The Comms Room

I named my file server "dat ass", so every night I "back dat ass up"

2

freiheit

@MattBear My inner 12 year old wants to star that...

@MattBear You get a star for however you figured out how to put spaces in your host names

@freiheit We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public

damn it... I've been watching Red Dwarf, now everything I read I read with a British accent

Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

12:18 AM

@freiheit Our surplus has auctions the first Saturday of every month.

@ScottPack Anything good?

@RyanRies OP is a liar.

@freiheit Employees can also go up there and buy stuff at any time, though I'm sure there's some kind of upper limit on what can be purchased outside of auction.

@WesleyDavid Sometimes, yes.

@WesleyDavid Who is OP?

Kevin Soviero

I'm about ready to give up on Rackspace... Every day is worst than the last... I'm going to start looking for a real job instead.

@RyanRies @MattBear

12:21 AM

@WesleyDavid I would have totally fell for DatAss or Dat-Ass... but...

@RyanRies I name my servers your_mom so I can send them a command shutdown your_mom

An my other server is named im_12_and_this_is_funny

@WesleyDavid Odd. I named a server wesleys_mom and set it up as a user directory. You know, for finger.

@ScottPack I could see you doing that.

your_mom needs to be fscked

2

Seriously that hard drive has bad sectors

@RyanRies Welcome to the star wall. You are officially depraved.

12:31 AM

:D

Dammit I'm spilling cheerios all over the place

Are you 1?

@ScottPack 1_bad_mofo Nkewl(n+2)U

What sorcery is that?

@ScottPack Buy me a bike at the next auction dear.

12:36 AM

I've never been to one.

I find the idea of auctions repugnant. Almost as much as I do haggling.

@ScottPack You are so suburban.

Show me a goddamn price tag and if it's fair I'll buy if. If not I'll go someplace else.

@ScottPack Pussycat.

Grow a pair and tell them how much it's worth.

I'll give you a dirty look and agree not to break your kneecaps if you give me this dinette set.

@ScottPack Did you ever see the penis on the cover of The Little Mermaid?

12:39 AM

I have gone to yard sales and when someone told me the price I gave them The Look, said, "Are you fucking serious?" and walked away.

@WesleyDavid Oh honey. You're asking me if I've seen a particular penis?

3

@ScottPack It's not like this is the first time I've asked you that.

@ScottPack surprised you didn't go the "used by hundred of guys every day" route

@MattBear That's overdone. Getting to say I finger wesleys_mom several times a day? That's fresh and exciting!

12:59 AM

I went to the zoo the other day, there was only one dog in it, it was a shitzu

1:12 AM

JohnMerlino

From my understanding, there is network layer firewall and application layer firewall. Network layer firewall filters packets on a port basis, such as blocking port 443 (ssl), whereas application firewall applies filter rules on a per process basis, such as blocking a process like firefox. If this is true, that there is a ditinction between these two, what would you consider iptables and ufw (uncomplicated firewall) on linux? Is ufw application level or network level firewall?

@JohnMerlino application layer

ufw is just a frontend to iptables, is it not?

JohnMerlino

yes it is, at least on ubuntu

@MattBear but can't ufw/iptables block traffic on ports, such as 443 or 80 for web traffic and if so, doesn't that also make it a network layer firewall as well?

@JohnMerlino no it does not, because the network layer is the means and method of transfering data from one host to another

JohnMerlino

1:22 AM

@MichaelHampton red hat and fedora I dont think support ufw by default, but debian distributions such as ubuntu have it installed by default and makes it much easier to manage firewall rules. On Ubuntu ufw is disabled by default

@JohnMerlino An application layer firewall can also do application layer decoding and block based on that.

eg. routers, firewalls, switches etc operate on the network layer

now I'm not sure if iptables is application level...

@JohnMerlino So, for example, if you were to have an application layer firewall in front of a SQL server it could be configured with a whitelist of valid SQL queries and block anything from the invalid list. Or take a blacklist approach and block anything that contained ' or '1'='1' -- '

iptables is network layer.

@ScottPack GreenSQL?

@NathanC I dunno, let me look at what that is.

1:25 AM

greensql.com

Yeah, that looks like it probably fits the bill. It's always hard to tell from marketing literature, but probably so.

It used to be free too

Odd.

@ScottPack would it be network or transport layer?

A WAF, like F5 ASM or Apache mod_security are also application layer.

@MattBear Don't goad me with this bullshit talk of the OSI model.

@JohnMerlino frozentux.net/iptables-tutorial/iptables-tutorial.html

Q: Prevent server from accessing network share

1:30 AM

0

I have built a test environment I want to isolate from my production servers. As part of this I want to prevent my new server from accessing file/network shares on production. For example prevent it from accessing \\MyProdServer I updated my host file with 0.0.0.0 MyProdServer However th...

windows-server-2003

no firewall? wat

Oskar!!

going home

lates!

It's finally raining. This has been building for days. It's about time.

Wow, also looks like the temperature dropped by about 11 degrees in 10 minutes when the storm finally popped.

@ScottPack Have you never heard of systemtap?

1:46 AM

I think so...? It sounds almost vaguely familiar

I'm getting this inkling it would have come up when I was working on a network scheduler kernel module. Man, I hated that project. It would have been 2005-2006?

@ScottPack Have a downvote :)

Why?

@ScottPack Because your answer is wrong, of course.

Don't worry too much about it. You'll probably get 10 or 15 more upvotes...since we're apparently turning into SO here.

Ah, systemtap is still newish.

It had just been released when I was doing kernel programming.

2:14 AM

@ScottPack Being able to instrument the kernel at pretty much any point lets you do a lot of things that were difficult or impossible before. If you haven't poked through the example scripts, I'd think you'll find at least one thing of interest, maybe more.

Q: Is there an Office specially for UK, different from the US version?

0

We have a developer that needs to test our applications output as the client sees it. The client is in the UK and we are in the US. Is there a different version of Excel in the UK that I can obtain and install that will simulate their experience? I have changed the OS localization to UK Englis...

excel office csv

I feel like this is off-topic, but...

I can see it being useful in investigations.

Anything you need, especially stuff that isn't exposed on /proc.

@NathanC That is off topic. Though I don't know whether to send him to SU or SO...

I'd say SU. It's not a programming question really

At any rate, sleep time. yay work

2:29 AM

So... if someone is using an ASA 5505 at home... off topic?

2

@MichaelHampton There must NEVER be ANY tolerance for home questions. The questions must deleted and the users executed.

MikeyB

@MichaelHampton Hey, I always phrased my Cisco-at-home questions in the form of a business problem :p

@MichaelHampton: and dosen't have the sense to phrase it like a small office problem? ;p

@MichaelHampton Yes. They should know better and hide it.

2

2:49 AM

Using an ASA, by choice? at home? but I don't want to self-harm.

@MichaelHampton Why has the user not been executed yet? I'm waiting.....

Nothing like downloading and uploading a 17GB file because crappanel can't handle the size with the transfer tool

@Jacob One of these days I should tell you about scp.

@MichaelHampton I would, but I don't have shell access to the other box...

@Jacob Ooooo. That means all the time is billable!

3:00 AM

@MichaelHampton You betcha

I think I need too slow my internet down though, 6MB/s is just too fast

I've got an ASA 5505 at home. It doesn't get used.

While packing I found a 501 in my box.

I'm decided to keep it, but I don't know what I'll do with it yet.

3:19 AM

Scoping enquiry: is hard-core Linux stuff that's sysadminny on-topic here?

@Andrew Largely, yes.

U&L is our out-of-wedlock child that we don't tell people about unless we absolutely have to.

@WesleyDavid so, debugging why grub isn't installing properly to both components of my software RAID (or is installing "wrong" or whatever)?

@Andrew ...yesss, but stick to the facts and don't say "I'm running this on a atom micro ATX board in my closet."

lol

Although, if you are running it on a micro ATX board in your closet... the beatings will be swift and brutal.

3:23 AM

@WesleyDavid: you're looking at my home lan arn't ya? ;p

@JourneymanGeek ahm in ur lans nmapin ur nodes

@Andrew You might get a better or faster answer on Unix & Linux for such a question, though, even if it is on topic here.

@WesleyDavid: its in a closet. Its not plugged in ;p

@WesleyDavid So is U&L baseborn or bastard-born?

It's wack

3:30 AM

@WesleyDavid it's a supermicro board, which is possibly worse :( it is rackmounted though.

@MichaelHampton it's hardcore bootloader/shell stuff.

@Andrew OK, then you'll definitely get a better and faster answer over there.

DYK: grub-install is a shell script! With an undocumented "debug" flag!

@ewwhite Did you get a chance to shipout that thinclient?

Standalone Sysadmin: Shopping for a server room cart

Consider: at Unix & Linux you have legions of neckbeards who live for the complex internals of Linux and UNIX systems. Here, you have people who, when you tell them you built your own server and are running mdraid, will look at you like you lost your mind and tell you to go buy an HP server.

Stack Exchange

posted on June 27, 2013 by Matt Simmons

A recent post on Reddit reminded me that I haven't really talked about anything datacenter-related for a while, which is ironic, since I now have the largest datacenter I've ever claimed as my own. The gentleperson in question had trouble looking for crash carts, because when you look for "crash carts", you find things like [...]

3:34 AM

@jacob no. I had to escape Chicago. Floods, power outages, etc. last night kicked my ass.

@ewwhite Not a problem, just wanted to know if I needed to look out for it

Server Fault is for the people who grew up...

@jacob. I'm back Saturday.

@ewwhite No rush, won't be needed until late july

@ewwhite or have monies.

codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/…

3:38 AM

Disagree...

I found it funny to hear, on the SE podcast, some understated backhanded comments about how they learned their lesson on building servers and just buying something from Dell or HP like an adult.

That's more like it

Dell shop

So where is @joelesalas?

13 hours until Macklemore's Seattle tickets go on sale......

Seattle people

Just kiddin

@MichaelHampton Calibri does not render nicely at low sizes...

3:51 AM

@Andrew All I see is Arial...

Also, the KVM-over-IP stuff that Jeff ~~Bridges~~ Atwood raves about only appears to exist on their very new stuff unless you have a separate IPMI/KVM card (which I don't)

"'I'm happy to spend money on nice dedicated hardware because I know that hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive." System admins are expensive too, along with costs of downtime

Ugh, I am always out of close votes.

@Jacob Hardware is also rather inelastic.

There's a reason we buy gear from vendors... we are assured it will work reliably or it will be replaced quickly without hassle.

4:02 AM

@Jacob which vendors are these which are so competent?

@FalconMomot Anyone that offers 4 HR SLA

I like HP gear

@Jacob Aah. That will do it, if you're willing to pay; otherwise, it's a fight every time.

especially with HP and dell.

@FalconMomot it's a cost/benefit evaluation

Indeed it is.

If the SLA is less than downtime buy it, and if it isn't then don't

4:04 AM

Yeah, so I just very nearly speced out Jeff's model server as a Dell R210. I could only put in 16GB of ram and 2x500GB SATA drives, whereas Jeff had 2x512 solid state and 32GB of ram. However, the Dell was $800 cheaper.

That was including the iDRAC card.

@ScottPack Does that include your EDU discount?

@ScottPack Those SSDs are $500ish apeice

@ShaneMadden And on the Dell builder the platter disks were $163, so assuming you could swap those out it would work out to be about the same price.

@ScottPack Yeah. The warranty is the important part though.

Right.

4:08 AM

@Jacob Hardware is also rather inelastic.

And, honestly, if I were to have the option of buying a factory built Dell versus home bench built SuperMicro for the same price? It'd be Dell every day.

@voretaq7 @MichaelHampton One of my new job responsibilities is to support Raspberry Pi's in a business setting.

@Adrian ~~You said that twice~~ Chat lied to you, I'm not completely sure what you're trying to say.

SuperMicro is certainly nice enough gear, but it's selling point is the price. If it's not any cheaper than fuck it.

@Adrian Run away!

4:09 AM

@Jacob Interesting. Chat app said that the posting failed the first time.

@MichaelHampton No, it's actually pretty cool.

@ShaneMadden Has it been your experience that companies get discounts from big players like Dell? I just did found the closest base and customized it straight from their main page.

@Jacob You can buy more hardware. You can't un-buy after a week if you don't need it anymore.

Cloud.

You get discounts from dell if you're buying good volume or otherwise "in" with them

@Adrian Ah, but the cost difference for them includes a buffer for overpurchase

we're 100% dell, save for a few pieces of <s>shit</s> legacy equipment

4:11 AM

Again it's really environment specific

@Jacob Yes. Am paying close attention to how my new employer runs things. Learning lots.

@ScottPack Definitely. Their margins are pretty big on server gear -- a big buyer can get them down significantly.

@Adrian What do the RPis do?

@Jacob Sorry, NDA.

@Adrian Didn't even think of that... Don't apologize

4:13 AM

RPi? As in, Raspberry Pi?

@ShaneMadden That's what I would have thought. I know that my shop can get fucking redonkulous discounts since we can buy off state and university system contracts. I wasn't sure if a smaller shop could get anything reasonable.

My NDA is more or less a joke. I just can't tell you who we host, or what we host

@Jacob Don't trouble yourself. I'm nearly 40. The apology is part of the courtesy of someone my age from flyover country.

@Olipro Yes.

@ScottPack Smaller shops.. a little. Really need buying power to get them to back down on the margins.

cute

4:14 AM

@ShaneMadden Figures.

But probably nobody pays their "list" prices.

@ShaneMadden I honestly would have expected SMB to be paying list, but the discounts to grow quickly with size.

@ShaneMadden The University System of Ohio, what with our nearly 500k enrollment, usually gets good discounts.

@ScottPack You've got 2 massive benefits in being a bulk purchaser, and EDU. I figure they just give them to you

@Jacob That's what they want you to think :)

Their margins start at "insane", so someone getting a "really good deal" compared to list is still giving them a decent margin.

If I were to guess what the RPi's are for I would guess a Android test enviroment

4:21 AM

I've seen discounts on buys go as high as 70-75%. You know those guys aren't selling at a loss.

@ShaneMadden Don't worry we have a family business. I've learned a thing or 2 about "deals" :)

4:49 AM

Definitely bedtime. Gentlemen.

@ScottPack Yep me too, I have an early appointment. G'night all

@Andrew New as in in the last five years? It's downright hard not to find integrated KVMoIP even in SuperMicro.

Sooo... mentioned something about wanting to mash up some APIs on Twitter and got a funny-ish response"

@Nonapeptide you should check out some basic HTML + CSS, and Javascript tutorials, you'll be developing in no time! http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html

Tweeted by nijikokun on June 27, 2013 at 3:39 AM in reply to Nonapeptide

...nice ...URL?

5:28 AM

@Jacob I don't think they run android

@JourneymanGeek It will

ahh I stand corrected

@JourneymanGeek Good dog! :P

Yeah, I've heard there's an experimental Android build for the raspberry pi. No idea how stable it is though.

there's quite a few things a raspi might be useful for tho

especially where you need a small, persistant, single purpose thing ;p

6:17 AM

@JourneymanGeek I have one possible use for them, but for my purpose a repurposed consumer wireless router reflashed with OpenWRT works much better.

ya

I really don't get why people use them in production

like... en masse

6:40 AM

lol

@FalconMomot: not very powerful, kinda messy to set up...

@FalconMomot because they can

Jenny D

7:10 AM

Morning

7:36 AM

Morning

moin moin

Yo yo

7:56 AM

Hi, I have a quick question wondering if anyone knows the answer - does Amazon over-commit on underlying physical resources with EC2? Done some Googling but no concrete answers

Almost certainly I'd have thought

Also don't know, but I would think so too.

The question you should be asking is: Will it make a difference and should I worry? I would have thought not, presuming it's well engineered and monitored etc (Which it almost certainly is, too)

Dennis Kaarsemaker

moin

I guess it will almost certainly make a difference as contention on physical resources could (and most likely surely?) cause performance degradations compared to an environment where there is no contention for the hardware

but yeh it depends how Amazon have engineered the process

none of which is really documented (as far as I can see)

8:00 AM

@emtunc No, you're confusing contention with commitment

If my virtual host has 50GB of RAM and I add 25 machines with 2GB of RAM, then there's no over commitment (We'll forget that the host needs from RAM for now). If I increase all my RAM to 3GB then I've over committed, but, if the VM's aren't using >50GB at once, there is no contention and no performance degradation

makes sense - thanks. I am writing an undergrad dissertation comparing the performance of workloads on virtual vs physical platforms and one set of my tests is on a virtual platform which has some contention

No worries, contention can really hit the performance on virtual platform, but it doesn't mean over commitment is automatically bad

Of course - if it is done properly then its the best way of maximising idle capacity

Yep, absolutely. I mean, with CPU there's almost no way to not over commit really

RAM is probably the clearest to understand because it's just an assigned number, storage can be very blurry

Fuck, where's the FAQ gone, I was about to pound on this guy; serverfault.com/q/518954/1435 but then I realised it's not there any more??

Jenny D

8:12 AM

@Chopper3 You can still write [faq] but the page is now called "help"

The FAQ has been fucked

2

And it makes the whole site even less clear to newbies

@JennyD it's no where near as clear though

Jenny D

@Chopper3 I completely agree

this is just licence for bullshit questions now - we can't even do a quick "please read the first paragraph of the FAQ" - fuck me

@Dan thanks - I think I know what stats to look for now :)

8:14 AM

@Chopper3 Yep, it's all about making us nicey nicey

@emtunc :)

@Chopper3 the closet thing we have is serverfault.com/help/on-topic

@Dan or making older, actually knowledgable, users, with rep, disappear off elsewhere as the site will be full of herpaderp questions that we can't even expect people to know are wrong

sigh... is having a server that won't boot if it loses a disk out of RAID bad?

@Andrew SATA?

@Chopper3 wtf is Proxmox

8:16 AM

@Chopper3 Yep.

@Andrew I had to Google it. My conclusion is, no, it's not an ESXi alternative

@Dan testing in a VM atm. but yes

@Dan "Complete virtualization management with KVM and containers." which sounds very hacky if you already have vSphere licenses.

also, gravatar still seems to be screwed for me

Apparently it's enterprise class - has anybody told the enterprise?

also, their webpage is hosted on Joomla!

@Dan "Fire phasers!" - "Yes sir! Might take a couple of minutes, though, we've got I/O contention with life support."

Not Industry Standard. Shoot your "consultant"

8:20 AM

We're all going to look silly when it's revealed that EC2 is running on it

@SmallClanger reminds me of the Voyager ep. where they can't initiate self destruct because the secondary command processors have been taken offline. Surely they can't just manually initiate it???

it's only a warp core breach, it can't be that hard to do on purpose

A manual, backup self-destruct. This is where the remaining crew break out some hammers?

@SmallClanger "in case of emergency, break the lava lamp"

@Andrew It's almost like it's fiction, eh?

@Dan proxmox.com/partners/technology-partner proxmox.com/partners/hosting-partner so no, EC2 doesn't seem to be a customer

8:24 AM

It would appear they have no customers

Kingston RAM? OCZ Vertex SSDs? WD Red HDDs? are they on crack?

these things does not a production system make

How much rep can I get for answering "Sure, go with that if you want to get fired, sued, and shot"

Problem is, people who aren't exposed to this stuff generally have no idea that there's a whole other world of equipment designed for production 24/7 environments

@Andrew None, it's closed :P

@Dan hence my "hire an expert, you noob" proposal... but in this case it would be "get a second opinion, your 'expert' is a moron"

@Dan my johnson's enterprise class

@Chopper3 What, sits in a room all day where nobody wants to look at it?

8:28 AM

@Dan arf

@Dan and costs a ton of cash?

I'm desperately trying to think of the next line, but I'm out

something something cheaper & actually works

Ooh, does it get serviced regularly by men?

do you mean "enterprise" or "enterprise-y"?

"enterprise-y" means DailyWTF-worthy

8:32 AM

@Dan that George Osbourne picture that you posted yesterday? It's just popped up on my news feed.

brb stealing your comment

You'll only start a row!

Just checked my bank account D: just glad it's payday tomorrow

You and me both

The wedding thing has started to get expensive and combined with booking attractions for New York

I've literally never spent so much money in my life

Or, rather, on one event

Good morrow

well, that comment went down like a lead balloon :)

8:44 AM

@Iain What's that?

@Dan my comment here serverfault.com/questions/518913/…

Haha, he's angry

@Iain are we still allowed to make comments? Or do they just have to be requests of where to send the bouquet of flowers to - servernice.com

@Iain you picked a good time to get out of the modding game

well where do I ask this freekin question then? — Jizbo Jonez 47 mins ago

> Yahoo! Answers?

how do i markdown i have the dumb

@tombull89 stars usually, different combinations of stars can do anything, with enough we could build a better world...

8:52 AM

@Chopper3 I am more than happy to make polite comments like that when they are justified. Anyone who is a Linux sysadmin who doesn't know how to mount a disk or create a symbolic link needs education. That people don't like being told that isn't my problem - it's a symptom of the pink and fluffy society

I had a manager who was a Buddhist - wouldn't harm a fly but wouldn't think twice about kicking you in the nuts if he thought it would be educational

@Iain sorry, bit back'n'forth, doing waffles, poached eggs, canadian bacon and maple syrup for a late breakfast :)

@Chopper3 twat! - Thurday is a fasting day for my diet :(

I'll be having Weetabix :(

@Iain problem is...I've done way too much bacon

:(

8:59 AM

@Iain I'll join you, I can eat again tomorrow when its pay day ;)

@ITHedgeHog I've been doing the 5:2 diet since Christmas so I only eat ~600 calories on Tue and Thur - currently just under 3 stone lighter than I was :)

@ITHedgeHog let me have your address and I'll send food - seriously

hah, no worries I was being overly dramatic. I'll be having dinner later, just no lunch at work beyond my mountains of coffee

@ITHedgeHog bacon all ate - anyway though, seriously, more than happy to sort that kind of thing out in the future if ever needed ok

@Chopper3 Coolio dude, if its ever necessary I'll be sure to tell you :) As it is I've been living off coffee this week anyway. I keep hitting the zone at work. Yesterday I checked the clock it was 11, then the next check it was 5:15 and time to be gone. T'was awesome :D

9:10 AM

@ITHedgeHog Not had coffee since 27/09/12 - gone right off it

Wow

my whole palate (sp?) has changed, started really liking salt'n'vinegar crisps - hated them before

oh and a mate wrote this about Boris Johnson making a dick of himself the other night, good read I thought; mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/boris-johnson-slated-joke-gay-2001538

@Chopper3 I'll have to disown you if you like Prawn Coctail crisps. They're the worst.

@tombull89 wife likes them, which.....no, not going there

@Chopper3 Oh, Boris.

RobM

9:14 AM

Boris is a reliable buffoon

@RobM what annoys me about him is that he's clearly VERY smart indeed, in all aspects of that, yet his 'schtick' is to be this baffoon character

Because it works

@Chopper3, sorry, on that comment I meant "start a new thread on MSO" and tag it.

oh, is it in the help center that users of every other SE site has to use SO and it's meta as some form of central hub now?

Yes, Meta.StackOverflow is that "meta to end all metas". There will be a meta.stackexchange eventually.

9:19 AM

well I've decided, I've got a webex thing with puppet in a mo then I'm switching work off for the day, going to make choc-chip and fudge, creme-pat-filled choux buns this afternoon

I see Mandela's pretty much gone then, I imagine there'll be reruns of "Desmonds" being hastily scheduled

@FalconMomot This is not a licensing but a technical question. Especially as 8.1 is a free upgrade / Service pack to 8.0 — TomTom 1 min ago

@FalconMomot I'd probably agree to him, to be honest.

blah. the presence or absence of a preview to RTM migration is totally a licensing thing.

even though it runs relatively deep.

shrug

Ignoring the fact it's off-topic and TomTom can be a bit of a dick...

There are a few reasons it's off topic; I'm not sure why I chose licensing specifically.

alas, I'm out of close votes.

9:28 AM

@tombull89 A bit??? Understatement of the week ;)

RobM

@Chopper3 you're not wrong - he's playing a game

@RobM Who's that?

FFS, just had last nights apprentice spoiled :(

9:44 AM

Most of my conversations with management lately:
Me: "Sound techical/security reason for not doing a thing"
Them: "I don't understand that, so it can't be important, do it anyway."

@SmallClanger time to update the CV then

I would if I didn't have one person who actually does understand and can take my side.

It means I stnad a change of winning some of these arguments.

find some material that puts it in a language they understand - i.e. Best Practice materials

@SmallClanger In my experience, even as an outside consultant being paid to tell the business it is wrong, these types of arguments are almost never won.

even with copious amounts of evidence, and detailed presentations about why it is dumb.

Yep, they aren't interested half the time

9:55 AM

I can sometimes win the ones where it is a decision made by a technical person that is dumb.

but, then there is the business that is like "we are not interested in migrating our directory out of novell netware or upgrading past windows XP service pack 3 with IE 7."

and the only thing that I have ever seen change that is months and months (or years) of time.

The tricky ones to win are when you're arguing vague risk vs. a specific practical requirement.

and, the whole way, it's additional firewall rules, more antivirus, IDS deployments, etc. etc. etc ad nauseam.

well, even when the risk is realized... it's a lot of inertia.

or sometimes a realized risk can't be explained simply (eg. an exploit that targets the windows XP freelist front-end heap manager specifically, which will never work against windows 7)