Can you recommend software that records what you are doing and then plays back the commands as well as allowing you to save that recording and set it up as an automatic task?
The reason I ask is because I'm struggling with automating a manual task because I don't have a way to pass the inputs to...
@GeorgeEdison they are probably doing soemthing stupid like just doing a lookup for DNS servers, and if DNS servers are the domain, then doing a reverse on the IP (which we have set to edge.stackoverrflow.com or something like that)
Hey, quick query for the Linux admins in the house... Is configuration management of ESX hosts with Puppet or Chef a good idea, or does them running ESX bork that horribly somehow?
I ask because I'm not looking forward to manually configuring a few hundred ESX hosts over PuTTY, for some reason...
There are better tools for mass management of ESXi hosts.
what are you planning to do?
As for other things, I just got a note from a customer...
"An employee was upset about being transferred to another department. As a result, she deleted a bunch of files from the shared drive and her My Documents folder."
Just standardize and manage a lot of configurations across all our ESX hosts... things like LDAP auth, creating local service accounts, logging levels and locations, and some level of version control on the damn things, all of which are different depending on when they were put in. I'm tired of digging through a 127 row spreadsheet to find the u/p to SSH onto the damn things, for starters, and everything connects to them as root (like our monitoring system), for finishers.
@ewwhite A risk one takes, I guess. One of our bosses has a needle-point "picture" on his office wall that says "Some things are so important, they're worth doing badly".
@ewwhite Alright, thanks... I might go that route then... on the other hand, maybe rolling out Puppet or Chef in this environment would be a relatively easy way to boost my enterprise Linux skills and have something to add to the ol' resume...
Anyway, off to the weekly time-wasting, bullshit change review board meeting.
We have a setup in which our users log into an access database using MS Access 2003 over an RDP connection. The backend database (.mdb) is accessed by our users with their frontend database (.mde) and secured through a security database (*.mdw).
The user's login to their own machines first usin...
@ewwhite Yeah. On the other hand, some states don't allow forcibly moving someone from one job description to another, and most unions take significant umbrage to that as well.
The C-Levels here all have the 4S. One had a problem the other day and mentioned the Genius bar at the local mall. I laughed out loud at him. I told him he'd need to make an appointment and they'll be booked about 36h+, so I hope he wasn't in a hurry to get his phone fixed.
@Basil AAPL P/E 15.50 Assuming they've got any sustainability that stock is underpriced.
I suppose DVI-DL wins over HDMI depending on what frequency you're running: DVI DL maxes at 3840 × 2400 @ 33 Hz and 2560 x 1600 @ 60 Hz HDMI maxes at 4096 x 2160 @ 24 Hz and 1920x1200 @ 60 Hz DP maxes at 3840 x 2160 @ 60 Hz
@DJPon3 Ug, the Lions looked ugly, really ugly in their opener.
@mbrownnyc "No. This used to be possible, but it has been disabled. The user would not get the reputation back, and the bounty will be displayed as +0, “this answer has been awarded bounty worth 0 reputation”."
So I had to wipe my BB and thus lost the Blizzard Authenticator data and had to upload govt photo ID to Blizzard to remove it from my account (not like I've logged into it in a few months). I was tempted to include in the picture a penis beside the photo ID.
@MikeyB While that would be humorous on some level, the poor support worker who got to stare at it doesn't make policy decisions, and the decision makers certainly wouldn't see or even hear of it.
This guy is spouting, what I believe to be, nonsense about vSphere
"In a server that does not suffer from resource contention, this reservation should do absolutely nothing" - theoretically it is correct, but practically, small CPU reservation helps and I do not know why. Also, it is a quick thing to try and does not hurt anything :) In my current setup, I do not do any CPU reservations per VM, but on resource pool level. — Serhiy23 mins ago
He's saying that there is a performance boost by giving VMs a 1MHz CPU reservation, even on servers that have absolutely no resource contention
@MDMarra It's one thing to go with your gut. It's another to assert that you're right simply because your belly is rumbling after your lunch and having a conference bridge with the voices in your head...
Yep. He also says that VMs are faster than physical on the same hardware.
The performance hit for being virtual is minimal, but there is one. Things don't run faster just because they're VMs. Virtualization isn't a magical unicorn of serverland.
@MDMarra Running faster in a VM than on physical hardware IS possible though -- it's totally a corner case and usually involves lots of network I/O that happens to be faster in the VM, but it's vaguely possible.
@MDMarra Depends on the frequency of cache invalidation and how CPU-intensive the VMs are. I doubt it'd be appreciable in the general case.
@Serhiy As a community of professional systems admins, we value empirical data, not gut feeling. There is an overhead to a machine being a VM. Because of this, most VMs take between a 2-5% performance hit (depending on hypervisor and configuration) vs being run directly on the same physical hardware. If you're going to go against the grain with your comments, you need to back them up with data. We're all open to alternative views, but in something as cut-and-dry as performance, you're going to have to supply reliable data to back up claims like that otherwise you wont be taken seriously. — MDMarra10 secs ago
@voretaq7 That can be explained by the install enumerating less devices and not having to search for a bunch of devices
A VM is going to have a known set of mostly compatible virtual hardware out of the "box"
Whereas when you do a physical windows install, it has to enumerate all of those unknown devices and hunt through the driver store for each one before marking it as an unknown device
@MDMarra I see the same performance jump on BSD and Linux installs too - can't say for certainwith Linux but I know BSD device enumeration isn't that much of a difference. It's actually measurable at the copying-crap-to-disk stage
I've always chalked it up to disk-to-disk I/O speed rather than CD-to-disk with a physical install
@MDMarra I will say I see the same spin-down on my VMs where if they're idle for days and I log in they're slow. It's possible having a CPU reservation keeps them "hot" in VMWare
@MDMarra In order to answer your RIDICULOUS query I first have to start up a virtual machine running windows so I can connect to the hypervisor running the virtual machine running Windows to ask its version number.
(or install the VMWare perl API on my mac, but that's HARD.)
That's my stance... with the amount of tuning and research we did... VM's were definitely excluded as not being responsive enough in realtime environments.
We are pretty new to VMWare and looking for some thoughts on our environment.
We have a VMWare cluster that has on one host:
VM#1: MS Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise & SQL Server 2012
VM#2: MS Windows 2008 R2 Standard & IIS
The IIS asp.net app talks directly to the SQL Server. We had this s...
@84104 That each dept of dream occurs faster than the last? Yeah, it was a thorn in my mind; but I could get past it... Sort of like suspension of disbelief for magic in movies.
@ewwhite Above a certain number of servers it seems more appropriate to build them yourself and support them in-house rather than rely on vendor support contracts.
Nope, all those servers will just build and run themselves. All you need is somebody to wander through the data center sprinkling pixie dust on any misbehaving servers...
Also had a bunch of boxes colocated in various parts of the country. Virtualization (and later the "cloud") saved me a lot of cash. I still have to deal with running the virtual machines, though...
Seriously though @ewwhite, everytime you talk about this I'm more inclined to stay here for a few more years and go back to school for something more hands-on and low-tech.
@ewwhite I'm thinking a lot about focusing more on the networking side. Should've listened to one of the guys I rode the bus with back in the mid-2000s who was pushing me to go Cisco.
@ewwhite I'm not overly surprised that the industry is going there though. That's pretty much what William Gibson was describing in some of his CyPunk books from the 90s.
Things may take longer to get where the visionaries are going than people expect, but it gets there.
@MichaelHampton Yeah. Essentially the technical understanding of our staff is so low that I have to build the internal site in Wordpress. But that means I need to write a bunch of stuff for WP to do things like SSO into our decripit old NIS.
Of course, I'd LOVE to get rid of NIS, but this project bumped all the prerequisite infrastructure projects that would've made the WP project easier.
So, just out of curiosity... who would you feel sorrier for?
A "sysadmin" with 15 years experience working for ~50k/yr (USD), or the shop that hires a guy with 15 years experience at that rate (and has no idea why it's going to be a disaster)?
We have a setup in which our users log into an access database using MS Access 2003 over an RDP connection. The backend database (.mdb) is accessed by our users with their frontend database (.mde) and secured through a security database (*.mdw).
The user's login to their own machines first usin...
We are pretty new to VMWare and looking for some thoughts on our environment.
We have a VMWare cluster that has on one host:
VM#1: MS Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise & SQL Server 2012
VM#2: MS Windows 2008 R2 Standard & IIS
The IIS asp.net app talks directly to the SQL Server. We had this s...
