The Comms Room

Magellan

11:02 PM

@RyJones Toys is good. Your stories are just as good as the toys though.

Ry Jones

@Magellan ruh roh

pauska

@ChriS fucking DPM and its alerting.. I'm drowning in emails every time we have a small hiccup

Magellan

@RyJones The one I particularly remember was the one at Boomer with all the explosives.

Ry Jones

I thought it was strange a couple nights ago when one of the other guys that's always there had the same experience I had with Old Granddad Bridge

@Magellan yes, scary day

Magellan

Blasted contractors. Look at my f*cking resume' before you call me! Do I look like I want to work somewhere as the sole support guy for an entire division managing HP Openview and Remedy?

Mark Henderson

11:05 PM

@Magellan Maybe you look desperate

Ry Jones

We have a shitload of HP laying on the floor right now

Magellan

@MarkHenderson I do NOT even want to run the remotest risk of turning into @voretaq7. =)

Danila Ladner

HP Openview and Remedy

pauska

@Magellan Remedy? Ask @Cole - he loves that shit

Magellan

It's at a healthcare company. had 5 calls about that one position this week.

Danila Ladner

11:06 PM

the worst shit you deal with after Lotus Notes

Ry Jones

Four 16 CPU, 256 gig ESX servers and a new SAN of (I think) 350tb

it might be 550tb

Magellan

I dunno. I've done Lotus Notes. may just be that HP OpenView is worse.

Mark Henderson

@Magellan Makes them seem desperate. Not a good combination

@RyJones 16 sockets or 16 cores?

pauska

@RyJones ESX, wow. You should mention ESXi to them!

Danila Ladner

SAN with 350TB must be super expensive.

pauska

11:07 PM

:)

Mark Henderson

Or four sockets with 16-core each socket?

Magellan

@MarkHenderson A-men. Brother. Plus I got a recruiter that actually knows my skillset pretty well and is looking at the places worth talking to.

pauska

16 sockets.. that's only mainframe-land

Ry Jones

@MarkHenderson I'll have to ask, I suspect cores

Mark Henderson

@pauska My thought too. HP Superdome shit

pauska

11:08 PM

@RyJones don't bother, 16 sockets doesn't make any sense

Ry Jones

@pauska I actually don't know we aren't running esxi. I don't have access to the management console

pauska

probably 2x8core.. it's the standard these days

Mark Henderson

@RyJones If it's quad-socket and 256Gb for ESXi, that seems fairly unbalanced, unless it's very high-CPU, low-RAM workloads

pauska

@RyJones I was fooling around, ESX is long gone :)

Mark Henderson

@pauska Waiiit, ok if you put a comma inbetween "four" and "16" it makes sense

Ry Jones

11:10 PM

@MarkHenderson the previous hardware topped out at 184 gigs of ram, and we were using all of that. we never use more than about 20% cpu these days, but I think this is a standard config

Mark Henderson

2x8-core and 256Gb is much more balanced

pauska

@MarkHenderson I've had a fun night btw

Mark Henderson

@pauska Yeah? More SQL tuning?

pauska

you know that powershell script I made to do tons of SQL scripting? the 18k line one?

Mark Henderson

@pauska Vaguely

pauska

11:10 PM

I tested that migration.. like a billion times

Ry Jones

@pauska that is some powershell

pauska

it's our financial system

Matt Bear

@MarkHenderson I want a superdome...

:p

pauska

@RyJones bad wording, 140 lines in powershell results in a 18k line SQL script

Mark Henderson

@MattBear I don't. Fuck that shit. Itanium? AIX? No thanks

pauska

11:11 PM

And so, here I am at 1am, still trying to get it to work

Matt Bear

@MarkHenderson 32 proc, 8TB RAM

Mark Henderson

Also for the price of a HP9000 you could probably buy 48U of commodity servers and interconnects for them

pauska

turns out that the (old, piece of shit) financial system is sending some kind of pre-historic bullshit through SQLOLEDB

so when I pointed it to sql native client, everything crashed

overflow in datetime blah bleh

Mark Henderson

@pauska Hahahaha that does not surprise me in the slightest. Fuck financial systems

pauska

:(

so no alwayson for me

at least not for this system

Mark Henderson

11:12 PM

I've done a bit of work migrating people off rubbish financial systems. Every single one of them is hateful

The worst one is one I'm still tackling that has so many WTFs I dont know where to start

pauska

oledb is so incredibly slow compared to the 2012 native client

it's like.. 1 thread, with locks

Mark Henderson

This was the biggest WTF:

5

Q: Creating an index in both asc and desc directions

Over the past few weeks I've been raging against an old Firebird database. This database is crappy for all sorts of reasons, but one thing I noticed was that every single field of every single table has two indexes; each one with a single segment, one in asc order and one in desc order. Apart fr...

Ry Jones

@pauska wait you rebooted all your vms like two weeks ago for a vmware update, right?

pauska

@RyJones what? no?

Mark Henderson

Followed by this:

4

Q: What kind of int storage is this?

We have an Firebird database for a (very crappy) application, and the app's front end, but nothing in between (i.e. no source code). There is a field in the database that is stored as -2086008209 but in the front-end represents as 63997. Examples: Database Front-End 758038959 44093 15320...

encoding integer firebird

And just look at the date range between those two questions; tells you how long this bullshit project has been going on for

Ry Jones

11:13 PM

@pauska oh OK that was someone else in here

pauska

@MarkHenderson that first one just proves how sucky non-transactional databases are.. the latter one, heh...

no sql views in firebird you can look at? if firebird even have views..

Mark Henderson

@pauska Honedstly, I ragequited that problem and told them to just fucking deal with it

Its only for a transitional issue anyway, in a few weeks they won't need it

pauska

good boy

somethings are just not worth it

Mark Henderson

I pointed them to the SO question and told them that if the smartest people on the internet can't figure it out, I have no chance

pauska

the sad part about my situation right now is that they are going to replace the financial system in 2014

Mark Henderson

11:18 PM

@pauska Then you can migrate them off this shitty system!

pauska

but they haven't decided if they are going to pay for migrating the data, or leave the old system there as a reference

Mark Henderson

More migrating work!

pauska

I can't migrate shit, the new vendor would have to do that

Mark Henderson

@pauska We find that 90% of our customers want us to do an ETL operation to get their data into the new system

pauska

and guess what.. 95% of the views are encrypted

Mark Henderson

11:18 PM

@pauska ... what?!

Fucking vendors :P

pauska

luckily encrypted back in 2003 or something, so should be easy to crack

freiheit

@pauska Encrypted views? You mean tables?

Mark Henderson

@pauska Faily sure I've seen plenty of online routines for decrypting SQL 2000/2005 views/SP's

pauska

@freiheit no, views

this application in question is basically a SQL shell

all it does it run views/SP's.. a ton of them

freiheit

encrypted views? ... what?

Mark Henderson

11:20 PM

2

Q: Anyway to decrypt an encrypted sql server stored procedure?

I have a couple of ms sql server (2000) stored procedures encrypted by ex-employee long time ago and things were okay until we need to change it a bit.... is there any way at all to retrieve the source? Or rewrite is the only option? Thanks a lot.

sql-server stored-procedures decrypt

freiheit

That's like putting really awesome locks on all your doors, but not bothering with walls

pauska

@freiheit since you refuse to believe me

I made this for you

freiheit

@pauska I believe you that it is possible and that it has been done. I just refuse to believe that it makes sense.

pauska

funny enough, zero tables are encrypted

freiheit

I mean, they're protecting their code, i guess... but... yeah... ok...

Danila Ladner

11:22 PM

@MarkHenderson " unless it's very high-CPU, low-RAM workloads" it would be very suspicious workload for esxi

Mark Henderson

@DanilaLadner Hence my curiosity. I think I just read the statement incorrectly though

Ry Jones

if the boxes didn't have big MUST BE OPENED BY VENDOR OR YOUR WARRANTY IS INVALID I'd open them and see what's up

Mark Henderson

@RyJones Here if they put those stickers, they're not legally enforcable

We used to do them when I worked in retail, but our laws regarding statutory warranties are pretty strict, and you would be able to argue fairly successfully that just be opening the server you haven't voided your statutory warranties.

Ry Jones

@MarkHenderson probably the same here, but I have no desire to test it. There will be a crew to rack them here in a few weeks

Andrew

11:37 PM

@MarkHenderson can you clone the DB and insert a bunch of dummy values into it?

Ry Jones

until then, all those boxes can stop the carpet from coming unglued

Andrew

@MarkHenderson they can really only get away with it for something where a reasonable person would reasonably not expect to find any user serviceable parts in it, and a "no user serviceable parts" notice/sticker

i.e. not a server

a new ashtray mac pro, maybe

@MarkHenderson I love how the ACCC has put clips from The Checkout up on their webpage: accc.gov.au/media/video-audio/consumer-videos

Magellan

well, that totally redeemed my otherwise Bleh day. Had an impromptu phone screen and will be following up to schedule a full-day interview next week.

Danila Ladner

in Seattle?

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Hah one could argue that they shouldn't have to

Danila Ladner

11:45 PM

F5 is there in Seattle.

Mark Henderson

I loved the checkout's episode about the Therapeutic Goods Administration

I had no idea they were so self serving

Michael Hampton

Microsoft is there in Seattle.

Magellan

@MichaelHampton No, that's in Redmond. They're about 5 miles away geographically, but about 5000 miles culturally.

Michael Hampton

@Magellan Microsoft is not part of the local culture?

Magellan

@DanilaLadner I know a guy there. Unfortunately he recommended me for a job there once but he's on HR's list of people whose recommendations go in the permanent kill file.

@MichaelHampton Not so much "not part of" but in many ways diametrically opposing.

The Eastside culture and the "Seattle culture" are like Batman and Joker.

@DanilaLadner It's pretty much impossible to get into F5 unless you're a networking God and/or advanced degrees from top-tier schools.

Michael Hampton

11:57 PM

And now for something completely different.

imgur.com/Q8nv4Bp

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton @Cole I'm watching the sysadmin video.

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