The Comms Room

Dan

14:00

@RobM I reckon that around 60 - 70% of all people need to be exterminated

Don't care about gays, jews, blacks, whites, muslims, etc - I just wanna get rid of dicks

ewwhite

@DanilaLadner Need more servers?

2

RobM

hear hear. Death to the wankers wherever they are, I say.

Dan

We should form the "Be excellent to each other" religion

Danila Ladner

Not yet, just went live last week

who is zabbix guru?

ewwhite

@DanilaLadner Hmm... I need a new roof... so buy some servers quick.

RobM

14:04

I'd join, @dan. Though I confess to not having excellent thoughts when I got a letter from my brother last week

Danila Ladner

lol

tombull89

oh man

Danila Ladner

what happened to the old one?

Dan

@RobM Ooof

ewwhite

@DanilaLadner it leaks.

I'm suing the original owners of the house for ~~$a lot~~

Danila Ladner

14:06

oh is that possible?

RobM

@dan yeah. Full of a lot of self-serving nonsense about wanting to know if he still had a brother when he got out of jail. So I talked it over with Helen and... it turns out my bin still works.

ewwhite

@DanilaLadner it's a fraud case

tombull89

@RobM how long is his sentance?

ewwhite

their real estate agent knew of the problems but didn't tell us

RobM

@ewwhite what did they do? I mean clearly this goes above the usual house selling BS then?

@tombull89 8 and a half years

ewwhite

14:07

@RobM they called a roofing contractor to come out and see how much it would take to fix it... $26,000. They didn't TELL us this.

when we moved in, we wanted to have a roofer check things out before the winter, and by chance, we ended up calling the same contractor.

RobM

@ewwhite ah... yeah. once they know that's pushing it into fraud because you'd walk away or demand a price adjustment of course

ewwhite

so we caught them

Dan

@RobM As you say, self serving. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer with what you do going forward, but it does seem indicative of the personality type. Remorse for being caught and feeling sorry for themselves

ewwhite

but it'll take 2 years to see anything from this lawsuit... so I still need to buy a roof... hence, @DanilaLadner needs to buy more servers.

RobM

Exactly @dan he's not sorry he raped his daughter. he's not sorry he had enough child pornography to make jimmy saville step back and say "you need to slow down mate". He's sorry he got caught.

Dan

14:10

@RobM Not gonna lie, you kind of made me feel sick there tbh

RobM

sorry :-(

Farhan

Dan

See how he feels in 4 years or so I guess

RobM

@dan I hope for his sake, and those of others when he gets out, that he sorts his head out. But I'm serious when I say I don't have a brother any more. Apart from anything else, there's no way to have him in my life and still have my niece and nephew in my life too and if I have to choose, I choose them.

Dan

@RobM Yep, no competition there

RobM

14:17

To change the subject entirely, has anyone seen this article about john lewis upgrading from XP? bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28790582

tombull89

seems like they did quite well

Our curriculum desktop machines are going from 7 > 8.1 for Sept 2nd.

Dan

14:31

Has anyone else used the term "forklift upgrade"?

RobM

not unless I've been discussing warehouse operations in my last job where we had warehouses full of forklifts that occasionally needed replacing...

Dan

:D

RobM

The bespoke programs being so hard to upgrade is a good illustration of technical debt I think. Because they didn't take the extra month to code their apps to write to 'allowed' areas of the disk properly in the first place, they ended up losing a year or more during this upgrade.

Dennis Kaarsemaker

A forklift upgraded to a lorry?

RobM

a forklift upgraded to a bigger forklift

a forklift upgraded with an autopilot.

Named Klaus... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oB6DN5dYWo

jscott

14:49

@Dan I've not used it. But it seems a common term with vendors trying to emphasize the expense/work required for a specific upgrade.

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite What are you using from rpmforge? As far as I know that repo is mostly outdated and possibly abandoned.

Journeyman Geek

@RobM I would consider that weaponisation

ewwhite

15:09

@Dan I love the term.

my clients understand it

Dan

Never heard it used before that bbc article

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton I use RepoForge and EPEL

and you just reminded me to mirror EPEL

Michael Hampton

A forklift upgrade is where you need a forklift to take away all the ancient crap that you should have gotten rid of years ago.

ewwhite

15:30

@MichaelHampton I think this is the list...

[root@LAS ~]# yum list installed | grep @epel
alpine.x86_64           2.11-1.el6      @epel
barcode.x86_64          0.98-17.el6     @epel
bash-completion.noarch  1:1.3-7.el6     @epel
bonnie++.x86_64         1.96-2.el6      @epel
ccze.x86_64             0.2.1-6.el6     @epel
denyhosts.noarch        2.6-19.el6      @epel
dkms.noarch             2.2.0.3-20.el6  @epel
iperf.x86_64            2.0.5-11.el6    @epel
ncdu.x86_64             1.7-1.el6       @epel
                        3.002-1.el6     @epel

Michael Hampton

Ah, OK

ewwhite

should I bother mirroring EPEL for that?

Michael Hampton

15:53

@ewwhite For that small of a package list? Probably not.

EPEL has hundreds of mirrors already, and if you haven't messed with epel.repo it will give you a ranked list each time

Dan

Vik Killa

1

This guy is just posting (his?) blog

Michael Hampton

@Dan Is that so?

84104

@Dan I can't see that he's done anything? serverfault.com/users/239455/vik-killa?tab=activity

Michael Hampton

He's been...taken care of

84104

@MichaelHampton That's rather ominous sounding.

Michael Hampton

16:07

That's me. Stack Exchange's scariest moderator.

Iain

> I owe SO a huge thank you for teaching me all I know about programming.

hmm

84104

@MichaelHampton How much do you spend in horse heads per month?

Michael Hampton

I don't use horse heads, only human heads.

Jenny D

@MichaelHampton I'd use luser heads. They are plentiful.

Michael Hampton

@JennyD Precisely.

Mathias R. Jessen

16:15

Woop woop. I just presented something publicly without fainting or having a panic attack. Today was a good day :-D

84104

Congratulations!

Mathias R. Jessen

Thanks. I hate being the center of attention, haven't been on a stage for years. Really glad it worked out :D

Mathias @IISResetMe live at #PSUGDK at Microsoft, Hellerup Denmark! .. Advanced Runspaces stuff! #PowerShell http://t.co/3WnehZ79ye

Tweeted by JakobGSvendsen on August 26, 2014 at 2:13 PM

I'm still in love with my own title for the presentation :d

jscott

@MathiasR.Jessen Is the deck/video available online?

Mathias R. Jessen

@jscott No, but I'll bloggify the contents soon. General performance stuff, Runspace Pooling, Runspace data proxying etc.

jscott

Cool, thanks.

Mathias R. Jessen

16:28

JakobGS presented a session about writing WPF UI's in PowerShell, I think I'll try to combine the two, should be fun :)

cole

I don't trust a company that uses Comic Sans in their logo: boston.craigslist.org/gbs/sad/4636766172.html

jscott

@cole I saw some guy with this shirt at the store. I felt angry-ish.

2

cole

Sometimes I just want to punch people in the dick.

Mathias R. Jessen

@jscott I can send you the slides, but they're partially in danish

RobM

@cole there's a painter and decorator near me who's clearly gone to a fair amount of trouble and expense to have his van all nicely done with all his details... in comic sans. I just cringe each time I see it.

@jscott that Helvetica shirt would be good for trolling at macworld or something though...

Iain

16:49

@RobM - yup :)

What's the best close reason when someone just doesn't appear to have read and understood/researched the error messages displayed by the helpful program ?

RobM

In fact I'm going to bookmark that shirt. If my PFY ever decides to leave, he is getting that shirt as a leaving gift.

Dennis Kaarsemaker

I love comic sans

Just for the effect it has on people

RobM

not professional enough to be a sysadmin or whatever it's called, @iain. a professional would read the error messages right?

Nathan C

@Iain Let me guess, this question?

RobM

@DennisKaarsemaker so that's comic sans in a nutshell: Good for actual comics (maybe!), trolling font snobs, nothing else. Ever.

Dennis Kaarsemaker

16:52

and apparently, everyone and his dog is a font snob these days

I should start sending work mail in comic sans

Jenny D

@Iain "minimal understanding" is what I'd use

Iain

@NathanC yep that's the one - must have spent more time asking the question than trying to fix it

Michael Hampton

@DennisKaarsemaker Just be glad it's not Papyrus?

RobM

@DennisKaarsemaker that's the best thing about it. You want to get value for money from the shirt right?

Dennis Kaarsemaker

@MichaelHampton ooh, I shold change booking.com to papytus as april fools gag. Internally only of course :)

Iain

16:54

@DennisKaarsemaker ?

Dennis Kaarsemaker

@Iain you haven't noticed how everyone hates comic sans without looking at its good properties (and it's a seriously decent font)

RobM

like many things, the problem isn't that it exists, but rather that it's misused by fools

Iain

@DennisKaarsemaker I don't recall the last time I saw it outside of here

Michael Hampton

iheartpapyrus.com

Dennis Kaarsemaker

Jenny D

16:58

@DennisKaarsemaker snerk

Dennis Kaarsemaker

It's a bit of an old graph, incognito mode changed this.

Michael Hampton

Do we have something against small businesses here?

Jenny D

@DennisKaarsemaker See, this is why I have a purse with lots of different pockets in it...

Nathan C

@DennisKaarsemaker That guy in the hat in the top left corner of the window has seen it all...

Jenny D

@MichaelHampton To the extent that they are sometimes hard to tell from "home network", maybe. I tend to be a bit harsh on questions like "can I configure X to do Y" regardless of the type of X - if they'd done due diligence they'd know whether it was possible and ask for help with specifics instead.

Michael Hampton

17:05

@JennyD Nobody closed it for that reason.

Jenny D

@MichaelHampton It's possible to misclick in the close window. Looking at it I though I'd've VTC for minimal understanding which is as close to "didn't read the manuals/use google" as I think we can get

Michael Hampton

That would be a fair reason to close it, perhaps.

And...finding Cisco documentation is always an adventure. Usually a frightening one.

Iain

@MichaelHampton can you see how the voting went ?

Jenny D

@MichaelHampton Is it as bad as HP's site?

Nathan C

@MichaelHampton Heh, it's a fair question ...with a SonicWALL it's as easy as using a wizard which configures all the NAT trickery

Michael Hampton

17:08

@JennyD Not quite...

@Iain Everyone closed it for "not professional" like it was a drooling home user

Jenny D

@MichaelHampton It can be pretty damn bad and still not be as bad as HP

Dennis Kaarsemaker

Is anything as bad as HP's site?

Jenny D

@DennisKaarsemaker I sincerely hope not.

Iain

@MichaelHampton to be honest the terminology used makes it seem that way

Michael Hampton

Iain

17:11

@MichaelHampton the worst thing is that it's only answer is just a link

Michael Hampton

@Iain True, but at least it's a starting point. It might have taken me all day to find that link.

Jenny D

Michael Hampton

No, that was navigating HP's web site.

Iain

@MichaelHampton and when cisco change it the answer becomes useless

Michael Hampton

@Iain I am well aware of this!

Welcome to Server Fault. Answers should not consist solely of links to external sites, because the content may change or disappear. Please edit your answer to include the essentials, with the link only for reference. — Michael Hampton ♦ 10 secs ago

I'm also in the middle of trying to eat my lunch

Nathan C

17:24

@MichaelHampton One-to-One NAT best NAT

:p

Jacob

@MichaelHampton Lunch? It's only 10AM?

Michael Hampton

@Jacob 1:27 pm. See, now that you're on the Wrong Coast your sense of time is all screwed up.

Jacob

@MichaelHampton Oh right...

oops

MichelZ

actually, it's 7:27pm

Jacob

@MichelZ Actually it's not

MichelZ

17:28

:)

here it is

We should communicate in UTC only

Michael Hampton

17:29Z

Jacob

So, I have spam assassin that isn't blocking the most obvious spam greaaat

MichelZ

i'm getting a lot of spam as well today

damn o365

Michael Hampton

I gave up on SpamAssassin some time ago, after it appeared to be unmaintained

Jacob

@MichaelHampton Better option?

Michael Hampton

17:30

@Jacob I wish there was one

Jacob

@MichelZ I prefer Zulu time :P

MichelZ

@Jacob use hosted... postini and things

Michael Hampton

Oh, wait, I wrote a SF post on this

MichelZ

@Jacob That's OK as well :)

Jacob

@MichelZ I'm asking the boss to migrate us to O365.

Michael Hampton

17:30

47

A: Fighting Spam - What can I do as an: Email Administrator, Domain Owner, or User?

To defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy. What is spam? For our purposes, spam is any unsolicited bulk electronic message. Spam these days is intended to lure unsuspecting users into visiting a (usually shady) web site where they will be asked to buy products, or have malware delivered to...

ewwhite

@ewwhite. I';ll figure it out. Been doing Unix/network admin'ing for 14 years. Was simply hoping there was a well written doc so I don't have to waste extra time researching it. — Michael Martinez 1 min ago

Ry Jones

@Jacob good plan

ewwhite

@Jacob I use Barracuda

Michael Hampton

That's mostly what I do, except I don't use SpamAssassin

ewwhite

which is sPamassasin with other stuff

Jacob

17:31

@MichaelHampton So what do you use?

Michael Hampton

47

A: Fighting Spam - What can I do as an: Email Administrator, Domain Owner, or User?

To defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy. What is spam? For our purposes, spam is any unsolicited bulk electronic message. Spam these days is intended to lure unsuspecting users into visiting a (usually shady) web site where they will be asked to buy products, or have malware delivered to...

Jacob

I think it's a bit early to buy all the things. OTOH I do have a corporate card though.

ewwhite

eff all that craziness

just use a cloud service or a purpose-built appliance

Jenny D

@Jacob greylisting helps quite a lot

Ry Jones

@ewwhite email is certainly worth outsourcing.

ewwhite

17:35

@RyJones I like keeping email in-house... but spam filtering offsite

also helps for queuing mail

and riding out outages.

I pay $8/user/year for Barracuda cloud filtering

so for my clients who don't want to pay $3k for a Barracuda appliance, it's easy to filter their mail through the service

totally hands-off, and I don't have to think about it

Ry Jones

@ewwhite ok, sure.

Jacob

@ewwhite 8/usr/year? really?

ewwhite

@Jacob yeah.there's probably a minimum... but pay $800/year

MichelZ

yes, we payed similar figures for google/postini

you also get nice quarantine and stuff

Ry Jones

We have total shit email filtering here at work and it's caused us all sorts of problems.

MichelZ

17:39

yes, e-mail filtering is not "easy" to get right

ewwhite

this is pretty damn easy. I don't bother with quarantine or anything like that. Maybe it's because my users are not too savvy... but why give the option?

Jacob

@RyJones We have 2 MXs with Spam assassin that haven't been looked at in months

Ry Jones

@MichelZ the biggest issue is it silently drops mail instead of quarantining it, and then we get phone calls from partners wondering why we're ignoring increasingly strident emails

and IT can not be assed to disable it for us

Michael Hampton

It's on my to-do list to completely rebuild my email server. So I'll probably update that in a few months.

Nathan C

We have email in house (Kerio) and use SpamAssassin and a few other things (SPF checking, DNSBLs) and we still get tons of spam ><

A majority of it does get caught before it ever hits the inbox, though.

MichelZ

17:42

@ewwhite I mean brewing your "own" solution with spamassasin and the likes

ewwhite

@MichelZ that is hard now

and I think it's like building your own server

at one time it made sense...

less so today

MichelZ

servers still make sense tough

at least for me

:)

Ry Jones

If your value add is rolling out email servers, sure

Bob

@JennyD Ahh, HP's site...

4

Jenny D

@Bob I had a medical checkup today, they say I've got a little too high blood pressure. I'm thinking most of that comes from all the time I've spent trying to find info there.

Ry Jones

17:45

@JennyD diuretics will help that

Nathan C

@Bob You're gonna need a bigger hard drive...

MichelZ

@Bob pretty big bios update :)

Bob

@NathanC Given infinite time, bandwidth and storage, one can eventually complete a download from HP.

Nathan C

@Bob And then it fails at 99% because the connection was broken, so you have to start all over again!

Jacob

@MichelZ That's because you sell software for them.

ewwhite

17:51

@NathanC Want a VMware question?

MichelZ

@Jacob so you're all-cloudy?

ewwhite

I know from a utilization perspective we don’t really touch the capacity our servers have. I’m guessing that has to be balanced against what we’ve allocated in some fashion. Overall, how “full” would you say we are with respect to our setup and adding more VMs etc?

Nathan C

@ewwhite That host has more than enough room for moar VMs...there's ~100 GB of unused memory!

ewwhite

it's a 3-host cluster

MichelZ

@ewwhite seems like you are at 10% CPU and 60% memory :)

and if you substract the N+1 node

you're at 100%

:)

Nathan C

17:54

Ah...I was gonna say, what's left of that cluster is what my entire capacity is...

ewwhite

right, so my explanation is:

RAM is always the biggest constraint in VMware environments.
Nothing in your environment has been optimized or right-sized, so I’m going to give you numbers that exclude overcommitment and other advanced memory features. Most environments DO overcommit, so when RAM gets constrained, VMware can usually handle memory decisions.

96GB x 3 servers = 288GB RAM
3 servers and the ability to run comfortably with one offline = 96GB x 2 = 192GB RAM
Current utilization = 173GB RAM

Available RAM = 192GB – 173GB – 4GB (system overhead) = 15GB RAM

MichelZ

yep, that would my answer be as well

Nathan C

@ewwhite As in, they're basically full but right-sizing can allow them to squeeze more VMs on if need-be.

ewwhite

@NathanC yeah, not every one of these Ubuntu VMs need 4GB RAM and 2 vCPU

Nathan C

Overcommitting just sounds...wrong. I know it's common, but I don't like it :P

MichelZ

17:56

@NathanC yeah, especially when RAM is so dirt-cheap nowadays

getting 3 new hosts with 384 GB memory each soon-ish, I hope :)

Nathan C

I mean, if they're looking to add more servers and they're constrained for hardware, then you can possibly do it until you can source more hardware to handle the load

On another note, my new shiny NAS should be in today...so I can have proper failover. Whee!

ewwhite

So vCenter Operations says... with optimization, I could fit 20 more VMs

Nathan C

@ewwhite I've always liked the idea of low-balling the RAM since you can hotplug RAM

MichelZ

@ewwhite lol.. 12 GB memory and recommended 1 GB?

respect

Nathan C

But you have to have downtime for downsizing

ewwhite

17:58

but without...

Nathan C

@ewwhite Ah, VOps. Ours broke one day and now it's just sitting off in a corner crying itself to sleep

ewwhite

(BTW, I broke my vCenter and had to recover from backup... so these values haven't been recalculated...)

Nathan C

@ewwhite I love how useless that capacity remaining value is

It doesn't even know how many VMs are powered on!

ewwhite

only because I had to rebuild vcops

Nathan C

I should do that too at some point...

But I'm already bumping against the maximums of what I should have on the servers, so...it'll have to wait until I can get the RAM

ewwhite

18:15

Client response:

I’m not sure how to completely explain why I’m asking other than to say my impression has been we are nearing the full side of the existing setup. I was told today I’ll need to be creating at least one VM (possibly 2) to support a site that could definitely see some traffic. I don’t want to just allocate and allocate versus when I should indicate things should be removed/shrunk before creating something new versus when we are nearing a point we need to expand the hardware.

84104

So they don't understand their infrastructure then?

ewwhite

barely.

MichelZ

@84104 that's usually a given if they get a consultant ;)

ewwhite

but it's the type of thing where t's a developer acting as sysadmin, and he doesn't want to know more

he wants the quick, easy answer

Ry Jones

"add stuff until it breaks, then call me"

MichelZ

18:21

well, at least he seems to see that it nears capacity, and he wants to shrink stuff / right size stuff before overcommitting

so the response is kinda reasonable, isn't it?

ewwhite

and for me, it's like, "you have 44 VMs and 192GB of ram in a cluster... some of your VMs are oversized. If you right-size them according to the recommendations I printed out for you, you'll be fine"

@MichelZ kinda... He didn't want to right-size some of the VMs when I asked him to

"don't give this 16GB of RAM. It only needs 4GB"

MichelZ

the response indicates otherwise

ewwhite

oh, it was a long drawn-out explanation... and I tried to explain resource pool math

MichelZ

:)

ewwhite

so now I've forced him to use resource pools that can guarantee the N+1

I did the the fun way...

with pool limits, share allocations and reservations

MichelZ

18:24

you can have so much fun with vmware

ewwhite

but it still seems hard

Nathan C

@MichelZ You can, but if you look at it funny it'll toss some obscure language your way and refuse to work. On a Friday evening.

MichelZ

@NathanC it does? haven't had issues in a while

Nathan C

@MichelZ Well, it's more vCenter's fault than anything...ESXi as a whole has been solid since fixing that damned intel NIC bug

MichelZ

so what's wrong with vcenter?

I only had troubles when updating it... luckily there are snapshots :)

Nathan C

18:35

@MichelZ I've had "ghost" datastores, times when SSO would refuse to work, that sort of thing

The datastore thing I was able to fix by manually removing it in the CLI

I think it broke completely at one point for some reason and I had to coax it back to life with some config file tricks

Hmm, yak shaving. An interesting term, and explains the project I'm working on quite well...

MichelZ

19:54

good night fellas

Ry Jones

@MichelZ sweet dreams, my prince

Michael Hampton

21:14

Just a reminder: Purchase a Red Hat OpenStack certification exam and get the online training course free. Promo code is Prep4Stack

Jacob

22:14

@MichaelHampton Do you use Pyzor?

Michael Hampton

@Jacob No, but I suppose I should probably look at it

ewwhite

23:05

On an Amazon interview.

Interesting.

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite You're interviewing at amazon?

I think a few people in here have interviewed there

ewwhite

Someone there told them to call me.

An SF user.

Ry Jones

@MarkHenderson heh, I worked there

@ewwhite won't make it there - it isn't lux enough

Mark Henderson

@RyJones Did they go on about how someone figured out how to use grep and sed to replace 10,000 phone numbers?

ewwhite

Looks like it's running Amazon.com's retail site.

Something about a barrel of lube...

Perl, ruby....

Ry Jones

23:16

@MarkHenderson no

ewwhite

I don't think I could handle SRE for Amazon.

And zappos.

Ry Jones

@ewwhite you'd have to live in Seattle, too

ewwhite

Oh, eww...

Icky.

Ry Jones

well, I assert that, but perhaps they have a Chicago ops team

amazon is a religion and it demands religious adherence.

ewwhite

Naw.

I'm not a relocating type.

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