@MarkHenderson I've used it a little bit, when you're working in MS apis it is pretty good. Its kind of more like a mix python and bash from what I have used. I think it suffers more from its extendability. Languages like python and perl have all kinds of different modules to make them do all sorts.

When I used it at least (about 3 years ago now) that was not the case.

Lots of PS modules too

hell, powerCLI for VMware is just PowerShell with VMware modules

@MDMarra Fanboi.

Heh, I'm happy to stand corrected.

Can you do signal handling in it?

@ewwhite I dunno python though

I basically need to learn python, right?

career-wise

Yes.

@MIfe not sure what signal handling is :x

If you know perl is pretty easy.

@ewwhite Ruby! Don't listen to @DennisKaarsemaker!

Isn't ruby dead!

hasnt everyone moved on to Go or Rust or poop?

@MIfe yeah, i don't know Perl either.

@MDMarra lets say you run some script, you create a whole bunch of temporary files in directories, then for some reason outside of your influence someones kills your process by sending it a TERM (because windows is posix compliant right? :)) Can you receive the signal and use the opportunity to remove all the junk you created during your run and then exit gracefully?

@MIfe PS is infinantly expandable; it has access to all the native .NET modules and you can load any other .NET module

@MDMarra I would totally develop in a language called poop

@ewwhite Any languages?

I think it's a function of environments, but I once had a dedicated scripting guy in Hong Kong that we dumped all of our heavy lifting on...

PHP for the record is a little pants comparatively speaking. Its not very posixy in its api.

@MIfe oh not sure, tbh. Since you can leverage .net directly inside of PS, I would assume yes, but don't know for sure.

@MIfe Just the usual floating by on Bash... But I can't think of any environments I've ever worked in that required much scripting.

@ewwhite It opens a LOT of possibilities. Believe me.

Do you guys actually use Bitlocker on your company's desktops? I don't mean laptops...I mean desktops.

@TheCleaner used to

No longer stuck with 'what works best'. You just glue/wedge that shit together and make that sucker work.

@MIfe Yes and no... Remember, I've usually been surrounded by superstar developers.

@MDMarra not anymore? It seems silly to deploy desktops with it. I mean, I guess someone COULD steal a desktop...but it's pretty unlikely.

So let's say in a RHEL ecosystem... with Puppet, Cobbler, automated deployment... maybe some VMware...

Different company now

where does Python help me/

We did at $university

You're missing out ;).Not just opportunities wise but you can better appreciate the platform you work on too!

@MIfe See my last firm... I had an entire team that had varying skillsets... Most had limited scripting, but rather specialized in one area or the other...

@ewwhite Ruby'd help with some of the more interesting Puppet stuff...

@freiheit Rubs on leg

@freiheit I definitely appreciate that... especially for extending Puppet.

@ewwhite Python would help you be able to figure out how to write this script: github.com/seveas/hacks/blob/master/puppet.py

Since I believe cobbler is actually written in python theres a distinct advantage there.

RHEL generally exports a lot of its interfaces into python.

@freiheit It would... since many of RHEL's tools leverage Python

@MIfe Is a repository of 3384 scrips/commandlets expandable enough.

@ewwhite I mostly used Ruby for extending facter and for puppet templates, not for extending puppet itself. (yet)

but in environments like my last, where things needed to be a s standard as possible... where do you draw the line between finding the right tool and building it?

@Scott well its not necessarily pre-cooked scripts that would interest me. Its being able to use the interfaces exported (which I think MS does a good job of its own interfaces). From what you've said about other stuff its probably true now as well.

@MIfe Unlikely.

Most of the things where I've seen custom scripting be a necessity were Microsoft and VMware automation.

oddly enough

Like... standing up new ESXi hosts at Logicworks was ~140 separate steps.

@ScottPack shame :(. Linux has a 20 year head start. I think thats what probably helps. Just has an existing ecosystem for it.

Scripting is useful everywhere but there's VMWare Orchestrator and System Center orchestrator as well as SCCM

Sometimes I pity windows. They want to do the right thing, certainly since Vista onwards but all the horrific backwards compatibility they need to support holds them back.

@MIfe Oh, what? I got pinged so I was just giving the most likely response. I don't know what you guys are talking about.

both can replace a substantial amt of scripting but are greatly enhanced by knowing PowerShell

@MDMarra But that wasn't enough (and I don't know anyone who's ever used Orchestrator)

@ewwhite Step 1: Blow flames out on destination host.

@ewwhite I do!

@ScottPack @Scott Theres too many scotts!

@MIfe When I started at my current job IT had about 160 people and, I think, 7 Scotts.

we'll see what the next challenge is... interviews for the next few days

@MIfe Someone call the English to mop the bastards up!

@ewwhite You missed your chance to become an Oracle eBusiness Suite Administrator.

@ScottPack I run away from anything Oracle at this point

@ewwhite I can give you a practice scripting task we use for our engineers if you want. has to be the binaries though so if you dont wanna run binaries off some random strange guy off the internet then so be it!

@ewwhite At the rate they acquire companies you best keep running.

@MIfe I'm in the middle of my programming test for one firm right now.

I mean, I think I can understand some of this when there's a purpose... or a direct goal.

It's like Puppet... if you're not using it every day, you lose the skills.

(or maybe I'm just really stupid)

Well, depending on how much you know about the Linux operating system and the interfaces it provides for you to get stuff done you may find the task somewhat challenging.

I.E if you're not really exposed much to systems apis basically

@MIfe probably...

Well, if you ever want it to get some familiarity with scripting for a task let me know.

@MIfe I felt like I dug deep when I needed to...

but with no direction...

@ewwhite Bit like my sex life in my younger years.

:-X

I'm not referring to the question there ;)

either that, or I've been faking it for too long :)

@ewwhite I've found that the best way to learn a programming language is a series of real tasks to do in the language (each one expanding what you need to know from the last). Anything too much like just reading or make-work homework is a lot easier to forget.

@freiheit That's how it's worked for me. Same for scripting... start with commands in sequential order... then variables, functions, arguments, better logic...

@ewwhite scripting == programming

But then there's a part of my career where nobody's pushed me far enough... One of these job opportunities would have me jumping into something I know nothing about.

Thats how I started, but that only gets you so far.

and I'd need to learn Python and Ruby.

Eventually I found myself basically soaking up all the man pages I found for man 2 syscalls

@ewwhite learning the first programming language is hard (just choose one that uses posix semantics -- not PHP).

Bad typo, learning the first one is hard!

Learning others is easy.

Well, I wonder if I missed the boat.

I learn php first (which I regret). Took me a week though to pick up perl. A weekend to figure out python. A week to pick up C.

@MDMarra - so, 2 weeks down doing only 2012 R2 Core installs where I can and I have learned to love PS v4 like my favourite child

@ewwhite What programming have you done? puppet? bash? PowerShell? Stuff with variables? Complex variables (arrays, structs, hashes, etc)? Loops? Conditionals? Subroutines/defines/multi-item-chunks-that-take-parameters? Recursion?

New-NetIPAddress, add-computer, etc

@freiheit I have a CS degree from a good engineering school! But somehow started down the DBA and sysadmin path in college.

C, Java, PHP, Bash, Puppet...

@ewwhite So you did stuff in some kind of "Real" programming language in school (Java, C++), and then promptly forgot all of it?

@freiheit absolutely all gone...

@ewwhite I made a concious decision to do systems programming as I am a sysadmin. Not data modelling.

although, I've had to touch code here and there...

Many, many C books and tutorials go binary trees, linked lists and data serialization.

@ewwhite Python is like Java+Bash with indentation defining blocks.

Seriously not that necessary for a sysadmin.

and in the early days of being a Linux fanboi and downloading everything I could from freshmeat.net (don't google), I've run into the same FOSS software issues as everyone else.

So the stuff I did yesterday for the VFS/systemtap question is what I consider 'systems' programming (because its primarily made up with system calls, not creating reams and reams of function trees to do magic stuff.

@MIfe It's useful to know the basics of how those work sometimes, but it's really really unlikely you need to actually implement them directly.

@freiheit really rare.

Well, I often use linked lists, rarely may implement a hash bucket. I very rarely do trees (I just cheat and use the rb-tree implementation in stdlib)

See, it's a different focus.

@ewwhite If you're implementing them directly, you're probably doing something wrong. These things are either built into the modern languages or the language comes with good libraries for them.

If you want to do some functional stuff in C, basically man 2 syscalls is your friend.

and I've clearly been on the hardware side of things.

I use deeply nested hashes to model tree data in perl all the time. :)

Ugh, I am sure god has taken 5 years off of your life expectancy for that crime against programanity.

@MIfe print $servers[3]{'Network Interface'}[2]{'Mac Address'};

:(

(actually looking at the data structure I most commonly touch it's arrays and hashes all up in each other)

But um... I know how to install a RAID controller?!? :(

@MIfe It's like a cheap struct of structs, except it's Perl so hashes are cheap

@ewwhite If you do systems programming in C, you'll be able to run an strace and actually know whats happening :). Isn't that motivation enough? :)

@MIfe I've spent my share of time in strace... It can be beneficial even without a systems programming background.

@franheit yeah. I wrote a bunch of bacula code (for quota support) and really appreciated the->wonderful.amount->of->indirection.they->implemented->in->their.code

@MIfe Somehow everytime I need to do that, it turns out either (a) I need to dig through 100,000 lines of output or (b) it turns out there's no system calls at all happening when the program has its problem.

Then ltrace is your friend instead ;)

@MIfe It's always good to throw an anonymous code block 6 layers deep in your complicated data structure. Just for fun.

Oh, shit. Wait. I kinda do that another place.

As a matter of fact, I have a feeling that my old company traded that bacula quota code for free commercial support.

Wonder if they have announced the 'new feature' in bacula yet.

ohai

isp decided to drop me off the net again

tomorrow I will drop ISP

that looks an awful lot like perl

can't be sane

that looks awful like perl you mean ;)

@DennisKaarsemaker You dropped my internet connection? I'll drop your wife! </insanity-kaarsemaker>

@DennisKaarsemaker Hmmm... the part that goes like this may prove your point: print LISTFILE join("\t", map {$_->[0]} @{$printkeys{$list}}), "\n";

@MIfe It looks slightly better when markdown doesn't kill my indentation.

I like cats.

(that's about all I can add here)

pwned-by-a-wild-markdown

@ewwhite beware. @Wesley may start humping you.

@franheit j/k . I just personally avoid perl. I can write code in it and 2 weeks later not know wtf I've written.

@Franheit? Is Eric going to start talking with a Queens accent and wearing tight pencil skirts?

@Wesley oh the mental images...

hey, before I possibly break a production SQL server... are there any issues with using the copy database wizard to make a clone of a database for testing?

@Wesley A pencil skirt? With these quads and calves? Hemline definitely needs to hit well above or below the knee, not right at it. Sheesh! What are you thinking?!?

wow

I just rejected the first suggested edit that was outright bad spam

at least the first I've seen

They didn't even TRY

Anonymous users can suggest edits?

@freiheit They make calf length pencil skirts.

I've had one can of soup as sustenance in the last 18 hours.

Blah.

@MarkHenderson Enter-PSSession

Sigh... cleaning up my monitoring graphs...

I never got to the bottom of this one.

@ewwhite You're concerned why the load went down to 10? This is topsy-turvy world you live in, eh? ;)

@freiheit The client asked us to bump the monitoring alert threshold to 100.

I had a theory about the cause of the issue... but the reason was soooo ridiculous, nobody wanted to hear me out.

If you offline a CPU does that red bar go down?

just curious :)

@MIfe Yes.

I.E is it measuring the number of online processors?

Christ, you like to run tasks on that host dont you?

Most of my systems are CPU clock speed bound... and can't leverage the available cores.

@ewwhite Most of my systems are database-lock-constraint bound and wait in line for Postgres to release table locks so they can do the work queued up for them.

Well with a load of 2500, your running 2500 tasks bound to one core>

(that's why we don't use a database as a work queue, kiddies!)

WTF, are they in a spinlock or something?

In most locking schemes the task should yeild until the lock becomes uncontended.

@MIfe note the "m". That's a load of 2.5.

ooh phew.

Why do you measure it to that degree?

@MIfe Just how this RRDtool implementation deals with vertical scaling.

Oh. OK.

@MIfe Because that's what rrdtool does by default (basically). milli-, kilo-, Mega-, Giga- etc prefixes for every 3 orders of magnitude.

@freiheit I guess I could count RRDtool stuff as programming.

but bleh, I'm still behind

Wut?

I want to know more!

@ewwhite I'm sure the CEO loves it when you tell him you dont measure load, you only measure in mill-load.

@MIfe well, again... my servers look stupid.

@MDMarra Damn straight. One day they will invent a way to keep a ps-session intact after you change the IP address

@ewwhite dont worry about it, its rrdtool.

Given enough time you'll lose enough granularity that itll be a load of 0

right

@ewwhite they're game developers. They're strange.

@ewwhite Well hell, suddenly I feel like I should go to my doctor.

@Wesley dont worry, your an exception. Most people dont have penises on the top of their heads.

Am I reading this wrong? serverfault.com/questions/546844/… Does this guy think he can use Vmware Workstation to P2V his computer to a VM hosted on his computer in a single step?

@MIfe Not if you configure to keep multiple consolidation functions (avg, min and max), like any right-thinking rrdtool config should.

@MIfe I'm a pretty unicorn!

@Wesley No your not, your a robot.

Meet CGI Federal, the company behind the botched launch of HealthCare.gov

Does anyone else use Solr?

@JoelESalas As in the iPhone app that gives you the weather?

sup bros

@ewwhite Good enough for government work.

@MichaelHampton so that was my biggest client

@MarkHenderson I mad

and psssssh... it was a shitfest.

@ewwhite You know them?

@ewwhite At LW?

Makes sense. It seems that all of LW's customers had more money than sense.

@Wesley Yes. That's the one that I complained about the most...

so yes... their infrastructure is in a place that almost ensured failure and a botched go-live

@ewwhite Nice.

Go LW!

Team spirit.

but the application development was terrible, too

@ewwhite /dev/Local Area Network 2

How did you know?!?

Hehehe I got my Windows in your Linux

I think my Sony TV just... bsod'd

@MathiasR.Jessen How is the land of the Danes tonight?

@RyanRies 'nother station attempted to deploy scheduler. Another PC doesn't have .NET 2.5. >_<

Just .NET 2.0

@Wesley Perhaps start distributing the .NET install with it, with the instructions "If your PC has not been upgraded since 2001, here run this .NET install first..."

@RyanRies Hmm... must have been lost in the translation because this person said some alert required .NET 2.5

@Wesley In a comatic state of first-world-problems as always ;-)

For all I know they got confused and tried to install LiveJasmine Dickcam or something.

@MathiasR.Jessen So I found out today that apparently Denmark leads the world for having the least government corruption or something.

There's no such thing as 2.5, at least not publically published

cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results

@RyanRies Well then this guy was smoking Jimson weed.

@Wesley That's correct... The latest scandal to hit the fans here is a question of whether our former PM was in his right place to enjoy number of first class flights, in his capacity of head of gggi.org

He hasn't broken any rules, he just wasn't modest enough = raging scandal

@MathiasR.Jessen You mean he doesn't have his very own presidential 747? =P

@Wesley He has a personal chauffeur - paid for by himself

@MathiasR.Jessen giggity

All members of the European Parliament receive a fixed amount of money to cover their travel expenses to and from Strassbourg and Bruxelles ... Most MEP's keep the money they have leftover for themselves (in accordance with the rules) - Danish MEP's are expected to account for each cent, and pay the rest to their party or another regulated non-personal fund

No one gets away with anything here :P

@MathiasR.Jessen Unless you're @jscott. That dude could rob the queen's panties and no one would know.

@Wesley Who's its what's it now?