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5:00 PM
@freiheit As long as it comes with all the fiddly bits and I'm not in for another $500 in accessories like brakes, pedals, and saddles.
 
@MattBear Awful shocks are worse than no shocks...
 
@MattBear Do not laugh. I love my Dahon. I can carry about $100 worth of non-whole-foods groceries (in ortlieb pannier bags)
 
I knew a guy in the mid nineties who had one of these:
 
@mfinni So a bag of apples and two bottles of wine?
 
@ScottPack non-whole foods
 
5:01 PM
@Wesley Only $50-$100 for pedals, water bottle cages and water bottle...
 
@mfinni sighs Something's wrong with me today.
 
Whole foods rocks - they have the cutest checkout girls. Them and Sprouts.
 
@Wesley THIS is how we cruise in style
 
Oh don't get me wrong, Whole Foods is amazaballs. It's just also so much more expensive.
 
5:01 PM
@MattBear Rockin' it like an AARP platinum member.
@ScottPack The checkout girls tattoos aren't gonna pay for themselves.
 
@Wesley I thought that's what dad was for?
 
BTW, @freiheit, checkout the dope fly error page that website gave me:
Error Page Exception

SRVE0260E: The server cannot use the error page specified for your application to handle the Original Exception printed below.


Original Exception:

Error Message: com.ibm.commerce.exception.ECSystemException: The following command exception has occurred during processing: "javax.transaction.TransactionRolledbackException: CORBA TRANSACTION_ROLLEDBACK 0x0 No; nested exception is: org.omg.CORBA.TRANSACTION_ROLLEDBACK: javax.transaction.TransactionRolledbackException: ; nested exception is: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError vmcid: 0x0 minor code: 0 completed: No".
@ScottPack Too hipster to have a sugar daddy, to ugly to be a stripper. Solution: work at Whole Foods
"Performance Bikes" - if only they focused a little on their server performance. @ewwhite So should I email them and say "Hey, sup? I can fix it..."
 
@Wesley yes
 
@ewwhite interesting...
 
5:05 PM
It's a Java app though. I don't know how to manage a Java based app. =(
 
@freiheit not CX, but a real gravel bike
with eyelets.
 
I really hate it when people set up a time to call you and don't follow through or call you 10 minutes late.
 
@Wesley Neither do people who do manage them.
 
@ScottPack =D
@Magellan Yeahhhh, remind me to tell you a story...
@Magellan Interview?
 
@Wesley Just a recruiter, so I'm mostly just annoyed.
 
@Magellan Burn the infidel.
 
Got a phone screen tomorrow with the University of Washington though
 
seriously!, its electric, all you gotta do is sit there!
 
@ewwhite I'm soo not shopping for another bike right now. Not shopping for another bike right now. Not shopping for another bike. Don't need another bike. Not shopping for another bike...
 
@Iain Downvoting with VTC is going to take some retraining since we were expressly told not to do that anymore earlier this year.
 
5:08 PM
@freiheit A local team here has "n+1" on their jerseys...
 
so... someone let my dogs out last night, got into my storage shed, and moved my motorcycle
 
@MattBear was this you drunk or you needing to call the police?
 
@ewwhite Sent them an email.
@MattBear Ohhh, that's bad.
@Magellan Hey, I know a guy there... Lee Damon? Know him?
 
@Magellan called the police, wifes dealing the report right now
im dealing with digging the hole to dump a body into
 
@ewwhite Besides, if I was shopping for another bike, I'd be more likely to go for a straight up endurance road bike (and commuterize the CX bike a tad), or something really thoroughly winter-proof...
 
5:10 PM
@Wesley Actually, I've heard the name before, which is impressive. The UW system is nearly the size of Microsoft.
If not bigger.
 
@Wesley So, at what point do you ignore the call from the recruiter when they're late? 10 min? 15 min?
 
@Magellan He's a really good guy. Earlier this year when I had a frustrating event that made me reconsider IT, he called me up and talked for an hour. Really helped me out.
@Magellan I'd answer up to an hour or so I guess. Maybe he had an emergency, I dunno. After that, it's highly likely that I'm on to another task that can't be interrupted anyway, sooo...
 
Quick Windows question.
 
@ewwhite reboot it
 
5:13 PM
If you had a hosted Exchange server... and the logs filled up because backups hadn't run since July... and now mail won't flow. What do you do next? GO!!!
 
@ewwhite say fuck it and move to o365
 
I know what I'd do...
 
@Wesley I dunno. My stuff isn't exactly that pressing that I can't interrupt it, but I really detest people that aren't punctual. If I get an apology via email or something, I'll probably reschedule.
 
@MattBear besides that.
c'mon @Wesley.
 
It's with Robert Half, so I'm not exactly heartbroken if I don't get on their list.
 
5:15 PM
@ewwhite Say fuck it and move to Google Apps
 
C'mon Windows people.
next step?
 
@ewwhite fix the backup problem, clear the logs?
 
@ewwhite Wow, next step, expand the drive if possible so you can manually backup to truncate the logs, and then kill someone?
 
@freiheit yeah, my suggestion was to set fire to it.
 
go home and rethink your life?
 
5:16 PM
k. So they tried to backup...
 
buy some death sticks?
 
and it failed... thus, not clearing the logs
 
@Magellan Yeah, I'm ultra sketch on RHalf. I think if anyone can find you a job it would be them, but that's last resort for me because I'd be in some awful droid position and have to wear a tie.
@ewwhite So, comb through event logs and find out why its failing
 
so now they're adding a 1TB disk to the server to copy the exchange logs off
 
@Wesley Yeah, and I've got a pretty good line on a position but won't hear back until end of month when all the people are back from vacation.
 
5:17 PM
then truncating the logs.
Am I weird for just thinking to enable circular replication?
 
@ewwhite Wait a second, isn't the point of hosted services so that you don't have to deal with that crap?
 
@ewwhite Yes, don't do that unless you want recoverability out the window.
@ewwhite Why are the backups failing?
 
@Wesley obviously no thought given to the recoverability
@Wesley I don't know
 
I'd say migrate the data to a running exchange instance and burn the old one down.
 
client has been without mail for 11 hours.
 
5:18 PM
 
Please send to my hotmail.com account
 
@Wesley you know you want one
 
This is 2013. If it's not redundant, it's not a real network service.
 
@ewwhite Also, performance bike, according to Quantcast, has a pretty dang big website. Top 5,000 on Quantcast. Servicing approximately 10,000 unique people a day.
Seems like they're kinda big.
 
@Wesley Fix the Exchange server!
 
5:20 PM
@Magellan If it's not redundant, it's Enterprise!
@ewwhite Show me the application and system event logs!
I bet it's a VSS writer issue.
What backup software?
Let me guess, Symantec NetBackup
 
R1Soft
 
@Wesley ctrl+c, ctrl+v
 
@ewwhite Oh hell, really? Interesting.
@ewwhite Event logs, babycakes.
@ewwhite Is this R1Soft CDP?
 
yeah
 
@ewwhite so there's a central R1soft server that is the console to a number of other servers, the Exchange server being one of them?
 
5:22 PM
yea
 
I love dealing with technicians who tell our our customers, "We went ahead and made this change, like we asked you to do yesterday."
 
@ewwhite so the agent on the windows machine is the CDP agent. What does the Exchange tab say on the CDP server?
 
I dunno
THey put a big disk on the server in order to copy the logs.
I don't understand why dumping the logs and going circular rep is such a bad idea in THIS case.
 
@ewwhite So they're not even looking at R1Soft's problem, just copying the logs off to make space and changing the log path.
I can see that for an emergency where you just have to get the thing running again, sure.
 
In this case, when customer is hard down, circular logging it is.
 
5:26 PM
client mail down for 11 hours...
 
@ewwhite Yeah, okay, fine.
But there's no monitoring that keeps track of free space on critical volumes and alerts on either a percentage full or some kind of standard deviation from a normal space usage pattern?
Like, even a Cacti instance running somewhere?
 
of course there is...
 
All ya'll need PRTG.
 
but that doesn't mean that people look or react.
 
@ewwhite Just no one was watching it or no alerts were sent or no one cared?
@ewwhite So it's monitored, but there's no one that either gets email alerts, had email alerts set up, or is paid to simply watch for things on a big NOC screen?
Is this for LW?
 
5:28 PM
@Wesley Run. Away.
 
um...
 
@Magellan Don't like PRTG?
Dude.
WTF.
=P
 
I had an interview once where the interviewer actually had PTSD shivers after I mentioned PRTG.
 
@Magellan Huh, that isn't the common experience that I've had. I know that ultimately everything sucks but hey, at least it's not NAgios. =P
 
@Wesley Monitor like a Real Man and roll with Nagios.
lol
 
5:30 PM
@Magellan Hah! nb4 Nagios masturbation. =P
@ewwhite ...yessss?
 
What's with all the bad language today? The P word, the N word...
 
@Wesley How does PRTG store its configuration these days? MySQL? XML?
@MichaelHampton Wesley started it. Kick the cat.
 
@Magellan Ummm... we don't talk about that. <_<
What's the one that @voretaq7 is always getting a boner over?
 
@Wesley If it can't be automated, it doesn't get deployed.
 
Zabbix is actually my new favorite.
 
5:33 PM
And I'm pretty sure that's just a Windows app with a fruity flaky back-end
 
@Magellan @Wesley that would rule out InterMapper -- you can automate it, but it's not "automation friendly"
 
Mmmm. Pie. There's pie downstairs.
 
Zabbix is decent - I'd use that before Nagios
 
@voretaq7 That thing also monitors Apple XServe boxen. There must be black magic involved.
 
@Magellan what are you trying to monitor?
 
5:34 PM
uggh, trying to figure out what I'm going to tackle today
 
@Magellan no magic, XServes talk monitoring over HTTP, it's all documented somewhere in the XServe book
The only caveat to InterMapper is that if you have a Windows environment you want to monitor you MUST run it on a Windows machine (so it can talk WMI)
 
@voretaq7 This is true. XServe's problem is that you have to think like an Apple fanatic to manage it.
 
if you have > than 2000 servers, nagios becomes PITA
 
@voretaq7 Burn. It.
 
@DanilaLadner yeah, I just never liked Nagios.
 
5:36 PM
@DanilaLadner Yeah, but at 2000+ machines, you're in the "Paying for a real solution" or rolling your own territory.
 
@Magellan XServe's problem is Apple discontinued it
 
In fact, the job I'm looking at now probably involves fewer machines than the game company had, which was about 35 full-time boxes.
 
it was a good platform
 
So basically Performance Bikes.com is a big ass Java app.
 
@voretaq7 I really didn't like managing it. You had to think like an Apple fanatic to understand what the ultra-simplified interface pieces all do.
 
5:39 PM
@Magellan Still using nagios here
well it is opsview, but same shit
 
@MDMarra No, @Wesley hasn't bought a bike yet.
 
> I test that, It wan't work, That's so embarrassing actually... I don't remember where I get this information... Sick!
From the fellow that said you can "skip DNS" by "pointing your registar's glue right to your web server"
 
I want to know who upvoted him? The upvote has since disappeared, but he had a rep of 3 when I downvoted him.
 
@Magellan I never really had to "manage" them -- just deploy and forget
 
5:45 PM
@Magellan you get +2 for accepting an answer
 
@voretaq7 Ours did everything. Time Machine, Jenkins, local DNS, plus some other things I'm happy to forget.
@MDMarra Ah, you're right. I'd forgotten that.
 
@Magellan Hell, i'd upvote him just for marking the answer as accepted.
 
I was flabbergasted when I saw I got a +15 on that question hah
especially after I was convinced that he was trolling
ok, time for a whiteboard session for an AD migration with a customer that doesn't understand AD or migrations.
99% of the time I love this job. Then there's today :)
 
@MDMarra I'd like to see that, considering that I don't understand the MS-proprietary AD stuff.
 
@MDMarra . . . -1 for not linking to the cricket book.
@MounirAhmina I STRONGLY URGE YOU to acquire a copy of the DNS and Bind book - buy, beg, borrow, or steal a copy, and read it before you attempt to do ANYTHING involving DNS on the public internet. — voretaq7 33 secs ago
 
5:48 PM
I never read it
I also don't really know how DNs works, so maybe I should
 
@MDMarra well you're a bad, bad man.
 
@Magellan If you're really interested, I can send you a sanitized migration plan sometime. I've done like three in the last 2 months
 
@MDMarra FUCKING DOMAIN NAMES - HOW DO THEY WORK?
 
@MDMarra That would be really cool. Sounds like I'll have to pick up some AD integration stuff for most positions nowadays.
 
Ok
 
5:49 PM
seriously the cricket book is one of the ones where I buy a new edition when it comes out. I'd offer you my 4th edition but I already gave it away to someone :P
 
gotta run
 
@voretaq7 Last one was 2006, right?
 
@Magellan 5th edition - yeah, 2006
we have a... <looks>
third edition at the office
Still valuable.
 
@voretaq7 My Perl Llama book is 2nd edition. Now that's old.
Think I bought it in a thrift store.
 

Linux Systems Administartor

Alliantist

We develop technology to better the world we live in. Our purpose will appeal to anyone who gets up in the morning and…

Posted on Careers 2.0 on September 11, 2013

I kind of bristle at the way that was written ^
> Like all great sys admins you will be dedicated
I don't like that style of position writing.
You will be dedicated!!
Is how it reads.
And the rest of it is similar. Sounds very demanding, and misses the whole point of finding a dedicated person to be their engi.
To find good people, you don't demand good people, you be a good place and then prove that you're good.
Good people are attracted to good places.
 
5:58 PM
I typically try to avoid the word 'you'. It's too easy to come off wrong.
In fact, I always say 'we' when instructing users, even though I'm not going to be doing a damn thing.
 
@Magellan I think mine is about that old too
I haven't seriously written perl since... the late 90s?
 
@voretaq7 I did mostly Perl until I decided to move to Ruby earlier this year.
It surprises me how many IT shops haven't standardized on a particular language.
 
@Magellan Liking it so far! On to chapter 6 of the Novice to Pro book. Lurve.
 
@Wesley Cool. The official O'Reilly book is not a good book to learn with.
 
@Magellan The one written by Matz himself?
People were telling me "Oh just start with that one!" Look, I know a reference when I see one.
Stop being so hardasses and admit that some people can't learn from a reference book.
 
6:02 PM
@Wesley Yeah. I think I was even guilty of that at one point.
 
@Magellan Why did you favored ruby VS python?
what was the decision maker
chef?
 
@DanilaLadner I cannot abide a language in which whitespace is not only meaningful but crucial
loop levels should not be defined by how many tab stops into the page that line was indented.
 
But that is something you get used to in a week .
 
Nice thing about Ruby is that it allows me to use quite a few of my Perl-isms which getting stuff done and can then go fix and do things the Ruby way.
@DanilaLadner Which I suppose is fine if everyone uses the same editors and default settings. But I had to share code amongst teammates who all used different editors and editor settings.
 
@Wesley applies.
 
6:07 PM
indentation of 4 spaces is quite standard to be honest
 
Quite a few of those editors used spaces instead of tab stops which would blow up the script in Vim, and then I'd have to muck about fixing the script instead of just fixing the broken stuff that was my real problem.
 
@ewwhite The what with the who?
 
But i see your point
I just know a lot of people who did love perl, went forward ruby.
 
@DanilaLadner In Python, it probably is. Quite a few other things I do require tab stops.
 
@ewwhite Do you have any customers that literally call you every day?
 
6:08 PM
@Wesley yes.
 
I never liked perl. I was fine writing scripts in it, but refactoring or reading someone else's code was a nightmare for me.
 
@DanilaLadner Matz was a Perl guy way back when and wrote Ruby because of his experiences with Perl.
 
@ewwhite Do they piss you off?
 
@DanilaLadner Perl is Write Once Read Never.
 
@Wesley naw... I allow my customers to text me, too.
 
6:09 PM
@ewwhite Is that your $3000 a month customer? =P
 
One just asked for help getting Apple Facetime to work.
 
As long as they're paying, I don't see a problem.
 
@Magellan I'm slowly developing a liking for Ruby.
 
I would charge them additional 25c for a text message since i do not have text plan.
But hey, my father is jewish.
 
@Magellan set ts=4 is pretty standard too
 
6:11 PM
@voretaq7 yeah, quite standard. I do not write in vim though
I like jetbrains
 
@Magellan @DanilaLadner I personally prefer tab indentation because I can set the tab stop to whatever I want. Spaces are easier for aligning calls/prototypes though.
@DanilaLadner . . . GET. OUT. ::DEATHGLARE::
 
@voretaq7 I think he's actually a cheese-eating Emacs pervert.
 
(we don't have emacs installed on the servers. The ability to use a proper editor is mandatory to work here)
 
On a webinar, someone just said "Revenue Leakage." Sounds disgusting.
 
Hell, i always did logical indentation in bash, so to have some mercy on people who will reuse or read the code
 
6:13 PM
Emacs isn't an editor. It's a miniature OS that is trying to topple the rest of the operating system in a violent coup d'etat.
 
@voretaq7 I don't have emacs installed on my servers because I only have 32GB of RAM in most of them.
 
I like vim
 
I LOVE LAMP
 
@ewwhite I think I'm an impatient prick.
 
@Wesley $3400/mo... and this one just asked me "We had a sales rep leave for another company. He’s a dick. He added passwords to the customer accounts so he can access them via the web in order to get pricing. How do we combat him? His login was XXX so you can see his home source IP. Can you block his IP addresses from his home and from <new employer>? Do you have any other ideas?"
 
6:14 PM
@mfinni Yes, they keep the room from getting overly dark.
 
> Love lamp
The lamp isn't interested in that.

>
 
@ewwhite Huh, well for $3400 a month steady, I'd be okay with getting called like that.
 
oh fuck you markdown
can't fixed-width a reply
and if it's not fixed-width you blockquote it
 
:11200394 love lamp
The lamp isn't interested in that.

>
See what happens?
Markdown hates us. =(
2
 
@Magellan I find python to be very similar.
 
6:16 PM
@Wesley so i should block his IP.
 
@ewwhite This dude calls me almost every day, but now he's behind a ton, and half the time he just rambles about stupid stuff.
@ewwhite IPs are so transient, that might be a quick fix for a few hours, but if he's that wiley, he probably knows how to use a proxy / VPN service.
 
room topic changed to The Comms Room: This is *NOT a place for 'Live Support', ask on the main site. // 5 Sept 1977 Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral; on 12 September 2013 it officially entered interstellar space. [markdown-ate-my-baby] [pwned-by-a-wild-markdown]*
 
@Wesley Produce
 
@Wesley This the guy you're hoping gets profitable during Christmas?
 
I'd block it, but only expect it to stop him for a few hours. Then I'd start resetting all passwords and contacting people.
@Magellan Yes.
 
6:18 PM
^^ So that happened.
 
@Wesley thousands of customers... so they're changing passwords.
 
@ewwhite So you're saying this guy is an idiot? =P
@ewwhite Oh yeah, yikes, that's bad. But it's the only way to be sure. =(
@ewwhite I had to do that for a client that runs a forum on a server of mine. I get paid by having my AdWords code on the forum, site-wide. They had an attack by some malicious users signing up and causing problems, so I did some quickie firewall rules, and Apache rewrite rules to prevent incoming links from certain domains. It quelled the riot, people got tired of trying to get around it and gave up.
 
even my bash is sexy
 
@DanilaLadner Yeah, that made me cream.
 
@ewwhite I dub thee Sir Jizzrocket.
 
6:21 PM
@DanilaLadner nice. I rarely had opportunity to write code that nicely formatted. Too much screaming about things blowing up.
 
@ewwhite Maybe I should apply to LW. I might work around weirdos but at least I'd have a recurring, stateful paycheck. =P
 
evening guys.. weekly maintenance at job
 
@Wesley :(
 
@voretaq7 Sadly, while that benchmarks question is clearly opinion-based, it's actually seems quite good when reading compared to all the horseshit we've been seeing lately.
 
@ewwhite You don't want me as a coworker?! =(
 
6:27 PM
@Wesley You don't want your to process your paycheques separately as they come in and go out?
 
Hilarious.
Domino Admin is starting to look for a new job.
If he leaves - they're SOL.
 
Well hopefully after I leave - otherwise just another thing for them to have me do.
 
@Magellan Me too, most of the time it is creepy, but i had a fe gigs as a sys dev
 
That would entail taking over Lotus Domino, Sametime, Traveler, and Connections.
 
6:29 PM
@Magellan I don't object to that question
in fact if a few people vote to reopen it I would push it back over the edge
it's not a question about a specific technical problem, but it's an OK general question about the value of benchmarking (which is something that comes up occasionally)
 
but i've worked in environment where u get your head from one ass incident to another, and its all in the loop.
 
@Cole The dominoes will all fall?
 
Oh yes
 
KB articles in engrish is way funnier: translate.google.dk/…
 
@Cole Sounds like you'd be good at it :-)
 
6:33 PM
Fuck Lotus
 
@Cole We'd be happy to help. $1800/h
 
@MikeyB For Lotus? Dude, you could charge twice that...
2
 
@voretaq7 I tend to go back and forth as to whether SF should allow non-technical questions that are frequently encountered by professional system and network administrators. This is a good example of one that I think would be quite useful with a little re-wording to be less inflammatory.
@DanilaLadner yeah. Non-profits being fairly notorious for operating in continual crisis-management mode.
 
@Magellan I generally believe we should allow Good Subjective questions
 
@voretaq7 Yes. But that also makes the wording of the Opinion-based close reason a bad idea.
check_dhcp plugin requires root. Do I really want to add the nagios user to sudoers......
 
6:44 PM
@ewwhite Simple. Detect when he logs in but don't block him. Instead, multiply your prices that he sees by 1.005^(julian_date - julian_date_of_when_he_left)
 
Probably better than using setuid on check_dhcp
 
@MikeyB burn...
 
@Magellan Do what I do:
Cmnd_Alias ZABBIXCMDS = /usr/local/sbin/zabbix_user_*, /usr/local/sbin/zabbix_discovery_*
zabbix ALL=(ALL)  NOPASSWD: ZABBIXCMDS
Defaults!ZABBIXCMDS !requiretty
 
@MikeyB Hmm. That is nicely elegant and scalable.
 
@Magellan I'm open to suggestions for changing that -- post on Meta :-)
 
6:46 PM
@MikeyB Where can I sign up for that job.
 
Good use of sudoers.
 
So... I watch "The Importance of Being Earnest" last night....
thought it was another Ernest movie :(
 
@voretaq7 meta.SO or meta.SF?
 
@Magellan mSF
close reasons are local now
 
@voretaq7 Cool. already working on it there.
 
6:58 PM
(actually I think that one is global, but I can poke SE folks and see if they want to change it)
 
@Cole Have you considered holding up a cardboard sign for money? It would be less degrading.
 

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