The Comms Room

Mark Henderson

00:00

Sucks

ewwhite

we're just trying to link an intranet site to the corporation's RODC's

Mark Henderson

Is it worth keeping them on board after this project is resolved?

ewwhite

they've been nothing but a pain

I took them on last year because I needed house money

Mark Henderson

Hrm

ewwhite

and I did well by them. Turnkey infra, new hardware, vsphere, datacenter...

flat rate... $45k to do it all

Mark Henderson

00:02

@ewwhite Including hardware?

Wow

Sounds like a good deal for them

ewwhite

or maybe it was $45k in hardware and $16k in my services

something like that

but it was a colo move, setting them up, firewalls, networking, making the right decisions...

letting them watch

(which slowed me down)

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Ohhhhh don't you hate that

ewwhite

yes...

Mark Henderson

How are you meant to destroy their bathroom porcelain when they're listening

I had one client who would only let us into their system if I VNC'd in to one of their machines and worked from there

Every time I mis-typed I felt a disapproving look

(for all I know they weren't watching at all, but still)

ewwhite

haha

Michael Hampton

00:07

I never get this sort of shit with small businesses.

Mark Henderson

@MichaelHampton I get it all the time with large ones

Well, one large on in particular

I have to log onto their SSL VPN with an RSA key, then log in to the Citrix XenApp web console, then launch a Citrix session into a remote desktop, then VNC from there into one of their computers, and THEN I can remote into the servers that I need to

Michael Hampton

Jesus. The latency alone would make my head explode.

Mark Henderson

Also the XenApp console doesn't work a lot of the time and I have to fall back to Java 1.6.2

@MichaelHampton I suspect that the latency anywhere in Australia would make your head explode

Andrew

@MarkHenderson I'm getting about 23ms to Sydney

200+ms to the US

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Not bad. I get 20ms to our DC from where I am

Hoping our DC move later in the year will get me to about 10

Andrew

00:15

@MarkHenderson our head office has (non-NBN) fibre

so <1ms to our colo

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Ahh yeah one ouf our clients has that. They pay $1,000/month for 10/10 fiber

@Andrew I get 35ms to internode.com which is Sydney > Melb > Adelaide (7 external hops, and I'm on an internode link here)

cole

evening

Mark Henderson

Evening

Slash morning

ewwhite

So I should fire them?

Or pass the client on to @MichaelHampton ?

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Well, I think it's very very poor form to fire a client when there's outstanding issues

It'd have to be exceptional

If you were to fire them I'd be telling them that once this issue is resolved, you will hand over their system to another contractor of their choosing

ewwhite

00:21

I'm a good consultant... I do care about my clients and go out of my way to take care of them, despite what I say here.

but in this case, there's no chemistry.

I get railroaded into shit like, "prove to us why you can't put the domain controller on the public internet"

Michael Hampton

Yeah I'd drop them like a hot potato.

cole

@ewwhite D:

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton you saw what they sent me, right?

So I'm now being followed by this guy on Twitter... He seems to be really into Open Source, ZFS and gay porn.

seth 周公旦 Ελεύθερος

@nimbosa, Tondo, Manila, Philippines

Man of Letters BBM: 74449e20 LiveProfile:LP1K5D8N #Freeman, #Liberator, #Good_CounseL #FreeSoftware advocate, @Android user,@Google enthusiast

18.6k tweets, 791 followers, following 1.6k users

And I wasn't sure if it was twitter spam or not

(probably NSFW)

I pulled up the profile and my wife was like, "COCK!!"

3

And I was like, "OpenIndiana ZFS!!!"

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite I got followed by the sales manager from DYN (as in DynDNS), although I've never mentioned him, or any of his products, nor do I use any of them any more

He also follows like 10,000 people but even so

ewwhite

@MarkHenderson yeah, I never understood that

Journeyman Geek

00:33

o0

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite mentions cock and @JourneymanGeek says "ooh!"

Journeyman Geek

no no. I said o0. Thats very different from ooh! or Oh My!

ewwhite

it's all out there

Mark Henderson

@JourneymanGeek It reads like "ooh" if you say it outloud

Journeyman Geek

You never say the eyes out loud.

Michael Hampton

00:35

@ewwhite Yeah I saw... Fuck that.

github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/2083

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton yeah, arc can go over the limit sometimes

all of my systems run with a few megs of swap used

and dedupe barely works on Solaris

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite I think that's the issue I'm seeing. ZFS is actually using much more RAM than the arcstats indicate

ewwhite

I keep it to 40% of installed RAM

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite So I screwed up when I created this pool and turned dedup on... I only turned it back off after copying all the data onto it. Oops! So now I have to un-dedup the whole thing...

ewwhite

beward deletion of deduped data, too

turn dedup OFF before you delete

13

A: ZFS - destroying deduplicated zvol or data set stalls the server. How to recover?

This has been solved. They key is that deduplicated volumes need to have the dedup flag turned off before deletion. This should be done at the pool level as well as the zvol or filesystem level. Otherwise, the deletion is essentially being deduplicated. The process takes time because the ZFS dedu...

Michael Hampton

00:48

I already turned dedup off

NAME                 PROPERTY  VALUE          SOURCE
libvirt              dedup     off            local
libvirt/backup       dedup     off            inherited from libvirt
libvirt/filesystems  dedup     off            inherited from libvirt
libvirt/images       dedup     off            inherited from libvirt
libvirt/isos         dedup     off            inherited from libvirt
libvirt/isos.new     dedup     off            inherited from libvirt
saurok               dedup     off            default

Now I'm just copying datasets

Hmmm... OK, not everybody at SO is bad...

... Why not get a print out of the current services are running. Work out what ones are not required. And then do you job — Ed Heal 8 mins ago

Joel E Salas

@MichaelHampton He's a jackass! one of us, one of us

2

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite If this fixes my memory problem, I'll probably keep ZFS. :)

I was rather surprised that, for a bunch of virtual machine images (mostly CentOS) that I only got 1.08x dedup. It wouldn't be worth it even if dedup didn't suck balls.

Joel E Salas

@MichaelHampton Is it just bad at dedupe?

Michael Hampton

@JoelESalas You'll have to ask @ewwhite

Joel E Salas

@MichaelHampton do you have fairly homogeneous VMs?

Michael Hampton

01:03

@JoelESalas Yeah, they're mostly CentOS 6, with a couple of Windows, a Debian and Ubuntu, (for reference).

Joel E Salas

@MichaelHampton Even when it comes to actual configuration?

Michael Hampton

Oh, fun fact: You can't name a ZFS zpool anything that starts with "mirror".

Joel E Salas

rofl

Shane Madden

@MichaelHampton Heh, bad arg parsing?

Michael Hampton

@JoelESalas Oh, no, they're all doing something slightly different. Though I do have three Puppet VMs...

@JoelESalas Their base systems, though, should all be in sync. I have my own local CentOS mirror (it's on the srvmirrors zpool) and they're (1) all pointed at it, and (2) all get updated on the same day each month.

Shane Madden

01:05

@MichaelHampton I've got five puppetmasters. Different network areas... kinda a pain.

Michael Hampton

@ShaneMadden Two of my three are for testing.

If I'm writing a new puppet module, it will be on one of the test puppetmasters, and deployed to a test VM.

Shane Madden

@MichaelHampton Oh nice. I don't have any test masters (just test environments), but that's really only a problem when bumping the puppet version on them

cole

thanks again @ShaneMadden

Shane Madden

@cole No problem! Not sure why they sent me an extra, but no complaints here.

Andrew

@MichaelHampton now the guy's dumped out ... something.

Michael Hampton

01:13

@Andrew Who what?

Andrew

I've posted a link to the canonical "securing a LAMP server" question.

@MichaelHampton the SO question for the comment you linked.

Michael Hampton

@Andrew He already cross-posted it here.

Andrew

@MichaelHampton chat or SF?

Michael Hampton

@Andrew SF

0

Q: Removing Unnecessary Services & Packages in a MySQL Ubuntu 12.04 Server

As part of hardening a MySQL 5.6 server running on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, unnecessary services and packages will have to be removed. For a server that is serving only as a MySQL server, what services and packages should we remove? Is there a list of services/packages that we can use? Here's a list o...

Andrew

isn't crosspost grounds for insta-close?

Michael Hampton

01:16

@Andrew On some sites it is. I don't believe either SF or SO is such a site.

Unix & Linux comes to mind. They even have a custom close reason for it.

MDMoore313

Anyone here use Ubuntu Servers in production?

Michael Hampton

@MDMoore313 I have one, and wish I didn't.

Shane Madden

@MDMoore313 I have in the past. None at the current job, we killed them off.

Andrew

@MichaelHampton I see your one and raise you... 12? 15? I've lost count.

MDMoore313

@Andrew by choice?

Michael Hampton

01:18

@Andrew Well, it's the last one, and one of these weekends I'll finally get rid of it.

Mark Henderson

@MDMoore313 I have a handful. One is a Varnish server, one is HAProxy and one is SVN

Andrew

@MDMoore313 someone's choice?

Mark Henderson

Oh and there's a zabbix server and two zabbix proxies

MDMoore313

@Andrew was it by your choice I mean

Shane Madden

I think $job[-2] might still be using an Ubuntu 9.04 server I set up. Needed the newer Apache version it had at the time, hot spare for proxies was seriously buggy in the Apache version CentOS had.

Pair of servers, I guess.

Andrew

01:20

@MDMoore313 when I started I was told "we're using Ubuntu" and I didn't know any better. it was still shiny and not entirely awful (or not obviously awful at least).

Shane Madden

I doubt they've upgraded it from 9.04

MDMoore313

@Andrew I see

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Eh. I get why people hate Ubuntu from a business perspective. They don't like the guy who drives the roadmap, they don't like some of the decisions that they make. But from a practical point of view, it's not so bad

Shane Madden

They do some things right. And I think they've put pressure on RedHat to improve, which is good for everyone.

Mark Henderson

Well at least I haven't found it so bad

Shane Madden

01:21

The main problem is they're focused on the desktop, often at the expense of the server.

MDMoore313

^

Mark Henderson

:o Right-angled patch leads! How did I not know that these existed?

4cabling.com.au/right-angled-cat-5e-cable-0-3m.html

2

ewwhite

I'm proud at how much puppet I wrote last night

Andrew

@MarkHenderson the Ubuntu approach of "don't fix what we know is broken" is... idiotic.

Mark Henderson

Now they just need to do right-angled flat patch leads and I'll be even happier

MDMoore313

01:24

A Sr sys admin broke it down to me once why it made sense to use CentOS v. Ubuntu for most scenarios, made sense

Plus Ubuntu likes to use cutting edge packages in their desktop, not sure how much of that bleeds over to their servers

ewwhite

60

A: How should an IT department choose a Linux distribution: Technical reasons

I'll share my experiences working as a technologist in a few different fields... (Caution: this is a story about Red Hat... and how I grew up professionally with it) I started working with Linux professionally in 2000-2002. This was during the wide adoption of Red Hat and the Red Hat Professio...

because Ubuntu is UGH

2

Shane Madden

@MDMoore313 Too much. I had to get into an argument on their bugtracker with a package maintainer to make the vmware tools package not install all of X11.

ewwhite

@ShaneMadden sad

Andrew

@MarkHenderson also 4cabling.com.au/cable/cat6-patch-leads/…

lockable cables!

Mark Henderson

@Andrew oohh la la

I like it

I should have ordered bright purple, lockable cat6 cables to solve my cable theft problem

ewwhite

01:29

Snip!

MDMoore313

@Andrew I started to mention that, but I thought everyone knew about those

Mark Henderson

(Instead I just ordered bright purple and orange ones)

MDMoore313

Here's some that ship outside of the Outback amazon.com/ft-CAT5e-FTP-Patch-Cord/dp/B005D7AZZK

Andrew

@MarkHenderson the "custom colour with custom boot colour" would be handy, too.

MDMoore313

Maybe these too blackbox.com/Store/lp/LockPORT.aspx

Mark Henderson

01:31

@Andrew They were expensive

I did look at those

Andrew

@MarkHenderson would be super handy for "which cable goes where?" problems

Mark Henderson

@Andrew I was just thinking about what additional identification I would want. Cable colour is obvious for vlan/subnet/dmz/san/etc

But cable colour + boot colour - what would the boot colour be useful for identifying?

Michael Hampton

I don't have any particular aversion to running new software, when it's necessary and justifiable.

Andrew

@MarkHenderson maybe if you had redundant paths and wanted to identify which cable connected to which endpoint?

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Yeah, actually that's a good idea

All cables that terminate on switch A or B have the same coloured boots, regardless of functionality

Andrew

01:37

we worked out that our SAN is connected in a left-right / top-bottom configuration but without actually knowing what goes where it's just... cables.

Mark Henderson

@Andrew $8.96 for a 3M cable

Better not have too many of them to do

Andrew

@MarkHenderson it's "Enterprise"!

Andrew

01:58

#calibrisucks

HopelessN00b

On a completely unrelated-to-anything note, I saw a question on the main about Raspberry Pi colocation services, and have to ask... is that actually a thing? It's like every time I think I'vefound the least useful thing ever, ServerFault shows me how wrong I really am.

Joel E Salas

@HopelessN00b I feel the same way

People end up doing the dumbest shit, just because they can

HopelessN00b

Well, spread the word... I'm gonna start a colocation service for $50 bills, marketed at the same folks who want to colo their Pis.

ewwhite

@HopelessN00b Mac Mini colo

MDMoore313

looks like a bunch of mini HALs

HopelessN00b

02:03

@ewwhite Yeah, that would be what I used to think the least useful thing in the world was, until I read about the Pi colocation service.

Mark Henderson

@HopelessN00b I saw a dude with his own RPi cluster, and for the first and only time, he had a legitimate reason for it

MDMoore313

@HopelessN00b seeing as how Mac no longer makes real servers, some datacenters have no choice, trust me

Mark Henderson

It was a dev cluster, he didn't give a shit about performance, he just needed to make sure his code was going to work in a HPC environment

And because he was a freelancer it needed to be cheap, so he spent $1000 on a 16-machine rpi cluster rather than $100,000 on a 16-machine proper cluster rack

HopelessN00b

@MDMoore313 right, I don't remotely get the appeal of Macs, but in that case, dealing with someone who gets wood over Apple products, I can see colocation. I don't want Macs anywhere near my real computers, either. But colocating a $35... almost-a-computer just makes no sense to me.

Andrew

@HopelessN00b iOS app development requires Mac hardware.

MDMoore313

02:08

^ There inlies the problem

Andrew

Given you can fit an rpi in a CD drive, I'm thinking I might turn an rpi into a NAS... inside my HTPC case.

Michael Hampton

I kind of like Mac OS X... as a desktop OS. Server? Uh..what are you smoking?

MDMoore313

While there is software for turning a standard mac into a terminal server, you still need macs

Michael Hampton

@Andrew I've actually seen server motherboards, complete with IPMI, that will fit inside your HTPC case.

HopelessN00b

@Andrew Yeah, can't wait until that dies off. I just... ugh, Apple. Combining the worst parts of Windows with the worst parts of Linux, and somehow being a multi-billion dollar corp for doing it. Thinking about it hurts my brain.

Andrew

02:10

yeah, now I'm going to get weird... it's not a true HTPC case (it's low profile but ATX) and it already has a motherboard in it. I want a second one, in a 5.25" bay.

Michael Hampton

I won't vouch for the quality of such boards, though...

MDMoore313

Does miniITX count? bit.ly/NWGcw7

@HopelessN00b Worst parts of BSD if you want to get technical

Michael Hampton

@MDMoore313 Yeah, that's what I'm talking about

MDMoore313

@MichaelHampton I happen to like that formfactor for headless appliances such as soho firewalls etc, you can make them with no moving parts and they're also fairly cheap

Shane Madden

Those 8 core atoms are really interesting.

HopelessN00b

02:13

@MDMoore313 same difference, more or less. There's MS, and there's UNIX-based OSes.

Michael Hampton

►

Andrew

blog.johndroach.com/2014/01/raspberry-pi-cd-rom-case.html

Shane Madden

One of my coworkers got one of the C2750 boards. Apparently it's outperforming the Gen4 AMD CPUs we have in cust systems.

MDMoore313

This one even sports dual nics
http://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-56-205-007

Shane Madden

Makes that big ol' HP moonshot chassis very interesting.

Michael Hampton

02:16

@HopelessN00b So apparently someone on reddit was giving away Android phones to anybody who would destroy their iPhone and upload video of it to YouTube.

cole

@MichaelHampton wow

MDMoore313

@MichaelHampton a bit extreme, and that's coming from someone who loves their gs3

ewwhite

@ShaneMadden meh

Michael Hampton

@MDMoore313 Well, when Apple bans your favorite app from the app store...

Shane Madden

@MDMoore313 I've seen one with 4 gig ports plus a dedicated IPMI port

cole

02:18

/pets 5S

Michael Hampton

►

HopelessN00b

@MichaelHampton damn. I wanted to do that to my company iPhone before I heard about free stuff for doing it. Wonder if he's still extending the offer...

Michael Hampton

@HopelessN00b Dunno, I think you missed it.

cole

I almost bought a Nexus 5

HopelessN00b

Damn. Well, I may just smash the hell out of the thing because I'm not allowed to assault my bosses.

Shane Madden

02:24

@MDMoore313 Found it: newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182851

Mark Henderson

@ShaneMadden Whoah

Shane Madden

@MarkHenderson I know!

Mark Henderson

6 sata, quad nic, 8-core 2.4ghz

Shane Madden

We'll see if Intel can do any damage with these. Definitely interesting.

Mark Henderson

4 DIMMs

That's insane

Shane Madden

02:26

Yeah. $400, and making older $15k servers look real bad.

Mark Henderson

That'd make a great NAS and a superb firewall

Even for light tasks like haproxy or varnish or a TS Gateway

Shane Madden

My coworker was testing those chips under ESXi - apparently they hold their own, somehow. Not sure if that quad port NIC would work in ESXi though.

MDMoore313

@ShaneMadden nice

@ShaneMadden Well @ least the proc supports virtualization ark.intel.com/products/77987

Shane Madden

@MDMoore313 Yeah, they really didn't hold back at all. This new generation of Atoms got good at being servers.

Mark Henderson

@ShaneMadden Guess how much a MBD-A1SAi-2750F-O costs in Australia

Shane Madden

02:32

@MarkHenderson Twice as much. At least.

Michael Hampton

@MarkHenderson About double what it costs in the rest of the world

Mark Henderson

@MichaelHampton Keep going

Shane Madden

And it's manufactured closer to you than us!

Mark Henderson

$834

dstore.com/buy/…;

They're the only retailer I can find

Michael Hampton

@MarkHenderson That's absurd. You could buy one from the US, have it shipped, and pay customs on it, and still come out way less than that.

Mark Henderson

02:34

@MichaelHampton No duty on personal purchases < $AUD1000 as well

So no customs fees

And for the same price as here, there's one in a 1ru chassis with a PSU fully shipped ebay.com.au/itm/…

Shane Madden

So what you really need

is someone to just buy stuff here and ship it there.

Mark Henderson

@ShaneMadden I have had the assistance of our bikeless cat for doing that twice ;)

Shane Madden

@MarkHenderson Haha, nice. And partial bike at this point.

I wonder how many years it will take to complete

Andrew

@MarkHenderson we should just send him a bike

Mark Henderson

@Andrew One of the $30 bikes from target

Shane Madden

02:38

That would be kinda awesome.

Mark Henderson

@ShaneMadden Haha who knows

HopelessN00b

Yeah, why is that, Mark? I mean I can understand media not wanting to deal with AUS trying to censor everything, but doesn't seem like it should apply to physical goods. That are manufactured by Indonesia children, much closer to you than us.

Andrew

@MarkHenderson a lego bike

@HopelessN00b effing Australia Tax.

Mark Henderson

@HopelessN00b Why is it that we pay so much more?

Because we have deeper pockets and corporations know it

Andrew

because our minimum wage is so much higher than yours?

Mark Henderson

02:39

We have a high minimum wage compared to most of the rest of the world

Andrew

because our hospitality staff don't need to beg (i.e. we don't have tipping)?

Shane Madden

Ask Adobe's CEO.

Mark Henderson

We're per capita more wealthy than a lot of places

And we tolerate much higher prices

If we continue to pay it, they have no incentive to lower it

Shane Madden

theverge.com/2013/2/14/3987706/…

Andrew

it's also cheaper to fly to the US to buy Visual Studio than to get it locally

HopelessN00b

02:40

Still, you don't see Luxembourg paying 2x American rates for everything.

Andrew

they used to claim "higher cost of retail" which was demonstrated as complete BS once it became a digital-only product. "Oh look, it cost soooo much more to put a credit-card sized serial number in Officeworks..."

Mark Henderson

When an average house in an average suburb is $550,000 and the cheapest new car on the market is $15,000 and the average joe is paying 39% tax and a grocery shop for a family of 3 is $300/week and petrol is $1.50/litre and we happily run our plastic through the POS machines for everything, what incentive do they have to charge us lower prices?

Andrew

@MarkHenderson Also, what incentive do I have to even buy the stuff? bittorrent here we come!

HopelessN00b

@Andrew sounds like a plan. Send your hot women to America to buy cheap goods and sekz American sysadmins. Win-win.

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Which give them an excuse to compound the problem

@Andrew Exactly. Steam games cost 1.5x the price here than in America, but there's no difference in delivery, content, sales, and there's no local sales support so they can't blame that

Steam blame the distributors for setting the sale prices

As do iTunes. But iTunes only have three pricing tiers for the distributors to choose from, and every single one of them is higher than the equivalent US price

So iTunes really can't blame anyone

MDMoore313

02:44

@MarkHenderson New car = 15K for a new car ain't bad @ all

Mark Henderson

@MDMoore313 Yeah we're talking something akin to a Daewoo Matiz with no options. i.e. not a car you really want to buy

Aussie cars made in Australia and shipped to the US are cheaper in the US than they are here

Figure that one out

Sorry that's $15,000 + taxes

So closer to $20k

MDMoore313

39% tax? Not much different than here, Uncle Sam takes about 1/3

Andrew

@MarkHenderson though now we won't have any local manufacturers, tariffs should disappear.

Mark Henderson

@MDMoore313 I was under the impression your tax rates were much lower than ours

@Andrew Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

ha ha ha ha ha ha

Andrew

also what is with "we don't support local industry" except if they're farmers?

Mark Henderson

02:48

I don't think the government will ever repeal any tax or tarriff we've been paying for years

Andrew

subsidising farmers but not car makers? Double Standard, Mr Rabbit!

Mark Henderson

Also, he never repealed the carbon tax, did he?

MDMoore313

For most people I run into their net = gross * .66, fed income tax soc sec tax medicare tax 8-|

Andrew

@MarkHenderson Do I even care? Canberra can die in a nuclear fire.

Mark Henderson

Of course he didn't. No government ever reverses the taxes of a previous government. They can just blame the previous people whilst collecting the money!

2

@Andrew Pretty much

And eventually we all forget that he ever promised to do it anyway and move on

Same as we will forget about all the pre-election promises that he has outright cancelled

ewwhite

02:58

@MarkHenderson what are taxes?

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Well, when an employer loves an employee, he pays him money for his services rendered. Then this guy called Sam comes in, and he takes a bunch of the money before the employee ever sees it. The the system is tolerated because Sam is meant to use the money to provide the employee vital public services, like trains, buses, roads, and health care. But what really happens is that Sam takes the money, and spends it on things like feasibility studies and projects...

... that are cancelled before they provide the public any benefit, basically funneling money into the pockets of the contractors. They also take your money, pay themselves a lot of money, and use that money to invest in products and companies that further take more of your money.

ewwhite

@MarkHenderson This is Third World America!! Chiraq - We let our infrastructure crumble!

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Well like I said, that's the theory

Andrew

03:16

@MarkHenderson brisbanetimes.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/…

etc. etc. etc.

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Yeh I read that

These people are so out of touch

Andrew

Malcolm "I own a shiny!" Turnbull as Minister for Stuff does not inspire confidence

Mark Henderson

The support the monopolies, and then slap you on the wrist for avoiding the monopolies, leaving you with no avenue for getting the content that they've only denied you access to so that they can get returns on their shares

And because I am with Telstra, because Cable, they will be the first one to stick their nose in the brown and inhale deeply

Andrew

@MarkHenderson so the real outcome of the Comcast / Time Warner thing in the US is that cable TV now owns the internet. Or vice-versa. or both.

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Either way, you're getting fucked

Andrew

03:20

yep.

It would be like if EA bought an ISP. Guess what's not going to work next week...

Though it would be kinda cool if Valve became an ISP.

Ubuntu switching to systemd! lololololololololololololololololololol

lolololololololololololololololololol

Mark Henderson

@Andrew I have no idea what that means

Andrew

@MarkHenderson they're ditching upstart.

Mark Henderson

@Andrew I have no idea what that means

Andrew

which they developed because sysv init sucked...

@MarkHenderson fairly major religious war amongst linux distros for the past few years

imagine if services.msc was replaced by "something else".

Mark Henderson

@Andrew Aahh

Ok

Andrew

03:26

and there were two or three competing "something else"s

Michael Hampton

@MarkHenderson There's no good Windows comparison, since the analogous Windows subsystems (e.g. smss, winlogon, etc.) aren't replaceable.

But the upshot is that now, nearly all Linux distributions will boot and start/manage their services in nearly exactly the same way.

Joel E Salas

@MichaelHampton Do you feel that the monoculture is dangerous in a way?

Mark Henderson

So they're replacing init.d?

Michael Hampton

@JoelESalas sysvinit was a monoculture. This is just a different one.

@MarkHenderson Yep. All that stuff is in the dustbin of history. (Though it will still read the old scripts if you still have them.)

Mark Henderson

Interesting

I'm sure that will fuck me when I move our current LTS systems to the next LTS

Michael Hampton

03:31

@MarkHenderson Services now start with a declarative unit file that describes the service, rather than a shell script.

@MarkHenderson I wouldn't expect to see it until 16.04 LTS; the change is too late for 14.04

Mark Henderson

Mmmkay

Well I'll keep an eye out for it in any case

Michael Hampton

@MarkHenderson And it does some stuff that sysvinit never could do, and that had to be done with third party tools, such as monitor a service and automatically restart it if it crashes

@MarkHenderson You'll see it sooner in RHEL 7, if you do any work with RHEL/CentOS

@JoelESalas And we don't really have a monoculture. There are still other init systems, e.g. Gentoo's OpenRC (Gentoo isn't making systemd the default, though they do offer it). If and when something better comes along, people will switch.

Which one would be better for this type of service? — neal 18 mins ago

Don't ask...

tylerl

04:26

is there a cheap way to acquire VMware 10 WS for personal use?

Mark Henderson

@tylerl I keep an eye out for discount codes for it

tylerl

@MarkHenderson just missed a 10% (or was it 20%) sale for valentine's day.

Mark Henderson

@tylerl retailmenot.ca/coupons/vmware.com

Yeahhh

Me too

> If you are a university or college student, prospective student or parent, or a member of the faculty and staff you can get upto 40% off VMware Fusion 6, Workstation 10, Essentials

So, if I'm just thinking about going to school, I can get your discount (prospective student)

tylerl

@MarkHenderson Hm. My wife is thinking of getting a masters degree in nursing. Wonder if that counts

Mark Henderson

Try it and see?

@tylerl store.vmware.com/store/vmware/html/pbPage.AcademicLandingPage

tylerl

04:32

@MarkHenderson how do they tell? They just ask for the school name.

...and apparently that's it.

Mark Henderson

@tylerl No idea, that page doesn't load for me

I might need to fire up tor or one of those proxy services and try it

tylerl

You just say "yes, I hereby decleare that I deserve a discount"... and that's it.

Mark Henderson

It just dumps me on the retail page for AU

Michael Hampton

@tylerl VMware audits this data to insure that academic purchases are only made by eligible participants. If VMware determines that you were not eligible to purchase from the VMware Academic Store, you authorize VMware to charge your credit card or Paypal account for the difference in price between the public retail price of the same product (published on vmware.com) and the price you paid on the date you placed the order.

Better use a single-use card number.

tylerl

@MichaelHampton yeah. I was about to say that sounds surprisingly low-risk

worst case: you pay what you would have paid otherwise.

Michael Hampton

04:40

Hmmm... none of my .edu email addresses exist anymore....

tylerl

@MichaelHampton Also... VMWare accepts wire transfers for payment. Realy?

Michael Hampton

@tylerl Well, of course. You don't usually place multimillion dollar orders on your American Express...though I'm sure someone does.

freiheit

@tylerl I doubt they really audit single small purchases, either. Buy 100 vSphere licenses, OTOH, and they're a lot more likely to audit it.

tylerl

@freiheit possibly. Also, it sounds less-than-simple to do an audit. Can you get a list of active students from North Chesterfield Community College, or what have you?

Sounds like the sort of thing privacy advocates would get all uppity about.

freiheit

@tylerl That would violate FERPA.

Michael Hampton

04:44

@tylerl Heh... they're lazy. I doubt very much that anybody with a .edu email that verified the email address will ever get audited. It's the ones who sign up with a trashmail address that will get hit. If they're smart.

freiheit

They'd have to ask you to prove that you're a student.

Andrew

@MichaelHampton I have an "alumni" address from my .edu, wonder if it would work

Michael Hampton

@Andrew Probably

Way back in the day, at one university I was associated with, a student group was allowed to colocate their servers in the university's datacenter. Or what passed for a datacenter. It was a royal mess. I had accounts on several of those boxes...

Mark Henderson

@freiheit Finally got onto it; they have "Parent/Guardian" listed

So yeah - my 4 year old needed a copy for his preschool

freiheit

@MichaelHampton Crazy. The university I work at makes it a royal pain for campus departments to colocate servers in our DC. A student group? haha! hah! no. not happening.

tylerl

04:50

@MarkHenderson yeah. Who isn't either a student or the parent of a student. That's a surprisingly small demographic.

Michael Hampton

Especially since they also say K-12 are eligible.

Mark Henderson

@MichaelHampton Kings Langley Long Day Care totally needs VMWare Workstation so that they can teach toddlers virtualisation the right way

Michael Hampton

@freiheit Oh, this was the mid-90s, too. Everything had public IPs and nobody even knew what a firewall was. Though, we couldn't actually get in to physically touch the servers without an escort, but it wasn't often that that was necessary.

freiheit

@MarkHenderson Need VMware workstation to run that preschool education app, right?

tylerl

@freiheit It's required on MY computer. Windows doesn't get to touch bare metal in this house.

Mark Henderson

04:53

@freiheit Yep cos it's only available for Solaris but they need to keep Windows XP as their desktop OS

Michael Hampton

@tylerl Amen brother!

tylerl

@MichaelHampton it's a matter of basic sanitation.

Michael Hampton

Your PC is ritually unclean! You must purify it by performing the sacrifice of Format C Colon.

tylerl

@MichaelHampton What's the windows equivalent of dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda ?

Andrew

@tylerl get the Windows version of dd of course

Mark Henderson

04:57

@tylerl There is none

Michael Hampton

@tylerl format c: /p Requires Vista/2008 or later.

freiheit

@tylerl Boot knoppix and run dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

Michael Hampton

The /p option zeroes out the drive.

Andrew

chrysocome.net/dd

tylerl

@MichaelHampton ah. Isn't kinda the opposite of "format" then?

Michael Hampton

04:59

Well, it also formats it (as NTFS) after it zeroes the drive. So.. side effects?

Transcript for