The Comms Room

@Adrian I hope you're not too mature to say "I told you so."

Shane Madden

@WesleyDavid The response will be, "we thought you had taken care of that!"

12:43 AM

I hate low budget months. Since we're a money driven company, when clients decide to postpone paying us for a month or five it gets tight.

@sysadmin1138 Sharing shirts during the cooler days?

This also means I can't buy new toys.

Speaking of tight money - I got the bill from my CPA in the mail today.
I've progressed from placing it in my in-bin to just now opening the envelope.

Sometimes between now and Monday I may progress to looking at the total invoice.

And we're moving offices. This is going to be a great month.

Joel

1:14 AM

I'm sure someone's raised the issue before, but what is to happen with really old systems-related questions that happen to remain on SO?

1:33 AM

Some got migratec here, some are ot closed over there, and a few more are historical-significance locked over there. We have a few 2008 questions in the SF database because of that.

2:19 AM

@Adrian: can you ddwrt the router, or repurpose a old desktop and a bunch of random NICs? ;p

4:02 AM

Wow, I just earned a badge I'm actually kinda proud of.

The "Generalist" badge. Also, I'm the lowest rep user to have earned it. serverfault.com/badges/15/generalist?userid=9770

Which I think is kinda neat?

4:13 AM

Why do people buy Sonicwall firewalls?

@ewwhite Because they're not half bad? I like 'em for SMB stuff, and their latest lines of SuperMassiv and NSA stuff are pretty kewl.

Well, those words are pre-Dell. I'm spooked away from them now.

I have most of my clients on Cisco ASA.

Probably just going to go 100% Juniper SRX nowadays.

But every once in awhile, I'll encounter a Sonicwall...

and the clients using them are plagued by reboots, convoluted setup, flaky VPN...

but they also try to use the Sonicwalls for content filtering and such...

I'm wondering where they're being marketed...

Like, "I have $2500 to spend on a firewall..."

@ewwhite Yeah, but that's because you're a badass.

4:17 AM

"Hmm, this Sonicwall looks good..."

@ewwhite Strange. Their VPN has been rock solid for me. I use GVN all the time. Every day. For years.

No, I'm not. I just find the devices difficult to support. And they're often misconfigured by the consultants who deploy them at my sites.

The setup is convoluted though. And the firmware / UI is sucky to deal with. At least pre 5.0

Some clients are also sold on VPN gateways... separate appliance.

Yes, SonicWall has the bad culture of being so "easy to use" that half-wit consultants drop one in, flail around in the UI for a while, and then leave as soon as enough packets are traversing it to keep people chock full o' pr0ns.

I'd use a VPN gateway if I dealt with larger clients. ATM I'm just a small office consultant, just because that's how word has gotten around.

sigh

Makes me pine for the days of working in a larger place.

4:19 AM

I have 3 trouble sites with the Sonicwall units, and I'm trying to understand how they got there. Three different local IT people/consultants.

It shall be so again, someday.

@ewwhite I think they have a good partner / channel.

Thus, small IT shops eat that stuff up.

I believe Cisco only likes partners that spend so much money their quarterly report bottom lines are confused for phone numbers.

Less than seven figure sales? Fornicate with a bovine.

I just assume that people know Cisco ASA. And at the SMB level, ASA 5505's are so reasonable.

5510/5520 for some larger sites. But my environments aren't complex.

@ewwhite I'm not knowledgeable with Cisco firewalls. I can get by in switches. I'd love to use 5505s for SMB clients. In fact, now that Dell has SonicWall, I just might. I just don't like Cisco's culture, thus I'm looking heavily into Juniper.

Especially now that ScreenOS is almost gone and JUNOS is reigning supreme.

@ewwhite Lemme know if you need some help.

I liked how SonicWall had a "solution" for everything. Anti spam, Anti virus, CDP... on and on. Very attractive for SMB consultants. Now, whether or not the solutions worked is a different matter... =)

4:49 AM

@JourneymanGeek You're in Singapore, right?

5:09 AM

@WesleyDavid: yeah

@JourneymanGeek Can I IM you on Gtalk? Do you have a GMail/Gtalk account?

ya

I'm nonapeptide@gmail.com

faileas.greywolf

@JourneymanGeek Invited.

5:11 AM

ditto

10:39 AM

oh dear, just read some of my comments/answers from last night, when I'd had a bit too much local cider - I can be horrible can't I

10:50 AM

hmm

serverfault.com/questions/377516/… why... a minidump... and totally no specs on the server o0

2:51 PM

@Joel My "I told you so" was the model of professionalism.

Lucas Kauffman

4:34 PM

gents

@Chopper3 That was mean. You made someone cry.

Lucas Kauffman

@Chopper3 was it what other people do on facebook?

5:09 PM

@ewwhite I am mean though

Q: HP P212 hangs on Initializing

And I've never had a drive rejected by HP controllers...

Actually...

STEC drives don't fare well in P410's...

but that's not a combination most people will encounter.

You should have criticized the OP for RAID 5 instead :)

1

I'm in trouble... Server: HP Microserver N36L Storage: HP P212/256 with BBWC Drives: 4 WD 2 Tb While expanding the RAID 5 array from 3 to 4 drives, the server rebooted itself. Expansion was at 76%. Now at boot the P212 seems to hang on initializing. After some time screen resets and the server...

Shane Madden

I'd say he's ripe for some criticism on the apparent lack of backups, personally.

5:30 PM

Oh, nobody runs backups properly, do they?

Actually, I'm looking for a better Linux server backup solution... but that may be good question material.

5:54 PM

@ewwhite What do folks run currently?

6:11 PM

There is obviously packet drop going on between my brain and fingers. What do YOU folks run currently?

I deal with a large variety of systems across different clients. Some have BackupExec and the Linux agent. Some use Cactus Lone-Tar to a standalone tape drive.

@ewwhite Cool. We're shopping around to find a replacement for a custom-scripted malange of crap that's accumulated over the years.

I'm not as interested in Bacula or Amanda. I'd like to do something that leverages R1Soft's hot copy.

@ewwhite Yeah, I saw that. I've seen no indication that the F/OSS Backup stuff is well-suited for increasing use of Virtualization. For that matter, I'm pushing for a transaction-level backup for our PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if any of the community-based stuff will do that well.

We're just getting big enough that we need it. We don't have the budget to double our IT Dept. Which rather leaves us needing a pre-packaged commercial solution.

I DO love the fact that most of the senior management are saying that monthly backups of the databases (including Accounting) is fine. Our CFO responded saying that if we lost more than a day or two he simply plans on quitting on the spot because of the hassle of re-creating even that short of a time period.

Shane Madden

6:51 PM

@Adrian That's pretty amazing

@ShaneMadden And pretty hilarious once you get in past the first beer or two.

Looks like a pretty nice Snr. *nix Admin position literally in my neighborhood. I don't have the RHCE-level chops to apply yet though. seattle.craigslist.org/see/sad/2940518889.html

Joseph

9:03 PM

Hey all. I've got somewhat of a generic question. End goal is to do something along the lines of Network/Systems Administration, though most of the places I see want minimum of 3-5 years experience or specialized experience. Any advice on how to gain it if I can't seem to find a job to get it? Seems to be a deadly circle.

9:24 PM

@Joseph Volunteer at a non-profit that needs computer help.

That's how I got some pretty gritty experience fairly early in my career.

1) You get experience
2) You work with people who will be your colleagues
3) Your name starts getting around and you can get into jobs through the backdoor.

@Joseph Where you located?

@Joseph You can volunteer even at public service departments like the police or fire stations. I know someone who volunteered at their city police department and ended up developing DB2 databases for them.

There are so many places that want help and are willing to let you do your work there it's ridiculous. You can afford to be picky I think. Find a place that fits right with you.

Of course, you can get taken advantage of and there's a lot of emotional baggage that will develop, but hey... that's people.

9:55 PM

Well this is an interesting coding standard. Drupal developing removes the trailing ?> on purpose in PHP files. drupal.org/node/318#phptags

Chris S

10:24 PM

It's funny how an ISP providing service these days with PPTP authentication + Borked MTU + Borked ICMP => Screams of East Europe and Asian ISPs.... doing things bass akwards and just generally half-arsed.

@ewwhite I prie myself on my backups, put more focus on them than most - including scheduled weekly file restores, fortnightly full system restores and monthly-quarterly full system restores - BIG part of what I do

Chris S

I still get sideways looks from some people when I say "Unless you've restored from backup; you have no backup. 'Verify' doesn't count either."

@WesleyDavid Strange at best... especially to call it a "best practice"... Chalk it up to "developers" I guess.

we're lucky, we always have 1:1 'reference' environments for every platform, we use them mostly for final test before live but we can restore every single part of a platform for backup test - and do, as a matter of course., and that makes me sleep well indeed

11:03 PM

But backup tech on the Linux side seems to be lagging behind that of other platforms. Plus, automation changes the game.

Should you worry about an individual server's recoverability, versus being able to reprovision it? All major configs in Puppet backed by source control. Kickstart deployment managed by Cobbler. Data or database replicated...

Or should there be more imaging-related backup solutions for Linux? Snapshot-based... I use R1soft hotcopy, but their full backup suite does not work with XFS filesystems (even though hotcopy does).

Any thoughts on Bru?

Chris S

11:22 PM

I would think it's entirely acceptable that your backup plan relies at least partially on reprovisioning. As long as you have written and tested procedures for 1. restoring select files/directories 2. restoring a whole server 3. restoring a whole site; it doesn't especially matter how you get it done, it just matters that it works and works within the time constraints necessary for your business's operations.

@ewwhite High Recoverability, baby. thenubbyadmin.com/2011/08/18/…

ugh

annealing?