@ChrisS I'm sure our tax systems are equally insane overall, just our personal tax is (mostly) easier. The flipside to that is, for people like me, when you suddenly get put on Self Assessment you have NO idea what to do and have to get an accountant to help you

Like, up until last year, I'd never in my entire life filled out any tax paperwork

@Dan up to a certain point

chrome crashes after a few days with the facebook tab open

@pauska That's not a caching issue, though

well.. in-memory cache and client-side processing, no?

That'll be memory use thanks to Ajax-y shit

I am never drinking again :(

@pauska Yeah, but not a caching issue as in you get the wrong data because your browser believes the page contains static information and doesn't reload

@Dan In the US everyone files a tax return annually, but for most wage earners it's a one-page affair and takes all of ten minutes. It's when things get more complicated...not too dissimilar from Self Assessment, I'd think.

@FalconMomot oh if I had a nickel for every time I said that...

yes, we both know it's not true :P

@MichaelHampton Sounds about right - it's a few pages long but it's not rocket science. Just that you really have to get it right and it's totally unfamiliar

@Dan I have to do tax returns for both here and the states - nightmare

@Chopper3 That's what accountants are for, I guess. Something for me to enjoy in my new life - I've learnt a lot of company tax law over the last few months :D

@Dan yep, I'd never do it myself

@Chopper3 The costs of fucking it up are too high for me

It's going to take me enough thinking to getting used to having money in my account that isn't mine

@ewwhite We tell people to hire a pro all the time, so why shouldn't we do that ourselves :)

looks like 40+ 1099's, several W2's, a new house purchase...

@MichaelHampton One page and takes ten minutes? Doesn't require spending money on tax software or an accountant? That sounds nice. Sign me up, please. Which country was this, again?

@pauska My accountant asked me about cloud computing for his practice :) Fair trade.

@ewwhite He's doing your taxes for free in exchange for getting some practice with your "cloud"? That seems... well, I guess it depends on what you're into in the first place.

@Chopper3 I too must do that. tax treaty crap and all.

my return is usually a small book.

@Skyhawk No, he advised me in exchange for some recommendations on small business IT...

@ewwhite That's pretty awesome.

I'm getting reamed for the rest of my tax needs this year

@ewwhite Ah.

@ewwhite That's not complicated at all... Doing your own consulting adds to the complexity, but still isn't that bad if you have kept track of your expenses and income.

Income, yes... expenses are fuzzy

@ChrisS ...and then what happens when tax laws affect the very details of how you track your time and invoice your clients?

@ewwhite That's what most of our clients say too. >=[

Lots of travel for consulting.. Logicworks not reimbursing me for thousands in travel... home office, colo, lots of hardware acquisitions...

@ewwhite Yep - if it's anything like here, it gets properly complex about what yo ucan and can't take tax free

Do you have to worry about VAT type stuff, too?

oh, no VAT

@Skyhawk wat?

@ChrisS For example, in WA, sales tax is due on repair/installation services but not on custom configuration, consultation, or custom programming.

My company owes me £1288 and I've not earnt a penny

@ChrisS THAT's a lot more than I'd like to keep track of.

and I'm selling hardware through a partner now so I'm not collecting tax, etc.

Woot no state taxes here.

@ChrisS Ewww, Michigan.

@MikeyB Where U live, Alaska?

slight step-up from Indiana

@Skyhawk Canada! Which reminds me:

@ChrisS See, I'm not paying an accountant to keep track (That's my job) - I'm paying them to tell me what tax I need to pay and what I can claim as expenses and write off etc

@MikeyB So, you're saying you don't have urbane taxes because you have provincial taxes instead? Or is it all tribute to Her Majesty?

@Skyhawk The former :D

@Dan Federal tax here is pretty easy. Your income is taxed the same self-imployed or not, except for one particular thing. Expenses are also somewhat simple, if it was "necessary and normal" for the business you were engaged in then it's a deductible expense. In practice, everything remotely related to your business operations is an expense. State laws vary, but many are extremely simple.

@ChrisS Wow, it's NOT like that here

@ChrisS right, but it varies... I've had years where I bought $50k in hardware for myself...

and then years with no new gear... and that impacts my tax burden pretty heavily

If the hardware was for yourself, personally, then it's not deductible and doesn't change your tax burden.

@ChrisS for my business

But it's not really for himself, personally. It's all work-related.

@tombull89 WTF? That's not a valid IPv6 address.

I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't buy $50K in gear just to have a lesser Scrabble experience than I could have in person.

If it was for a business purpose you should be depreciating the fixed asset over it's useful life.

@ChrisS ha, would that (Canadian) tax law allowed that! no, there is a table for how much and how long you will depreciate things.

I made mistakes with that before... especially as the useful life of some of my gear wasn't as long as expected

e.g. my Sun Thor/Thumper box...

@FalconMomot yes, same here cs.thomsonreuters.com/ua/fixa/cs_us_en/ass_life_tbl/…

IT stuff is 6 years. Or 5 with the "alternate" scheme

@ChrisS hashtag ass_life

I dunno...

but yeah, the accountant will help me with this ridiculousness

@Chopper3 Do you contract to your $MainClient?

@ChrisS Why is the depreciation bit important for taxes?

@Dan Yes

@Tanner becasue you get to write off the depreceiaton of assets

ahhh

I would almost trade having to do taxes 4 times a year for not having to feel like I do at the moment.

@Chopper3 Do you find IR35 to be problematic or do you just forget about it?

Or are you not going through Ltd?

@Dan not at all, just make your client send the contract confirmation through to you a few days after the contract start date - thus you're 'working at risk', something employees would never have to do - also don't take any hardware from them; laptops/phones etc.

@Chopper3 Thought as much, done lots of reading but I don't actually know any real contractors personally!

@Dan and eventually yes it's a ltd. but I'm actually paid through an offshore

Oh right, that's too much for me for now!

Aren't they starting to really looking into those type of schemes, now?

residency laws are usually such that doing that isn't especially advantageous

most tax treaties will make you pay the higher of the two tax rates, split across countries, when you do that, if they protect you from double taxation at all.

@Dan [on a call, sorry for the delay] yes they are but I pay someone to outsmart them :)

@FalconMomot It's a lot more complex than that, especially when you're operating as a business

I know

@Chopper3 :D

that complexity is where you get into double taxation sometimes.

@FalconMomot Yeah, but this is the opposite

but there are ways. I wouldn't dare do that without a professional accountant.

It's mostly legal, but our tax people (HMRC) are working hard to close loopholes

@FalconMomot Oh, 100%

that said, you can depreciate all kinds of strange things, and do many other odd things to move income around and create expenses, so that you can avoid making much money at all.

My ex is being paid lots as a geologist in Ethiopia and doesn't pay a penny tax somehow, she's classed as an expat, though

it's very shady

@FalconMomot "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich" - Or 'how to avoid taxes through crazy international agreements'

@ChrisS yup.

> how could someone break into my server and use it for an attack when it uses the default ftp, apache and ubuntu configurations?

@FalconMomot Indeed - I know of lots of people pushing it. Problem is, you'll get away with it in a paper shift but if they ever actually come and sit down with you at your business you're going to be fucked

I'm doing my best to be above board at the moment with taxes

@Tanner Is that posted someplace where I could share it with students/graduates?

@FalconMomot Same - I want to minimise my tax as much as I can but without touching the grey

however, it looks like I might be getting paid 50% in canada and 50% in the US in the future, which makes things extremely hard to work with

@FalconMomot Yeah, enjoy that

it's basically a necessity to avoid being bankrupted by currency fluctuation though

if the exchange rate favoured either country by more than 20% I'd have serious trouble.

@Tanner Context is everything. I was thinking of the job that your team is looking to fill.

haha -- sorry

@FalconMomot It's probably easier if you get paid at least 2x what you need for your living expenses. :-)

@Skyhawk No, we have no job posting. Just word of mouth for now. There should be one up before too long, unless we find someone.

@Tanner OK. But, basically, you're looking for an entry-level... Windows helpdesk and entry-level admin position with basic networking skills?

@Skyhawk I need to be rich, that's what I need!

@Tanner Or, do you want someone who knows some Linux? You're paying, what, $14-18 per hour?

quick question for you guys, when/if you're purchasing dell servers, do you use a rep @ dell or a preferred reseller?

I use resellers

i put in a quote request direct with dell ~48 hours ago and havent heard back

they get nearly the same pricing, and you have someone to do the dirty work

who's your preferred reseller?

@Skyhawk Basic Windows support. Little bit of networking, which will mostly be limited to figuring out how $isp screwed up in new and interesting ways. We have around 30 locations through the US, so it's mostly remote SOHO stuff. We use Citrix XenApp and an AS400 (if you know somebody who's touched one of those, that's a bonus). AD and Group Policy isn't well leveraged, and a lot of work could be done there if somebody is interested. Lots of freedom to break improve things.

@Skyhawk probably start around $15 -- at least that's what I started at I think

@Tanner Cool. I'll see if I can send you a candidate or two.

@Skyhawk thanks :)

@Skyhawk your living expenses tend to balloon a bit when they involve two residences and 4-8 flights a year.

@jlehtinen Switched off of dell years ago when their direct sales reps went to shit

@FalconMomot Yup.

@Skyhawk add my habit of flying small aircraft around and my continuing education habit, and it's not hard to see how I can make what I do and be broke all the damn time.

@FalconMomot Yeah, I get it. You're talking to someone who spent five figures on avionics at Oshkosh.

@Skyhawk nice!

@FalconMomot For delivery in April.

I'm assuming this is for IFR?

in a plane that previously was not IFR-capable?

or did you get a TCAS?

I hate you foreign aviators

If you think it's expensive over there, check out the costs here

where's here for you?

UK

aah, yeah, that probably is brutal

At one point (Late 90's, early 000's) it was considered cheaper to fly to the states, stay over and learn to fly there

of course, if you do that now, you should expect DHS to come knocking and cart you off to Guantanamo bay.

I'll get my PPL one day, though

@FalconMomot Haha

@MDMarra who do you use now? HP?

At previous jobs, yeah. I brought HP in to two different workplaces. Now, I work for a infrastructure consulting firm - I don't have my own hardware anymore, but we sell Cisco UCS and run internal workloads on UCS

@FalconMomot nah, we have a lot of people at my airport who are doing that

I'm blown away that I submitted a request to dell ~48 hours ago with an "i need to buy a server ASAP request" and i'm still waiting for even initial contact from a rep

cisco UCS looks cool, i didnt even know they had a platform like that

@jlehtinen why didnt you call your rep?

Always speak to sales people on the phone

the TSA takes your finger prints (and probably gives you an anal probe), and you're not allowed to change instructors without going through the whole process all over again, but otherwise it's not an issue. Y'all don't value privacy do ya?

@MDMarra don't have a dell rep, trying to get one...

oh

@voretaq7 dat joke.

@FalconMomot oh I wasn't joking about the anal probes. This is the TSA we're talking about :)

and I'm sure if you refuse the anal probe you get sent to GTMO. Hell hath no fury like a TSA agent scorned :-)

@jlehtinen Why don't you just call one of our Dell reps instead of trying to get referred to one by Dell? I'd imagine it would go over fine unless you don't share a country with one of us.

...but then I suppose that is the problem.

mornin gents

Typical Comms Room. Topics of conversation: Infrastructure Hardware and Anal Probes.

@Magellan I'm trying VERY HARD not to set that as the room topic right now.

@voretaq7 go for it

@Magellan that hardly seems appropriate or professional

@voretaq7 Hahahahahahahahahaha

DO IT

probably not a wise idea

someone could be offended, you know

or that's what some mod told me once anyways

Ohh I forgot about RoboMod

More to the point, while we're generally lax about the "professional" aspect in chat that certainly doesn't seem like something we'd want a new user coming to chat to see as the topic.

Since when do new chat users read the topic?

ask him!

@MichaelHampton the kind we'd want in here would.

and they may not be fond of anal probes. You know some people apparently don't enjoy them. There's no accounting for taste.

here, let's do a survey. @Jacob do you enjoy anal probes?

(we can abuse @Jacob because frankly if we haven't already broken his mind he's indestructable :-)

@voretaq7 I'm going to go with a solid no.

@MichaelHampton ^ See?

@voretaq7 That would require a definition for broken.

A solid noprob from @Jacob

@voretaq7 Confirmation Bias!!! Confirmation Bias!!!!

@Jacob Huddled in the corner clutching your keyboard, rocking and whimpering something about "please, not another high-voltage-power-over-ethernet test"

Must ask random new people and establish a control group!

@voretaq7 Maybe you should just pin it...

@Magellan Prob or NoProb? Go.

OK, infrastructure and 55-gallon drums of lube.

@freiheit It's only earned 3 stars, that's hardly pinworthy in this room!

@MichaelHampton nettechdi.com/polywater-55-gallon-drum-dyna-blue-lubricant

Apparently Dyna-Blue comes in 55 gallon drums (but the photo is only of the pail size)

"Heavy-Duty Cable Pulling Lubricant With Clingability"

@voretaq7 Damnit, that picture is of the 5-gallon pail

you can't buy advertising like this.

@MichaelHampton yeah even the polywater site doesn't have pics of the drum

not that I'd want that shit by the drum, you really have to scoop it out. you'd probably fall in.

Best quote of the day. Y'all can just go home now, you can't top that.

@voretaq7 But it's informative about the topic of this room

The Comms Room Topics of conversation: Infrastructure Hardware, Anal Probes and Lube Barrels. // This is NOT a place for 'Live Support', it's a love hotline. Ask questions on the main site.

@freiheit I'm half tempted to change it to that

@MDMarra Works better on the star-wall swapped around. Don't want lube replaced with ...

Test. It works! :)

@daveloyall So, probe or noprobe?

Probe.

@Magellan Statistical anomaly!

@daveloyall Thank you for your participation. =)

good evening, anally challenged friends.

@DennisKaarsemaker ...now does that mean they're missing an anus, or that the probing will be challenging to endure? 'cuz it could go either way, and the former means you're saying we're all full of shit...

@voretaq7 yes.

@DennisKaarsemaker Excellent.

the .ma registriy is crazy

@DennisKaarsemaker do you really ever need to register anything besides ma.ma

@voretaq7 we have booking.ma

and for all domains we have the same nameservers. ns[0123].bkngs.com

go.cry.to.your.ma.ma, run.home.and.tell.ma.ma, yo.ma.ma, hot.ma.ma

actually I guess you might need to register yo-yo.ma too...

except that the .ma registry disagrees and created srv1-booking.ma and srv-booking.ma records with the ip addresses of our nameservers

so our old nameservers now only get queries for booking.ma :)

I need to nagios-ify this.

@voretaq7 big.mom.ma

is that Nagios-y enough?

@voretaq7 send 50 emails when you cross and recross the threshold

@RyJones oh those were just the crossing the threshold emails

@voretaq7 I like the way it never seems to roll up alerts, too.

we have yet to get to the reminder phase :)

I SENT YOU 500 OF THESE ALREADY HERE'S 500 MORE

@voretaq7 ALERT! SOMETHING IS STILL WRONG

@RyJones alert rollups aren't easy - even my system occasionally sends you 2 for 1

@voretaq7 I know it isn't easy, but it's impossible (seemingly) to do with nagios

or it was in 2008 when I cared about it

I should pick another one of these up: bestbuy.com/site/microsoft-surface-pro-with-128gb-memory/…

I have had evenings where the phone was constantly buzzing due sto misconfigured alerts

although I'd really like the Surface 2 pro with dealer undercoating

and they were already sent to the phone company, so couldn't be canceled

@DennisKaarsemaker oh every system does that if you have each server independently monitored

@DennisKaarsemaker BUZZ BUZZ YOU SEEM TO HAVE SOME BATTERY LEFT IN YOUR PHONE BUZZ BUZZ

that's how I found out t-mobile's ingress sms bandwidth is 200 sms/minute and egress maybe 5 :)

I loved the original Microsoft Media Center remote with big glowy buttons. when the battery got low, it would light up full power to let you know the battery was almost dead

@DennisKaarsemaker I worked on that feature at Microsoft, we called it the American Idol feature (SMS throttling)

also, it's completely within spec for a gateway to toss messages on the floor. SMS is best effort

I'm so ready for this week to be over

@voretaq7 You think nagios is bad? How about the EMC VNX: every week, each box sends an email saying "CRITICAL ALERT", buried in the text is "The array is healthy, this alert is generated once a week"

Well, nagios's behavior is in the name...

*nag*ios

pwned-by-a-wild-markdown

...damnit, markdown.

Yeah, I don't do Nagios. But some swear by it.

Does anyone here know DRBD.?

@ewwhite A little. I decommissioned one once.

Is it generally regarded as bad news?

@ewwhite Not if you use it right. Active/Passive is about the only safe way to use it

@ewwhite the cluster tutorial you linked to a while ago did a decent drbd setup

I remember lots of DRBD emergencies at last job... And wasn't sure if it was something inherent to DRBD

but I'd rather avoid needing it, solving redundancy a (few) layer(s) up in the stack

I'm going to evaluate a ZFS on DRBD commercial solution soon...

@ewwhite I think it's something inherent to your last job.

:(

annoying gif is annoying

Hey!

But my dream of clustered ZFS may come true!

That gif was slowing down my iPad!

well, I'd better bring it back then

No, it means ipad upgrade!

And I still can't boot the ESXi installer in a KVM guest.

What are you doing?

Trying to avoid setting up Yet Another Physical Server...

Sounds evil.. I'll sell you some hardware.

But... they told me with the cloud I wouldn't need hardware!

@ewwhite I'm hoping that FreeBSD picks up the glove and builds a native storage cluster platform.. file-system agnostic if possible

I know that Matt Dillon is working on it on his DragonFlyBSD project

though code from that is very hard to port to other platforms

@MichaelHampton Wait...ESXi inside KVM? Err....

Yeah, it seems like there's a gap in the offerings... DRBD or ?

@MichaelHampton I do know ESXi runs fine inside of vmware workstation and ESXi itself

@ewwhite heartbeat.. but that's dirty

Though that may not help you in your situation.

aka "node went down, I must now mount the luns and scrub the volume"

@JohnD Yeah, doesn't help here. I can't use Workstation.

@ewwhite you do have this though.. freebsd.org/doc/handbook/disks-hast.html

@MichaelHampton This might be helpful: communities.vmware.com/thread/451412

@ewwhite and read some about HAMMER/HAMMER2

The serial log might have some clues...

it's supposed to be cluster ready from the ground up.. dedup, compression etc.. all the fancy stuff

Hammer!

Yeah. But overshadowed by ZFS? Maybe?

@ewwhite rings buzzer What is MurderFS ReiserFS?

Murder isn't funny!

Was it the McAfee guy?

Or norton?

does it matter?

I bet McKusick is a serial killer. BSD guys are just WAY better at hiding the bodies.

@ewwhite HAMMER got very little attention

not sure why.. I tested it and it was ridiculously fast

a bit unstable, but fast as hell

Wow, I'm getting 40,000 IOPS in real life on a Fusion-io produce system

@ewwhite are those the people using your machines as now open spam relays?

haha

probably

@ewwhite So, root has a four character password, too, and they're installing Shell in a Box, right?

@MichaelHampton root just logs you in the the tuber ordering system

So I can order potatoes at 40,000 IOPS. That's... useful?

maybe if you're McDonald's

this is the place that delivers produce to Silicon Valley

Google and Cupertino (Apple) are their clients

shit

that's a lot of produce

@RyJones Production environment, naturally.

@MikeyB zing

So, I found an answer here on SF that is telling folks to do something that is a bad idea from an information security point of view. Well, I wasn't completely sure... So I asked the security experts over at security.stackexchange.com... They say that I was right, the accepted answer (with 135 upvotes) is wrong!

...As a responsible netizen, I'd like to help, but I don't have any rep here. So, here you go SF: security.stackexchange.com/questions/49645/… It's the best I could do. I hope it helps. :)

@daveloyall Well.. where's the wrong one on SF?

he links to it in the post.

Yeah the question on security.se is about the wrong question on SF. I basically said the same thing I said here, but included "is this important enough to bug SF about?" ..to which they replied: "Well, that's really up to them." or something to that effect. :)

@daveloyall so what do you want done about it ?

@daveloyall I just ready both answers on security.se. They don't say that the answer on SF is wrong. They give a long explanation why it's not a cure-all, but not really all that bad an idea, and the one downside mentioned (can mask non-SSL links in an app that should get fixed) may or may not apply

What? They say that redirecting to http to https is bad. The "duplicate-of question" answers say this, too. ...They do unfortunately get lost in the weeds of details and workarounds. But all the answers and comments (on every http --> https question on security.se, and there are many!) are of a very different nature than the answers and comments to #570288 here on SF.

Yes, it's bad, but the alternative is worse.

@daveloyall Tey say that it's not ideal but that there is nothing better that is currently available

Love nonsensical errors.

I just don't want some newbie to read "hell yes it is a good idea to forward http --> https". That answer is wrong. And, there is something better: don't listen on http. shrug OH well I tried.

Heh, is it timelike or spacelike ?

@daveloyall Then as Gilles says - go to meta.sf and make your case. Theera re currently 6 active people here

@daveloyall The question is still open to answers. Feel free to provide a better answer.

Of course, I think those issues have already been raised in some of the other answers.

wwhy the fuck is everything so fucking complicated