The Comms Room

Zoredache

19:04

@NathanC I have never really understood why everyone worries so much about that. Just buy an unlocked phone in the first place.

Nathan C

@Zoredache Well, say my contract with AT&T expired and I wanted to take my phone to a different network. According to the law before the bill, AT&T could refuse to unlock my phone even though I "owned" it at that point.

In fact, it's very difficult to get an unlock code from a carrier...

Nowadays you don't always need one since there's exploits and such to unlock stuff for you, but those aren't "legal".

Zoredache

@NathanC I generally dislike the idea of subsidized hardware. I kinda hope this means phone companies will make people their own phones, and charge less for the service, since they aren't partly subsidizing the hardware.

ewwhite

Sysdig + Logs: Advanced Log Analysis Made Easy

Ry Jones

I paid for my phone

cole

I wish I could get away with a flip phone sometimes

2

Nathan C

19:13

@Zoredache In a way the subsidizing is very good for business because not everyone has $600+ burning a hole in their pocket to dump on a phone

It's much easier to rein people in that only have to pay a penny in return for being on a contract for 2 years

Besides, all those prepaid plans popping up everywhere are shams in themselves...

(as in, they claim unlimited data but in tiny text say you get 500MB of 4G then throttled to 2G after, and videos stop playing after 30 seconds)

MikeyB

@RyJones I am using it for three different projects; it's pretty nice.

Zoredache

@NathanC Sure it may be good for the business, but it isn't really good for the consumers. I suspect if you looked at their subsidy as if it was a loan you would find it is basically a loan at an absurdly high interest rate.

Joel E Salas

@kce The questions/responses are rather old fashioned

cole

@MikeyB when are you hiring me so I can shit on my boss' desk?

10

voretaq7

@cole Anything you say can and will be starred to be used as evidence against you.

2

cole

19:23

haha

Nathan C

@voretaq7 You have no right to an attorney and any pleas will be eaten by Markdown.

3

voretaq7

@NathanC Your attorney IS Markdown.

4

Oh hey you guys discovered the privacy badger?

Nathan C

The sky is angry again...

2

Lights keep flickering

cole

@NathanC yeah it totally just opened up and shat on us

cole

19:40

huh - my work is doing a workshop on sleep for the company

Nathan C

@cole It's those types of workshops that will actually put you to sleep

cole

@NathanC hope not

free lunch, too

Håkan Lindqvist

Isn't "whitespace" a very common term when working with computery stuff? Maybe it's symptomatic that the guy who puts whitespace in the wrong places also misunderstands the term?

Wesley

@HåkanLindqvist Yeah, common enough. AKA "Invisible characters"

@HåkanLindqvist Give me his email address. I'll say dirty things about his mom. That'll teach him.

Ry Jones

@HåkanLindqvist outside of python, yes, whitespace is used for alignment and frippery

Wesley

19:46

@RyJones Also frobnosticating and wonkery.

Don't make me wonk your frobs!

Ry Jones

@Wesley you'd like that

cole

So upon further inspection

my health insurance doesn't explicitly deny SRS

I think I need to make some calls

Nathan C

@cole Get yo cash!

cole

Right

PAPA'S GETTING A PENIS

15

Michael Hampton

@voretaq7 Nope, never heard of it.

cole

19:58

You guys see this? blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/08/06/…

Nathan C

Heh, this jar of peanuts has a "Choking Warning" on it ...

Ry Jones

Java exploits represented 84.6% to 98.5% of exploit kit-related detections each month in 2013.

I'm tempted by today's meh

cole

Never knew of such site.

$25 for 7 pairs of sunglasses isn't bad

Ry Jones

it's from the old woot.com team

cole

ah

Nick

20:06

I just finished setting up a honeypot to test something, any of you know where I can get the attention of skiddies and anyone else on it? :p

Michael Hampton

@Nick 4chan?

Nick

@MichaelHampton /me feels awkward not knowing what 4chan is

Michael Hampton

@Nick Actually you're probably better off not knowing. Your life is about to change...for the worse.

2

SpacemanSpiff

4chan isn't that like a more raw version of reddit

cole

Raw is one word for it

Chris S

20:18

I'm a regular redditor, but I avoid 4Chan like the plague that it is.

cole

@ChrisS agreed.

Ry Jones

@ChrisS I only have a dozen or two reddit accounts

ewwhite

Okay... stupid question...

I converted a customer to Exchange 2013... they need to send pics of rotten and bad fruits and veggies.

they are trying to email some large-ass photos... and are running into an Outlook Web Access limit.

elsewhere in the Exchange environment, the limits are 35mb.

but OWA seems to limit to 10mb

should I just tell them to resize the photos?

84104

@ewwhite Might be an IIS upload limit.

Ry Jones

@84104 I'm certain you're right.

cole

20:30

Yeah

you need to change it in the Web.config

ewwhite

@84104 it definitely is... but having to edit web.config is a bitch, and I'd need to add padding for encoding overhead and all..

cole

I'd have them resize - do they need super high res pics?

ewwhite

nope

Ry Jones

yeah, is this a single picture larger than 10 megs?

cole

I'd have them resize and zip the files

ewwhite

20:32

maybe 20 photos

but they don't even know how to resize images

Ry Jones

imgur

cole

that was my next suggestion

Ry Jones

it's shit like this that kills me. consumer photo sharing is such a fucked up space

ewwhite

they're being uploaded from a digicam to a PC.

84104

Drobbox box.com

cole

20:33

Also have them adjust the size on the actual digicam.

Ry Jones

no don't do that

jesus, I knew a guy that bought a nicer digicam and set it to shoot low-res so it would fit in his email, then wondered why his pictures looked like shit. Microsoft employee, no less

cole

ah

Ry Jones

I worked at a consumer photo sharing startup and the numbers are horrible. People have exactly one copy of most prized photos, and it's on an iPhone, for the most part

cole

Time for me to go home.

ewwhite

@RyJones and they never sync their photos/phone...

cole

20:36

Time to go home.

Ry Jones

@ewwhite yes, exactly, I was just talking to someone a couple weeks ago that lost a shitload of baby photos because of that.

I'm like, flickr is free, set it up and use it. It syncs automagically

Zoredache

@RyJones If it was iOS, why weren't they using iCloud.

Ry Jones

@Zoredache fine, whatever

but iCloud doesn't offer infinite photo storage for free, does it?

ewwhite

simple...

Ry Jones

It's simple for us. It's really hard for normal people.

voretaq7

20:43

@cole Oh that SO has to be starred more!

@RyJones FUCK NORMAL PEOPLE!

84104

@voretaq7 Why limit yourself though?

Zoredache

@RyJones no, not for free, but flickr doesn't let you keep your photos private for free does it (it didn't in the past).

ewwhite

I shouldn't have to teach people how to resize photos in 2014.

Zoredache

20:58

Interesting, flickr has updated their limit to 1TB for their free accounts. I guess that is probably enough these days. I know it was much lower in the past.

ewwhite

@Zoredache I am the lone fool who still pays flickr.

Tanner

Random 'DNS service down' alerts from network monitor all week. DNS is fine. Call support. They can't tell me how DNS is checked, what interval, if there's any retries, etc etc nothing nadda (and no docs on it). Hour later guy creates a ticket and says, "Ughhh... If it happens again tomorrow call back for an engineer."

Fuck. Citrix.

cole

You could always resize with a Powershell script

Hooray, my lobes are back to being stretched up to 7/16"

voretaq7

@cole . . . you stretched your lobes with a Powershell script? You kinky little bastard...

cole

@voretaq7 automation, bitch.

2

Get-ChildItem 'D:\test\*.jpg' | Set-ImageSize -Destination "D:\test2" -WidthPx 300 -HeightPx 375 -Verbose

I think you need a Powershell pack for that though.

MikeyB

21:16

@cole Oh, it's so cute watching powershell try and do things Unix has been able to do for tens of years.

9

cole

@MikeyB better than nothing, ya know?

Tanner

@MikeyB s/powershell/Windows

Makes me want to ditch Windows...

cole

WHY IS MY FACE SO ITCHY

voretaq7

@cole It's called a beard. Welcome to mahood.

YOU WANTED THIS YOU FOOL!

cole

It actually is - I haven't shaved in 3 days.

This is about what 3 days of growth is right now for me (except the goatee, I never shave that - but sideburns, cheeks and mustache I shave): i.imgur.com/g0W9W6W.jpg

Mark Henderson

21:39

So I tried Azure for the first time last night

VMWare: Take note. That is how you do a web interface

voretaq7

@MarkHenderson Your feedback has been received. <raspberry>

Mark Henderson

@voretaq7 Your feedback has been submitted and will be ignored in the order it was received

ewwhite

-2

Q: KVM cart for datacenter use

We've got a few racks of servers in our office and up til now we have kept a monitor, keyboard and mouse at the top of every rack and manually plug them into whatever server we need to interact with. Problem is this wastes a significant portion of the rack space and we can't afford to waste it a...

datacenter

Shane Madden

@ewwhite ...what is that guy wearing?

ewwhite

@ShaneMadden sexy, right?

Joel E Salas

21:50

@MichaelHampton How important would you say it is to be able to take a vanilla AMI and turn it into "your" AMI?

let's say my AMI has some environment specific config, puppet installed, etc etc

If I already made an AMI with those features... who cares if I lose the entire cluster in a sense? the AMI's not going anywhere

ewwhite

devops life.

voretaq7

@MarkHenderson It wasn't ignored! You got a raspberry!

@ShaneMadden Bike shorts and a suit jacket?

@ewwhite He's very Oompa Loompa - orange skin, greenish hair, white eyebrows...

Michael Hampton

@JoelESalas What @ewwhite said. You basically make the AMI your own, and then you have cattle. As many as you need.

voretaq7

►

Joel E Salas

@MichaelHampton I know people place a lot of stock in something like Packer, to go from "vanilla" AMI to your "custom" AMI

which for what it's worth sounds like a best practice

I just don't know if it's overkill

Michael Hampton

21:54

@JoelESalas I don't think it matters much what you use. You could lovingly hand-craft your environment if you wanted. Though that might be a waste of time...

Joel E Salas

@MichaelHampton I am doing the artisanal hand-crafted locally-sourced approach for now yes

just get it to a point where it can run puppet, I make an AMI, then everything else is puppet

Michael Hampton

@JoelESalas Well, you're halfway there already.

ewwhite

I don't know what best practice is anymore.

I mean, at least you're not using Ubuntu @JoelESalas

Mark Henderson

@cole so just a heads up. I know you like to share photos of your physical transformations, and this is a reasonably (un)safe place. But I strongly suggest not sharing photos of your new penis. People seem to take unkindly to cock selfies.

Joel E Salas

@ewwhite I'm on CentOS 7 now

Michael Hampton

21:57

@ewwhite For dealing with developers, slugs.

Nick

@ewwhite im using ubuntu... in production... on one single server

More of an experiment

Mark Henderson

p.s. congratulations on the news

Michael Hampton

@Nick I tried Ubuntu in production once. I have regretted it every day since.

Nick

@MichaelHampton its day 2 of it running no problems so far, why did you regret it?

Mark Henderson

Michael Hampton

21:58

@Nick It's about as manageable as my hair in a hurricane.

Mark Henderson

I would not want to be shot with any of them

Nick

Im more familiar with debian that red hat tbh

Joel E Salas

rofl

hate you guys

Mark Henderson

:17017217 quickly registers dragondildos.com

cole

Yeah def no dick pics

Joel E Salas

22:00

@MarkHenderson That's totally taken

Ry Jones

fuck if I know

Mark Henderson

@JoelESalas pendingdelete

So it's expiring

Joel E Salas

@MarkHenderson I'm sure some 4channers will drive the price up

cole

Is it wrong of me to turn down an onsite interview with a company after i found out who the client was and their glass door reviews are horrible?

Joel E Salas

@cole Nerp

Mark Henderson

22:04

@cole Nope

cole

Like very review is like "this is a terrible company and the CEO is a dictator"

Ry Jones

dude where's your loyalty to the guy that took you back?

Michael Hampton

@cole "Thank you for your offer, but I have decided not to pursue the opportunity with Hell Inc. at this time."

cole

It went out the window when I'm working 7 days a week

So we're pretty much down to 3 sysadmins now

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton ?

Joel E Salas

22:07

@cole how do you end up with such horrible jobs dude

2

cole

Manufacturing.

Joel E Salas

wut

cole

My background is in IT for manufacturing companies

No money for IT in manufacturing

Michael Hampton

There's always healthcare IT. You can make a fortune screwing everything up for everybody.

cole

Fuck that

3 sysadmins for 6000 users and 87 sites

Errrr 89 now

Michael Hampton

22:10

How many of those 3 actually do anything?

cole

Unix admin does a shit ton

VMware guy...eh

Me... A lot

Technically we have a 4th but he's never there. Seriously he works 8am-12pm if he comes in at all and he can't do basic tasks.

84104

@cole Sounds like he's living the life.

cole

He's supposed to take care of CA and he doesn't even do that

Joel E Salas

@84104 yeah mad jelly

@cole So why not pivot to a new field

cole

Field of work or industry

Michael Hampton

22:14

@cole Industry. Go find a nice startup or something.

cole

I'm going back to school in the fall for engineering.

I can't work in a startup

And I've worked at NetApp

ewwhite

Don't underestimate the value of working in a niche vertical market... (cough: produce)

Ry Jones

@ewwhite produce seems to give you horrible coughs, though

ewwhite

But I can hack the nastiness from the coughs into a pile of $...

cole

Bleh

Michael Hampton

22:34

Oh dear god, you're going to scar the poor guy for life... — Michael Hampton ♦ 8 secs ago

Ry Jones

man, that sprig of mint on top of my cheesecake was too much. Keep belching mint

ewwhite

Does that font look clean?

Ry Jones

looks good to me

but "nope, Chuck Testa!" runs through my head every time I see that name

it's like a rick roll, but more lame

cole

That looks like MFGPro

ewwhite

@cole but it's PRODUCE Pro ;)

cole

22:46

Similar I'm assuming.

ewwhite

you're right

cole

Ooh I'm good

Used to do a lot with MFG pro

when we migrated to QAD with the GUI people were like ZOMGIDKHOWTOWORK

ewwhite

terminal-based applications work super-well for industries like this

cole

I think so too.

The QAD interface was very busy

It's all .NET I think

I know way too much about manufacturing shit lol

Should I tell this recruiter why I don't want to move forward with the on-site interview?

ewwhite

@cole what's the story?

cole

22:53

@ewwhite everything I've read and even the vibe I was getting from the recruiter - the owner is a dick

ewwhite

what does the firm do?

cole

One man shop, ~130 users. 1 site in the americas, 2 abroad.

ewwhite

you need experience... so you should go through with the interview process

cole

It's just hard getting time off anyways right now, and I don't really want to waste it on an interview that I have no want to work for.

ewwhite

you don't know that yet

cole

22:55

It's a manufacturing company - medical diagnostic type stuff.

It'd be a step down - from enterprise to small/mid-sized business.

With headlines like “a small company that exploits its workers.” and “Communistic Dictatorship!!!!”

on Glassdoor

Ry Jones

I might pass on that

cole

"The turn over rate was amazing with some people quitting after a few days."

ewwhite

Then go to the interview and ask them to explain the poor reviews.

see how they answer.

cole

What would I say? "So I researched the company, and noticed it had some really poor reviews on Glassdoor"

ewwhite

Yes.

Ry Jones

22:58

go in and pee on the table to establish dominance

cole

I may

ewwhite

I've done this before...

cole

I think I'm going to just tell the recruiter I did some research on the company and it doesn't look like it will be a fit for me.

ewwhite

and asked then how they feel about the reputation and what's been done to correct those impressions

cole

If they say "we didn't know" or "uhh"

All I can say is: THE WORST COMPANY I HAVE EVER WORKED FOR!

and

When employees would leave the company, the CEO would still write emails through their email accounts in their names to avoid the shame of having such a high employee turn-over.

That's...that's pretty bad.

Michael Hampton

23:00

Shit. I think I just explained DevOps to a developer.

cole

@MichaelHampton great.

You've gone and fucked it all up now.

Michael Hampton

0

A: What are the frameworks or methodologies for handling a development and a production environment?

Let's stop for a minute and recall why we separate development and production environments in the first place. In short, it's because we are human and make mistakes. The point of having separate environments is to catch and correct mistakes as early as possible, and before they impact our users....

Wesley

23:20

@cole Move to SanFrancisco.

Lots of opportunities.

We can be roomies!

Ry Jones

@Wesley I didn't know you'd moved to SF

Michael Hampton

Yeah, how are you dealing with the freezing cold?

Jacob

I'm in Chicago Midway!

Wesley

@RyJones I haven't yet, but I'm preeeeety much aiming for that once I get some money saved.

Ry Jones

this is horrible: An old Macintosh IIci 25Mhz running Apache under NetBSD

@Wesley will Mongo relocate you?

Wesley

23:22

@MichaelHampton Seriously, dead of summer and the overnights are like 50 degrees. That's awful.

cole

@Wesley SF is insane $$ and I can't move, anyway.

Wesley

@RyJones It's a startup so everything is conversational and fluid - short answer: Probably maybe. =P

@cole Yeah, it's absurd. Literally, renting a room that's someone's living room with a blanket nailed into the ceiling as a partition costs $1200 a month in San Mateo

Ry Jones

@Wesley well congrats on landing at a cool company

Michael Hampton

Hm, maybe I should put a web server on my old MP3 player.

Wesley

@RyJones It's dope.

@MichaelHampton There's a website somewhere running on an old Apple Newton 120.

Ry Jones

23:24

shit bro live in South San Jose with all the illegals

Wesley

I had a Newton 110. Loved that thing.

cole

@Wesley yep - it's crazy

Wesley

@RyJones I'm looking at Gilroy and CalTraining it into San Mateo three days a week

Ry Jones

@Wesley I miss the food of the Bay Area, but that's about it.

taxes and oppressive air quality suck.

Michael Hampton

OK, well, now it's war. ITIL vs. DevOps.

Wesley

23:25

@cole At the same time, it's hard to not make 100k a year there.

cole

@Wesley that's true.

Michael Hampton

You described ITIL, providing tools references that are not welcome here. ITIL can applies to very small companies and to very big companies with no difference, and of course can be adapted and should be a guideline for all. Reactivity is a company internal problem, not an ITIL problem. If you think it is something that almost nobody understands in its entirety and almost nobody actually likes it's up to you, you are certainly right, but no need to understand all of this and apply everything to get the right guidance from this. — krisFR 3 mins ago

cole

Unless you're me.

Wesley

@mikeyb Tweet that about PowerShell and appropriately hashtag it. #powershell #unix #sysadmin etc.

I want to RT that

Ry Jones

@cole you choose to make little money

you have the skills to cash out, and you don't

Wesley

23:27

@cole Dude, if an idiot like me can work at a trendy kewl startup, anyone can. =P

Seriously you're more skilled than me.

Most people in this room are more skilled than me.

And by most I mean all.

And that's not bluster.

Fuck, I listen to dubstep and I still make a paycheck.

cole

@RyJones I make good money.

Ward

WFT? Got a Zebra label printer from UPS for shipping and it has USB, serial, and a f&%#ing Centronic! port?

cole

@Wesley startups are weird

Michael Hampton

@Ward That's for companies like @ewwhite's customers.

Wesley

@cole Really hit and miss. I hit one, got lucky by most people's estimation.

ewwhite

23:28

@Ward LP-2844?

cole

@Wesley that's awesome though - do you work from home or go into the office?

Wesley

@cole Home. I'm welcome to fly into San Mateo or Birmingham any time though.

Ward

Zebra ZP-450 Why the hell can't they use one with a built-in NIC?

cole

Wow - that's awesome. What do you do all day?

Wesley

@cole I'm still trying to figure that out. =P

Ward

23:29

@cole He rides his bike!

cole

@Wesley well what did you do today?

Wesley

@cole Today, we're internally hashing out support boundaries for customers. Externally, I had to deprovision a dedicated AWS MongoDB cluster, figure out why someone's S3 backups weren't working, explain mongodump to a customer that thinks backups are optional, partake in sharding discussions for a large customer, look into why a database wasn't cloning into a new deployment.

cole

@Wesley interesting.

Wesley

Basically 80% of my day is spent grepping logs and playing forensic analyst. =P

Regex is your friend at all times.

cole

Neat.

Wesley

23:32

Also, MongoDB logs blow weener.

5

cole

Have you told them that?

Ry Jones

@Wesley I'm tweeting that

cole

Hey your logs - they kinda suck.

Wesley

Totally do not conform to standards.

Yes, the main engineer on a logging project who's splitting up logs and feeding them into rabbit queues / logstash workers has nothing but murderous rage for mongo logs

Don't get me started on connection tracking with logs.

Also, logstash blows up with a few billion messages FYI

Java FTL

jruby I think, in specific

cole

fucking databases sound awful.

Ry Jones

23:35

we need a powershell-java-ruby-python wrapper

cole

powerpyjavuby wrapper

Ry Jones

DCOM needs to be in there

Wesley

Wanna know what I'm doing right now? Customer wants full text search enabled on their mongo instance, so I'm checking to see if they're runnign 2.4 (which is a no-no as FTS is a beta feature).

Scott Pack

@Wesley WAHS!

Wesley

If they're not, ask them to upgrade (we have a UI element that allows for managed upgrades), if they are, set it up like a boss for them.

@ScottPack SKAHT!!

Oh and look at that. Mongo 2.4.10

Scott Pack

23:39

I've missed you my love.

Wesley

SUCKAHS!

@ScottPack I've loved you, my miss.

cole

@Wesley Do you have to talk to people on the phone?

Scott Pack

Me?

Wesley

@cole Me? Never. Once in a while a big dollar customer will get a phone call, but usually for topics way above my head right now. Mega sharded setups, 24x7 SLAs, etc.

We highly discourage phone calls. Almost never does anything good.

cole

@Wesley oh that sounds kinda nice then.

Scott Pack

23:41

@cole So you've heard @Wesley's voice then?

cole

Haha.

Just curious about his job.

Scott Pack

Wait. You're getting yourself a dingdong?

cole

@ScottPack hopefully.

They changed our health plans this year so we'll see.

Scott Pack

►

Wesley

Damn - looks like we've updated this customers past 2.4.x databases with full text search, so I'll be changing their deployment after all. Full disclaimer mode, activate!

cole

23:43

@ScottPack haha

Wesley

And done

On to the next problem

cole

sweet

Wesley

Ergh - custom syslog shipment issue.

Fun.

(really though, nothing is really awful. You know what's awful? consulting and not getting paid)

Scott Pack

@Wesley Are they using RFC 5424?

Wesley

Some shitty hosted log endpoint.

Whatevs. It's all syslog-ng at the source..

Scott Pack

23:51

I kind of like the design idea of syslog-ng, but it can get so messy so quick.

Transcript for