@Undo Ignore him - school IT techs love the challenge really

@Dan ಠ_ಠ

Not done much with HPUX myself @JennyD - played with AIX which was interesting

@Dan OK, then... NET SEND 'IM WINNING'

@Undo net send * "go eagles"

@Dan Yep. I was really not alone in that situation.

See, I prefer things like NET SEND * "A violation has been detected, your computer will be seized"

@TomO Better yet, NET SEND * 'This request has been logged.'

@RobM I've been working with it for 8 years. The security containment system is fairly impressive.

Granted I was a pain in the ass at school but the network admin didn't actually do any adminning and just spent each day evey day pulling students out of lessons for having a hello.exe.jpg in their work area.

Also, IMHO, the only reason to use HPUX instead of one of the free ones. REally.

@Undo All requests are logged.

@tombull89 When I was at school the computers weren't actually networked...

@Jenny I tried to access my Google docs for a whole year. Then I switched to iCloud and they promptly blocked it :)

@tombull89 I was a complete dick

And yes, it's quite impressive :p

@Undo It's possible there was a technical reason because Apple isn't know for it's manageability and standards (.local I'm look at you)

@tombull89 Amusingly, my mother is part-timing as network admin at her school in addition to teaching. She learned from me :-)

@tombull That shouldn't apply to iCloud.*com*, though. Should it?

@Undo Don't know. My tolerance of Apple gear is very low, and my use of it is even less.

Depends, though, was it personal or school stuff you were storing on iCloud?

@tombull Everything. After they killed GDocs, I put my school stuff in iCloud with everything else.

I'm trying to do some bitwise operations and I can't get my head in gear

Opposite end of the spectrum here: you seem to hate Apple, I'm an iOS developer. Went to this year's WWDC.

@Undo We'd frown on that here because we've got no backups of it.

@Undo I don't hate Apple. I believe it has it's place in education where the pros/cons are weighed up and there is a need for it.

@tombull89 In the art and music tech depts

@tombull With all the blocking, it got to where I just brought in my iPad to write stuff on. All my teachers were Apple geeks too, thankfully.

My main gripe with Apple stuff in schools is that it seems get bought because the senior staff see "ooh apple shiny that'll look good on our brochures" without any input from the staff that'll run it/support it.

@Undo I bet you cause all sorts of trouble at school..

iOS dev at 13? notbad.jpg.

@TomO Nope. I caused the least. Seriously :)

@Undo I found when i was at school that i got bored so quickly, i just spent my time fiddling with stuff.

i wrote LOADS of VB6

I only really started messing around when I got bored as well - my IT course was basically a glorified Office course for two years - I was expecting web design and taking apart hardware.

@TomO'Connor I made money doing freelance PHP work when I should have been doing an IT project. No wonder I only managed a C :D

i wrote a remote management system for the school so they could psexec stuff on the client computers

@Dan I got a C for IT too, because I wrote code the teachers didn't understand.

I've got to go now. Thanks for a fresh look on the previous situation and for a nice chat about net send. Bye :)

I had this enormous access DB, was some pseudo-ecommerce thing

and it was so slow to load..

i wrote an in-memory key-value store (like memcached), in VC++

You weren't normal, mate.

I've just spent the last 5 minutes figuring out Undo's real name, school location and so on.

ooh, hold on, let me play

@TomO'Connor Closes WHOIS page Thanks.

Just went for the who.is as well

@tombull89 let's see if you can make the slightly less obvious inference jump(s) though

@TomO'Connor that happened to me on a project - someone asked for a complex database in access for a HND course I was on, and couldn't understand the sql statements I used in place of access macros, etc.

I've also found a picture of him at WWDC

morning

@RobM My college was ace - it was the first time I was able to 'stretch my legs' technically in an academic sense.

hey basil

@dan yeah I get that, the stuff at school was way too easy

@RobM Problem is, it just wasn't IT in any real sense. Like Tom says, it was just an office administrators course and bored me shitless. I once got banned from the computer suite for playing with BASIC on the Acorns.

I think what pissed my teachers off the most was that, although I only got a C, I got that C by condensing 2 years worth of coursework into a couple of hours in the last week. There was no written exam from what I recall, so it was all that

@TomO I'd really prefer you didn't share that type of information here... It's great you found it. But please don't share it here :) WWDC was fun, by the way.

@Dan See above.

@Undo You should be more careful with it then.

I'm usually amused just how easy it is to find that kind of thing from something like whois info.

@Tom I get that. Could you please not share it here?

I won't .

I am amazed at it too - it's great how much info a Whois plus Google can get you.

Thanks.

@Undo I'm not sure great's the word i'd use.

@Tom scary, then

Probably a better word.

@TomO'Connor Depends how you look at it - I'm sure we could find loads about each other, given that both of our CV's are out there, LinkedIn etc

I don't tend to worry too much

@Dan I don't care. I'm over 18

Undo isn't.

See the difference?

Oh, I didn't realise

I make a point of being easily googlable.

I heard you make a point of being easy.

I'm constantly battling for SEO terms with a "comedian" from the 60s.

@Dan I do try to keep some personal things separate from my actual name.

@dan yeah, I knew IT education in the UK has been pretty dodgy, I was lucky to do proper "computer science" O and A levels.

Considering my home phone number has been on my whois info for nearly 10 years, i've had surprisngly few crank calls

I guess I'm kind of glad of it now, but I reckon I'd have gone the full programmer route if I'd have had the chance to do some kind of CS A Level

aye

Afternoon, guess who deleted a production instance today \o/

But my college course was very much a Systems Administrators / IT Pro course which set me up for this.

@ITHedgeHog Whoops

@ITHedgeHog uh oh

@ITHedgeHog Anyway, nobody deleted anything. Unfortunately, it appears there was a rare race condition in the management software which caused an accidental delete.

In my defence, naming it StorageDev and telling me its unused kind of makes me think its an unused development thing.

oh.

Turns out our core services were writing too it ;)

I don't always break production, but when I do I take down core.

@ITHedgeHog That actually is a good defence.

Yeah, nothing with Dev in the name should ever be business critical (Unless you're a software dev company, the rules change there I guess :D)

@ITHedgeHog ouch - backups ?

@Iain are you kidding me, its the clouds

Cloudscale means no backups.

::boggles::

@ITHedgeHog What kind of 2-bit operation do you work for?!

@ITHedgeHog Um. Cloudscale means irresponsible and insane?

lol

@ITHedgeHog how does that work then ... ?

@Iain tongue in cheek comment, I just missed the ;)

it appears I did too ;)

@ITHedgeHog for some people, that is the only way to learn...

It kind of went "Dan you've deleted StorageDev, its broken the core services" My reply "Where was it documented that it used StorageDev in production?"

@ITHedgeHog and that is how they learn the value of documentation :-)

@ITHedgeHog I approve of your excellent name

@Dan Name???

Oh yeah, sodding dumbass I am

:D

Although I'm a 'Daniel' here shudders

@ITHedgeHog could you please tell me what is the difference between "meta" and "main" user here?

@ShaonaBose Meta is the site for discussion about the main site. So main here is serverfault, meta.serverfault is the site where we talk about serverfault issues.

@ShaonaBose Sorry I cannot, this is an excellent site to ask on: meta.serverfault.com

Or what @tombull89 said :)

@tombull89 oh okay. Thank you.

@ITHedgeHog okay.

Man, I needed that sandwich. I've had less fulfilling sex

@tombull89 NAd are the users here a bit old and all?

*and

I mean, people who are kind of aged

Is ServerFault full of old people? Uhm...not really.

(also, lol)

no no..not the ServerFault. I meant, this stackexchange site

@ShaonaBose That is a matter of definition

This StackExchange site...is ServerFault.

This room is the ServerFault chat room.

@JennyD I didn't quite get you..sorry?

@tombull89 okay..a bit confusing

@ShaonaBose What do you mean by "old"? 30? 40? 50? 60?

kind of aged? Well I feel old and worn out today but that's cos I've been sleeping badly lately

@JennyD 50+

The stack exchange sites are broadly aimed at people of all ages and backgrounds, this isn't a place for young people or old people

just people

@ShaonaBose Can I ask why you'd think this? What are you trying to find out?

@RobM okay. I get it.

@ShaonaBose Given that ServerFault is aimed at professional sysadmins, and that most (but not all) people in the chat room fit that profile, it's likely that most of us are at least older than, say, 25. Beyond that, if you want to know, you'd need to check people's profiles, for those that have entered their date of birth (which not everybody does).

@Dan well..I was just a lil curious about the users of this site

@JennyD aah..i see

@JennyD You've given me a satisfactory answer. thank you.

@ShaonaBose the users of this site range from mid teens to 60+; this particular room is (mostly) mid teens to 50+

Then I'm out of place

why is that ?

@Iain what is the age bar for mid-teen?

there is no age bar that's just what we get

As long as you're over 13, you're welcome here.

phew!

then I'm not out of place

over 13 and under 130

not at all, sysadmins have a reputation for being mean... which is sometimes deserved if we're being honest, but we're not unwelcoming, we just don't do a good job of putting up with fools

Fools are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

@ITHedgeHog sriracha!

@RobM Ok. a bit That was harsh.

*That was a bit harsh

On a totally unrelated note, it's surprising how easy it is to build a new Mac OSX image for all our workstations now that we're using SCCM to manage them

@ShaonaBose not meant to be harsh on you, I can assure you...

@ShaonaBose other than this room is mainly for serverfault and not EL&U which appears to be your main (only) site, so don't expect erudite discussion on the finer points of English language

@RobM you mean, doing things right improves the way they work? amazing, innit...

i know

@Iain you may expect some nitpicking though, because that is kind of part of the sysadmin personality...

@JennyD perhaps

@Iain okay.

I am out of the office for 2 weeks after today. woohoo.

I may celebrate by sleeping all day monday

@RobM going anywhere ?

@iain maybe the odd day trip here and there depending on how we feel but mostly I'll be sorting out the garden I expect...

@RobM Me too, except it's a week at a building site followed by a week at a server build centre

what fun!

Yeah, next week is okay - but I have to stay in the wonderful town of Wakefield the week after. Looks like you'll have some sunny days for your hols, though

yay :-)

If you get bored of your garden, feel free to come up and take a bash at mine

@Iain english schmenglish. We should all speak newspeak :)

@DennisKaarsemaker 1984 was a warning, not a "how to" guide.

@tombull89 that's just what Goldstein would say

hehe @dan nice try but my garden is a building site right now, i'll be bored of it a long time before I'm finished with it ;-)

Hehe

I need a new fence

and need to re-lay the brick paving

which'll be expensive for me as I'm not supposed to lift anything much heavier than my wallet with my messed up back...

so fixing that problem will make my wallet lighter and easier to lift too, I suspect!

@RobM great news then - your wallet will be much lighter after that :)

exactly

I've got the fence arranged through trade - a builder I know needed some computer stuff sorted so we swapped my time for his on that score

I think if I ask nicely he'll do the paving for a fair price on top, too...

@RobM I do that for horse riding - I think I get the better deal though :)

Sounds like a good deal to be honest :)

yawn

Just idly found this. I giggled lots. NSFW link: reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1ho62b/…

hey birdie

bites @DennisKaarsemaker's finger off

So much stuff was in the review queue this morning.

and so little stuff worth answering showed up on the front page.

heh

I think the appropriate thing is this, though:

@FalconMomot serverfault.com/questions/520929/… the last bit doesn't parse well

Grammatically you mean?

it doesn't look like I'm allowed to edit it anymore though, so I may just leave it

@FalconMomot I wasn't entirely sure what you were saying

@Iain that the number of open ports doesn't act as a "security coefficient" to coin something, and that his application security is more important and he's barking up the wrong tree?

What is with all these questions about yum lately?!

@FalconMomot or apache.

That too.

The yum ones are especially annoying... I don't use it or any distribution that requires it, and largely this is because it's awful.

@FalconMomot yeah, it's not a patch on .deb

@TomO'Connor Actually, my preference is portage :)

@FalconMomot eugh.

@FalconMomot you use Gentoo?!

@TomO'Connor in production!

@FalconMomot Wut?

Are all your servers hand built by dwarves?

Do you really need that extra performance boost of -O4?

heh

I just like being able to insert my own patches and recompile stuff to avoid binary incompatibility

and my servers are all significantly overprovisioned on CPU because it isn't economical to do otherwise

Ha. The text should be replaced with arch though.

@Falcon You're a lot less sexy as a Gentoo user.

@TomO'Connor Heh.

...why so much hate?

@FalconMomot bad experiences, mostly.

mm

it was massively hard to use in 2006

and 2005

wow, I've been using it for like 9 years now!

I was using Slackware and RedHat in those days

I started using Ubuntu from it's release day.. whenever that was.

2004 apparently

oct 20, 2004 +/- a week

I started using it end of september

The biggest problem with Linux is all the distros. All forks should be based on the same code and simply be optimized for different jobs. Software should be interoperable between all of them.

@Basil Isn't it?

The biggest problem is no fucker sticks to the FHS

@TomO'Connor I dont know, I see that every piece of linux software has a list of distros it'll work with

@Basil I'm never sure how much i believe that..

I'm not talking about compiling it yourself, I'm talking about the ability to install it as a user

Oh, i don't really think of myself as a "user" in the traditional sense.

If it's not available as a package (RPM or whatever), it doesn't count

so i dunno.. if i want something, i'll make it work.

@FalconMomot Most of the people in here are too stupid to use Gentoo, so they mock it instead

</troll>

@Olipro Most people in here have better things to do with their time than recompiling kernels.

When it comes to unix, I am a user. I administer storage using a AIX box.

@Basil You're supposed to compile it.

or at least, that's the vision

and also why most people (who aren't closed-source annoying people) distribute their software primarily as source

@FalconMomot I don't pretend to understand linux, but when I pick some software package and it just installs and works, that's what all software should be

which is also why we have binary distributions.

heh

I think this is the whole reason basically that I use OSX at home

because I CBA to spend my spare-time kernelfucking too

Windows 7 is more to my taste

Windows is a hell of a lot better with Powershell

for a home pc, at least

@Basil The just works thing is honestly a little too much to ask when you don't have people being paid to ensure it centrally... a lot of software is just written and released, and... writing a build system for it is hard enough without having to make it trivial to use; as often as not doing that requires a different skill set.

although, it could do with a native ssh binary

instead of using PuTTY

ubuntu does an astoundingly good job of it, mind

@TomO'Connor they'd probably butcher it.

All they'd have to do is compile openssh..

Microsoft DNS server is just BIND, after all

@FalconMomot it's the tragedy of the commons. People keep thinking that by separating out into their own group that will have to redo the same work just in order to have better control over the direction of the project that they're not really hurting the overall goal of having an open source OS.

@TomO'Connor you'ld rather fuck the finder instead? :)

anyways, it is what it is. Unless a better more central version of Linux is created, the status quo will remain.

@DennisKaarsemaker I find Finder fairly usable..

I do spend an inordinate amount of time in iterm, though

I live in terminator

got ~30 windows open at work, most with more than one ssh session

I'm used to PuTTY. I know its not perfect but we've reached an understanding. I'm happier using SSH from my mac though

hey, I notice a few perl mavens around... is there any way I can sort an array the same way bash would sort a list if I used sort -k 1.5?

sort { f($a) <=> f($b) } @foo

there's really nothing wrong with the status quo for linux tbh :P

sub f { whatever you want to extract a key }

Who's actually working today?

me

@DennisKaarsemaker that f()- will it work on letters and numbers?

@ewwhite me

mucking about with puppet

I just wish I wasn't.

@ewwhite me

or rather, wish i was working on a project that wasn't quite so shit.

@Basil f() you need to write. It can do whatever you want :)

@ewwhite I'm at work. Whether I do any remains to be seen.

I'm not even sure if I have today off.

I was geared up to go to work but no one else seems to be here so I guess it was a false alarm.

Ha

SQL server 2000's EOL date was in April, if I'm reading the badly formatted date correctly.

it was either april 9th or september 4th of 2013.

Activation by phone fails, as it's an evaluation version.

Ha.

Not got Technet / MSDN?

apparently at microsoft nobody thinks you can have a computer without internet access anymore. that's been the case for a good long while.

@Dan Nope :(

and technet is going away!

For some stupid fucking reason

as we're effectively an OEM

/me :(

What a great song: youtube.com/watch?v=k5CltsEN8DQ

I have Windows 2008 on 2,000 floppy disks.

@FalconMomot: that gives me a serious sad

I can't understand the logic behind shutting technet down.. nearly half of the pro sysadmins I know use it for lab software

since it was one of the things I'd have gotten when I got a proper job

@TomO'Connor How does any large org not have a subscription?

and you can't use MSDN for any kind of production testing (clearly stated in the license), you have to use technet..

@Dan: not everyone is a large organisation? ;p

@pauska Say again? You sure about that

SO if technet is going away...

@Dan yes there are some weird licensing rules

@tombull89: the arguement is people can use the eval versions for evaluation

@pauska They probably think people will buy MSDN (which they are amending to allow for the kind of testing use technet is currently for), or retail copies

@JourneymanGeek The eval runs for...what, 90 days?

MSDN is only for developers. You can't use say MS SQL from MSDN and then have non-MSDN subscribers use the SQL server to test software.

@pauska That doesn't sound right, Technet is pence compared to soem of the MSDN subs

but MSDN is 10x as expensive if you need OSes

@tombull89: yeah

I don't know how you guys all a mange this stuff. I have a firm that I use just for distilling the Microsoft licensing rules.

@pauska Yeah, right.

@FalconMomot because it permits developers to stay on the OS, it's not just for eval

but only developers

@pauska Ah, that;s a little different to what I was thinking. We use MSDN for lab work, but the whole company has MSDN

or well, someone with a MSDN sub

which is why we have over 6 MSDN subs here now.. crazy expensive

@pauska Yeah, they're changing the MSDN license a little

@FalconMomot they are? source?

not 100% sure on the specifics but the intention is to cover some of the things technet did, like letting you install it.

@pauska hang on...

@FalconMomot The OS license is the cheapest bit of MSDN

might be for MPN only... technet.microsoft.com/subscriptions/ms772427 @pauska

@Dan You can get a la carte MSDN? I thought it was tiered.

@FalconMomot It is, but the OS one is the lowest

@pauska better source: msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/cc150618.aspx

@Dan Right, I'm an idiot - I meant if you need office to test with

2.6k/year to renew; almost 7k to start

Yeah, it's not cheap :(

It's so colossally expensive that it would be cheaper to evaluate using retail licenses

I dunno how much we pay per annum, though we are a partner

one good thing about all this is that people need to get MUCH better at powershell scripting, seeing that your lab will have to be redone every 180 days

Haha

@pauska yay repeatable results!

When i started my own company, i registered with MS Bizspark

@pauska ha.

effectively 3 years free full MSDN

I guess I DO have to work today.

MPN I think would be helpful for the company I am starting

Anyone wanna do my VMware install for me?

@ewwhite No.

see, there is one thing I miss about a ticket-driven work environment, which is that fridays were really slack

but...

I enjoy doing research a lot more than solving tickets.

@tombull89 - all 120hz/3D'd up in BF3 now :)

:(

licensing.microsoft.com

:(

@Chopper3 Why do you have so much money :( gimme some. Or come play with me in WoT instead

@Chopper3 3D BF3? Bleeeeeh.

@FalconMomot I think thats the idea

sadly, least in acedemia, there's no really viable alternatives I know of

@JourneymanGeek I am certain that it is.

(tho, I can get away with running a copy in a VM on an eval version of windows, since I mainly need it for citations)

and I do most of my work in a text editor ;p

our microsoft enterprise agreement doesn't terminate until 2017

which means I can get technet until then

yay

I'm listening to a recording of a telephone call through my headset. It went on for some time, and then I went to interject :(

haha

@pauska the right amount of work multiplied by the right type of smart to the exponent of luck :)

@pauska been listening to some Sondre Lerche recently btw

@tombull89 looks amazing, be better at night

@Chopper3 yeah he's OK, but I get a bit tired of his style after a while

jukebox?..

@MikeyB O.o

Yeah… which shouldn't happen as I don't have any HSM on this filesystem.

This is a little....odd

Both the premise for the film and the post

yes, even by our standards...