out of town for a day before a path opened over the mountain to my parents house, where they still had power. We "evacuated" our house, packing what we could from the fridge and freezer into the minivan and following my dad who found a route out.
As soon as we got home, the coolant line in the van burst.
@BartSilverstrim No, moving a hardware instance into a VM instance. There are two IT groups at my company... everyone else and me. They take care of the server room, I run my own group of machines.
I guess in the modern age, we'd call that DevOps. Anyway, I'm moving from running independent hardware to running inside a VM server that they manage.
Anyway, thank you for watching my fantastic demonstration. Firewall "issues" turned out to be an arp cache that was lazy to expire, and life is good. bows
@BartSilverstrim I could keep it the same, but less hardware == less money, and failover is easier because they're folding replication to a remove site via block-level mirroring into it. It's like my work laptop... I don't do software updates on it, they do. The more stuff somebody else wants to manage, the happier I am as long as I can opt-out if it breaks things.
@Joel "I don't want to wait around until 8pm -- I've logged you into the core switches. When you're done with the IP move type clear arp here, press enter, then wait 10 seconds and do it in the other window. Log out when you're done."
According to the documentation, a management group should have an odd number of managers greater than 1. I have a four node SAN consisting of P4500 G2s. I plan on having two clusters with two nodes each in this management group, i.e.:
-Managent_Group1
-Cluster1
-Node1
-Node2
-Cluster...
Is there any setting/configuration item to avoid Windows Azure from printing that error on the screen or detecting it? I've put a screenshot below that shows the message when you RDP into the web role. My web role runs on Windows Azure Guest OS 1.17 (variant of Windows Server 2008 SP2)
Backgro...
Gonna be Nomex Suit time for me in a couple hours. I get the joy of being the Stormcrow again and telling people things they don't want to hear. We've gone from being 80/20 local vs remote office users to 20/80 in the past 5 years.
@voretaq7 The fact that adding 30% more people to our existing remote offices infrastructure is going to break the metaphoric bank. Our backups already run 16 hours each night.
@voretaq7 This is more the offices. we're not really appropriate for tele-commuting.
@JeffFerland I let it use up to the CIR limit (which it happily does)
@JeffFerland yeah - I have a gigabit link to play with, but if I use it all the accounting people come and ask me what the hell is going on with the bandwidth bill :-(
Most of the time I love the people in my hallway. I leave my office door open because no one in this hallway is on my team, so people only stop in to talk sports. Today, though, the old school (semi incompetent) Solaris admin across the hall from me is lecturing the clueless Dev about how mod_proxy works (incorrectly), but her assertions about how it works are also incorrect.
our datacenter would charge for it like a tape rotation :-/ 's part of why I implemented this dump and sync process -- dealing with tape rotations sucks if the equipment isn't local
@ewwhite Our wierd old data guy loved Amanda. But he programmed in Paradox too. I'd started looking into Amanda and Bacula before the boss decided to take that project over and start shopping for an outsourced backup solution with somebody like Iron Mountain.
And the mgmt. just decided to hook our newest site (due to complete in 4 months) with a DSL to "save money" They'll lose more than what they save over T1 lines in lost-time waiting for page displays in the first month.
room topic changed to The Comms Room: This is *NOT a place for 'Live Support', ask on the main site. You came in here for an argument? Oh I'm sorry - this is abuse! [effing-markdown]*
One of the projects I have to make time to hassle over for our "upgraded DSL" is "what speed should be we be seeing? Because if we're not going to get it, I want to have the lower priced version again..."
@petergrace SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LET DEVS PLAY WITH SERVERS?! DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS?! /bashes headlights with crowbar DO YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS, LARRY?
@BartSilverstrim It's SFW, although it might make you bang your head on your desk. TLDR="Girl spends 4 minutes trying to work out time taken to travel 80m at 80mph."
@voretaq7 Reliability is the problem we have. Our regular "entertainment" internet for the client is very unreliable. They won't let you use your own equipment and theirs crashes every couple days at inopportune times.
@Adrian we have occasional fault reports from monitoring (packet loss >3%) but it's never been noticeable so I content myself with yelling at the provider once a month about it.
@voretaq7 And my Comcast in the 'burbs in fine. It's just the downtown business core that get taken behind the shed for over-priced under-performing Cable. 12Mbit is $115/mo.
Quick question: Is there a way to assign a variable in the attribute editor in Active Directory to point to another attribute so both fields are the same?
Listening to a skeptic's guide podcast. They talked about this thing in countries basically trafficking in human organs. Rich guy needs, say, a liver. The broker arranges it with some poor sap; hey, we'll give you $2K for your liver. I mean, they live on like $2/day ordinarily.
And it's illegal, but doctors, companies, etc. look the other way because they're makin' money.
And they take this idiot's liver, and may or may not actually pay. The guy didn't even, in the case they mentioned, know what his liver was.
So basically they're preying on these people's ignorance. And this was an illegal human rights violation.
But if you take advantage of people financially, with mortgage terms, or credit debt, or whatever...if you're financially ignorant, that's your own fault when you're taken advantage of. That's okay.
@BartSilverstrim that's a different kind of illegality -- personally I think if you want to donate a kidney, part of your liver, etc. to $_ANYONE for $_ANY_REASON it should be allowed
It would be like offering you 2 grand for something, just hop on this gurney...you'll be fine in a few hours (except for recovery) and you agree to it.
@BartSilverstrim that's going to happen anyway though, and I'd argue that by making it damn-near-impossible to "buy" a liver/kidney/whatever the current medical climate makes it more likely.
Surgeon profited. Hospital profited. Wealthy person got what they wanted. Broker profited. Sucker may have lost an eye or liver or kidney but...hey, learned lesson :-P
I just thought it was a funny parallel to draw on my part. Horrible ethics and human rights violation to take advantage of someone's ignorance to get a liver, but to encourage someone to get into a situation where you can take most of their money and drive them into bankruptcy? That's their fault.
According to the documentation, a management group should have an odd number of managers greater than 1. I have a four node SAN consisting of P4500 G2s. I plan on having two clusters with two nodes each in this management group, i.e.:
-Managent_Group1
-Cluster1
-Node1
-Node2
-Cluster...
Is there any setting/configuration item to avoid Windows Azure from printing that error on the screen or detecting it? I've put a screenshot below that shows the message when you RDP into the web role. My web role runs on Windows Azure Guest OS 1.17 (variant of Windows Server 2008 SP2)
Backgro...
