The Comms Room

Scott Pack

2:06 AM

@WesleyDavid YOU CHEATING BASTARD!

Michael Hampton

3:50 AM

neilhochman, Brooklyn, NY

1

What on earth made him think this was a dating site?

Ward

4:54 AM

@MilesErickson I'd like to know more about what they mean by public transportation.

WesleyDavid

@MichaelHampton So you mean you haven't found a nice woman on ServerFault to share some some fun times with that lead to something more serious? Totally doing it wrong, man.

Michael Hampton

@WesleyDavid Ha.

Iain

6:36 AM

G'day

DJ Pon3

10:30 AM

@Dan - have to agree about Windows 8. I installed it here to try it out on release day, and it lasted until, well... yesterday morning when I put 7 back on.

It's got some good optimisations in there at the back end and I like some of what they've done, but overall it just feels like a big old mess. I'm sure I can get used to the interface in time, and I would if I could see that it was progress from what we had before, but it just doesn't feel like an "improved" UI at all, just a newer one.

tombull89

3:40 PM

spotted in local leisure center...

Hennes

4:33 PM

Answers a question which is almost guaranteed to get moved to superuser. ( serverfault.com/questions/419098/… ). So why the heck did I answer it? goes to get coffee

Michael Hampton

8:04 PM

I think we need a Canonical Question for how to set up ownership and permissions for public web server files. I swear I see a question on it twice a week.

Iain

@MichaelHampton if you go looking I'm sure you'll find one

are both this guys questions really programming serverfault.com/users/132615/friendlycello ?

Michael Hampton

@Iain That';s the problem. I can find dozens of them.

One's obviously a programming question, the other seems to be a deployment question.

Lucas Kauffman

@Iain yea one of them is the other is overlapping with SO

Iain

@MichaelHampton find some with great answers and we'll get consensus on the 'best' and make it canonical - we can then get the rest crowdsource reviewed as dupes

@LucasKauffman @MichaelHampton the answer to both is the same

Shane Madden

9:05 PM

Cleaned this up, but I don't really want to write the novel that it needs as an answer right now..

4

Q: How does traffic make it to the correct destination IP address on the internet?

Lets say I am connecting to 64.34.119.12. How does the network know where to send the traffic? I know there are chucks of IP addresses given to ISPs, but how does the internet manage getting the traffic from anywhere in the world to the correct destination network and IP address?

networking

I don't think we have a canonical "How does IP routing work" question yet, right?

Iain

@ShaneMadden do we really need one -it's not like we get lots of questions about it

Shane Madden

@Iain Yeah, fair enough

Iain

it's a question

Shane Madden

@Iain Yeah, not sure. Just saying it's a fair point - don't need a "canonical" one unless we get a lot of dupes.

sntg

9:33 PM

@ShaneMadden I think it's better suited for superuser

Shane Madden

@sntg Yeah, probably.

ewwhite

It's been an interesting weekend of upgrades.

two virtual, two physical... same application...

and the differences are astounding...

Joel E Salas

9:50 PM

Can some eurofriends inform as to whether they have wall-to-wall carpet in their homes?

I'm apartment hunting for a place without carpet and it's such a huge premium for not-a-rug-tacked-to-the-floor

Carpet disgusts me. It's a rug you can't remove and clean properly, and it drives me insane with allergies

ewwhite

@JoelESalas Weird question.

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Do you have carpet??

ewwhite

In the upstairs portion of my loft... hardwood floors everywhere else.

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Surprisingly hard to find in LA. One agent told me that people prefer carpet in the bedroom. I guess they're allowed to have bad taste, but now it's becoming my problem

ewwhite

@JoelESalas depends on budget... I used to be in LA every three weeks for almost 6 years.

and my impression of housing is that much of it is pretty broke-down.

50's, 60's, 70's-era apartments.

Joel E Salas

10:01 PM

@ewwhite We're looking in Beverly Hills, some of these places are thousands a month. Still have carpet in the bedrooms. It's like I'm taking crazy pills or something

ewwhite

but anything new is going to skip the carpet...

Don't you watch Selling LA? :)

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Hahaha. My room mate and I were like "We're two guys with decent incomes, we just want a nicely-appointed place with lots to do nearby... WEST HOLLYWOOD!"

ewwhite

My buddy from college was paying $2200/mo. near Santa Monica Blvd. and the 405... 3 bedroom... carpet, shitty kitchen, 1970's building..

Hennes

I do not have carpet anywhere except the living room. And that one only covers half of the room

However if I visit friends in the UK they seem to have carpet everywhere. Including in the badroom.

ewwhite

He and his fiancee are now in a $4k/month condo-for-rent.

Joel E Salas

10:03 PM

@ewwhite In Santa Monica? because that'll get you a nice modern building with a view of the ocean

Chris S

@Hennes Is that common for the Netherlands?

ewwhite

@JoelESalas same neighborhood... in view of the Mormon Temple...

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite That's a nice part of town. Century City and all that.

Hennes

Aye. Most people have carpet in the living room (as in, 'carpet' glued to the floor). Sometimes other ooms have the same, but those are often stone or wood.

And the bathroom never has carpet

ewwhite

@JoelESalas I'm not even sure where I'd live in LA... I alternate between staying in Commerce (eww) and downtown.

Joel E Salas

10:06 PM

@ewwhite Do you stay at the casino? Hahaha

ewwhite

@JoelESalas Down the street at the Citadel.

Chris S

Carpet in bedrooms, living rooms, hallways, etc are common here (hardwood in older or fancy houses). Bathrooms, kitchens, anywhere there's water is usually tile or vinyl/linoleum.

ewwhite

For ten years now... If not there, then LA Live/Ritz/Marriott.

Depends on who's paying.

@ChrisS Is there a building boom in "the Valley"?

Chris S

When I was house hunting a few years ago I saw a house with a basement bathroom that had yellow shag carpet.

Hennes

Aye. Water is a sane reason for that. Which is why it really surprised me when I visited a friend in London. She had a bathroom with carpet in all three places she lived in (she moved a lot in the last few years). I asked her about it and it seemed to be common for the UK.

Chris S

10:08 PM

@ewwhite The housing market is pretty darn beat-up here... I don't think anyone is building much.

Joel E Salas

"For details about this property, create your free account" - You just guaranteed that you won't get my money.

@ewwhite Honestly I'm loosening my location restrictions. I wanted to live in Mid-City West, but dealing with shady agents has left me fatigued and burned-out

ewwhite

@JoelESalas What's your budget? I may have some connections.

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite We wanted to get away with $2600/mo by compromising on some requirements, we'd go as high as $3K if it was perfect.

ewwhite

You need parking?

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite We want two spots, no tandem.

ewwhite

10:12 PM

@JoelESalas Yeah, tandem seems to be the common setup at that range.

Anyone here know anything about LXC?

Shane Madden

Can't say that I do.

ewwhite

@ShaneMadden I just deployed it for a customer... It's basically a chroot container. I needed a certain type of isolation between a primary application and a tomcat6 server. It's working, but I know there are probably some cool tricks I'm missing out on.

Shane Madden

@ewwhite Ahh, gotcha. Interesting.

ewwhite

It really works. Great performance... Good way to use a big server (if everything on it is Linux)

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite What sort of isolation did you need to achieve?

Chris S

10:26 PM

LXC => Linux got jealous of FreeBSD's Jails and Solaris Zones, so they made their own Made in China-quality version. =]

ewwhite

@JoelESalas Company I used to work for has these application servers. Multi-user systems with people accessing via SSH and Telnet. There's an e-commerce portal aspect to it (non-PCI), and for years, it used to be a separate cheap server. In 2007, I started using VMWare server to add it to the main app host... Then ESXi...

but it's nothing more than a Tomcat portal... all processing occurs on the application server... so not much isolation is really needed...

Yes, one Linux install could run it all... but the devs are squeamish.

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite I segment off every service that can be segmented (when I have the resources). If a given application stack can be broken into layers, each layer gets a VM. That way the scale-out process is ironed out in the experimental phase, and when it (inevitably) ends up in production (sooner than expected), it's ready to be scaled up.

ewwhite

@JoelESalas crappy software. Can't scale any way other than vertically.

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Feels bad man

ewwhite

Well, I don't mind. I just sell bigger servers and take the opportunity to tune.

Joel E Salas

10:33 PM

oppor-tune-ity

ewwhite

One of yesterday's upgrade was nice to see...

And last month's...

so basically reducing I/O wait... better hardware selection... and letting the CPUs do less..

Yeah, i don't know how to work in a real distributed environment.

@joel any resolution on the job situation?

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Those are some serious gains, are the devs more productive?

ewwhite

@JoelESalas No, it's all my hardware and OS tuning.

and that XFS issue from last month...

It turns out that the XFS speculative dynamic preallocation is killer.. I have NO fragmentation.

In turn, that makes this app fly.

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite Oh sorry, I was under the impression that you had a dev team relying on that box. Did the end user experience improve (load times, etc)?

ewwhite

250% improvement in disk access times for the app.

Joel E Salas

10:43 PM

holy shit.

ewwhite

Yeah, users are happy.

This is a proprietary database that relies on flat files and ISAM indexes..

so performance is a function of how quickly data records can be locked, modified and unlocked... so CPU clock speed is the real limiter..

but fragmentation plays a role... a typical data file is 10GB-30GB of TEXT... and usually have 6000+ extents (via filefrag)

now they have 1 or 2 extents.

So the XFS thing was a surprising change that made a ridiculous difference

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite I guess it's a good thing, my predecessor over-committed storage by about a factor of 200%, so I had to take action fast before my datastore was completely overrun by huge empty XFS volumes.

ewwhite

@JoelESalas Oh, yeah.. this is bad news if you've thin-provisioned or overcommitted..

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite ^ That's the story with the job situation, not sure how to proceed. Trying to be reasonable

ewwhite

@JoelESalas you redacted it too quickly :)

but that's okay. Must go home... sitting in a cafe.

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