@MDMarra Why?

some Los Angeles number called me

looks like: VALLEY ENDOCRINE & DIABETES

the. fuck.

@ewwhite To talk about the metro RDP app for Windows 8

Nothing a Linux neckbeard would care about

Woo. Looking like 2 more new phone screens set up over the next few days.

@Adrian sweet

I have a phone screen to hire for a large shoe company

@MDMarra I'm too pretty for a beard.

Ha

So, what happened with general earlier, @ewwhite?

Was that yesterday or today

this morn

Exchange was trying to reach out to a decommissioned DC... was only down for a few seconds.

but bitchassness prevailed, and users complained.

oh exchange

@ewwhite The "connection to the server interrupted // restored" balloon is the worst thing.

@ShaneMadden The local IT guy is on vacation, so people texted him, prompting him to call me, since he couldn't see what was happening...

Your delete vote has been recorded

@MichaelHampton They just re-posted: serverfault.com/a/491300/23067

It's more spamming anything with "Barracuda" in search

...and they're dead.

@StackExchange Holy shit

They will be getting upgraded to 4x Intel S3700 800GB drives a piece, in a RAID10

I want

Why do you get all the nice toys? :(

You forgot the 10Gb part

Did you see the rest?

They have 18x 200GB SSD in a single R10

I'm no storage guru

@MDMarra I missed that they were SSD's... shit

...but that seems like a lot

oh yeah all disks in their DB servers are SSD

Can they even push the limits of that many drives?

Even just 18x SAS 15k drives would be tasty fast

Its probably capacity over iops at that point

Probably still cheaper than those Fusion IO things Jeff was wet panties about.

@MDMarra Probably right

@jscott fusionio.com/products/iodrive-octal

@MDMarra Yeah, guessing not hot swappable.

Less than a minute, eh? So...a couple of hours then.

@jscott You'd want to hot swap it?

@ShaneMadden Seem like all the IOPs in the world wouldn't be that useful if you lose all 5+TB on failure. :)

@jscott Well, it's like if you lost your RAID controller in an 18-drive RAID10.

And it's probably got a hell of a lot more internal redundancy than that RAID controller

Thus the expensive.

If they contacted me, they'd realize that I can provide FusionIO for less than the Intel SSDs they're talking about...

but alas...

@MDMarra If on a single server, they'll be totally oversubscribed... diminishing returns past 8 SSDs.

I'm getting ready to put 6 x FusionIO cards in a single HP server :( $2200/ea.

@ewwhite Did you ever find out what they were doing?

@MichaelHampton yeah :(

Is it completely wrong?

@MichaelHampton It's in the "moar == better" camp.

Let me guess, they're going to RAID5 them?

Are you having nightmares yet?

Yes.

RAID 5 across 6 x 1.2TB FusionIO

"Because we bought our own and tested in our lab. This is what we want."

Well, when it breaks, it's their problem!

@ewwhite "What else did you test"?

It's a Windows system, too...

Still, I bet there's a nice markup for you/your company on FusionIO gear

I imagine a rebuild wouldn't take too long, but it will impose quite a bit of wear.

The cards are cheap to me... I buy the HP-branded FusionIO.

there's wear-leveling on the device...

If you rewrite everything from beginning to end... you've just shaved off a whole level.

I was gonna ask.. a 1.2TB FusionIO for $2200? Where do you get these deals?!

HP blows them out.

@MichaelHampton Shit buy one for your Mum, stop her from complaining about how slow her computer is

I know I would (if my parents had desktops)

And I had a spare 2.2k I wasn't doing anything with

Shit, I'd resell it on eBay, then go buy two more.

@MichaelHampton They're cheapish on eBay too. For certain SKUs.

I just looked for completed listings, and saw a 1.2TB FusionIO sold for $5500. You do the math.

@MichaelHampton Yeah but is anyone going to pay that much?

Gotta look at the completed listings

these are cheap because they were just eclipsed by a new lineup

@MarkHenderson "I just looked for completed listings"

@MichaelHampton Oh

I have a head cold, I say dumb things

(Whoops pressed "destroy" on @MichaelHampton's account)

Cisco SA520 - anyone familiar with it?

Got someone trying to sell me one of them instead of an ASA5505

It is substantially cheaper...

@mgorven Just the dude I've been wanting to talk to!

Herrow.

@WesleyDavid Hi

I see the cat is back

@mgorven Yarp - after a brief stint as a bear. Which I still might go back to.

There is something inherently liberating about eating park rangers.

@WesleyDavid Don't, it's very confusing

@WesleyDavid: that and the smokey flavour?

Sooo... I see that you know the pythons.

And it is in fact your most endorsed skill on LinkedIn

@WesleyDavid I may do.

@WesleyDavid Yeah, because those endorsements mean so much...

I probably should get on that at some point

@mgorven inorite - I'm endorsed for system administration so we know how much that's worth.

@WesleyDavid Indeed :P

@WesleyDavid: heard about my school's latest f-up? ;p

@mgorven TL;DR I'm considering a career pivot and getting into web development. Python stands out to me because of it's potential for scripting, salt stack, and full application development as well.

@MDMarra You rang?

It's like the perfect language, from what I've seen so far. It has ability to be applied to pure systems work, pure development work, and err'ything in betwixt.

@WesleyDavid: how good are you at python as is? I believe udacity's offering a decent primer course on it

@WesleyDavid Python is awesome for that, and the ecosystem is great

@WesleyDavid: it also oddly makes sense

(Django FTFW BTW.)

@JourneymanGeek My dabling in development has mostly stuck with C, JavaScript and PHP.

@mgorven Yeah, it looks awesome and way more manageable past 100 lines than perl and PHP

@WesleyDavid: take a look at udacity CS 101 ;p

@WesleyDavid Yup, it's very flexible.

@mgorven Django looked like a beast - I was looking at CherryPy and Flask as beginner frameworks, but yeah, Django and Pyramid also stand out as the big dawg frameworks.

@WesleyDavid Indeed.

@JourneymanGeek I was looking at starting with Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way

@mgorven So what does your development tend to focus on. Would you say web development? full applications?

(And am I eating your time that you need to spend elsewhere @mgorven?)

@WesleyDavid I'm not sure that it's necessary to start with a "beginner framework"; I'd probably suggest starting with Django anyway. They really do things right.

The TL;DR part II is: I've had dozens of times in the last two or three years where I've had to stop on a project and do something half-assed because I had zero skills in building a program or more than just a one-liner shell "script" and I think that has kept me at the realm of mediocre sysadmins. Add that to a couple of ideas that I think have good potential to take off as web apps that solve problems I've hit upon...

@WesleyDavid Server side system management is how I'd describe it. It's kinda webby in that it uses HTTP/REST, but it's more a full app.

So I thought I might as well get into web development, get some apps written that handle the problems and needs I've collected over time, maybe have some fun and make some money, but come out the other end with a new skill set that I can either apply to a sysadmin role and become awesome, or just stick with web development for a while and make more money. =P

@WesleyDavid Nope :)

Oh, and SaltStack looks awesome.

@mgorven kk

@WesleyDavid I have recently done a side project for someone which is a web app, using Django though.

@WesleyDavid There's certainly a lot of scope for doing web dev right; most of it is pretty crap TBH.

@mgorven Django seemed so focused on the ability to rapidly spin up sites, or entire "sub sites" that it seemed much of its intended uses would be ignored if you only had one relatively tightly scoped application to build.

@WesleyDavid That's not the impression I got, and it's certainly not the case

Kinda reminded me of the problems I ran into running Joomla (yes, that's a CMS not a development framework. Hang with me...) because Joomla was made by I think the Kansas City Herald team to be able to handle craptonnes of content every single day, so Joomla doesn't make sense to me as I tried to use it's content paradigm for a mostly static site that I managed.

@mgorven Oh okay.

@WesleyDavid There's plenty of other good stuff in it, even if you don't use the multi-site capabilities.

Any thoughts on the methodology of using a javascript MVC library like backbone.js instead of a Python framework's templating features?

@WesleyDavid You mean a full client-side app with an API on the server instead of separately served pages?

@JourneymanGeek Oh and what was your school's latest fiasco?

@mgorven Yeah, I suppose - it's all still a jumble of concepts in my mind that seem oddly overlapping until I get some stuff actually written and working (hopefully starting in mid / later april)

@WesleyDavid It completely depends on the application -- it can be an appropriate choice. The UI for our cloud OS is a JS app and that works well. On the otherhand I don't think writing StackExchange like that is the right choice.

Doing this web app side project has made me realise that I don't like CSS/JS, and so personally I'm going to avoid that stuff, but it can be the right approach.

@mgorven Gotcha. Any ideas on learning materials for Python?

I was looking at that Zed Shaw course / book

@WesleyDavid I came across a good guide a while ago, let me try dig it up

@mgorven There are tons of docs out there that I've found, but I'm trying to stick to Python 3.0 just because it's the wave of the present/future so why start with a older version

@WesleyDavid I can't find it right now, I'll have to have a proper look sometime

@WesleyDavid I haven't touched Python 3 yet, but I hear that 3.3 is good enough to use now

@WesleyDavid: The last two modules I need arn't being offered next term

I need to wait at least another term

unless we can work out some way for me to do it myself. Which means its very likely I'll get in touch with that recruiter and see if we can't get things going

@mgorven Ah, still on 2.whatevs?

@JourneymanGeek derrrrrp

@WesleyDavid a lot of python frameworks haven't moved over, there's some changes that break compatibilty, some libraries that haven't been moved...

@WesleyDavid: I know, right?

and its both modules, not just the fairly uncommon IT modules

Interesting...

@WesleyDavid Ye, 2.6 or 2.7. As @JourneymanGeek says, there are still compatibility issues with libraries, so just look out for that.

amazon.com/Practical-System-Administration-Experts-Source/dp/…

@mgorven oh okay

@WesleyDavid: if you're coding from scratch, go with 3.x, if you want maximum compatibility go with 2.x

(i'm learning 3.x ;p)

There's a slight chance, should they be offering those modules at the mothership in oz, I might spend a semester in perth.

@JourneymanGeek That would be cool

@WesleyDavid: the alternative is taking those modules as an external student

assuming they offer them

(or waiting a term, not cool. external student sounds best to me)

Tonight's fun: bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=916727

IPv6: Big mistake, or bad idea?

@JoelESalas There's something wrong with that question...

@JoelESalas: neither IMO

Good morning

Morning

is serverfault.com/questions/491337/… NC (too broad) or a dupe of capacity planning ?

@WesleyDavid wat

@Iain NC -> Shopping question/too localized, I think. Asking how to determine whether you get a VPS, a dedicated server or an all out cloud solution... well, you compare them and go with the best one, for your specific use-case.

morning all

Mornin'.

@Iain i think it is too broad, but ultimately the question he is asking is whether you scale up or scale out. He has given 2 examples, those examples are specific, but the question should be re-phrase slightly to put emphasis on which factors contribute to scale out and which factors contribute scale up

@HopelessN00b which filtering system do you guys have in place out of curiosity?

@ColdT Websense.

@ColdT We're Smoothwall here.

hmm i looked at both before, smoothwall; i here users having issues navigating and becomes messy very quickly looking for things. Websense; a little bit more on the price side

I know what you mean, the "admin" side is very confusing.

@ColdT If it were up to me we'd use Barracuda, if that helps. I much prefer their little appliances to Websense.

I think they're cheaper too. :/

no one use Bloxx or Lightspeed?

Not I.

@ColdT We use LightSpeed.

@jscott It's one of the suckier options, innit?

Lightspeed & Bloxx both were used in a number of FE and HE. Both rated higher then Smoothwall and Websense on the admin, installation and management

@HopelessN00b Performance wise, yes. The admin interface and speed with which policy changes take effect is miles better than the R3000 horror we migrated from.

Morning

I did a survey, out of 15 FE colleges, 4 used Bloxx, 4 used Lightspeed, and the rest mixture of smoothwall and websense and RM SmartCache (Squid)

@ColdT Yeah, Websense administration/management is a constant nightmare. I hate, hate, hate it for that.

@jscott i was under the impression with the raid 5 config and 2x500gb drives, performances has now improved?

I have two phones interviews this week.

@Cole good luck! remember leave on 'GOOD' terms, never backbite about your current employer!

@ColdT I always leave on good terms, the tech world is much too small

and thank you

@HopelessN00b never seen Barracuda used, interesting will need to look at that option, hopefully within the budget

@ColdT We've about ~4200 clients and since the LightSpeed was installed there's been noticeable slowness in browsing, upload/downloads etc.

@jscott no chance of hardware upgrade within their appliance? more RAM?

The R3000, although a nightmare to manage, had no perceptible affect on speeds.

Who cares if it's slow? It's enterprisey!

@ColdT I haven't followed up since our last report to their support.

@jscott what is your Internet Speed there, i understand they have 3 models catering different Internet speed

@MichaelHampton your face is enterprisey!

@Cole Again, you sir are no @ScottPack.

:(

@ColdT We're sharing with a number of other school districts, but we have two 400/Mb connections from separate providers.

@ColdT They have a lot more than 3 models now.

barracuda.com/products/webfilter/models

@HopelessN00b the minimum I'd look at is the 610 web filter, any idea of the pricing range

@ColdT Unfortunately not. My experiences with Barracuda's been at the up to 250 users range.

@ColdT Although, @ewwhite might know. He uses Barracudas at a lot of his client sites, as I recall.

@HopelessN00b not to worry, found their online pricing guide

@Cole It's true.

@ColdT Cool. Good luck. Few things ruin my year quite like having to install a web filtering solution.

@HopelessN00b lol could be worse I'm sure of it

ps - the 610 model, you're looking around £12k (1yr updates & maintenance)

@HopelessN00b I cause a kernel crash on my desktop by doing a Nessus scan with safe checks enabled. So I get to track that down.

@ScottPack Still sounds better than playing internet mommy to a bunch of dumbass users. I got into IT as an attempt to avoid people, not so I could review their web browsing habits and explain why they don't need to be looking at youtube from the office.

does anyone know how oracle licensing is done?

@ColdT amazon.com/Passion-Natural-Water-Based-Lubricant-Gallon/dp/…

gentlemen, gentlemen

and weirdos

@ColdT First, you purchase the above, then you bend over, and call Oracle for a quote.

@HopelessN00b Barracuda?

Whose looking for Barracuda Spam Filtering?

Oh, Web filters...

@MichaelHampton unfortunately a system we cannot get away from :(

@MDMarra sup

not much

@ColdT You'll need the lube, then.

@MDMarra how's work going?

@MichaelHampton it isn't too bad, 4k for 1400 users perpetual license!

I hate having to rely on Barracuda's hardware... However, during a trip to a client earlier this month, I discovered that Barracuda has new gear. Totally new hardware.

that's half of our Microsoft Campus agreement!

@Cole pretty good

@ColdT With what, one CPU core - as long as it's a smartphone CPU?

@ColdT Yeah, well, see if you feel the same in a couple years when they drop by for an audit.

If you have a VMware environment, you could run the Barracuda appliances as virtuals.

@MichaelHampton 16 core, 2 processors

I did my internship for a guy who mostly did IT for SMB. I think most of his income was through reselling Barracuda.

that's the best deal

@ColdT Oh ho, but don't you try to virtualize it!

I'm wondering how good Barracuda gear really is.

@KennyRasschaert I've used it in the past with no issues.

Oracle auditors... the only occasion I've had to use the phrase try to touch that again, and I'm shoving up your fucking ass!

Oracle Database Standard, Internet Developer Suite (don't even think we need this!) and Internet Application Server Enterprise, approx 4k perpetual

@KennyRasschaert It's poor hardware.

I've sold a lot of them...

@MichaelHampton no way I'm I p2v the systems! I dare not think of the consequences!

I tend to throw them away.... I've moved most of my spam to Barracuda's cloud solution

and keep the physical webfilters...

but I have to RMA three Barracuda web filters TODAY

I was at a security/storage expo in Brussels last week. At the Barracuda booth the guy told me you get to send in your gear for a newer model every 4 years.

@KennyRasschaert for a price...

Goes without saying :D

@ewwhite RMA 3 Barracudas, that doesn't sound too good

if you buy the Instant Replacement feature.

Instant Replacement == cross-shipped replacement unit

Still, if you're in the business of just selling and supporting hardware to (clueless) SMB. It's yet another thing to generate some revenue with.

@KennyRasschaert 4 years, for something I really want to replace in 3? Gee, thanks.

Exciting News! We recently made our Instant Replacement (IR) subscription an even better value. Effective immediately, any customer with a 4 yr or older Barracuda product and active IR will be eligible for a FREE hardware refresh! Even if you don't have IR you can still refresh your hardware for 75% of list price.