The Comms Room

Mark Henderson

00:33

Looks like the world has itself another Stuxnet: news.com.au/technology/…

Mark Henderson

01:17

I just died a little inside. Our sales guy is now calling our solution "cloud based" (which I guess is technically true, I just despise that term)

Miles Erickson

01:32

@MarkHenderson Have you tried pointing out that it is technically "silicon-based"?

Mark Henderson

@MilesErickson Hah, doesn't sound as good

Plus when I think of silicone I think of the stuff they use for sealing bathrooms

Chris S

@MarkHenderson There's something wrong with a guy who hears "silicone" and thinks of bathroom sealant before breast augmentation.

Mark Henderson

01:54

@ChrisS Yeah its called being married :P And really not into fake tits

WesleyDavid

@MarkHenderson So being married castrates you? Good thing I haven't been close to such a fate in my 30 years...

Mark Henderson

@WesleyDavid No, but I found myself watching substantially less porn

And just generally less interested in other women

WesleyDavid

02:09

@MarkHenderson I can see that. Although, the same thing happened to me when I discovered IT as a profession. Not sure what to make of that.

MikeyB

Congratulations, you're the first person to mention that in Comms Room chat: http://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22breast+augmentation%22&room=127
The other room to mention it was The Bridge. Surprise.

Chris S

@MikeyB Sweet! Where's my badge?

@MarkHenderson You've never felt fake have you.... That or you mean you're not into overstuffed appendages that make most watermelon jealous. If the latter is the case, I completely agree with you.

WesleyDavid

Ouch, Adrian got a beat down.

Mark Henderson

@ChrisS No I've never felt fake :p

But I have felt large and small and large ones aren't nearly as much fun as you might think by watching the movies

Chris S

;-)

Adrian

02:45

Heh. I've not ever seen a Linksys that I trusted. I've dealt with so many "home routers" that I KNOW what utter shit they are.

WesleyDavid

@Adrian Yeah, I avoid them if at all possible. And if not possible, I avoid the potential customer.

Adrian

The newer stuff has been quite good. The older un-flashable stuff was irritating in its TCP setting.

My GF's Linksys DDWRT has been a total CF. In fact, I'm once again trying to get it working, which is why I'm online right now instead of on the couch sucking down Cabernet.

Journeyman Geek

@Adrian: the wrt54G?

Adrian

wrt54gl

Journeyman Geek

I'm starting to wonder if the older models were better made

Adrian

02:49

v1.1

Journeyman Geek

/me has a GV4

that is to say the GL before they split the line

Adrian

they were. There's less memory in them now.

Journeyman Geek

I might replace it anyway (eventually), since i'm getting to the point where most of my systems do gig-e

Mark Henderson

@Adrian They're good for DD-WRT and that's about it

Adrian

@MarkHenderson And I'm not sure about even that anymore. This one sucks.

Mark Henderson

02:53

When Cisco bought Linksys we used to get the occasional Linksys customer who had called us instead. We then had to explain that they had a different support number to call and they would crack the shits because "FUCK I just spent 45 minutes on hold there and I gave up and called you! Now I'm at the back of the queue again!"

Adrian

If it gives me too much more trouble it's gonna end like a clay pigeon and get chucked and shot.

Mark Henderson

@Adrian I have a small pile of dead WRT54G's :p

Most of them to be honest probably just need new power adapters

But they have such tiny specs you can only get the basic DD-WRT on it, which doesn't have any of the good stuff like routing protocols or VPN support

Adrian

@MarkHenderson Heh. Old ones were good. I've been told that the ones since about 2006 have less memory.

Journeyman Geek

i feel that way about netgears

was it netgear?

Mark Henderson

@Adrian Yeah they do. I have the v3 which has 1/2 the memory of the v2 :( And I think from v4 and above you can't load DD-WRT on them without a lot of work

Journeyman Geek

02:55

no, dlink

Mark Henderson

Well I used to have. Recently replaced it with a normal N-based belkin AP totally un-flashed

Adrian

@MarkHenderson yeah, that and the DIY nature of DDWRT on those things. I really can't recommend that route to small branch offices like that.

Mark Henderson

@Adrian No, not for actual corporate use

I love the tiny Watchguards for branch offices. Don't have any here but another client has them

They all "phone home" and pull their configs from a central store

Adrian

@MarkHenderson Unless there's full-time on-site IT staff, that shit just needs to run: serverfault.com/a/393420/73435

Mark Henderson

New office? No worries, drop it into the IPSec diagram and every device automatically initiates a connection to the new office

Adrian

02:57

I got a little pissy, but I think I stayed in bounds.

Journeyman Geek

.-.

Mark Henderson

@Adrian FVS318 doesn't do IPv6 does it?"

We had an older FVS and its IPv6 was... lacking

Journeyman Geek

@MarkHenderson: neither do dd-wrts ;p

Adrian

Heh. You're probably right in that respect. Of course, some of that IPv6 seems to be getting past the routers and straight to clients judging on by what I'm seeing.

it's really strange.

Journeyman Geek

@Adrian: probably tunneling

I've got it tunneled over UDP in some of my systems since it seems to sort of work, no matter what

Adrian

02:59

Time to go. The Lady says I need to start the grill. Laterz.

Journeyman Geek

it might also be teredo (which needs to die. Painfully. In a Fire.)

Mark Henderson

@JourneymanGeek Thats sad. I have an 8-year-old Snapgear device that supports IPv6

Journeyman Geek

@MarkHenderson: no one really seems very enthusastic about it

Mark Henderson

It even has a built in Hurricane Electric thingo. One checkbox to enable and 10 minutes later everyone has an IPv6 address through HE.

Journeyman Geek

neat

Mark Henderson

03:01

@JourneymanGeek Teredo is almost useless in Windows. It uses IPv6 native first, then IPv4, then Teredo. Chances are if your connection fails on the first two, Teredo isn't going to help

Unless it's an IPv6 only service that only serves AAAA records and you only have teredo

Journeyman Geek

@MarkHenderson: teredo is useless in linux as well ;p

MikeyB

I have been sooo happy with my dlink-825 or somesuch. Totally stable running DD-WRT.
The Cisco 610N WAP piece of shit on the other hand, ready to see if it'll blend.
And the WRT54GL, well it is what it is.

Journeyman Geek

i've messed around with it for ipv6 access and its performance has been horrible

@MikeyB: maybe they got better, i have at least two identical d-links i know of fail mysteriously and suddenly, one of which had pathetic signal strength

Adrian

Wee. Chat on the phone works tho. snicker

Journeyman Geek

damn, the debian text installer has much more options than the ubuntu one

including a minimal init

MikeyB

03:05

@JourneymanGeek I suspect that for that kind of consumer-level hardware, you're rolling the dice a little. But yeah...

Journeyman Geek

ya

MikeyB

Oops, it was a DIR-615. (Is it bad that I went to my old SF question mentioning it to check the model rather than the device itself? :)

Journeyman Geek

lol

MikeyB

What the fuck…?

Journeyman Geek

@MikeyB: hm, one of the ones i have has had all its labels removed and gutted

MikeyB

03:07

Nearly the same drive, except 128GB model on top vs. 256GB model on the bottom. What kind of fucked-up performance graph is that? (the wacky orange line is maximum IO latency)

Anyone ever seen anything like that?

Adrian

Ugh. This SSD stuff is downright strange.

MikeyB

Yeah, it can get really weird. Don't forget though, I'm pushing 6000 freakin' random write IOPS through these drives. Trying to break them.
We have a customer who has an application that is VERY sensitive to write latency - if a single IO take 3 seconds to complete it'll pretty much shit a brick.

WesleyDavid

Client emails me about their MySQL database that pegged a quad core Opteron with 8GB of RAM during a recent traffic surge. "I read once that there was a setting in one of the configuration files that allows the database to handle surges better? To be more flexible?"

Other than adding make_mysql_flexible = true in my.cnf, I'm not sure what he's recalling.

2

Adrian

Sounds like the Oracle stuff I worked on at Big Blue. Every device in the network reported in to our app, and it had a 10 minute data SLA including the report runtime.

George Edison

03:27

I'm having a bit of trouble connecting to IPv6 addresses:

ping -6 2001:4860:b002::68

Pinging 2001:4860:b002::68 with 32 bytes of data:
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.
PING: transmit failed. General failure.

I've checked the device manager to ensure the Teredo Tunneling interface is enabled.

How would I go about debugging this?

Journeyman Geek

@GeorgeEdison: it seems to have issues with a native ipv6 box as well

Mark Henderson

@GeorgeEdison Do you uuh, have an IPv6 address?

George Edison

Nope.

I thought the Teredo Tunneling interface would route IPv6 packets through an IPv4 network.

...or am I confused?

Journeyman Geek

vaguely. in theory

it never works worth a damn ;p

George Edison

How would I go about debugging it though?

WesleyDavid

03:44

MikeyB

@GeorgeEdison Can you ping a host that's up? 2607:f8b0:4002:801::1014 for instance? The one you gave doesn't respond at all.

I still suspect not as you're getting a transmit failure, but couldn't hurt. Personally I wouldn't bother debugging Toredo.

George Edison

Same results, I'm afraid.

Mark Henderson

I fucking hate it when I get emails like this:

I am in financial meeting with Adam and Marisa and Adam has advised this needs to be fixed by the end of this month or there will be trouble.

Seriously, you have an oustanding issue for 3 weeks but you don't log a support ticket for it and then crack the shits when it's not fixed?

Especially when at first glance it seems to be a PEBKAC problem

WesleyDavid

@MarkHenderson Backhand time!

Chris S

@MarkHenderson Am I lucky that I could take something like that to the person's boss and have them chewed throughly before they get it fixed?

Journeyman Geek

03:59

@GeorgeEdison: windows or linux box?

George Edison

Windows box.

I have Ubuntu running in a VM... I wonder how complicated it would be to tunnel IPv6 through VirtualBox's virtual network interface and then through my actual network :P

WesleyDavid

I hate that SQLSERVERAGENT is in all capitals. It's like it's screaming "FUCK YOU I'M A SERVICE!" #sysadmin

Tweeted by nem515 on May 29, 2012 at 3:44 AM

Mark Henderson

@ChrisS This guy is the boss

And they're our 2nd largest client

Chris S

=[

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Do you use any software to tally how much to bill clients for the use of any of your appliances?

Mark Henderson

04:10

@ChrisS He's pretty good 99% of the time, but sometimes he gets a bee in his bonnet. Usually if we havent visited in a while and he might not feel like he's getting value for money (they're a 90 minute drive away from us)

Usually a quick phone call to remind him that we're still working (we deal with them probably 30% of a working week, but not with him directly)

Chris S

OIC

WesleyDavid

@MarkHenderson Man, sucks. So you just brownnose your way out of it then?

Mark Henderson

@WesleyDavid Nah you don't even have to do that. Just instead of hitting reply, pick up the phone and give hiim a piece of your mind

I started to get pissed off at him for giving us an unrealistic 3-day deadline for something that his staff didn't log and after about 10 seconds we were all cool

WesleyDavid

@MarkHenderson Sounds like a reasonable fellow.

Mark Henderson

@WesleyDavid He is, absolutally. And he spents a shitload of money with us

I don't know exactly how much, but I think it's about 300k/year

WesleyDavid

04:16

@MarkHenderson That's nice. Is it all hourly MSP style stuff or do you host is infra?

Chris S

Why the heck can't browsers just release a list of the parts of SVG & SMIL that they DO or DO NOT support?!

Mark Henderson

@WesleyDavid They host their own infrastructure, but we do the majority of the maintenance. We also developed their core LOB application.

And their system grows at about 30Gb/month during a slow month, so its a pretty busy system

WesleyDavid

@MarkHenderson sigh Sounds dreamy. I've come to the conclusion that I'm really not cut out for small business consulting where you're under the gun to either wipe and reload or troubleshoot to a successful end all within half a day simply because they can't afford your time.

I'm looking for options to level up to a different market.

Working right now with a nice guy that has an online, eCommerce site that's not doing too bad. But still, it's just a one man shop. Troubleshooting is minimal and reactionary, thus the server is starting to look like the Beverly Hillbillies car.

Mark Henderson

Yeah well it's not all roses :P The demands are pretty high. If we fuck up they start losing money, big time

WesleyDavid

Eek. Yeah, that's not fun. Ultimately, I've got different plans, but getting there is slow.

ewwhite

04:22

@WesleyDavid For appliances, no... but Observium can do it for per-port metering...

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Gotcha. I didn't know if you billed for like "per 100,000 messages a month" or "per X amount of transactions" or whatever.

ewwhite

@WesleyDavid $180/hr... and anywhere between $100/mo and $300/mo for data storage.

WesleyDavid

I'm looking into how to tally per client usage of services. Basically, some kind of gateway / invoice tracking system to consume SNMP or MySQL data and then auto-generate and send the invoice or coordinate with the gateway for autoamted payment.

ewwhite

what types of services?

I like the flat rate approach... keeps billing simple.

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Like percentage of emails relayed (smarthost), storage for hosted backups (Unitrends or rsync/rsnapshot)

ewwhite

04:26

Flat pricing for me... so my biggest client uses ~800GB of storage on my systems... they pay $300/mo.

But then, I have around 20 customers doing that...

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Not bad at all. Is that file storage or something more specific like email archiving, or backup storage?

ewwhite

for smarthost services, it's just a freebie..

It's tied to the specific ERP application they use... so it's app-level replication on 10-minute intervals... think log-shipping.

But the clients also have images... tiff files of scanned documents. And I'd like to save myself the worry and move that to S3.

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Yeah, but this might be bulk. Like there's a guy that I know who needs help sending emails to 400,000 subscribers to some bizarre game that apparently went viral in Asia / western pacific rim. So For customers like that, I'd handle outbound mail with like Exim and some baysian, ClamAV, CommTouch filtering and other magic to keep them from being blacklisted when sending their newsletters to subscribers.

ewwhite

so I'm trying to understand s3fs and s3ql as possible options.

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Ahh, I see. Okay, interesting. Yeah, I'd do that kind of stuff too if I could find interested clients. Lately backups have seemed to be a concern, so I was looking at a Unitrends appliance and then do a monthly fee for backing up full client systems. Graduated pricing simply based on amount of space used. Doesn't matter if it's filesystem level, bare metal, or with fancy apps like Exchange or MySQL.

ewwhite

04:36

@WesleyDavid backups are important.

4

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Starred for truths.

Restores are importanter.

ewwhite

But I'll admin that I know very few organizations that get good backups.

meanwhile, I'm back on the 3-host vSphere cluster...

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite I know. =/ It's so, so hard to get and maintain an excellent backup. It's the unsexiest job in IT.

ewwhite

83 VMs, SATA san with 14 disks in RAID5

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Okay, I was mistaken. That is the unsexiest thing in IT.

ewwhite

04:39

and I don't think they're getting backups either.

Actually, I see Veeam running.

Mark Henderson

@ewwhite Thats the ultimate SAN gangbang

"83 hulking VMs. 14 disks. 7200 RPM. One party."

WesleyDavid

@MarkHenderson You forgot the cup.

ewwhite

It took 6 hours to copy 250GB between two VMs on the same host.

copy was limited to ~15mb/sec

Mark Henderson

@WesleyDavid No cups in this party. This is a normal gangbang that everyone can enjoy.

ewwhite

What do I tell the client?

"Just do this over... scrap it and start from the beginning"?

WesleyDavid

04:45

@ewwhite That about sums it up.

That's a tough spot to be in. You're the harbinger of doom and are essentially telling them that they either suffer in pain indefinitely or spend lots of money to do it they way it should have been done in the first place.

ewwhite

Well, 14 disks in a RAID 5... what's the technical argument against it?

WesleyDavid

I'd come armed with copious graphs and numbers.
1) How it's currently designed
2) How it should be designed
3) Consequences, pro and con, of each decision.

@ewwhite First is just speed. From my understanding of the communication, SAS at 7200RPM will edge out SATA at the same speed.

ewwhite

Well, they're in a bind. In the rush to virtualize, they put everything on a trio of old servers... pre-nehalem

WesleyDavid

Then, realize that 15K disks with proper cache will more than double performance.

ewwhite

@WesleyDavid Yes, queuing and error recovery.

WesleyDavid

04:49

Then, RAID five is a bit dangerous for such a large array.

I don't know how big their drives are, but I hope they're not bigger than 500GB

ewwhite

1TB

WesleyDavid

And I hope they have hot spares.

>_<

ewwhite

no

WesleyDavid

Are they at least "enterprise" drives? Like the WD RE4?

ewwhite

I've already had disk failures here... everything goes to crap...

WesleyDavid

04:50

With a higher URE number?

ewwhite

Whatever Dell specs

WesleyDavid

Okay, so that sounds promising at least.

Not like someone raided Best Buy for all the WD My Books on the shelves.

Rebuilding 1TB on such a contentious array will take days.

And will kill whatever is trying to run simultaneously.

ewwhite

Is it that the write speed is essentially that of one disk?

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite The write speed is essentially much less than one disk as the controller will be contending for the disk. See how the controller schedules its rebuild operations. It might be tuned for either aggressive or submissive.

IF it's aggressive, of course that'll take precedence. If submissive, the build will take a week or more.

ewwhite

@WesleyDavid well, general write speed. Assuming healthy array.

WesleyDavid

04:53

And then, with 1TB drives, your URE risk is higher. SO you could hit a bit that's just toast. Better hope it's not an important bit.

ewwhite

For random writes.

so it's a mess. I offered them a Nexenta array as proof of concept.

WesleyDavid

If you've got RAID6 and a good controller that scrubs platters, UREs can be caught and corrected before a rebuild finds them.

@ewwhite Did they slap that down?

ewwhite

@WesleyDavid Yes.

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Yeah, sounds bad. So present your technical findings, submit your invoice, and run.

ewwhite

Oh, can't run... I support the ERP application.

WesleyDavid

04:56

IF they're balking at a NExenta box for what is a rather obvious problem with a rather obvious solution, then they're not serious about doing business and you'll do well to get your invoice in and...

...ohhh, shoot.

ewwhite

But here's the challenge... this is a place with internal IT people.

and the virtualization project was a big deal for them... so they wanted to run with it.

So I'd be kind of an ass to tell them that their ideas were off...

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Wow, that's tough.

Wait, they're internal IT and they can't figure out what the problem is??

7200RPM array, with 80+ VMs, contended as heck

"OHAI!! Stuffs be liek, all slowz and stuffz!! IS IT CAN BE TROUBLESHOOTING TIEMZ NAO?!?"

ewwhite

I think they thought, "SAN + VMWare and a lot of RAM"

WesleyDavid

@ewwhite Ergh.

Maybe I'm a pompous ass, but whenever I do something, I read the HECK out of it to at least get a basic idea. And I think that just a few days of reading the heck out of this topic, built on top of what I consider to be prerequisite knowledge to calling one's self an IT person, should have told them that this was a bad idea doomed to failure.

You don't have to be a storage guy to know this stuff. Just basic hardware knowledge coupled with some targetted reading and chatting with people for a few days.

ewwhite

Well, it's one thing to be a consultant and see a lot of environments...

versus ONE environment.

WesleyDavid

05:04

Yeah, but... I dunno. I haven't seen a ton. I've been stuck contracting mostly for one place. I might as well have been their internal IT guy. But... maybe I'm a pompous ass.

ewwhite

but more than anything, I'm sad that they're using such old servers.

needed all sorts of VMWare EVC settings enabled.

mgorven

@ewwhite I've heard some bitching about s3fs, but nothing concrete. I think the main problem is that it makes you think that S3 behaves like a filesystem (which it doesn't), and so stupid stuff ends up happening. Better to use something like s3cmd where it's obvious what network operations are happening.

ewwhite

@mgorven There's an s3ql that sounds interesting... I'm looking for an interface to use S3 as a WORM store for tiff image files.

mgorven

@ewwhite Haven't used it, but it has some potentially useful features like compression, encryption and deduplication.

Tacticus

05:35

juju is very cool

ewwhite

05:54

@Tacticus Requires Ubuntu, though.

Iain

06:30

G'day

Tacticus

07:05

@ewwhite that's a good thing :P

cause frak centos

Bart De Vos

07:37

Morning all

@ewwhite I've used both s3ql and s3fs, It's not great.

One of them doesn't support UNIX flags/permissions (everything is 777) and the other is a expensive. If you change 1 bit in a block (which are 10 mb by default I think), it has to copy the role block over to S3 which is costly (transfer rate) and heavy on CPU (encryption and whatnot)

I had to design a backup solution 'in the cloud' as part of my thesis.

Dan

08:08

Morning

Chopper3

morning, 43 today, what an old bastard...

pauska

grats mate

I mean, grats - old fart

Iain

@Chopper3 many happy returns

Dan

@Chopper3 Hey, I'm 26 today. I wasn't going to mention it, but seeing as you have!

Bart De Vos

Congratulations to the both of you :)

SmallClanger

08:24

Morning all. Happy birthday paradox day, you two.

Bart De Vos

@SmallClanger Ah, the pigeonhole principle :)

pauska

08:45

@Dan grats!

Dan

It's my own birthday and I still just looked at the system tray to get the date. Christ.

2

Chopper3

Thanks guys

@Dan I can remember exactly what I was doing on the day you were born, I spent most of the day in a pub called The Green Bank and was sick in a bin outside - nice

Dan

I had no idea my birth was so important to you ;)

Thanks guys :)

Chopper3

This guy confuses me... serverfault.com/q/393496/1435

pauska

@Chopper3 I bet he copied it onto something newer (like ext4), and that it created btimes

Chopper3

08:54

exactly...

tombull89

3

Q: How to deal with mass out of office / company closure

We have a 4 day weekend coming up soon and it has been suggested that all turn out of office assistant on to ensure all customers are aware we are closed. Due to end user reliability and stupidity i have been requested to come up with a way to set all of them. Is there a way to make a transport...

Due to end user reliability and stupidity i have been requested to come up with a way to set all of them. snerk but true.

Dan

@tombull89 Ah, the story of IT

Chopper3

Not a brilliant composed question but if someone answered this well it could be pretty canonical - I imagine there's a lot of that kind of request out there, could do a linux variant too

tombull89

I guess he's UK-based, closed for 4 days because of the weekend and bank holidays.

Chopper3

yep

WTF?? serverfault.com/q/393513/1435

tombull89

08:57

hi, BTW, and happy birthday guys.

Chopper3

fanks

tombull89

well, I thought clone was, y'know, an identical copy?

Journeyman Geek

something might have gotten changed/corrupted

Dan

Surely easier just to re-clone

tombull89

09:15

did anybody spot this on the BBC last week?

growse

?

Journeyman Geek

what should i be seeing?

tombull89

@growse the "UNSC" logo is from the United Nations Space Command, in the Halo series. They meant to use the UN logo for the UN security council.

growse

ok, that's very very funny

Dan

@tombull89 Ahh, Google Images - fucking over producers everywhere :D

Dan

10:30

Wow, the Olympic web team have come up with the most pointless system in the world

You find your event, select the tickets you want. It then spends 15 minutes (Literally, no lie) 'reserving' said tickets before you can buy them. Except, well, it doesn't. So twice now I've waited, inserted my details and blam "Sorry, your tickets are not available"

My favourite bit is that, apparently, it's not even broken. The webpage just says "Sorry, yeah, those tickets are no longer available."

DJ Pon3

I've said it before, and I'll doubtless say it again, but fuck the olympics.

I've got no problem with the actual sporting events themselves, but fuck the whole "olympic" package.

Iain

I bet the bits I want to see (equestrian) will be mostly not shown or will be on at really weird times

Dan

@DJPon3 Despite having tickets to see something, I have to agree. The whole thing is far too overtly corporate and has lost the whole ethos of what it's all about really

DJ Pon3

Yeah that's the bit I'm talking about, the whole "corporate event" thing that we're having to spend a fortune on

want to watch the horse jumping? Watch it with my blessings (as if you need them, I know!)

got a ticket for something you want to see? nice one!

I hope to see some of the Judo on TV myself.

But all the BS surrounding those events? All the concerts, the opening ceremony, the flame (that's just some lame idea the nazis introduced anyway, IIRC)? Not interested, sorry.

tombull89

10:47

claim to fame: a friend's fiance's brother is competing in the kayacking events.

DJ Pon3

cool

tombull89

I was thinking about going to london for a week during the summer but the prices and the olympics have put me off a bit.

Iain

@DJPon3 as we have good prospects for showjumping and eventing we'll probably get them at reasonable times, tbh it's the dressage I'd like to see some of

Dan

@tombull89 Yeah, I'd avoid London at that time unless you're actively going for the Olympics. Transport will be hell - I've booked a hotel just inside the M25, based solely on the premise that I can get to Stanmore station and then not have to change tubes until I'm at the park

DJ Pon3

ah.. fair enough

Iain

10:50

@tombull89 a friends, cousin's horse is competing for New Zealand (eventing) in the olympics. It should have been competing for Ireland but the friends cousin was killed riding it at a cometition in Ireland

DJ Pon3

yeah my brother's a road warrior for a "green" heating company and they are dreading the transport disruption for their london sites

tombull89

@Iain That's unfortunate - no sport should cost a humans or animals life.

Iain

yeah - eventing is dangerous

actually - standing next to a horse is dangerous and it gets more so from there on

Dan

@Iain Yeah, I like horses as animals but I prefer to keep my distance.

Iain

I've cracked an elbow and ahd a few bruises from falling off but my worst was broken bone in my foot from standing next to one and being stepped on

DJ Pon3

10:55

I'm going to go with 'ouch' there

Also, having just read the star wall, happy system tray day Dan

Dan

@DJPon3 Thanks dude, it's Choppers, too

DJ Pon3

Happy birthday to @Chopper3 too

Iain

@Dan Happy Birthday

Dan

@Iain Cheers :)

Yay, got tickets to the Orbit

Iain

11:18

@Dan what event is that ?

is this sophisticated spam, cluelessness or something else serverfault.com/questions/393560/… ?

Dan

@Iain It's just to visit that big tower thing they've built in the park

Bart De Vos

-1

Q: windows Server is hacked by SOG how any one please help me?

my server is Win2K8 Web SRV , IIS-7, it is a web hosting server & my sites was hacked by some pakistani terrorist groups it is hacked by SOG say's Soldiers Of God From Pakistani Group, please help me to fight the situation. how can i stop attacking from these groups.

hacking hacked

Another 'O NOOOZ MY SERVER GOT H4XORED'

ewwhite

12:20

@Chopper3 Happy birthday.

5

Q: Convert a Smart Array RAID5 array to a RAID6 (ADG) variant

I have an HP MicroServer (N36L) with a SmartArray P410 controller, a 512MB BBWC unit and four (4) 2TB disks connected. Three of those disks are configured as a single RAID5 array and one is left alone. I'd like to migrate the RAID5 array to a RAID6 array. Is it possible to migrate it "in place...

hp proliant raid5 smartarray raid6

if the guy read the instructions posted, he could have figured this out in the same amount of time it took him to take the screen shots.

Dan

I've been asked to confirm which version of ASP.net an IIS7 website is using - can anyone point me in the right direction?

Chris S

@tombull89 That's awesome!

ewwhite

@Dan nmap -O? No, I'm not sure.

Dan

Ah, application pools, got it

Peter Grace

@Dan Nessus should be able to find it too.

Chris S

12:27

@ewwhite I've seriously thought about changing my resume, under skills, #1 Can actually follow directions #2 Strong Google-Fu, can find directions #3 Effective communications, can write directions.

There seems to be a shortage of sysadmins, particularly in small businesses, with those skills.

ewwhite

@ChrisS They're important skills... and I ask that of engineers I've interviewed and of potential team members that I want to join...

I mask it as "how do you solve engineering problems and what resources do you tend to use?"

The last 3 or 4 interviews I had, I asked the existing engineers that question. None use ServerFault... One guy even went as far as to say that the answers here were often wrong, so it was discredited in his eyes...

Bart Silverstrim

The answers here are often wrong?

ewwhite

Writing a good question is almost as important (communication skills, getting to the point, etc.)

Chris S

@ewwhite I've found wrong answers before, so I guess it's possible someone ran across several of them. It'd be nicer if he corrected them, but no loss to him either way.

Bart Silverstrim

Wrong as in wrong, or wrong as in not what he wanted to do so he disagreed "wrong"?

ewwhite

12:32

@BartSilverstrim Yeah, another Linux engineer I interviewed with landed on the site a few times from google and was not impressed.

Bart Silverstrim

But didn't say what made them wrong.

ewwhite

@BartSilverstrim Basically... I suggested that he correct what he saw... and then went on to say that there's community pressure to correct bad answers here.

Bart Silverstrim

And he said?

Chris S

I wonder what happens to the votes anonymous people put in on the site... I know it asks them if the Question was helpful: "yes" or "no"... Perhaps that data could help us clean up some of those answers.

ewwhite

@BartSilverstrim "Um, I have some good engineers in Australia to ask questions of... so I don't need to go to the internet that often to find answers."

Bart Silverstrim

12:36

ah. A cop-out.

Chris S

@ewwhite I know that's why I and other people from my company don't ask Q on SF hardly ever, if we break something we just call MS and get them to fix it.

Bart Silverstrim

So it's a cultural thing.

ewwhite

@ChrisS I do it when I see something good on StackOverflow or Unix.SE

Well, I ask a lot of questions... but sometimes it takes someone else's experience to jog memory or to lead you in the right direction.

I spent 4 hours last night trying to get Linux LXC containers to work before giving up.

It may become a question here or on Unix.SE today.

Bart De Vos

How do you tell your client politely he's an idiot?

ewwhite

@BartDeVos I'm in that situation with the VMWare disaster I mentioned earlier...

You avoid saying "I told you so" and efficiently clean up the mess.

Bart De Vos

12:44

I can't seem to make him understand that spaces in a DNS-record (A/CNAME) are a BAD idea that I can't even implement...

my application.corp.tld will NOT work

But, he turned to google and said it was possible while he threw something on the table about DNS name spaces...

ewwhite

@BartDeVos That's one that's easy to prove, though.

Bart De Vos

ugh

yeah, showed him. "Maybe, you should be using another product then...."

Permalink to your vmware problems?

ewwhite

8 hours ago, by ewwhite

83 VMs, SATA san with 14 disks in RAID5

Bart De Vos

Auwch

ewwhite

The client is running a Dell SAN with 14 7200 RPM SATA disks... but also has three ESXi hosts and 83 virtual machines running Linux apps, web servers, databases, Exchange and VDI...

Bart De Vos

12:50

And no backups?

ewwhite

I saw Veeam running, so there are some backups.

Bart De Vos

Nexenta would be a good call imo

Bart Silverstrim

@ewwhite Performance must be rockin'!

ewwhite

@BartDeVos I offered... but it's a case of the client not wanting to really admit the mistake.

Chris S

@BartDeVos DNS supports it on a technical level, but no application supports spaces in domain names... So unless he can modify the app, which will be difficult to implement and support, he's still up a crick.

pauska

12:53

We run lots of vm's on S-ata.. works fine :)

Chris S

@BartSilverstrim I can only image what a 1KB random write test would look like on that array...

ewwhite

@pauska SATA isn't the problem. It's the 14-drive RAID5.

@ChrisS Well, I'd like to show them a graph of how bad things are... what's the best vSphere graph to show? Queues? Latency?

Chris S

@ewwhite I've never touched vSphere =]

Bart De Vos

@ewwhite I'll have a look

Chris S

Throughput and Queue depth should show off "performance" though

Bart Silverstrim

12:56

Well...are they hitting the VM's enough that it shows an appreciable lag?

ewwhite

@BartSilverstrim Yes. I needed to copy ~200GB from a VM on the iSCSI RAID5 SAN to a new VM I created on local disks. The transfer was capped at ~15 megabytes/second because the read speed from the array is so bad.

Bart Silverstrim

THEY NEED MORE MEMORY

Dan

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-18250397

Jesus, someone must've been confident to go ahead and clear off that arrest

ewwhite

it should have been 80-90 megabytes/second (over the virtual 10GbE NICs)

@BartSilverstrim Lots of RAM, though.

Bart De Vos

Ugh, looks like our stats b0rked out (again)

once you have multiple data centers in you vsphere the thing goes crazy

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