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07:00
Partially private-owned, partially public-umbrella company owned guys who make food. And many a metric fuck-tonne of money every hour doing it.
surely they won't miss a few rounding errors here and there...
@MichaelHampton I actually quit a job with a great IT team at a job I enjoyed, to take this position for the professional development opportunities (And frankly way more money than I'm worth) that their massive infra-project offered, and wast actually "|| <- that" close to storming into a board meeting and telling them shove the position back up their asses over this.
I'm still really pissed off that the comptroller... or accounting upper manager guy who had all that info out in plain sight for anyone who knew what it was to use "since forever ago" wasn't fired on the spot, and still has his job, making more money than me. >:/
so, you're a contractor... how much access do you have?
God of any electronic anything in the company.
07:05
are password changes audited?
What password changes?
Which doesn't bother me half as much as the other situation, because there is a least a basic level of auditing and logging and even security of the electronic stuff.
e.g. if their password was reset by an admin
Yeah, to both of you.
Audited by a paper-pushing process anyone can ignore/not do, not audited with logging, like it oughta be.
oh ok. so set up a mandatory password length restriction?
07:07
This sort of problem requires C-level intervention.
Line item 2,000 something on the list of shit I need to urgently change around here as part of the project. Literally, no exaggeration. Up to over 3,600 line item changes that need to be made to make the environment/company remotely secure or function in its IT assest.
So they know, and they're burning through a lot of $$$$ to make these changes they need happen, it's just you walk into something like that, and you know it's a longer term, multi-year project.... but I just couldn't conceive of anything being such... an indescribably "WTFF" state as a lot of the stuff here and I was... just floored. OH. MY. GOD., killmenow kind-of floor.
@HopelessN00b Hey, it's money.
I wrote a similar answer you might find interesting.
6
A: Casual Business Computer Management

Michael HamptonYou're being paid to admin these systems, right? You can do a couple of things. First, you can just live with it, and pocket the easy money. Of course you're going to burn out fast. Second, you can tell your boss exactly how much money it's costing the company to allow the users to trash their...

@MichaelHampton Oh yeah, and I'm happy here. I'm not really complaining, just venting, because, well, wow, I just gotta let some of that out or it'll build up inside and kill me.
Why do you think this chat room exists?!
Damn straight!
Actually, my approach/outlook on that kind of thing (regarding that answer I can't upvote again, lol) is #2, followed by #1 if my warning are ignored.
"Hey you need to fix this, ASAP, thusly [...]. If you don't agree, that's fine too, I have no problems cashing the check for doing nothing but having my recommendations shot down by you."

I've yet to have anyone say, "great, keep cashing the checks for doing functionally nothing."
07:16
You just have to watch for burnout. It's a very real hazard working in an environment like you describe.
Yeah, but probably not for me. I came from a long series of one-man everything admin/IT guy (literally like, hey we need you to do professional-grade video editing/econding on Wednesday and stand up a SQL deployment on Thursday) working 80-100 work weeks and getting paid for 40 to a batshit-insane large datacenter with 6 nines uptime SLAs with a simialr work/pay set up (and 24/7 forced oncall responses of <5 minutes kinda deal - 0 life at all) to whoring myself out as self-employed consultant
Woah, there's a new review task.
to this place. If I was gonna burn out or toss myself off a building, it would have happened at least 8 years ago. :) This is a slow, relaxing pace in a more sane environment than I'm used to, sadly.
I just cope well by bitching/venting and drinking. In large quantities for both. :D
later
Must be nice for them to allow alcohol in the workplace.
Then again, in my office, alcohol is mandatory.
07:29
@MichaelHampton Kewl... moved a task from the old review system to the beta... not sure I like that... browsing the big list of those categories by time period and type of potential shit I found to be very effective at finding large amount of shit to fix or flag.
Anyway, I got like 4 hours 'til work time again, so I'munna sack out. See ya later, and thanks for listening to me vent.
Ha, and I just found a bug in it.
and now I can reproduce it. Off to meta!
0
Q: Review Beta First Posts: I'm Done disabled if browser Back button used

Michael HamptonIn the new First Posts review, if you take an action on the question, I'm Done becomes available to click on. However, after taking the action, if you click the browser's Back button and then Forward again, I'm Done is disabled again. Closely related: Today I edited a question to improve it, com...

07:55
@HopelessN00b Can you do it in a less public forum so that the rest of us (and via google) the rest of the internets don't have to listen ?
I'm not sure how I feel about this though: Review completed just now:
Kenny Rasschaert reviewed this just now: Reviewed
08:08
0
Q: Review tasks not anonymous

Kenny RasschaertWhile trying to reproduce the bug posted here, I noticed something peculiar. When you completed a review of a post, your name shows up on top for other people to see. I'm not sure how I feel about this. When I edit an item I reviewed, my name is added to the question or answer for obvious rea...

@KennyRasschaert Are you sure that's only visible to you and not other users?
Then it would probably state something like "You already reviewed this". Now it contains a link to my profile.
Morning all :)
do you see my name above the post?
@KennyRasschaert Jep
08:15
@KennyRasschaert Also, confirmed.
So, this was how I spent my night :)
y u no scom2012!?
and what's up with all the secrecy? :P
I'd love to SCOM 2012
but, with over 200 clients in our scom
it takes time :)
Dan
Dan
Mornin
I think our raw storage disks mounted to the vm's failed
then the SQL cluster failed
taking everything with it
Morning :)
08:21
@Dan Heard $employer has been having issues recently, anything affected you?
Dan
Dan
@tombull89 What with, dude?
@Dan Welcome back. I'm a bit confused now.. are there certain days you wake up as Chloey?
@pauska: man, he feels like a woman.... ;p
Dan
Dan
@pauska No, it was just for a couple of weeks then I started to feel weird about it
But for you, I can be anything
@Dan I think that was a couple of weeks after everyone else started to feel weird about it
Morning!
08:28
Morning all
@Chloe Are you keeping the name, or is that just a caching problem at my end?
Dan
Dan
@SmallClanger Cache, I'm Dan now
Reminds me of that episode of Red Dwarf where Rimmer's still walking around with Kochanski's hips...
Dan
Dan
@SmallClanger Haha, yeah. I love Red Dwarf
@Dan Something along the lines of a major EasyMail datacenter outage?
Dan
Dan
08:46
@tombull89 Ooh, that's ex-employer!
But I had that pleasure a few years ago - was down for the best part of a week, amazing stuff
@Dan Apologies, thought you still worked for them.
Dan
Dan
@tombull89 Nah, left 18 months ago now. Work for a teeny little consultancy now which I love
09:38
SO is migrating crap again.
Dan
Dan
Who wants to give me some advice on DNS
@Dan What sort of advice?
Dan
Dan
@MichaelHampton Just a sanity check
intodns.com
Dan
Dan
Have an external domain name, that points to a NATed public IP which then directs to an internal service. All standard stuff.

Internally, this works fine with NAT reflection but I need them to go direct. Really don't want a full split-dns setup as there is only one record that matters, the rest of the domain is all external
09:44
SOHO network?
Dan
Dan
So, if the domain name is mydomain.co.uk and the URL that I care about is myservice.mydomain.co.uk, can I create a zone for myservice.mydomain.co.uk with a blank (?) A record
So that [anythingelse].mydomain.co.uk and, indeed, mydomain.co.uk itself will just get forwarded as normal
@MichaelHampton Nope, pretty big!
Crap, it would be easier if it was
Are they running their own DNS recursors?
Dan
Dan
@MichaelHampton Unknown
But currently, mydomain.co.uk is 100% separate to anything internal, just a normal hosted website using the hosts DNS
Yeah, find out what their setup is NOW, it makes a big difference.
Dan
Dan
Looks like they just have forwarders to a public DNS
09:50
OK, what are they doing DNS forwarding with? MS, Bind, some antique embedded box that everyone's forgotten what it's for?
Dan
Dan
Ooh, sorry, this is all Server 2008 R2 AD kit
Walk me through this.
Dan
Dan
What do you need to know?
OK, well, um you're probably screwed. Go set up split horizon, though for some reason MS calls it split brain.
Why I seem to have so much latency to chat.
Dan
Dan
@MichaelHampton So creating a zone for the subdomain won't work?
09:54
You'll have to ask someone with more knowledge of Microsoft. That is most certainly not me.
Dan
Dan
@MichaelHampton Okay
Sod it, I'm going to give it a shot, I can always delete it
I know they call it "split brain" even though it's not quite that, and that's about all I know.
Dan
Dan
Yay it worked
I guess I do know something
 
1 hour later…
11:09
I don't know.
11:24
posted on September 14, 2012 by Matt Simmons

When someone tries to interview them, you try to interview them right back - With apologies to Malcolm Reynolds A question came up on the SysAdmin subreddit asking how someone could be sure that the company was actually presenting itself accurately. I think that needs to be a concern for anyone interviewing for a new [...]

weird.. UAG has TMG in it's core..
sbi
sbi
12:05
Hi. A while ago I was helped a lot here on a Friday afternoon with a Powershell question I had asked at SF. I was then told that, while such questions are on topic here, it might be a better idea to ask those questions at SO. In case anyone of you wants to earn some rep on SO, I have now done so with a new question I have.
@sbi Consider also the time of day. It's only just now coffee-making and breakfast time in the US east coast, and three more hours before the West coast rolls out of bed.
And that's if the sysadmins weren't up all night doing maintenance on something.
Finally, as I seem to be the only other person awake here now, I'll tell you I do Linux, and know little of PowerShell. So I can't really answer your question.
sbi
sbi
12:21
@MichaelHampton Thanks for looking at it, though. In general, I'd expect more input from SO than from SF — because SO has so much more users. I just thought that, since some of you did answer my question back then, those might be interested to answer on SO.
Anyway, I will now bow out again. Have a nice one, everybody!
@sbi Somebody might see it later :)
sbi
sbi
Yeah! See you...
Dan
Dan
12:54
I hate IT
4
2x servers, cloned from a template. Very little configuration done, though what was done was done at the same time, identically on each. Except I can't RDP to one, but I can the other 0.o
You're in the wrong line of work, then.
Do they have different names and IP addresses? Are you SURE?
@Dan I've just been handed a MacBook Pro. 2.6GHz Quad Core i7. 8GB RAM. Dual graphics cards. Probably cost more than my car.
@Dan cloned without new machine SID/mac address is my bet
Dan
Dan
@pauska Nope, config wizard with correct IP, name and newsid
@tombull89 Hand it here.
Dan
Dan
12:56
@tombull89 Suhweet
Also I can UNC to it etc, just not RDP
@MichaelHampton chuckle. Nice bit of kit but no way could I justify buying one. And no-way could I justify the school buying one but it's for a senior member of staff that does a lot of propectus work.
So what senior wants, senior gets.
@pauska UAG was developed by a company, that MS bought, who used TMG (used to be ISA) at the core of an appliance. So UAG was always just TMG with some extra crap. Personally I can't believe they're keeping UAG around as it blows pretty hard. TMG was already a red-headed step child, and a joke of a firewall. It still doesn't support IPv6, at all.
So I'm watching CS5 install on the Mac, while using LogMeIn to watch Origin download Battlefield 3 on my home computer.
So who here knows about web development?
Dan
Dan
@ewwhite A little
12:59
@ChrisS I know, TMG is more pain than most other things in IT.. but UAG is kind of nice to support external clients with untrusted PC's.. We publish terminal servers etc
@ewwhite I know what web development is, and sometimes I can write PHP code.
@ewwhite also some.
IPv6? Is anybody even USING that?
@MichaelHampton More than you'd think; less than you'd want. =]
@Dan I'd double check anyways.. we often get problems with vm's not being sysprep'ed correctly after cloning even with customization specifications going in
13:00
Okay, @dan @michael @tombull I have a customer (the same one from yesterday) who wants to build an online store for their business. They are doing it in PHP, and one of the two IT people is going to do it.
@dan it seems like it dies when you do a clone of a clone
Someone who isn't technically a web developer.
@ChrisS Yeah, I know. I've spent way too much time bitching at developers who haven't even begun to think about IPv6 support...
Dan
Dan
@pauska Doubel checked, definitely right IP and I've joined it to the domain and installed Citrix which everything worked
does that sound like a recipe for disaster?
Dan
Dan
13:00
@ewwhite Ooh, urgh, yes
@ewwhite coding it from scratch?
Dan
Dan
Sounds like the next company to leak a bunch of payment information
@ewwhite That is a recipe for disaster.
I mean, has web development moved to the point where you always turn it over to a pro?
Dan
Dan
When dealing with purchasing, pretty much
13:01
Like, I used to hand-code pages... in 2001...
@ewwhite I'm no webdeveloper, but I think I can make something that looks entirely decent.
Dan
Dan
Paypal has some decent integration, but it's not straightforward if you want it to look pro
@ewwhite I'd be happy to take a poke at making a website but a web shop? Nope. I'd use something like whmcs.com.
@ChrisS with CSS and all of that?
@ewwhite Considering that you can get off the shelf code to do it for FREE, that WORKS and is reasonably SECURE...
13:02
@ewwhite CSS is easy stuff. JavaScript and it's bazillion frameworks and libraries, that's hard.
...and that all it needs is for the CEO to decide what logo and colors to use...
So this is the same place that says they're going to try to build AD and VMWare and Exchange on their own.
so I feel like I should intervene... and just bring up the issues that could arise.
Dan
Dan
@ewwhite They sound like a good friend of mine, has a crack at everything - he gets away with it because his place is tiny
@ewwhite Ask them if they have a plan for what they will do when all their customer credit card data gets out onto the Ukrainian black market.
Dan
Dan
(He's the one I had to bail out because he didn't know snapshots were linked and he manually booted off the original vmdk)
13:05
I mean, maybe they won't use CC#... and may just take PO's...
but that still seems off.
and it needs to be up by Oct 1.
@ewwhite Two guys aren't going to build a reasonable online store in two weeks, unless the requirements are VERY minimal.
And even then they'll be debugging it - live - through the holiday season.
Dan
Dan
@ewwhite Haha, I mean they can make an online catalogue, but an online store - no
@MichaelHampton I don't think too many hired companies are going to agree to an Oct 1 live date either.
How many sales can they afford to lose because there was a stupid off-by-one error in the code that took three weeks to find?
@ChrisS No, but you can go download an open source online store package and have it up by tomorrow.
Then you call it a "beta" and ask the CEO what he thinks. That'll give you the critical information you need about the logo and color scheme.
@MichaelHampton I assume they'd do something like that... But it's still take a week or three to setup the store, load inventory, test, test, test.
Dan
Dan
13:09
@MichaelHampton Yeah, but it's going to take a while to make that flash intro and get the MP3 together
Well, I think this business has leaders who say, "we have two full-time IT guys... this is what we're paying them for"
Building something functional from scratch in two weeks is going to look like a Geocities page.
@ChrisS I think the one guy was working on the site, but ran into PHP dependencies that couldn't be resolved on the CentOS 4.4 webserver they have.
Does PHP have an equivalent of CPAN?
13:11
Well, I'm not sure...
so I told them that they have to move to a newer OS for web.
but they're running mail on the same server...
Dan
Dan
@ChrisS php.net :D
and it's all too disruptive.
Dan
Dan
@ewwhite Running the mail server and web server on the same box?
@Dan I can't just enter that into the command line followed by the PHP module name and have it install though.
and that's where the conversation broke down
13:12
PEAR/PECL, but you really don't want to go there unless you have to.
Dan
Dan
@ChrisS oh, no idea, I've never had a non-hosted LAMP stack
The distro will have the 95% of them that get used already packaged.
And...I'm afraid I don't even remember EL4.
I did a upgrade to FreeBSD 9.0 from 8.0 this past weekend. I love that I literally ran:
1. Shutdown all services
2. fetch kernel.txz and base.txz
3. cd /
4. tar xf kernel.txz and base.txz
5. Reboot
A couple schg flags tripped me, but those were quick to fix.
@MichaelHampton Right. I installed this server in 2007
to replace the once I installed in 2002
Didn't EL5 come out in 2007?
13:15
they run their stuff for way too long...
I stick with the major versions until the new version gets to .2
so RHEL 6.2
5.2
etc.
RHEL 6.0 was a mess. 6.1 was rough.
Good idea. I didn't start deploying EL6 until about then myself.
6.2 was okay. 6.3 made some disruptive changes... but otherwise, okay
Now all I have to do is get rid of the last Debian and Ubuntu boxes...
Oh, also... what's the quickest way to find a rogue DHCP server?
just encountered one.
Dan
Dan
@ewwhite Wireshark
And access to the switches if possible, so you can track the port by MAC address
13:20
Ask the switch where it's plugged into?
This assumes, of course, that the cabling is reasonable, which may not be true.
I found it... nmap.
Wi-Fi access point?
Turned out to be an Airvana cell reception booster.
hijacked the warehouse wireless gun and scanner network.
13:22
Fun!
Dan
Dan
@pauska Deleted the RDP listener, rebooted and now it works. I blame Citrix
13:42
My boss just asked me how I felt about branching out towards database administration (Oracle, MySQL or PostgreSQL specifically).
Oh, I'll install a database, but don't ask me to fix your crappy query that takes 38 minutes to run because you forgot to add an index.
Dan
Dan
@KennyRasschaert MS Access is pretty straight forward, and has a nice GUI
Combined with Excel and some VBA you can pretty much do anything - Oracle are just a bunch of con artists
Access? That thing is still around? Last I heard of it, I wouldn't trust my kid's piggy bank to Access.
Dan
Dan
@MichaelHampton A friend told me that Facebook runs off of it
@Dan Access...for Android.
13:48
pretty sure facebook runs on cassandra and hadoop
Dan
Dan
@tombull89 On a bank of Raspberry Pi?
Beep. Beeep. Beep. Beep.
Dear Exchange server, why must you never restart after updates properly
Access can work great, it can work against a MS SQL database, and it's pretty easy to build User Workable front ends. It's DB backend blows chunks.
Don't be silly. Facebook is just a bunch of hacked together PHP scripts running on somebody's old PC.
@MichaelHampton Sounds like Google
13:52
@MichaelHampton Used to be Perl scripts... but close enough
No, Google uses Python scripts. But it runs on a bunch of PCs that they found in dumpsters all over Silicon Valley.
"Does anybody know how long you can keep a chicken in the freezer for? I put one in there last night and it was dead this morning."
Wait. I once threw an old PC into a dumpster. It's probably in a Google data center right now.
14:11
@chop I have a real WORK question for you
Can anyone suggest a good multiple ssl/single ip/apache tutorial?
Eh, it's just like setting up SSL normally, only you use the same IP address.
Well so far all it does is crash apache as soon as I add a second *:443 vhost
first one works, second one, crash and need to reboot..
Sounds like a fun day at the office.
or anyone here who runs a large VMWare environment,
14:13
it's great
so any tutorial on this matter is welcome...
We generally find our tutorials via Google.
tried that and read countless threads on here
figured I'd ask if anyone had a good ressource
@ewwhite Well, we've got a 5-blade VMWare setup, but my expereince/technical knowledge is...limited.
Do your research, and then ask a good question on the main site.
16
Q: How can I ask better questions on Server Fault?

voretaq7 This is a Canonical Question / FAQ Candidate to help our new users ask better questions, and hopefully get better answers. Similar questions: How do I get better answers? Welcome to Server Fault! You may have found your way to this question from a comment on the main site -- mayb...

Thanks
14:15
@tombull89 This is several hundred ESX hosts...
SOmething I've never ever seen before
@Enkay SF is just a bit different from SO, so definitely check the meta post I linked before you ask.
ok will do
@ewwhite Jesus. I can't imagine a setup that large.
'morning
14:25
@Enkay What version of Apache are you running? If it's less than 2.2.22, upgrade and come back if the error persists.
no @chopper3?
where is you?!?
Ah, there we go.
@Chopper3 I'd like to understand vCenter redundancy in a large host environment.
There isn't any!
@Chopper3 Really?!?
14:32
actually we obviously have our VC's as VMs in HA clusters, use linked mode and SRM but that's about it
@Chopper3 What is linked-mode?
you can have up to ten VCs talking to each other, you see each VC as a top-level item in the VSClient
like you see datacentres in single-VC mode
and can just work between them, it's a way of dealing with the limitations of one VC
@Chopper3 what if one vcenter goes away?
when HA/SRM brings it back it just reappears - it goes grey like if you lose a host
@chopper3 Maybe I can describe the topo...
We basically have a multi-tenant setup.
but running off of one big vcenter.
14:39
shared hosts?
@Chopper3 Each client has their own hosts in one of X physical data centers.
ah, that makes things easier
Maybe... I'm trying log in to see the scope
? how do you mean
@Chopper3 There is a vCenter that has ~50+ datacenters.
and one of the engineers went through a lot of effort to make it multi-tenant...
so each customer is its own data center.
and may have up to a dozen hosts.
14:46
50? wow - why?
so the problem is that all of those hosts need to be able to check in and see the vcenter
seems a bit odd, I'd have been tempted to have had bigger clusters and used resource pools myself - but I guess it's a contractual thing
that shouldn't be a problem
Support issue: a host lost access to vCenter...
and some craziness ensued.
sounds odd
but this approach gives our customers access to their Datacenter only.
but it seems to be a massive SPOF.
14:48
sure, like I say it's probably a contractual thing
fucking emc
there is yes, you could split the DCs across two or more VCs (at cost obviously)
@Chopper3 what do you mean?
have two VCs, put some datacentres in one and others in another
then if one falls over it only affects half of your users
Can it all be seen in one pane?
14:50
yes
or if you want to spend money for no reason you could get vCentre Heartbeat, but we don't use that, don't know anyone who does
I think they're overlaying vCloud director soon
this is a vSphere 4 setup... moving to 5
ah ok, shouldn't make much of a difference - heartbeat's for 4 and 5
can you not live with the restart time on VC that HA would give you?
we can
I guess a customer's host lost contact...
and at some point, needed to be restarted to rejoin.
client wanted to know why HA didn't push VM's to the host that was in contact with vCenter.
Although, if I were dealing with it, I'd restart the management agents on the orphaned host.
but I noticed that everything really depends on one vCenter machine.
can't say without knowing more about how it was setup, depends with v4 who was the lead HA host
you're right, but other that heartbeat ($20k iirc), you've really only got HA/SRM or splitting the DCs across VCs
I suppose you COULD use FT but I really wouldn't
But you're saying I could see multiple VC's in one window?
by linking them?
or that the safer solution would be to virtualize it entirely?
14:58
yep, linked mode is 10 VC right now
is your VC not virtualised?
@Chopper3 it does not appear to be
ah, balls, that's a problem, and yes, yes I would asap
then you get HA etc
all of ours are VMs

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