The Comms Room

Joel

17:00

@wfaulk In LA, it's very competitive, and the salaries are quite high. Other places might be different

Adrian

@Joel Interesting. Having Bug Blue listed on there may do me some good then.

Basil

sup

0

A: Windows 2008: re-use of deleted blocks on virtual "thin" disks

What you're looking for is actually called "thin reclamation", a process where the server OS tells the underlying storage when it has unmapped a block, even if it's not been zeroed out. Windows 2008 can be configured to act this way with some vendors, however (at least the last time I read about ...

ewwhite

I've seen a little of both..

@Joel Why so competitive?

Joel

@ewwhite This is my assessment from the receiving end of six-figure prospects for my measly two years of experience. And by competitive I mean firms competing with each other to snag talent, as well as talent competing

Basil

@Joel 2 years and 6 figures...? what field?

Joel

17:09

@Basil The job titles are of the flavor "Senior Linux Administrator"

Basil

At my shop, there are no senior anythings with less than 10 years

we're not in LA though :)

Lucas Kauffman

@Basil do you pay 6 figures?

Basil

@LucasKauffman For some folks. Maybe the top 30% of the department, not including managers

ewwhite

In Chicago, the jobs are starting to look like "we want 2-4 years experience"

They don't want SENIOR people.

Basil

bearing in mind, the cost of living in Montreal is less than a 10th of the cost for LA

@ewwhite Until 2 years ago, the average tenure of an IT person at my company was 30 years

then we grew from several hundred IT people to several thousand, and now it's down.

ewwhite

17:13

30 years...

Basil

hrm, less than several thousand if you only count HQ I suppose

@ewwhite that's tenure, though- many people came into IT from other departments and kept their seniority

Adrian

@ewwhite Yep. Here they want entry-level positions or 10+. There's no middle ground openings.

ewwhite

Any storage people here?

Looking for an opinion on EMC vnx3100e

MDMarra

@ewwhite @Basil is a storage dude

ewwhite

For VMWare.

Adrian

17:17

I'd say to poke @MikeyB

MDMarra

I think @pauska uses some vnx kit with VMWare

Basil

I hate all the VNXes, but only because they're such a pain to manage

MikeyB

@ewwhite Sure, send it over, I'll take a look.

Basil

Too many places with firmware

ewwhite

Not for me...

but I have a client who has a new IT director

he wants to put one in....

11 600GB SAS disks.

Basil

17:19

Celerra has one, Clariion has one, the service processors have one...

ewwhite

Is it low-end stuff?

Basil

I use VNX5200s for the vmware at remote sites

they flake out once in a while

ewwhite

do they use SSDs or tiering anywhere?

Basil

yes

ewwhite

<-- I'm spoiled by Nexenta/ZFS performance

Basil

17:20

they have auto-tiering

actually, I assume yours does- I'm going by the 5200 I know

The entire line is still a little flaky since they bolted on the NAS to compete with netapp

pauska

Yeah we're using a VNX 5300

Chris S

@ewwhite Same here; though it's tempered quite a bit by how memory hungry zfs is.

Basil

sorry, I've got a 5100, a few 5300s, and a ns120

I am not sure where I got 5200 from :\

ewwhite

Good enough for a 3-host vSphere cluster?

Basil

yes

ewwhite

17:22

would you run VMs over NFS or iSCSI on that unit?

Basil

iscsi

I don't trust the celerra

pauska

while I use actual facts when I make choices

:)

Basil

it's flaked out on me too many times (on CIFS)

pauska

CIFS works just great here..

ewwhite

How about compared to HP/Lefthand or the P2000 series?

Basil

17:23

@pauska You don't consider the experience of someone who has a few of them "facts"?

I have never used lefthand

@pauska works here too, most of the time. It broke twice, though, on two different boxed for two different reasons

pauska

@Basil no, not really, unless they actually describe the problem and in what scenario the problem showed up..

the only gripe I have with the NAS head is that it's more complicated than needed to set up in terms of storage carving, and that it can only be a DFS member (no replication in other words)

Basil

@pauska I'm not the one asking for help

anyways, I've gotta jet

pauska

but they promised me branchcache on the roadmap.. so we'll see then

@ewwhite I would stick to block for regular vm servers, and use NFS for VDI's (dedup)

ewwhite

K. What are the cache options on units like that?

pauska

allthough I'm not sure which features the VNXe have now.. they keep adding stuff

VNX or VNXe?

ewwhite

17:26

VNXe

pauska

I'm not sure if you can run fast cache on those

looks like you're limited to controller cache

not even sure if the VNXe does tiering

ewwhite

ugh..

pauska

but do you need tiering? not everyone does

Chopper3

@pauska we don't use tiering - well we use 7.2k 2TB R10 LUNs for backups but we only really use 15k R10's for data

Kyle Brandt

Anyone have a contact at a Dell Factory where we can get a lot of hard drive caddies?

SmallClanger

17:38

@KyleBrandt Too proud to go slumming it on ebay? :)

ewwhite

@pauska I think for the cost, it's easier to go the ZFS route

Iain

@KyleBrandt what's the official route to get an IP address or a url banned from SF ?

Kyle Brandt

Email [email protected]

Chopper3

@Iain Let me have their details - I'll get them banned from the rest of their lives

Rebecca Chernoff

@Iain y'all know how to reach the community team (;

Iain

17:46

Cheers

Kyle Brandt

Or more correctly, Ask in here, I ask Rebecca in video chat, she hops in here and tells you ;-)

Rebecca Chernoff

lol

Iain

that works too ;)

Rebecca Chernoff

@KyleBrandt -1, not enough steps.

WesleyDavid

@Iain WHY?!? WHAT DID I EVER DO TO YOU?!?

Iain

17:47

@RebeccaChernoff can we just get anything that contains fixtoolbox.com blocked ? or more correctly *fixtoolbox.com

Scott Pack

@KyleBrandt So how frequently, pray tell, do you and @Rebecca video chat during work hours? Sounds kinky.

Iain

@WesleyDavid well let me find my list ...

WesleyDavid

@Iain It was the whole "termites in the sock drawer" thing wasn't it. =|

pauska

someone said socks?

2

Iain

@WesleyDavid nah it was the spiders thing

WesleyDavid

17:51

@Iain Technically scorpions aren't spiders, but I get what you're saying.

And yay we had a tussle in here!

Too bad it apparently caused flags though.

Adrian

@WesleyDavid Yeah, somebody was being an egregious dick. As opposed to the usual sort.

Scott Pack

I missed the dickishness?

Adrian

Yeah. I decided not to flag it though considering that I've been a dick often enough in my time.

WesleyDavid

@Adrian He seemed very passive aggressive.

But, it could have gone a lot worse.

Iain

poige ?

Adrian

17:56

@WesleyDavid Dunno. I'm so used to a Seattle baseline passive-agressive that I wouldn't have noticed the garden-variety.

@Iain Yup. Much like Big Blue though, I don't invoke the name.

MikeyB

Mmm random write sexytimes:

Rebecca Chernoff

@ScottPack lol

Iain

@Adrian I didn't use the @ on purpose. It seems to be the way of the Russian's - must be something to do with the vodka

Rebecca Chernoff

@ScottPack almost every day! q:

Scott Pack

@RebeccaChernoff Giggity

tombull89

18:00

Just read that US people have to pay to receive texts on their mobile/cell phones!? what is this madness?

Scott Pack

@tombull89 Pretty much. I have $5/month to get 200.

tombull89

As a Brit, that's mental. Pay to send and that's it.

voretaq7

@tombull89 Free to carrier = pay to consumer.

What don't you get?

@tombull89 we also pay for incoming calls, isn't most of the other side of the pond Calling-Party-Pays?

Scott Pack

@tombull89 Some carriers used to do that. It was the "pusher" effect. First hit's for free and all.

tombull89

@voretaq7 yes, whoever initiates the call/text pays.

Adrian

18:04

@Iain Aye, figured as much. I prefer not to invoke bad karma.

Chris S

@tombull89 Yep, used to pay $5/mo for 300 messages (in and out count against you). $10/mo for 1000, and $15 for unlimited. I've switched away from the 4 bit carriers now, so I get unlimited everything for $50/mo.

Either that or pay $0.15+ per message.

Adrian

Is there anyone in the room that DOES use KVM for virtualization?

Joel

@Adrian Too neckbeard for me. Or rather, too neckbeard for the suits. If it doesn't have a Win32 GUI or a web interface, it doesn't exist.

Adrian

@Joel Trying to sort out best practices for host and guest tuning on KVM. Swappiness, I/O scheduler, and whatnot.

Chris S

@Adrian Use QEmu at home... Does that count?

ewwhite

18:09

@Adrian No.

Adrian

@ewwhite I figured you were right out on this one. =)

ewwhite

Although I'm getting ready to install it in place of a VMWare Server 2.0 installation

@Adrian Not sure on swappiness... I'd do deadline on host... noop on guest.

Adrian

@ewwhite Yeah, I need to download the VMWare 4.x installer you mentioned the other day. Try that against the other Dev box.

MikeyB

@Adrian <--- yep

Adrian

Ah. We're pretty much running cfq everywhere.

I need to track down a modern kernel book.

MikeyB

18:18

@Adrian On RHEL6 at least, there's a tuned package. You can (for instance): tuned-adm profile enterprise-storage which sets (possibly among other things) deadline and nobarrier. That may provide some useful info. docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/…

Adrian

@MikeyB Ooh. Nice. Will look that up. Getting a little tired of trying to peek in the window of the RedHat stuff. We need to simply pony up for a RH sub and be done with it.

@MikeyB Thanks. That's quite useful.

ewwhite

@Adrian NO CFQ!

12

Q: Linux - real-world hardware RAID controller tuning (scsi and cciss)

Most of the Linux systems I manage feature hardware RAID controllers (mostly HP Smart Array). They're all running RHEL or CentOS. I'm looking for real-world tunables to help optimize performance for setups that incorporate hardware RAID controllers with SAS disks (Smart Array, Perc, LSI, etc.) a...

voretaq7

@tombull89 yeah, over here EVERYBODY PAYS (except the carriers. They get subsidized)

ewwhite

Another storage question. Do any arrays provide inline compression?

Trying to compare/contrast ZFS versus EMC

WesleyDavid

Seriously Microsoft? This is the best you can do at making a "We've moved!" page?! eopen.microsoft.com

I thought it was a joke at first.

Adrian

18:35

@ewwhite Yeah, that one. I kept it open in a tab on my iPhone for several weeks because I knew I'd need it soon.

And then totally forgot about it when I needed it.....

Joel

@ewwhite nimblestorage.com these guys are leading the way on that front, it seems

I haven't seen inline compression on any "enterprise" storage offering, but to be fair I haven't looked in a while

MikeyB

@Joel NetApp netapp.com/us/products/platform-os/dedupe.html

Joel

@MikeyB Awesome, reading it now

MikeyB

18:54

Urgh…
Last write time: Mon Apr 30 17:00:17 2012
Did someone give this server a backhand on the way out the door after work? :)

So customer calls in saying "whenever someone tries to leave a voicemail, the system says the mailbox is full."
Well, when I try it, it doesn't quite say that. It says "the mailbox cannot accept any more messages."
Because the file system errored out to read-only :) Subtle distinction there.

MDMarra

Details

Hey @RebeccaChernoff! Quick question, since you're an omnipotent SE being. When does the vote fraud process run?

Rebecca Chernoff

on days that end in y

Joel

@MDMarra What constitutes "vote fraud" as opposed to "vote enthusiasm"

Iain

@Joel I don't think that's publicly available information

Adrian

@Joel Heh. I'm generally guilty of vote enthusiasm. There's a few people in the room that post some freaking awesome stuff and then I go back and read a bunch of their OTHER stuff and upvote all that too.

Joel

19:08

@Adrian That's the sort of thing I mean

Jeff Ferland

@Adrian I love vote enthusiasm :)

Adrian

@JeffFerland It usually also gets trimmed down though. And probably annoys .SE.

@voretaq7 is this one appropriate for workplace.SE ?

0

Q: Manager title for a group of linux systems administrators

My coworker and I, both considered Sr./Lead systems administrators, are currently de facto "managers" for a group of 7 linux systems administrators. The group is going to expand at minimum 3 additional admins. We are looking to hire a manager however coming up with a title has been a lot harder t...

linux manager

Joel

This might be a meta-question, but is there a way to get a SEO-able user profile on SE

Zoredache

What do you mean?

Get you profile so it doesn't have the nofollow stuff? Just earn enough rep, I think.

meta.stackoverflow.com/search?q=nofollow+profile

Joel

19:28

@Zoredache I just wanted to show up in search results when someone googles my name. I guess I'll keep at it! Thank you

Zoredache

Earn reputation is the key. Also add links to your serverfault profile from your Google Plus profile, and any other social networking site too.

Joel

@Zoredache HNNNG IT WON'T BE NORMALIZED

ewwhite

@Zoredache Can I do it for Facebook?

Zoredache

I know when I search for 'zoredache' my profile shows up pretty close to the top.

@ewwhite I said 'any other social networking site.' I just suspect, though I am told I am wrong, that Google tends to prefer Google stuff.

Lucas Kauffman

when I google my name, my profiles with the lowest scores turn up first :(

Joel

19:32

@LucasKauffman HAhahaha When I search, I get some jerk that got a ticket in Arizona

Lucas Kauffman

@Joel sucks :p

MDMarra

@Joel I received 14 downvotes in about a minute ;)

Then the gentleman that did it came into chat and started a minor ruckus while admitting that he did it because he didn't like that Dan and I had edited an answer that he wrote.

ewwhite

Hmm, so since chat is forever captured by google... should we be taking any precautions here?

MDMarra

@ewwhite I change my username periodically

Chat logs don't automagically update with the latest user name

ewwhite

Okay, MarkM

Joel

19:39

@MDMarra Hooray!

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Should we? Yes. Do we? Not usually. =/

MDMarra

I also consciously never write out the name of my workplace

Joel

@WesleyDavid Can't we politely request that this not be indexed?

ewwhite

I forgot that the private chat shows up..

MDMarra

If people ask, I'll tell them to go to my twitter, which is in my profile

WesleyDavid

19:39

@Joel Can we? Yes. Will it be honored? No.

Ward

@MDMarra Before they changed the way vote counts work, I would usually notice my vote total go down sometime between 4pm and 5pm PST (so 0000-0100 UTC) on Friday.

ewwhite

I was thinking about the KVM rants I had..

MDMarra

@Ward Makes sense that the process would run at 0000

@ewwhite Just change your user name if you're really concerned

Ward

Since then, I have no freaking clue... I sometimes get extra votes early in the day (just after 0000) but sometimes later on

MDMarra

I did after I saw this

protip: my username used to be the #1 result

WesleyDavid

19:41

@MDMarra BRB, changing my name.

(at the courthouse)

Ward

@MDMarra You should ask Wesley... he's always getting bonus votes.

ewwhite

haha

Zoredache

@ewwhite Just don't say/publish anything anywhere on the Internet unless you are willing for anyone in the world to know about it.

ewwhite

Oh, I know.

WesleyDavid

I don't mind the world knowing that I find humor in profanity, it's just that people are so weird about what they think of it sometimes.

Weird and inconsistent.

MikeyB

19:43

Wow, no wonder that SU screen question got so much traffic. Welcome John Carmack to SU: superuser.com/questions/419070/…

Ward

I stick with just first name for most things to have a thin edge of deniability.

ewwhite

Great idea...

7

A: Is it good idea to shorten URLs in a CV?

Nobody, and I mean nobody will take the time to type in a URL that they see on a printed CV. So, from that perspective I say no because there's no point in putting the URLs there to begin with. If you have an electronic CV, there's no point in shortening them because the user isn't going to type...

QR code!

Ward

Googling my first last names gets a well-known author instead of me, gets my name on LinkedIn, some other guy on Facebook...

WesleyDavid

@MikeyB Who's John Carmack?

4

Ohhh, that john carmack.

MikeyB

@WesleyDavid Founder of id Software

WesleyDavid

19:45

nevermind

ewwhite

@Ward I have a famous-ish author who also happens to be from my hometown... slightly annoying

MikeyB

@ewwhite Oh yeah? I live practically next door to Justin Bieber. Well, an hour away, but still :)

ewwhite

oh :(

Zoredache

@WesleyDavid Dude, that is a -10 geek points right there.

MikeyB

@Zoredache Someone pin that

Joel

19:47

HOLY SHIT CARMACK

He is absolutely bar-none my nerd-hero

Chris S

@ewwhite Damn, why didn't I think of that.

Ward

On the one site where there were a couple things I'm not proud of, I got the owner to partially purge my name so there's a bit of deniability there, too.

Joel

I got to upvote John Carmack. My day is complete – JoelESalas just now

MDMarra

@Joel Your upvote didn't count!

He's repcapped!

quick, undo it and wait until 0000 UTC and then upvote

Lucas Kauffman

0

Q: Poor indoor cell phone signal

Due to the construction materials of an office building, cell phone reception is poor, and it's quite common that calls are dropped. AT&T, Verizon, and RIM are the typical cell phone networks used (iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries). Is there a way to boost the signal somehow to provide a...

iphone blackberry cellular verizon-wireless

Joel

19:49

@MDMarra It's the principle of the matter

Lucas Kauffman

is that on topic xD?

Iain

@LucasKauffman no

awoodland

@jscott They've been doing it on a lot of SE sites

Iain

@awoodland they've been resolved :)

jscott

@awoodland Yeah, think the mods got out the big guns.

awoodland

19:56

@Iain excellent. There was one more within the last two hours on SO

@jscott network-wide blacklist?

jscott

It really surprises me, that a "tech" company would manually spam potential target audience.

Iain

@awoodland there is now an SE wide ban on their URLs - was put in within the last hour or so

jscott

@awoodland Not sure of the details, but I saw @Iain chatting with an SE employee directly in the chat transcript earlier today.

awoodland

@jscott is it definitely manual? I sort of assumed from the gravatars and the fact that it was 1 unregistered account per post it was a botnet

Adrian

@jscott Whattup?

jscott

19:58

@Adrian No-mo fix t00l b0x posts. :)

Iain

@LucasKauffman I see the guy with the 4Gb/10Hrs thinks that his problem is solved - by blocking the logins on his server - I wonder if his hosting company think the problem is resolved

Adrian

@jscott Ah. Too bad we cannot request site bans be delivered by meteorite strike.

jscott

@awoodland I'm not sure, but it seemed slower than I would expect for a scripted-bot pulling up all the, let's say, [sql-server] questions and post an answer every x-minutes.

Iain

@jscott sysadmin1138 mentioned it on the TL and then in came to lite that they had been spamming elsewhere too, the rest is history ...

Lucas Kauffman

@Iain well the attacks have stopped and the bandwidth dropped, it might have been a bit an amateuristic attack

awoodland

20:00

@jscott I thought they figured spamming slowly would slip under the radar

jscott

@awoodland I would also swear I thought I saw them self edit an answer I found in /review, but my memory could be wrong. :)

Iain

@LucasKauffman it depends on where the traffic is measured - his hosting co will be measuring it at a switch which the packets still have to traverse to get blocked by his machine surely ?

awoodland

@jscott maybe they've outsourced it then but I didn't think humans were that bad at spotting if it actually related to a question

WesleyDavid

@Zoredache I was more a Romero fan.

jscott

@WesleyDavid Was just talking to a co-worker who is my age, a bit of a gamer, yet knew nothing of the daikatana/IonStorm fiasco.

WesleyDavid

20:09

@jscott I don't know a ton about it, but just enough. I was out of the gaming scene around '98 and really didn't get back in front of a PC until 2004. Weird story.

JoelESalas

@jscott I was/am a complete fanatic of the history of video game companies, wanting to found one myself. It's amazing how the Internet really changed the face of the corporate fuck-up

Lucas Kauffman

20:26

@Iain true, also most of the time attack scripts go to the next host once they notice that their packets get dropped

Iain

@LucasKauffman I'm still not convinced he was seeing enough failed logins to use that much bandwidth though

Lucas Kauffman

@Iain yea, but someone suggested that he got sent garbage after the login session is started

but I agree that it's unlikely

Iain

suggestion != evidence

Adrian

And this is why Devs should never pretend to by sysadmins....

Lucas Kauffman

@Iain true, well if it persists he'll come back I guess

Adrian

20:30

All of our Dev's command-line scripts return errorlevel 0. Every last one of them. They only know how to write scripts that are read in via Apache's PHP module.

2

MikeyB

@Adrian … wow.

Adrian

@MikeyB Yeah. It's painful sometimes. I spend a fair bit of my grocery bill on Three Buck Chuck.

Heh. Forget that Trader Joe's is regional. Charles Shaw Wines. $3/bottle at Trader Joe's.

I hate having to file bugs against their code. They get so pissy about having to do anything that isn't a new feature. Not that it's for the sake of doing new features, but their to-do list of new features is about 250 deep at any given time.

Woowoo! Got ourselves a little May Day riot downtown too.

Lucas Kauffman

@Adrian well who's fault is that it didn't work from the first time :p?

Adrian

@LucasKauffman Theirs. I'm not even supposed to SSH into their server without prior permission. They get all arsey about it. I think it's mostly because they don't want to hear from me about how their server config sucks great big rocks off the ground.

Lucas Kauffman

you let your devs manage a server :/

Adrian

20:42

@LucasKauffman It's not a matter of let. They have the political pull to get what they want since 90% of the agency depends on the software they provide. They've made enough mistakes in their last deployment that I'm able to make some changes stick and ram other changes through, but it's a bitter struggle each time.

WesleyDavid

amazon.com/Western-Digital-Personal-Cloud-Storage/dp/B0047FL85U

^Personal Cloud? Really?

wfaulk

I didn't know I could get rep off an upvote to an answer to a closed question

WesleyDavid

A hard drive on your desktop is now a personal cloud?

wfaulk

@WesleyDavid well, it's a small NAS, but, um, yeah

ewwhite

It's just a hard drive!

Lucas Kauffman

20:44

buzzword alert

Scott Pack

@Adrian We still call it 'two buck chuck' here, even though it hasn't been $2 in a very long time.

Adrian

@ScottPack Others probably still do here. I'm just a bit of a pedant where my own usages are concerned.

Scott Pack

I've heard that about you. What with the windowless van and all.

Zoredache

@ewwhite But it has an Ethernet port, therefore it is Cloud.

ewwhite

It's be one thing if it tied into Amazon's servers or WD's cloud solution...

"Backing your crap up!"

WesleyDavid

20:46

I rsync across the LAN to another PC therefore cloud!!!

Iain

@wfaulk yep, needs to be locked to stop voting

wfaulk

@ScottPack "pedant", not "pederast"

2

Scott Pack

@wfaulk Tomato...potato....

DJ Pon3

@WesleyDavid WD's copywriter needs to be reprogrammed with a clawhammer

Iain

I got an email from my local BCS group secretary asking if anyone knew someone who could do a talk on cloud computing - I was a sad panda :(

Scott Pack

20:52

@Iain Why? Apparently they wrote a whole book about it.

DJ Pon3

You could put your own name down and read an extract from "The Emperor's new clothes". See how far you get before anyone twigs

10 PRINT "Computer Nostalgia is bollocks"
20 GOTO 10

Iain

I wanted to point them at someone in a marketing department but I don't know anyone

MikeyB

I'm sure there's some law about requests like this coming in at 4:58PM…
"Michael how to remove software raid when it’s not even showing vgdisplay , actually software si corrupt and even if I have recreated the hardware raid it now flashing software raid away , is there any way to get rid of software raid . please help."

DJ Pon3

that's what the magic 8 ball is for

tombull89

so...is upvote upvote or downvote? — tombull89 yesterday

120 upvotes on that. 120.

Lucas Kauffman

21:01

@tombull89 on that silly question about fitting a router upside down?

wfaulk

1

Q: Mac Terminal, quit application

I'm fairly new to mac. I am testing a php application that runs continuously in a loop. When I run this application from the terminal, the machine name disapears and the application proceeds to echo out all of the statements as it is supposed to do. However, while in this state (no 'machine name...

mac terminal

buh-link

tombull89

@MikeyB asked: today. last active: today. Views: 36,000...wait, what?

@LucasKauffman yup.

Lucas Kauffman

That's why a friend of mine stopped coming on serverfault, the silliest questions get a mega upvote where the more complex ones just get a few upvotes since most people don't even understand it

DJ Pon3

Yeah. It's a bit of a popularity contest for questions

tombull89

@LucasKauffman like that "halp my servers been hacked emergency"...a few people rode the rep train on that one.

DJ Pon3

21:05

yeah. The bastards

Iain

@tombull89 nah - our security auditor is an idiot is a better example

Lucas Kauffman

It's the same with my bloatware answer I got 3 times a repcap because of that

wfaulk

@LucasKauffman coming on serverfault? That's a weird fetish.

DJ Pon3

he gets excited whenever people type "Cage nuts". Be nice...

tombull89

@Iain yeah, now that one I really didn't understand. Probably because the guy kept coming back with updates and bumping it back to the front page.

Lucas Kauffman

21:06

@wfaulk he said he really likes the pictures of those guys with long curly hair with a small beard that seem to be working on some servers or switches

DJ Pon3

I think when its a general question, everyone feels like they can contribute

so they join in, post and upvote

Lucas Kauffman

@tombull89 It also went viral on other websites, I think it got linked on reddit. I also saw it passing on IRC from people that had never heard about serverfault

tombull89

jesus even TomTom got in on it

Actually no, but remember to get special drivers to turn the upside down bytes back up. It works, though - I here people in australia install all network equipment upside down. — TomTom yesterday

DJ Pon3

omg

I wonder if that driver works on upside down phones...

JoelESalas

hory shiet, that got a lot of attention

wfaulk

21:12

Cage nuts: http://www.stayonline.com/snap-in-cage-nuts.aspx
Nuts cage: http://www.stockroom.com/Snap-On-CockBall-Harness-P490.aspx (NSFW)

tombull89

31

A: Can you mount a network switch upside down?

YES There is no problem mounting a device like this any way at all -- on its side, upside down, whatever you want. I have 20+ years of network admin experience, fwiw, and have built and managed many racks of gear.

20 years?

JoelESalas

@tombull89 more like 15 years of worthless experience

DJ Pon3

I wonder if plastic surgeons talk about building many racks...

Lucas Kauffman

@DJPon3 they expand their racks

2

DJ Pon3

true. Rack Management at its finest

I had to ask tomtom if that driver would work for phones by the way. I know I should know better but god help me, I don't.

wfaulk

21:18

How did area51 get to be my "parent" profile?

tombull89

@DJPon3 My saga with that education software came to a end today - yes, they provide an MSI to install. No, it cannot be pushed out through AD, because it tried to read from a goddam CD. Therefore I have to install it on 20-odd computers manually because they were to tight to buy the proper network install version.

So the money they saved on buying a couple of standalone versions will now be wasted on paying me to install it manually.

Horay!

Zoredache

@tombull89 yeah, but they already paid you. Paying for the network install would be more money.

I am sure that you weren't doing anything else important with your time. You were just at your computer playing games and surfing the Internet right?

Adrian

Ah, yes. That bullshit concept of "sunk cost". As if the other things I could be doing have no value either.

tombull89

@Zoredache No, not at all. It's not like there's a pile of thirty-five laptops behind me that need their keyboards replacing after being wrecked, or battling with proper software installs. Oh, wait. Yeah there is.

Iain

@tombull89 find some way to make the system you're deploying to mount an iso of CD just before you launch the MSI ?

Adrian

21:27

Doh!

Cranky Accounts Payable person just got snotty with the senior director that's heir apparent for the executive slot.

Talk about career-limiting moves....

tombull89

@Iain by the time I've worked how to do it, bodge a fix and test it it would be, in the end, quicker for me to do manual installs.

Iain

but you would have learned something

MikeyB

@tombull89 Until the 20-odd computers all get pooched by gamma rays right as you finish and then you wished you had automated the process

JoelESalas

@MikeyB this x1000

tombull89

@Iain yeah, buy the proper version and don't skimp out :P

Iain

21:33

You've already learned that - learn something new and save yourself grief in the future

(as with most things) there is a relevant xckd but I can't find it

MikeyB

Iain

@MikeyB that's the one

MikeyB

Ungh… OK delving into the details of extending admin-side templates in django has filled up my brain. Time to go home.

tombull89

In theory, I might be able to extract the disk contents to the deployment share and see if will install okay from that. If not, I could try and map the share as a drive and install it from that. If that doesn't work I could make an image of the disk and push out a gpo batch file to run a disk mounter stored on a fileshare, mount the image and install it from the mounted disk.

The point is, as much as I'm willing to spend the time automating it I'd rather it was done right in the first place because there's two members of technical staff and we shouldn't have to waste it where people have mucked up.

But that's a perfect world, so maybe I'm being annoying and bitching about petty matters.

Mark Henderson

Anyone else having trouble with gravatars today?

@WesleyDavid Toldja I hate the marketers that invented "cloud"

Lucas Kauffman

21:50

@MarkHenderson I just hate the people that use the word cloud for something that isn't remotely close to a cloud service

tombull89

@LucasKauffman I just want to create a folder on the shared drive and call it "CLOUD"

2

Zoredache

You should also create a folder and call it the Internet. Just for laughs. You can have loads of fun telling people to put things on the Internet.

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